Death Drop (46 page)

“Maybe. I really don’t know.” Dezmara realized she was shaking her head in confusion—or perhaps it was denial—a little too much and looked up to find Simon staring at her with concern. She forced a smile to coerce her mind back on an even keel. “How long ‘til the rendezvous at the launch?”

“At our current speed, be ‘bout forty-three minutes.”

Dezmara synched her watch to Simon’s estimate and then looked up at him expectantly over her raised forearm.

“Right, The Bug,” he said as he got to his feet. He punched a button and the sound of the retracting bay door filled engineering. He skirted his flashing screens and dropped to a sitting position on the floor, then paused, legs dangling somewhere below in the innards of the ship, before reaching up and snugging his mechanic’s goggles over his eyes. He kicked out over the edge, pushed off the floor with his hands, and disappeared below decks.

Thirty-eight minutes and twenty-two seconds after she had stood in engineering and heard the ship’s bleak status from Simon, Dezmara was sitting in her captain’s chair with her eyes closed in her usual pre-run meditation. She was visualizing her two hundred and thirty-first victory when Simon plopped noisily down in the seat next to her. She cracked her lids like a coma patient struggling to break free of an eternity of sleep, but only partially succeeding, and peered over without turning.

“Bug’s all done-up, luv.”

“Good,” she said in a dismissive whisper and then closed her eyes again.

“An’,” Simon continued with a strange combination of excitement and frustration, “I checked out this little beauty as well.”

Dezmara pulled her mind from its tranquil surroundings and plunged her senses back into the tension of the
Ghost
on the verge of a run. She turned, clear-eyed, to see Simon holding the vambrace with even more reverence than he’d shown when she first handed it over to him. Simon never ceased to impress her: the Kaniderelle had a singular talent for solving complex mechanical or technical problems in record time, and she laughed to herself when she thought of the original time frame of one to two hours to fix just The Bug. Now Simon stood in front of her in almost a quarter of that time, having completed both tasks she had given to him. He was a genius.

“What’s the good word?”

“As far as I can tell,” he said excitedly, “it’s a velocity magnet.”

“Come again.”

“A velocity magnet. It forms a hemispherical field, ‘bout six feet in diameter, an’ sucks the fastest movin’ metal whirly-gig within that space right into the disk.” Simon made a swooshing sound followed by a noise like a freshly popped cork as his hand floated in and tapped the arm guard. “Absolutely, amazin’ technology, luv—absolutely amazin’!”

A smile of understanding graced her lips and Dezmara shook her head in amusement. “Six feet,” she said under her breath. “So, kid, that’s why you wanted to know how tall I was. Can you replicate it?” Simon’s eyes went wide and he took a small, pained sip of air.

“Luv, I know
what
it does, but I don’t have the foggiest
how
it does it. There aren’t any seams or screws, no place for me to open ‘er up and see what makes the bloody thing tick! I’ve never heard of tech like this, let alone held it in my hands. Where’d you get it exactly?”

“A friend.”

“Right, well, if you don’t mind, I’ll be seein’ if I can’t unravel the mystery while you try your best to unseat my lunch from the already frazzled confines of my stomach—which, if you succeed, an’ you almost always do, will not contain the slightest trace of stout, I’m very glum to report.”

“You can buy enough stout and fancy dinners to last a lifetime from this payday. Biggest one ever.” Dezmara tried to continue the lighthearted banter that Simon had begun with his ‘lunch’ comment but, much to her surprise, his face turned sour—instantly sad.

“Yeah, biggest one ever,” he said, then turned and left for his work.

Although it bothered her somewhat, Dezmara had plenty to do in the next three minutes, and Simon’s strange mood shift would have to go unaddressed. She whistled loudly, with her thumb and forefinger, for Diodojo, who appeared a moment later between the two seats in the cockpit. Dezmara fitted a sturdy harness fashioned from thick cargo strapping over his head. In addition to the material now arching down over his shoulders, a strap crossed his chest, and she rubbed the upper part of his belly after securing the tightly woven fabric under the pits of his two front legs and attaching the upper and lower pieces with heavy duty clamps sewn into the device. Four heavy cables were looped through the inner edge of both seats in the cockpit. She clipped the topmost restraint from each seat to a D-ring on the back of Dojo’s harness between his shoulders, followed by the bottom cable from each seat to an identical ring on his chest.

The instrument panel beeped, signaling that they had reached their destination, and Dezmara disengaged the auto-pilot, grabbed the control stick, and feathered the throttles. She exhaled loudly. They were on the edge of danger—about to teeter over and plunge headlong into uncertainty. The
Ghost
slid into place and then hovered among five other star freighters in a semi-circle. Dezmara was familiar with two of the competing ships’ captains, Rilek in the
Lodestar
and Saraunt at the helm of the
Maelstrom
, and them by reputation only, but she knew that every runner drifting nearby was focused on the same thing. Each captain and crew was keenly aware that the broken remnants of the Trinity planets swirled just below them and to the left—shattered dead-gray stones circling ominously, hoping to reach out from the grave and add to the countless souls that haunted their fissures. They stared out of their viewing panes in tense silence as each waited for the call from Trillis and the run instructions; then all hell would break loose.

The holodex chimed a full minute and thirty seconds ahead of the scheduled launch countdown.

“Ringer, Leonardo Fellini. Authentication code LFX6239. Encryption secure.”

“Well, that’s a first,” Dezmara said as she punched the com button.

“Greetings, my brave runners! Here are your official instructions. Each of you is to proceed through the Straits until you reach the clearing at Trinity Medar. From there you will head toward Hexalon in the Simokon System and the port city of Chuudagar through open space. The first ship docked wins the prize! Gentlemen, I will remind you that the odds in Trillis are calculated using the course I have prescribed, and any deviation will result in disqualification. Should anyone care to
communicate
to a fellow captain during the run, the shared frequency is—” Dezmara terminated the transmission.

“Ha,” Dezmara scoffed, “communicate, my ass!” Runners were outlaws and bandits, loners who trusted no one outside of their own crew—and most likely not even them—and any communication over the shared channel during a contest amounted to nothing more than trash talk. Dezmara never used the shared frequency. She was more than a little secretive about her identity, and she never knew who might actually be listening on the other end, or how many other ships had a crewman like Simon who could decrypt the voice-veil program with his eyes closed and one hand behind his back. She had learned long ago to terminate the instructions before hearing the frequency, in order to eliminate the temptation—and the risk. There was someone out there that knew she was Human, and she had almost died because of it; and she had a feeling that person was close by.

She punched the coordinates into the flight computer for the second half of the run. The flight through the Straits would require too many twists and turns and too many variables to get a route that made any sense. She gripped the stick, letting her fingers wrap one by one around it before holding the contoured grip steadily, then she reached for the throttle with her opposite hand. Her limbs shook slightly as she anticipated the start of the launch sequence. This was one of the many aspects of being a runner where she excelled. Her reflexes were so sharp, and the
Ghost
so finely tuned, that it was a rare occasion indeed when Dezmara didn’t jump into first place right from the start. Of course, Rilek was a formidable pilot, and she savored the battle to come for the lead position. She waited, body buzzing with surges of energy. And then her excitement gave way to confusion.

Dezmara had sat in this very spot more than two hundred times, and something was different. She had never waited this long for the countdown to begin. Had she missed some final important instruction? Did she terminate the transmission too early? Suspicion started to spread its roots in the crevices of her mind, but before the dark flower of paranoia could burst into bloom, the holodex chimed politely over the com.
“Ten. Nine. Eight.”
She reached down and scratched Diodojo’s ear for good luck.
“Seven. Six. Five.”
Her hands twitched on their controls.
“Four. Three.”
She inhaled.
“Two.”
Exhaled.
“One.”

Dezmara slammed the throttles wide open and the acceleration pinned her to her seat. A mischievous smile curled her mouth as she rolled the ship from side to side, nearly missing the myriad of asteroids that sped by in a continuous blur of muted gray and brown. The holodex announced that she was in the lead, followed closely by the
Lodestar
,
the
Argonaut
,
the
Maelstrom
,
Aurellia Blue
,
and the
Berillica
bringing up the rear.

The ships that trailed her, except for the
Lodestar
, were changing position rapidly. They were all in a horizontal line, spinning, whirling, and trying to gain position while dodging the lethal, crushing blows of the asteroids constantly stalking them. The ships were flutters of blue, burnt-orange, gray, silver, red, and black that vanished and then reappeared through the rocks over and over like shapes in a cosmic kaleidoscope. The holodex in the
Ghost
was chiming out position changes rapidly as the ships nosed ahead of one another and then twirled away to avoid being smashed. The runners were ‘slicing and dicing,’ as they say, everyone except the
Lodestar
—which was in its usual position—just off Dezmara’s stern and in second place.

Rilek was pacing her—following closely and waiting to see what the stony heavens had in store for the lead ship. He was smart. Patient. Dezmara was thinking how much she admired the man and wishing she could meet him one day when her screen beeped and flashed. It showed the
Argonaut
swinging wide of her wake and accelerating to starboard.

Dezmara’s surprise at the bold move had her staring at the screen longer than usual—too long. The collision alarm sounded its ear-pounding wail, and Dezmara slammed the controls forward while yanking the throttle back. The
Ghost
dove like a sleek, black porpoise through the fluid dark as if it lived to obey its master’s command—turning and spinning with ease, with pleasure—and for the second time today, Simon saw a dark shape cast a heavy shadow over the engineering room through the panes of the gun turret above. He didn’t want to know how close it was—he didn’t want to know that had there been atmosphere outside and had the hurtling boulder been a living thing, its monstrous breath would have steamed up the glass.

The G-forces pressed on Dezmara again as she pulled back on the controls and throttled up. The ship ascended to its previous flight level and Dezmara’s lip turned to the side in quasi-irritation—the
Argonaut
was now in the lead dead ahead of her. She checked the screen and the rest of the field hadn’t changed. She reminded herself not to get lost in the burning orange glow of the
Argonaut’s
engines as she flicked the
Ghost
into an easy left-hand barrel roll and a cluster of rocks blasted through the center of the maneuver. She was gaining rapidly as her engines ate up the Straits of Trinity Major, and she twisted and turned her ship like the ace pilot she was. Time to move. Dezmara pulled the stick to the left, but before she could smile like a captain in the lead of a run, her mouth formed a different shape entirely.

“SHIT!”

Dezmara mashed wildly at the control panel in front of her, hoping to hit the right switch in time as two clusters of insulator charges toppled, end over end, from four rectangular hatches at the back of the
Argonaut
. The shiny cylinders were magnetic, and once they were attached to a ship’s hull, they would emit a pulse that would shut down the electrical system of most freighters. They weren’t all that dangerous, and any engineer worth his salt could have a space-hauler back up on reserve power in less than a minute, but setting off insulator charges in the middle of an asteroid field was almost murderous. A ship without flight controls in the middle of the Trinity Straits, moving at the speed of a run, was as good as smashed. There were only two ways to escape an insulator charge—avoid getting one stuck to your hull or shut down before it discharged.

Dezmara never liked shutting down because it gave the attacker the same result they would have achieved if its charges had actually made a direct hit—it slowed you down. When magnetized gadgets as weapons started becoming the standard, Dezmara had Simon devise a simple way to demagnetize the outside of the
Ghost
, and now a series of cables passed through the hull and were supplied with a constant electrical current when engaged. She managed to flip the right switch in time as she tore through the spreading field of charges, and several of the canisters bounced off of her craft with a dull clunk. She looked at her screen and hoped that everyone else had seen them in time. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case at all.