Dark Beneath the Moon (14 page)

A moment later Baden nodded, and I signalled him to put the message on the ship’s comm. This time the voice was not disguised. It was disgruntled, defensive, and surprisingly,
female
.

“I suppose you’re here to gloat, Captain.”

“Not at all,” I told her. “I am here to check on your status. Obviously you have some power, if your comm board is operational. Are you hurt?”

“No,” she said sullenly. “But I have no drives or weapons. Life support is fine.”

Yuskeya caught my eye and nodded.

“Our scans confirm that. How are you for supplies?”

A momentary silence. Then, “You’re going to leave me here?” she asked, her voice tinged with disbelief.

I tried to keep the smile out of my voice. “Temporarily, yes. It’s a more effective prison than anything I could come up with aboard my own ship, and while you’re there, you’re not causing any trouble for me, my crew, or anyone else.”

“What’s wrong with my ship?”

“I don’t know. Whoever was in that dark ship used some kind of energy field on you and on one of the Protectorate ships. We can see it as a dark globe that surrounds the aft half of your ship. Can you move around your entire ship, or does the field block you from going aft?”

“I’m blocked,” she said after a pause. “It’s like the ship is cut in half. There’s a dark, sort of hazy ‘wall’ that feels solid to touch, although I can sort of see through it. Was there some sort of explosion? I got thrown into the wall when it happened. It’s solid, trust me.”

I exchanged a glance with Hirin. He shrugged.

“The dark ship also appears to have blown up the wormhole to Delta Pavonis,” I said.

“What the—how do you ‘blow up’ a wormhole?”

I swallowed. “I have to admit, I don’t know. We’ll keep an eye on it and see what else we can find out. It doesn’t appear to be traversable at this point.”

She was silent, apparently digesting that news.

“Don’t get blown up, yourselves,” she said in a tight, bitter voice. “I appear to be dependent on you to rescue me
eventually
.”

“All right. We’ll monitor you, and if your other systems seem in danger of shutting down then we’ll come and get you. You can signal us if you encounter any difficulty. Oh, one more thing. Do you wish to tell me your name?”

There was silence for another minute, so long I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then, “Sord. Jahelia Sord.”

“Very well, Jahelia Sord. I’ll be in touch.” I signalled Baden to cut the communication. He was frowning, but did so. “Baden, first chance you get, run the name Jahelia Sord through the pilot registry database, would you?”

“Aye, Captain.”

“What is it?”

He was frowning at the comm board. “I’m not sure—that voice. It sounds familiar.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “You know this person?”

He met my eyes, his face puzzled. “Maybe I’m crazy. I can’t really place it . . . it seems like I’ve heard it before.”

“But you don’t recognize the name?”

“No, and it’s unusual enough that I’d remember it. Never mind. I must be mixed up.”

Maja reached over and patted his cheek. “That’s because he’s forgotten all the other women now, Mother.”

I was pleased to see Baden, for once in his life, flush.

Rei rescued him by turning to me. “Captain, I’d never have suspected that mean streak in you. Leaving that poor pirate girl on her ship.”

I laughed. “It’s not mean. It’s exactly what I said to her—practical. What facilities do I have here to restrain a PrimeCorp operative, even if she’s not the most effective one they’ve ever employed? And honestly, if I were to meet her right now, I probably wouldn’t be able to restrain myself from taking a swing at her. She threatened my mother—or relayed PrimeCorp’s threats, at least. I won’t let her die out there if I can help it, but I’m not taking unnecessary risks for her, either. And,” I added, “if she’s alive and unharmed by that field, then maybe that means the folks on the
Stillwell
are okay, too. So I’m feeling magnanimous.”

“I guess it all depends on how you look at it,” Rei said. “Seems a little like torture to me.”

“Maybe you’ve never seen her really angry,” Hirin joked. He made a horrified face and shook his head, warding off an imaginary evil with outstretched hands.

“Okay, let’s quit joking around,” I said. While it felt good to laugh, the situation hadn’t become any less serious. “We still have some scientists to save. Or at least I hope we do. Rei, take us over to the operant moon and make a slow orbit while Yuskeya checks to see if the scans can get through yet.”

Because if anyone was down there, they were all that remained of the
Domtaw.

“
FEK!
”
I SCREAMED
, as soon as the communication line to the
Tane Ikai
closed. I turned and pitched my half-empty mug of
cazitta
against the dark barrier behind me. It shattered and splattered as satisfyingly as if I’d hurled it against a cement wall. Bits of ceramic skittered across the floor amid dark, sticky droplets.

“How dare she? How
dare
she leave me here?” The feed from one of my few working scanners showed the other ship slowly turning and heading away from me. Off to investigate the wormhole, I supposed. Somehow that was more important than getting me off my disabled ship. I stood up and kicked the skimchair, but it didn’t move since I’d locked it down earlier. That made me angrier.

I paced the confines of the cabin like a caged beast. With the area of the ship effectively reduced to half, it did not make for therapeutic pacing. I fetched up in the tiny galley and leaned my balled fists on the counter top, forcing my breathing to slow. That
megero
Luta Paixon might have left me here to wait until it was
convenient
for her to rescue me, but I would not let her see that I cared.

Once again, I ran my hands all over the dark field cutting me off from the rest of my ship, searching for a way to remove it. It felt completely solid, faintly cold but not chill. It couldn’t be solid as I understood the word—it hadn’t actually chopped the
Hunter’s Hope
in two—but it didn’t have any characteristics of a simple field, either. No hum of energy under my fingertips, no sound, no yield under pressure. No obvious seam where it met the interior wall. Nothing, nothing. Nothing.

I couldn’t help myself. I slammed my fist into it and screamed again.

All I got was a sore hand.

More pacing, more cursing, more deep breathing. I missed Pita—more than I ever would have thought. My first priority had to be resurrecting her. The
Tane Ikai
would return for me at some point. Captain Paixon had said so, and I believed her—unless she got killed doing something stupid around the wormhole. I put that thought away and surveyed the small part of my ship that I could still access. The pilot’s console, the forward hatch, the tiny kitchen console.

Cazitta
still trickled, impossibly, down the dark field as if it were a solid wall. With a sigh, I knelt to carefully gather the pieces of my shattered mug, and used a cloth to sop up spilled, lukewarm liquid.

Wait.
I paused with the damp cloth halfway down the field wall.
The kitchen console was a self-contained unit. It might still have power.

I tossed the broken bits of ceramic into the recycler and pulled off the access panel below the kitchen station. It wasn’t difficult to trace wires and routing until I found an auxiliary power source. A tiny indicator glowed a cheery green. I sat back on my heels and smiled. If I could change the routing, patch some connections . . . I might be able to revive Pita. It wouldn’t be even close to enough power to get the entire ship online, but it might be enough for her.

Half an hour later, a single screen on the pilot’s console flickered to life. I heaved a sigh and crossed my fingers. “Pita?”

“What have you done to my ship, Sord?” Pita asked in a cranky voice. “We’re adrift, and I can’t get the engines online!”

I leaned back in the single pilot’s chair. “Calm down, I know all that. I had to pull half the guts out and rewire them, to power you on.”

“I’ve been offline for over an hour!” she said. She must have been checking all the shipsystems. “Did you do this?” she asked suspiciously.

“Of course not, I—”

“No, wait, what about those other ships? The Chron, and the other one—”

“Don’t make me sorry I turned you back on. Shut up and listen.” Briefly I outlined what had happened, my conversation with Luta Paixon, and where we were at the moment. “So I need to make a plan. Either for getting us mobile again, or for when she comes to pick me up.”

“You’ll abandon the ship?”

“I don’t want to.” It pained me to think of leaving the
Hunter’s Hope.
PrimeCorp had paid for it, sure, but it was mine. My freedom, my lifeline, my ticket to wherever I wanted to go. Even with pain-in-the-ass Pita, it was my sidekick. Without it, I’d be alone again.

“What about me?” It was hard not to think of Pita as another person when she could infuse such a sense of betrayal and indignation into three little words.

“That’s why I worked so hard to wake you up. I need you. If you can get rid of this field or bypass it to get the ship moving, we’ll get out of here before Paixon comes back. But if not, then I want a way to take you with me.”

“I’m flattered,” Pita said. “All right, let me see this field, first.”

So we did, for the better part of an hour. I even shut down the heat for a little while to give Pita access to some extra power for scanners, but by the time I had started to shiver, she declared it a pointless exercise, anyway.

“I don’t know what it is, what it’s made of, or what it’s supposed to do,” she said finally, in the tone of someone who’d just thrown her hands in the air.

I hugged myself, trying to get warm. “All right, then, I guess we’re on to alternate plan B. How do I take you with me?”

“Do we have options?”

“Well, I can’t get to my sleeping quarters, so I’m limited to what I have here with me right now, including clothes and personal items. I have my datapad, and I can access everything as far as the kitchen console.” I had my
vazel
, leaning in the corner near the kitchen, but I doubted they’d let me bring a six-foot wooden staff with me. I also had a small flechette pistol, which I might try to sneak aboard the
Tane Ikai
, but that was irrelevant to this conversation.

“Your datapad is the only way I can see,” she said after a minute. “But we’ll have to make some modifications. I’m rather . . . large.”

Pita
was
rather large—larger, now, than even PrimeCorp knew. While I’d been ensconced at PrimeCorp, letting them read my brain to create Pita, I hadn’t been exactly idle. Pita and I had walked out of the labs with a lot of PrimeCorp data—a lot of
classified
PrimeCorp data—far more than she’d been trusted with by the corporation itself.

What can I say? Breaking into the classified files was a good task to test her loyalty to me. And it never hurts to have an ace up your sleeve, even if I still hadn’t had a chance to discover half of what comprised my particular ace. Getting the files had been easier than I’d expected. My own techdog tendencies and three years of AI training at the Protectorate
akademio
, plus Pita’s extensive and wide-ranging skills (never meant to be used against her makers, but I guess they should have thought of that possibility, shouldn’t they?) made it almost laughably easy. The encryptions on individual files were daunting, but trying to break them gave Pita something to do in her downtime.

I was damn glad she had a wide knowledge base to dip into right now, at any rate.

We began to hash out a plan. I couldn’t keep the ship, perhaps, but I could take parts of it with me. The datachips from the main computer console and the kitchen console. The transmitter to send messages to PrimeCorp. A few select bits of other hardware that might come in handy.

Humming a little to myself, in between arguing with Pita, I started to take apart the brains of the
Hunter’s Hope
.

THE BRIDGE OF
the
Tane Ikai
was unusually silent as we made our way around to the operant moon. None of us, it seemed, could keep our eyes off the screen displaying the roiling wormhole.