Her Brother's Keeper - eARC (29 page)

With a loud buzz barely audible over the constantly blaring klaxons, every single detention cell opened at once. The other prisoners, wide-eyed and confused, mostly stayed in their cells, afraid to do anything, but two of them bolted, running up the stairs and out the door. Where they thought they were going to hide on an inhospitable planet with only ten thousand permanent residents was anyone’s guess.

The mercenaries led Kimball out of his cell and handed him the Peacekeeper’s very old-looking carbine. “Don’t shoot unless you have to,” Wade said. “We’re trying not to kill anybody.”

Marcus keyed his microphone. “
Andromeda,
this is Cowboy-6. Package in tow, headed back to the barn.” As his team checked Kimball for injuries and got him ready to move, Marcus took a quick look around. Two of the rooms in the detention center had large chairs in the middle, fastened to the floor, complete with restraints for the arms, legs, waist, and head. The floors were bare, complete with a drain. “Does that look like a torture chamber to you, Wade?” he asked.

“It sure as hell does, Boss.”

Kimball spoke up after tightening the straps on his mask. “They were constantly accusing me of trying to threaten the aliens, their so-called protected ones. They pointed guns at me and accused me of being a weapon-loving fanatic. I pointed out the inherent irony in that situation,” he said, pointing to a large bruise on his brow, “and they responded with a demonstration of their nonviolence.”

“He has few bruises and swelling, but he’s good to travel, Marcus,” Tanaka said, switching off the flashlight he’d been checking Kimball with.

“Good. Alright, boys, let’s get the hell out of here. We just kicked a hornets’ nest.”

* * *

Mazer Broadbent rolled the van through the narrow streets of the colony as fast as he could manage without crashing. He hadn’t driven a ground vehicle in quite some time and was a little rusty. This became perfectly clear when he bucked the wheels over a curb and scared the hell out of the young Tech Daye, who had volunteered to come rescue Kimball. The colony had woken up. Nearly every light was on, people were peering through their windows, and a few were running through the streets.

Fishtailing around a corner, Mazer stomped on the accelerator and raced the boxy vehicle down a slightly wider street leading to the Office of the Peacekeepers. With vision-enhancing goggles, he could see the mercenary team holding a tight perimeter by the building’s entrance, awaiting his arrival. Coming to the end of the street, he hit the brake, cut the wheel to the right, and spun the van around, lifting it briefly up on two tires, so the rear doors were facing the waiting mercenaries.

The van’s cargo door was yanked open, and the mercenary team shoved poor Kimball in with such force that Mazer thought that they
threw
him. The seven mercs piled in after their quarry, faces concealed behind masks and tac helmets. Two of them were very difficult to see in the gloom of the night until they deactivated their thermoptic camo. Those two, Starlighter and Markgraf, climbed in last and pulled the door shut.

“We’re in!” Marcus Winchester announced. “Drive!”

“Hold on!” Mazer replied, hitting the accelerator again. The mercs were tossed around in the cargo space of the van, not having seats nor anything to hold on to, as the security officer roared the vehicle back through the city the same way he’d come in.

As he made a hard left turn onto the main road which led to the spaceport, he saw a group of men hurriedly trying to pull barricades into the street.

“Roadblock!” Daye announced.

“Brace!” Mazer said, pushing the accelerator to the floor and bringing the van to its top speed. Terrified Peacekeepers dove out of the way as the clunky vehicle smashed through their plastic barricades, sending them clattering down the street. Mazer had no idea why they thought those would stop a speeding vehicle, but they were certainly unhappy about it. In the van’s wake, orange muzzle flashes appeared in the night as a couple of the constables opened fire.

“They’re shooting at us!” one of the mercs shouted, as small-caliber bullets punched through the back door, narrowly missing the occupants. But in a flash, the van was too far away from the Peacekeepers for their sidearms to be of any use, and rounding a bend, put the colony out of sight.

“I think we’re in the clear,” Mazer said, and immediately regretted it.

“Mr. Broadbent!” Daye said, tapping the security officer on the shoulder roughly. “Mr. Broadbent!”

“What is it, man?”

Before Daye could answer, Marcus, in the back of the van, peered out of the rear hatch. “Hellfire
,
” he spat. “Mazer! We’ve got company! Inbound hovercycles, coming in fast!” Mazer hadn’t known the colonists actually had any vehicles, much less hovercycles. But there they were, skimming low over the pseudo-trees, twin lift-fans screaming in the dark. They would’ve been hard to see except for the bright spotlights they shone on the van as it sped up the highway.

Daye ducked down in his seat as bullets
pinged
and
dinged
against the van’s body. “They’re shooting at us!” Each hovercycle carried two Peacekeepers; the one in front drove while the one behind him aimed a pistol as best he could. Their accuracy was terrible, but one lucky hit and the van would crash.

In the rearview mirror, Mazer noticed Halifax changing magazines in his weapon. Wind filled the cab of the van as the mercenary slid open the top hatch and stood up. “Marcus, I have a shot!”

Mazer swore to himself. “Marcus, shoot them down!”

The mercenary team leader nodded and gave Halifax a thumbs-up. The stout merc laughed aloud and opened fire. Between the hovercycles zipping back and forth, being blinded by spotlights, being shot at, and the van weaving all over the road, Halifax could barely hit anything. But the cycles weren’t armored to save weight, so one lucky shot… “Yes!” he exclaimed victoriously. One cluster of flechettes had struck something critical on the closest hovercycle. It rolled over and crunched into the pseudo-trees, disappearing from sight. The other one slowed down and backed way off.

Halifax ducked back into the van. “I got one! The other bastard’s runnin’ home to mama.”

“We’re almost there!” Mazer said, as the van sped through the gates of the spaceport at well over a hundred kilometers per hour. Hardly slowing down, he maneuvered the van down into the subterranean service tunnels. The vehicle entrance ended at an airlock. The Security Officer hit the brake and cut the wheel. The van’s wheels screeched at is slid to a stop, barely two meters from the wall. Mazer took a moment to exhale heavily as the mercenaries kicked open the back door and piled out. “I don’t think we’ll be getting the deposit back on this,” he said, examining the holes in the vehicle.

Leaving the van where it was, the spacers cycled through the airlock as quickly as possible. Once inside, they discarded their respirator masks and ran down hundreds of meters of tunnels, dodging oblivious service robots and knocking over a garbage can. Rounding a corner, the group ran down another, shorter corridor and came to a massive cargo elevator. The doors opened, and all nine people piled in, breathing heavily. The elevator moved slowly upward, taking almost a full minute to reach the cargo deck of the
Andromeda.
The three spacers and seven mercenaries, sweating and panting, said nothing as tinny, electronic music played softly.

The music gave way to a chime as the elevator came to a stop. The doors opened, and the group ran up the long, ramping tunnel, the arm of the spaceport’s service tower, and into the open cargo bay doors of the ship. Crewmen were waiting for them inside. They had barely cleared the entrance when the cargo doors began to close and the service tower began to retract. Med Tech Lowlander, checking them for injuries as she led them through the ship, hurried them to the crew deck and got them strapped in for liftoff.

* * *

Up on the command deck, Captain Blackwood received word that the ship had been secured, all personnel were accounted for, and all stations were secured for liftoff. At the same time, one of her screens flashed a warning and displayed more incoming hovercycles. There were six of them in total. Hovering at low altitude, they circled the
Andromeda
like vultures as the service tower slowly retracted.

One of Peacekeepers transmitted a threat to the
Andromeda
in a thick Esperanto accent. “Stand down at once! Stand down! You are all under arrest! Comply!”

Catherine had had
enough
of these people. She tapped the transmit button on her display. “Officer, this is Captain Catherine Blackwood of the
Andromeda.
Be advised, we have been cleared by the spaceport for launch. We are lifting off in T-minus ninety seconds. If you value your lives, you will be clear of our exhaust plume by then.
Andromeda
clear.”

Catherine listened to their frantic transmissions as the Peacekeepers, completely unsure of what to do, called back to the colony for instructions. Their leader radioed Spaceport Control, demanding that the
Andromeda
be detained. The traffic controller, a quintessential Freeholder, calmly explained to the Peacekeepers that as a sovereign and free individual, not only did he not recognize their authority but he had no authority of his own to detain a ship. As a matter of fact, he said, detaining them would be tantamount to
piracy.
The
Andromeda,
he said, hadn’t broken any spaceport rules and had filed its flight plan twenty hours in advance, as requested. He repeated Catherine’s suggestion that the hovercycles clear the launch area before the ship lifted off, and reminded them that the spaceport would not be liable for any injury or death that may occur if they chose to stay.

Catherine actually laughed out loud as the Peacekeepers broke and fled. As the countdown reached T-minus twenty seconds, she reclined her command chair back into the launch position. The deal she’d worked out with the Freeholders who ran the spaceport hadn’t been inexpensive, but it had proven worthwhile. Freeholders, by nature, disliked the weird, authoritarian rules of the tiny colony, and only accommodated them to the extent necessary to do business. She’d gotten her crewman back, and these backworld crazies could go pound sand.

“This is the captain,” she said, broadcasting over the ship’s intercom moments before launch. “Well done, all of you. Stand by for liftoff.”

Chapter 21

Zanzibar

Danzig-5012 Solar System

Lang’s Burg, Equatorial Region

Pale light from Danzig-5012 peeked in through the shutters as Zak opened his eyes. He stretched lazily, like a cat on a summer morning (a cat with creaky, cracking joints, anyway). While normally a night person, since coming to Zanzibar Zak had been a habitual early riser. He suspected it had something to do with the planet’s lack of a magnetosphere screwing with his sleep patterns, but that was only a guess. It would be a while before Anna got up, and even longer before Cecil crawled out of bed. He retrieved his handheld from the nightstand and took it out of standby.

Zanzibar didn’t have a functioning planetary network. There were a few satellites in orbit, but they were strictly pay-for-use, and Zak didn’t have access to them. Lang’s Burg had its own crude local network, but it was monitored and had nothing of interest on it. Little, if any, news from the rest of inhabited space ever made it as far as Zanzibar, and what news did arrive was months out of date. Fortunately, Zak had thousands of texts saved on his handheld: history books, novels, poetry, anthologies, fiction and nonfiction alike. He was a voracious reader in his free time, and found solace in the quiet solitude of a good book.

His current fascination was an ancient epic poem titled
The Fall of Mankind and the Coming of the Long Night
, written some eight hundred years before. It was a romantic, tragic, and sadly beautiful retelling of the First Interstellar War, the horrific atrocities committed as both sides struggled to exterminate each other, and the ultimate collapse of interstellar civilization. It was woeful lament of humanity falling from its zenith, destroyed by its own hubris, returning to pre-Space Age barbarism and continual struggle.

The long-dead author of the poem had seen his civilization destroyed. He wrote the poem not knowing if or when the Long Night would ever end, and the sense of loss he felt was palpable with each verse. It made Zak think of the ancient Zanzibari; did they know their end was coming? Did they write epic works lamenting their impending doom, or did it happen suddenly? How many times, on how many worlds, had such a cycle of achievement and destruction been repeated, over billions of years? What great civilizations had lived, flourished, and died in the countless eons before humankind had taken its first step? The Milky Way Galaxy was but a grain of sand on a vast beach, stretching across the cosmos and through time. What difference did any of it make? What did it matter?

The author of
The Coming of the Long Night
pondered these possibilities as well, and felt insignificant because of it. Perhaps it was just the melancholy that comes with witnessing an apocalyptic war unfold, but Zak could feel the bleak hopelessness, the futility of man’s insignificant struggles, in the words. It was depressing, more depressing than merely waking up on a dead rock like Zanzibar.

After an hour or so of reading, Zak heard Anna quietly moving around downstairs. She, too, was an early riser, and typically started her days with yoga, then breakfast and tea. He pulled up a picture of her on his small screen. It had been taken right after their arrival on Zanzibar, before their ordeal of captivity began. She was actually smiling. Such a beautiful smile. She undoubtedly had her pick of suitors on her homeworld.

Yet, apparently, she had set her sights on Zak. Cecil had pulled him aside and told him, bluntly, that Anna was in love with him, but he didn’t believe it. At first he thought the Avalonian aristocrat was playing a joke on him. After all, Anna had always seemed all business to Zak. She never made any flirty gestures, seemed to dislike physical contact, and was almost standoffish at times.

Cecil had laughed at Zak when he said that. “You just described yourself there, my friend,” he’d said. “Did it ever occur to you that she’s just like you?”

As a matter of fact, that
hadn’t
occurred to Zak. But why hadn’t she said anything about how she felt? Anna was a strong woman from a powerful family, and never had any trouble speaking her mind.

Cecil had laughed at that, too. “It wouldn’t be proper,” he explained, “for a woman of her position to go chasing after a man. That’s not how they do things on New Constantinople. Supposedly sophisticated societies sneer at how backward it all is, but in some places a man is still expected to court a lady, to earn her favor. Women don’t necessarily give their affections away. You have to work for it. She’s not going to risk humiliation by expressing her interest in you. That’s your job, as the suitor, to read the signs and make the connection.”

The cultural differences between Zak’s home of Columbia and the colony of New Constantinople seemed greater than just the fluid accent Anna spoke Commerce English with. He’d made it a point to read everything he could find about the history and society of Anna’s home. Cecil had told him that he wasn’t going to find a better woman than Anna, and as condescending as it may have sounded it was probably true. The clichéd advice usually given to people in his situation was to “just be yourself”; Zak had been himself for his entire life, and had never won the affections of a woman like Anna before. He had to do it right if he hoped to…
to what? What is it you think is going to happen? Focus, man. Get her off this rock alive, then worry about romance.

Driving the sentiment home, a message box popped up on the screen of his handheld.
What?
Zak hadn’t received a message since he’d been on Zanzibar. Without access to a network, his handheld was as isolated as he was, and there wasn’t anyone to send him a personal message anyway.

He tapped the screen to bring up the text message. His handheld didn’t recognize the sending address.
Mr. Mesa,
it said simply,
your message has been sent.
That was it. A ship willing to carry his message must have left Zanzibar, bound for Concordiat space. A feeling of relief washed over Zak; no matter what happened to him now, he’d done all he could do. He didn’t know if the plight of the Zanzibaran people, or the theft and sale of alien relics being used to fund a warlord’s army, would be enough to move anyone to act, but at least he had tried.

Zak felt good, for the first time in a long time. He had to tell Anna the news! Jumping out of bed, Zak ran downstairs and entered the kitchen, where his partner was making herself a modest breakfast out of the food supplies provided by their captors. She looked up at him quizzically when he entered the kitchen, waving his handheld around like a madman. “Well, ah, good morning,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

Zak held his screen for Anna to read. “It’s done. We did it.”

Anna looked thoughtful for a moment, then smiled. “Good. Very good. It doesn’t change our situation, but at least we did
something
. We may just get through this yet, Zachary. Our ride home is on its way, and Lang has been happy enough with our work of late.”

Zak’s expression darkened. “I hate that man,” he said quietly. “I hate what he’s doing. I hate being so powerless. Anna I…” he trailed off, taking a deep breath. “Anna, I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I’m sorry…for everything.”

Anna smiled. “Stop apologizing. You and I, and Mr. Blackwood as well, we are all of us victims of circumstance. I don’t blame you for what’s happened to us, and neither should you. I knew the risks when I signed the contract. Do you know what my life was like before we became partners?”

Zak simply shook his head. He’d met Anna at a historical symposium on Columbia, where he presented his paper on the history of Zanzibar.

“New Constantinople has been a center of trade, commerce, and culture for a thousand years. My world was burned in the fires of the First Interstellar War, but instead of backsliding into chaos and barbarism, my ancestors held fast and rebuilt our civilization. My family can trace its lineage back to the colony’s founding during the Diaspora. I…there’s something I have to tell you.”

Zak’s heart quickened. “Yeah, sure, go ahead. You know you can always talk to me.”

Anna looked down. “I’m afraid I’ve not been entirely forthcoming with you about things…about myself. My name isn’t Anna Kay.”

Wait, what?
“Okay,” Zak said. “What
is
your name?”

“My name is Anna Komnene. When I said my family can trace its lineage back to the founding of the colony…” She trailed off.

Zak’s mind raced. “Holy hell. You weren’t joking. You’re a member of the royal family? Anna…why didn’t you tell me? Why are you even here? Why…?”

Anna hushed her partner so she could speak. “I’m not an
important
member of the royal family. I’m not going to be empress or anything, if that’s what you’re wondering.” New Constantinople was a constitutional monarchy. The royal family rarely involved itself in day-to-day governance in the modern era, though their leadership had been key in pulling the colony through the Interregnum. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to treat me like a partner, not nobility. Before I met you, I lived a life of leisure and luxury. I was free to pursue whatever interest or activity I desired, or not. Anything I wanted, I could have. If I wanted to marry, there was no shortage of men, men I’d never met mind you, willing to propose. Growing up, I was always treated differently, deferred to even, out of respect for my family.”

“That…I mean, I’m not trying to be mean, but that doesn’t sound that bad to me.”

Anna laughed. “I know. Rich girl problems, right? But that’s just it: it wasn’t hard. I’ve never known struggle, or want, or danger, or adventure in my entire life. They were abstract concepts that I read about, not things that happened to me. I was free to do whatever I wanted, but nothing I did mattered. Most people who knew me didn’t actually know
me
, they knew Anna Komnene, of the Komnene Family, descendants of Alistair Komnene, one of the founding fathers of New Constantinople. People assumed I was vapid, spoiled, and out of touch with the world. You know what? I
was
. The superficial charity work I did, the ceremonies I attended, it was all a chore for me, just doing what was expected of me. None of it mattered.”

Zak shook his head. “What were you doing on Columbia then?”

“I ran away,” Anna said, smiling. “Not that it was any great sacrifice. I had quite a bit of money put away, after all. After I was awarded my doctorate in archaeology, I told my family I was moving off-world, gathered my things, and left. Columbia was the closest major colony. I wanted to see how the rest of the galaxy lived, and your world was as good a place to start as any.”

“Why tell me this now, Anna? Do you want me to try send a message home for you? Will your world send a rescue mission?”

“My world doesn’t have much of a military, Zak. No punitive expeditions are going to be sent on my behalf. My title, my position, they were mostly ceremonial, and I walked away from them of my own accord. I didn’t tell you before because I thought…well, I thought you’d be mad that I’ve been dishonest with you. I was worried that if Lang found out who I was, he’d hold me for ransom the way he’s been holding poor Cecil. But I want you to know the truth now, because I want you to stop blaming yourself for my situation. You and I are both in over our heads, but we’re in it together. I have you to thank for a great deal. You treated me like a regular person. You gave me the dignity of a meaningful task. You let me do things on my own, instead of treating me like a precious artifact. I want you to know that no matter how this ends, even if…even if we both die here, I’m grateful. I truly am.”

A tear trickled down Anna’s cheek. Zak had never once seen her cry before, and his first impulse was to try to comfort her. He wasn’t the hugging type, but she looked like she needed a hug.

Anna stepped back slightly. “Hold on now.”

“I’m sorry!” Zak sputtered. “I just thought…”

Wiping the tear away, Anna raised an eyebrow, flashed him a smile, and looked him up and down. “I know we’re laying it all on the table, as it were, but perhaps you should get dressed? I’m a lady, Zachary, and that is no way to present yourself to a lady.”

Zak’s eyes went wide as he realized that for the entire conversation with his partner, he’d been standing in the kitchen in his underwear. In his haste to tell her the news, he had forgotten to dress. His face turned a deep shade of red, and he slowly backed around the corner. “Probably not a good day to wear my lucky rocketship underpants,” he said meekly.

“I disagree,” Anna said with a devilish smile. “I find them adorable. Run along now, get dressed. We’ll talk when you’re wearing pants.”

Smooth, Zak. Cecil is never going to let you live this one down.