Doomed Cargo Read online

  The ship’s proximity sensors were down. They were wrecked. Along with radar, E.M. sensory and neutrino detection equipment. Malice 1 was momentarily blind. The command crew detected an RX-111 model freighter for just a second before everything went down. They flagged it in their banks as suspect, but they wouldn’t find it again. Not any time soon.

  Xantrissa glared forward, supremely mad. Those tri-rockets were some sort of neutron warheads. And they worked, at least temporarily.

  Below her dais, her command crew struggled with failing systems. Alarms rang. Automatons shuffled around, each initiating the necessary damage control. She grimaced showing teeth, and took her lift down to floor level. She strode out powerfully, leaving Paleron gluing himself against the dais elevator, scared witless. She ignored him and sneered to her operators, “Where is N’halo?”

  Her fire control operator answered in his mindless monotone. “The strike scored a negative hit, my Matriarch.” He turned back to his controls.

  “We were tracking a ship. Where is it?” she snarled.

  Another controller turned to her. “Tracking systems have been knocked offline, my Matriarch.”

  Her fists clenched at her sides. Two attempts at N’halo. Two failures.

  She felt her fury reach down into her guts and pull up something even more powerful. Her hate. Her hand went down to the knife strapped to her hip. She needed a victim. Like a child needs a mother, she needed a good, ripe kill. Anyone would do.

  She spun on Paleron and pinned him hard against the dais elevator, elbow to the neck, and jerked her Kat’ah—a 10-inch knife with a blade so gorgeously crafted most thought it a shame to stain it. But not Xantrissa. She jammed it low into his belly making him go—Guh!—and his eyes go like saucers. She unsheathed it from him and jabbed it in again. His face scrunched together and he said, “Oh … my Bitch … I serve … only you … in this.”

  “Good, Paleron,” she hissed and stabbed him a third time.

  His hands went to her face, fingertips stroking across her cheeks lovingly. “Thank … you …”

  A fourth good jab. Everything went lax. Eyes rolled up in his head. He slumped, those fingers drawing away from her face, and he fell into a heap on the floor.

  She wiped the blood off on her pant leg and sheathed her weapon. She pointed to two of her attendees, both hiding their horror, and commanded, “You and you. Get him to medical. See to it that he lives.” She strutted away sneering, “Or suffer the same fate.”

  Chapter Ten

  Tawny felt them go into inner-warp from the cargo bay. She went to the inner-ship comm. “Benji?”

  “We’re clear.”

  Her body went lax in relief. She took her guns off and hung them back in her locker. Her eyes went to the orphans. They sat huddled together against the far wall, most of them sniffling and snuffling. They sensed the danger, read the action. She smiled to reassure them. Everything started to cool. She went back to the comm, said, “How’d we get away?”

  Ben paused before answering. “It was Lona. She’s gone, Tawny. Sacrificed herself.”

  The silence between them over the comm was thick. Tawny accepted the news impassively. Lona had done her part. To her, it was a divine sacrifice. Tawny hoped she was with her god now, despite the one she’d chosen. But it left her wondering what her own part was.

  She looked over at Sireela who was huddled up with her companions. Lona had told her to get the girl to the N’hana. For just an instant, she wondered if Sireela had anything to do with the strike that had taken out Requiem. She squinted as a horrifying realization struck her. If whoever it was would destroy Requiem to get the girl, they would have destroyed Haven Crest, too. It made sense.

  Was the girl a target?

  Ben scanned the local system chart. They needed a safe place to hideout for a while. The last twenty-four hours had seen far more action than he’d bargained for. He was supposed to be transporting goods to refugee colonies, not rescuing orphans, not running for his life.

  They were coursing at half-light inner-warp through the outer orbits of the solar twins. Way out here, there were over two hundred planets—steel gray chunks of iron, yellow spheres of sulfa gas, dark iridescent bodies of azure skies and carbon dioxides. None of them were alive, but their paths all crisscrossed each other, moving at different speeds and different apogees, all following their dual suns, exchanging orbital roads, sharing space. Ancient collisions had caused multiple bands of asteroid debris; each cosmic band mingled and intermingled as they threaded throughout the system.

  There, the Zii Band. It was a broad swath of ice and rock, a long, winding asteroid field, most of which was closely compacted together. The shifting magnetic qualities therein would throw off any long range detection sensors that might be hunting them. Plus, no auto-wandering sensor probes would last long in there before an alien collision would pulverize it. They’d be safe among the Zii Band, if they themselves didn’t get punched through by any random meteoric matter.

  He set a course that would fling them around the planet Inanis, a frozen ice ball that had once been several times larger than its current size and had contributed much of itself to the ultra-tonnage now inhabiting the Zii Band, and into the swath of debris. There, they’d find a nice big chunk of ore to cling to.

  And then they’d think.

  They’d reach Inanis in under two hours.

  The door whisked open. Ben said, “Hey, bay—” he stopped himself and looked behind to make sure it was his wife. He sighed, “—Be.”

  Tawny had that look on her face. Gears were working between her ears. She squirreled into the co-seat.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Oh, just that we’ve been rocketed and laser blasted twice over the last twenty-four hours, universal.”

  He gave her a serious look. “Curious, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  He almost didn’t want to ask, thought for sure she’d sneer on about Sympto and his wily ways, but he asked anyway. “Any theories?” The answer he got was unexpected.

  “Don’t you think there’s anything strange about all this?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Do you see a trend?”

  He pinched his lips together, flicked them with a finger, thinking. He said, “Orphans.”

  She nodded, said, “Orphans.”

  “What do you suppose?”

  She paused for a long time weighing her thoughts. She finally said, “What if someone’s after them?”

  He nodded at her. It was reasonable, all things considered. But he said, “Who would want to destroy a bunch of orphans?”

  “Maybe it’s just one.”

  Ben rubbed the grizzle on his chin. “Okay.”

  “Lona seemed to think the girl was—what’d she say—unique, or something?” She shot a look at Ben, said, “What if she is unique, Benji?”

  Ben winced. He’d never been one to buy into superstition or the notion of superhuman insights or abilities. There was no sixth sense or spiritual powers. The girl was just that—a girl. He gave a skeptical, “Mmm.”

  Tawny continued, “And what if someone else out there feels the same way?”

  Ben nodded his head realizing an unsavory fact, and said, “And she just so happens to be sitting in our cargo bay.” He looked at her. “Playing with her doll.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh boy,” Ben groaned.

  Tawny sighed, reflecting on the girl. She said, “There’s something…”

  “Odd?”

  Tawny said, “She knows things.”

  “What things?”

  “Things little girls shouldn’t know. Like how to get off that station—Haven Crest—how’d she know where you’d be?”

  Ben tried to withhold a grin of wonderment, but he couldn’t. He said, “She told me…” He chuckled it away ridiculously.

  “What?” Tawny said.

  “Nothing.” A pause passed between them before he blurted, �
�She said she heard my eyes.”

  Tawny cocked her head, squinted at him, questioning.

  Ben inhaled patiently. “Look, she probably knew every nook and cranny on that station. It was her home. Children explore. Maybe it just made sense.”

  “There are other things,” Tawny said. “She knew my name. She knew I’d come back for her before the attack ever happened, when I met her that first time.”

  He looked at her hiding the ridiculousness in his gaze. “She’s a girl with a hunch.”

  “She hears people’s eyes, Benji. What do you think that means?”

  “Okay, yes,” he said, “but maybe it’s just, I don’t know, she’s got a child’s intuition.”

  Now it was Tawny with the ridiculous look in her gaze. “Maybe there’s more than that.”

  Ben laughed, said, “Okay—she’s a very cute, very sweet, very innocent little girl … with a child’s intuition.”

  She clicked her teeth and said, “Isn’t that enough?”

  “For someone to want to kill her?” he quirked.

  “Then why the bombings?” she said back. “Why are they raiding refugee colonies? And why are they raiding refugee colonies everywhere we end up? What’s the common thread?”

  Ben screwed his face up. That was a very good question. He didn’t know how to answer it. He wasn’t sure anyone could.

  Wait!

  He looked up, said, “REX.”

  “Yeah, Cap?”

  “Just before the attack on Requiem, didn’t you receive some—”

  “Yes!” REX declared. “I intercepted more streamed data from our mystery friend, yeah.”

  Ben looked at Tawny. Their message in a bottle had gotten broader. Maybe their answers were buried inside REX’s drive code. “What’d you find, REX?”

  “My tap dancing worked. It got their attention, whoever they are. They responded. I’m extrapolating now.”

  That cosmic white noise blasted through momentarily, then dwindled into a series of blips and bleeps. The holopad zippered into view and a series of symbols and numbers flashed across it like little, 3-D tickertape. Ben observed, “Coordinates.”

  Tawny said, “Another strike?”

  “No, these are nav.” Ben looked up to address REX. “Plot this in.”

  REX said, “Already done. Look.”

  The holographic map display unzipped. It showed their location in space as a red blip. The map rotated, flattened out showing only their operational plane. The planet Inanis showed to the objective east still fifteen light minutes distant. Beyond it, caught in the gravitational tides of this system sector was the Zii Band. It appeared like a vast, river-like swath of rock and ore snaking through and around the immediate planetary neighborhood. A series of target blips were visible along its edges as if demarking an invisible shoreline. One of them pulsed.

  “Is that the coordinate point?” Ben asked.

  “Yep.”

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like empty space to me.”

  “Look,” Tawny said running her finger in a curving line across the map. “This line—it follows the asteroid belt, whatever it is.”

  “Any theories, REX?”

  “Maybe it represents a series of mining posts that run along the Zii Band, you think?”

  Ben offered a skeptical grunt and said, “I hope not.”

  “Why?” Tawny asked.

  “I don’t want to run across anybody right now, do you?” He retorted.

  She gave a nod of agreement. Good point.

  “They could be the ones talking to us,” REX volunteered.

  Tawny and Ben looked at each other with decisions to make. Tawny said, “Why would they code messages to us through REX’s drive system if they were hostile?”

  “Set a trap, maybe.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve seen traps before. This feels different.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  She shook her head, concentrating, thinking. “It seems more like a plea for help. Or maybe a warning or something.”

  Ben inhaled a big breath directing his gaze at that suspect blip still pulsing on the map. “They did warn us,” he agreed. “Okay, REX, adjust course. Let’s find out.”

  Course set, it was time to settle the kids. Having had varying adult influence throughout their lives, the kids were surprisingly self-contained. But they were still kids. Nothing presented more thrilling things to discover than a cargo bay. And nothing presented more ways to find danger as well.

  Tawny prepared a vat of microwave cooked protein-packed beef and broth soup with a savory cream base while Ben went below to begin the herding. When the utility lift stopped at the bottom of its descent, the sound of a zoo struck him loud and sudden. It made his jaw slacken, eyes beam with terrified curiosity. He shoved open the gate and stood at the far end of his cargo bay looking at a dozen children going crazy. A group of them chased each other around, howling and laughing, two had climbed up the bulkheads and were hanging from the fifteen foot ceiling, a small group were over to the side rummaging through his large, standing toolbox like it was a toy box. Tools and things flew through the air as they chucked them over their shoulders.

  “Wh-whaaat?” he groaned.

  A tiny hand tugged at his thigh. He looked down to see the curious little Stathosian looking up at him with her forehead fins flexing back and forth, a sign of perplexity. “Mister, what is this?”

  He looked at the small control unit mounted to the wall. “Uh—that’s the local temperature regulator.” A flash of violent motion took his attention and he looked over. Two orphans, one a green-hued Malibriun, the other a finely-furred Solaptran, took turns slugging each other hard in the head … and laughing. “Hey!” Ben called. “Are you two hitting each other?”

  They looked over, eyes suddenly going puppyish. “Uh-huh …” they both said. Malibriuns and Solaptrans represented two of the more warlike species in the system, each raised with the genealogical bent toward physical rough-housing. It was in their blood. Maybe they were supposed to punch each other.

  Ben shrank a bit, said, “Oh. Umm, okay.”

  More tugging at his thigh. “Mister, what’s this?” The little Stathosian now pointed at another wall-mounted control unit. The inner-ship comm pad.

  “Oh, that’s a thing that you use to talk.”

  A tremendous bang made him duck, nearly hit the floor, and look over. One of the smaller toolboxes had been tugged from its mount and went crashing to the metal floor. Tools splattered all over the place. Orphans scattered.

  Ben winced painfully and cried, “Oh, that’s …” his words trailed off. He called, “Bot!”

  One of the man-sized utility bots jerked into motion on its hovering platform and scooted over, began collecting the tools with its multiple crane arms. Kids squealed with delight and danced around it.

  Ben pointed, “Hey, try to stand out of its way, so it can …”

  The kids started grabbing its arms and hanging off it as it pivoted and turned. They laughed and celebrated the thing. It was designed to lift and transport hundreds of pounds. They wouldn’t hurt it.

  He just scratched his head and said, “Never mind.”

  Tugging at his thigh again. “Mister, what is this thing do?”

  He looked down. The girl held a tool up at him with a glowing blade. His eyes went huge. A plasma cutter! He snatched it from her. “Whoa! That’s a cutting thing. Don’t—don’t play with that, little girl.”

  Another noise over toward the port. He looked over, horrified to see two orphans, both females among their specie, huddled around a glowing holopad. He cried, “Hey you two, what are you doing with that?”

  They both looked up. One said, “Reading.”

  “Oh,” he said backing down. “Yeah, you go ahead and do that.” Then he muttered under his breath, “I wish they’d all do that.” He took a big breath and yelled over the pandemonium, “Children!”

  Amazingly, everything stopped. As if pre-o
rdered, they each scattered toward the starboard wall taking assigned positions and standing at attention, shoulder-to-shoulder. It made him smile in bewilderment. This was obviously some routine they’d been programmed with at the orphanage.

  Now what?

  “Okay, uh, let’s all go in the lift here, and uh,” he looked at them. They awaited their orders like tiny little soldiers. “We’ll go up,” he said.

  They proceeded into the lift until it was full. Seven orphans. Ben sent them up. When the lift returned, the others loaded in. He counted heads. Four more. That was eleven little soldiers in all. He scrunched his face. One was missing. He gasped and turned to the airlock at the far end of the cargo bay. Had one trapped themselves inside it?

  No. Impossible. It was locked. It was auto locked.

  Then where was the twelfth child?

  He looked to the right, slowly. The Menuit-B security skiff still sat in the corner buried in half-shadows. The hermetic flight carapace was activated curving over the pilot’s seat.

  Bingo.

  He made a relieved face and went over to the space bike, punched the release button. The carapace folded back revealing Sireela straddled over the flight seat wearing a helmet twice the size of her head. She looked up surprised, and flashed an innocent, caught-with-her-hand-in-the-cookie-jar grin.

  Ben put his hands on his hips and asked, “What’re you doing in there, kiddo?”

  “I’m flyin’,” she said.

  He plopped the helmet off her head and said, “I bet you could, too. You hungry?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He swung her down to her feet. “Come on, let’s go eat.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Tawny and Ben had attempted to seat them around the main table as they served them the bowls of soup. It didn’t work. Once the oldest boy became curious about the port side alcove with its bubble window staring into space and moved over to it, they all migrated with him, each carrying their bowls or cups of soup. The boy was a thick-bodied Tremusian named Toon, a quiet, physically powerful race of people, and he made the others feel secure, so they followed him wherever he went. Seating was less organized, but the orphans were prone to huddling together, just like their sleeping quarters. There was something alive in their closeness that made them feel safe. They sat together under the radiant, dark glow of starlight slurping at their soup.