The Catalyst (Targon Tales) (2 page)

"Put that on, Nova." He went back to the door and looked out into the hall. "We have to get out of here."

She slipped the mask over her face. "I said: What the hell is going on, Seth?"

He grinned. "Didn't expect to see me after all these years, Sweets? Get rid of your jacket."

"Why?"

"Because that powder on your clothes is going to be seeping through the entire ventilation system any moment now. How much of it did you breathe in?"

"A lot. It’s making my throat hurt." She stepped out of her skirt. She was glad to be rid of the disguise. Beneath the skirt and loose jacket she wore tight gray breeches, solid boots and a brief leather vest over a long-sleeved shirt. She gathered and tied her long hair at the nape. "Is it dangerous?"

"Very. Lean forward."

"What–"

"Do it!" He grasped her neck to bend her down and squirted her neck and chest with a bottle of saline he had pulled from the medicine cabinet. She sputtered when some of it ran into her respirator and fought his grip when the liquid burned her open wound. The floor below her turned pink.

He pulled her back up. "Sorry about that, but we’re in a hurry." He handed her a wad of clean cloth to place over the wound on her neck. He taped it to her skin with almost absentminded efficiency before striding back to the door. "We're going to make our way down to lock four. They won’t follow."

"Who, your pirate pals?"

"Not my pals," he said, again looking out into the hall. He grasped her arm and dragged her outside. They raced toward the docks, meeting no one.

"What about the others?" she protested and tried to slow down. His iron grip on her arm was unyielding. "I've got two other squad members here. And there are civilians. We can't just leave them!"

"No choice, Nova. Come on." He pulled her along. "The air here is poison."

"How do you know it's poisoned?"

"The tank broke?"

"What? Yes, it broke."

"Then the air is poisoned."

"We've got to warn them! There’s got to be portable air on board. Order your people to take the passengers off the ship."

He hesitated. "They don’t take orders from me."

"Try anyway! They can just dump them back on Pelion. We’re not that far."

He shook his head in resignation and they turned to run back up the main concourse where they had left the others. Both of them came to a sudden stop when they rounded a bend. People, both pirates and passengers, were stumbling along without direction, gasping in the caustic air now moving through the ship’s conduits. They watched some of them drop, clutching their throats. A woman nearby saw Nova and raised her arms toward her, pleading silently for help.

"Too late. Let’s go." Seth whipped her about and they hurried back to the freighter's docking ports. Once there, he propelled her into the airlock and closed the gate. "Nova, meet the Dutchman."

She released the opposite door and entered his ship through the umbilical.

"Where are we going?"

"Out of here, mainly. Your captain will have sent a distress signal. Sit down." Once through the cargo area, Seth crossed the untidy main cabin and stepped into the cockpit. The Dutchman, a small private cruiser, whined into readiness. Seth barely waited for Nova to drop into the co-pilot seat before tearing away from the freighter, warning lights flashing their protest when her thrusters pushed it away from the larger ship's hull. They raced away, toward the jumpsite beacons.

"Ten seconds to entry," Seth snapped at her and connected the neural interface at his temples to the ship’s sensors. When she did not reply he slammed his fist against the lever above her head. The crash guard came down hard on her collarbones. He revved the Dutchman for the jump and steeled himself against the freefall across the reach, putting all of his faith into the ship's crossdrives. Nova looked over the cockpit indicators. His acceleration exceeded anything she would have expected from a ship of this size.

He closed his eyes. The plane entered the breach through the power of complex calculation and survived by the strength of its shielding but it took a sentient mind to find the way out again. There was a long, silent moment of nothingness. No light, no sound, nothing remotely like the tangible reality they had just left, now many light years away. It was a long jump, reaching from Pelion all the way to Magra Gate, still within the rebel-held sector. But it was well-charted and the Dutchman crashed back into normal space before too long. Seth slowed the ship and began a systems check, hoping for the best. 

"Not a bad jump. I just about drained my coolants, though. We'll have to land on Aikhor." He disengaged his connection to the ship’s processors and set the autopilot.

Nova stumbled out of the cockpit to fall into one of the chairs in the main cabin, a cluttered combination of living and work space. She tossed her respirator aside. The dizziness she had felt earlier had subsided but an annoying scrape in her throat remained. He followed and sat down across from her. "What a ride, huh? Does your neck hurt? It's still bleeding."

She leaned toward him and slowly pulled his gun from its holster. She regarded it thoughtfully and then pointed it at him. The safety catch went off audibly enough. His eyes widened.

"I am going to give you about five minutes to explain why you attacked our ship and killed six Union officers along with over forty civilians and the crew. Not to mention how you knew about the tank and its contents. Then you are going to set course for Targon or I will kill you now and go there by myself."

 Seth swallowed hard. Nova's accusation had been delivered with all the emotional involvement of a weather report. The barrel of the gun was aimed levelly at this head. He knew quite well that she was capable of using it to kill even him.

Chapter Two

"Put that away, Nova. You need me to fly this ship."

"I’m every bit the pilot you are. Don’t think I didn’t notice your crossdrive update. That isn't even legal for private planes."

He glanced at the cockpit. "You saw that, huh? Look, you are not about to shoot me. You can't fly this plane, navigate, and keep that thing pointed at me all at the same time."

"All the more reason to shoot you now. Is that what you are these days? A pirate?"

"No one was supposed to get hurt."

Her eyes narrowed. "You know, I don’t think you’d bother with pirates, Sethran Kada. That’s just too crude for you. But you are known to consort with rebels. I have heard about you over the past few years. Not a lot of commendable stuff."

"Oh? What have you heard?"

 "You've raised hell in a number of places that'll never invite you back. Did some mercenary work, played the hero on Callas for a while. You have a habit of turning up where nasty things happen. Your name comes up when Tharron’s favorite deputies get mentioned. You got arrested for smuggling dope and guns more than once. You are a wanted criminal in a lot of places."

He leaned back in his chair, taking care to move very slowly. "I don’t smuggle dope. Are you writing a memoir about me?"

"Air Command is."

"Sounds like they need a new hobby. I'm a small-time privateer compared to what's going on out here. You won't even get a pat on the back for turning me in."

"Privateer? Those people back there are dead because of you! Union agents shot. Others on their way to some slaver or to be ransomed if they’re really lucky. That is treason, not small time fun for profit!"

"Treason? I don't remember pledging allegiance to anyone lately. And if those cowboys of yours hadn't decided to start shooting they’d still be alive."

"Some of those cowboys were my friends. Why did you take me with you?"

He shrugged. "I couldn't let a woman–"

"There were two dozen other women aboard. Don't patronize me!"

"Well, maybe I wouldn't have taken you with me if I had remembered what a handful you can be." He smiled disarmingly. It didn't work. "Since you know all about me, let's talk about you. But put the gun down, will you? It’s got a touchy switch. There isn't an evil thought in my head right now."

Nova studied his relaxed pose for a moment, knowing very well that he would uncoil and snap up her gun the moment she set it aside. Instead, she lowered the weapon without removing her finger from its trigger.

"Thank you," he said. "I have to say this is a fine welcome for an old friend. Will you not give us a kiss to say hello?"

"We were never friends."

"I recall differently. I was a virgin before I met you, I swear."

"Yah, right."

 He smirked. "Last time I saw you, you were pointing your academy pistols at anything that moved. I see they give you real guns now, First Lieutenant Nova Whiteside."

"You're familiar with my record also. I kinda like mine better."

Seth reclined lazily, clearly measuring the distance from his not so relaxed body to her gun. He saw her watching him closely and smiled innocently. "You've climbed the ranks over the years."

She tilted her head to regard him thoughtfully. "It's been a while since you quit, hasn't it?"

"Six years." He leered at her. "You've grown up."

Her hand strayed to her already tightly buttoned collar. "And you’ve grown even more disrespectful."

He leaned forward in his chair. "Is there anything nice forthcoming here? Like: 'Hello, Seth, good to see you'. Something like that?"

She tipped her gun up until he sat back again, at a safer distance. "How about ‘Hello, Seth, how come you left the base without notice or good bye?’”

"Oh. That."

"Yes, that."

He shrugged and looked at his hands. "I just had to get out of there. Too many rules. I just couldn't keep them all straight in my head. I had to jump. They couldn't teach me anything else."

"That's just it! You were brilliant in every way. At the top of your tier all the time until you screwed up."

"You weren't so bad yourself, love."

"I am not trying to flatter you! You could have joined Air Command, too. We could have used you. Instead, you are a bloody pirate!"

 "Stop ranting, Red. This is your life, not mine. If I could not make it through that academy, how do you think I'd handle military? I was never meant to be a soldier." He raised his hands away from his body. "Look, I'm going to go back there and get you some bandages. You're bleeding all over my nice chair. Don't shoot me - I'm not about to jump out of the airlock to get away from you."

She rolled her eyes and gestured with the gun. He rose with fluid grace and she watched him walk toward the rear of the cabin to search through some bins. He wore comfortably shabby leather trousers and a loose shirt, looking every bit the pirate. His powerful body seemed to have changed little in the years since she had last seen it. In her bed. On the day when, after a long shift of maneuvers and exercise, she had returned to the base to find him gone.

They had both trained under the same instructors, not far from graduating from Air Command’s advanced flight training while pursuing additional studies. Seth had an intuitive understanding of people and retained entire volumes of histories, languages and customs of the worlds he studied. Her own interests had leaned toward weapons and navigation. Their shared passion for aviation was boundless.

 She had at first been taken by his looks. His effortless grace, so different from the awkwardness of her Human friends, was not easy to ignore. Genetically linked to their Human neighbors, there was still something sleekly alien about the Centauri that fascinated her along with many of her female friends. There was no wasted movement, no incomplete gesture. The apparent laziness of his fine-tuned body belied the fact that he could strike like a snow cobra when moved to do so. It served him well and he often took over instruction for hand-to-hand combat training.

That Seth had been older than her classmates and also working as a tutor while completing his advanced standing had made him even more attractive to Nova. She had grown up on one military installation after another while her parents were assigned to wherever the need was greatest. Their only child was always closely guarded, always under the stern eye of her father who made it clear that a dalliance with another pilot, especially one who was not Human, would not be tolerated. The disciplines he had instilled in her were not easily left behind even after she had set out on her own.

But neither her father’s principles nor the academy’s rules deterred her when Seth had singled her out. He had demanded nothing from her but her company until she had come to him. Her experience with men had been limited to furtive groping among classmates and short-lived infatuations with seniors whose interest was fleeting and rarely extended beyond the bedroom. Seth had been her first real lover and had made their encounters a series of joyful discoveries, unhurried and memorable. Weeks passed blissfully as they carried out their affair while eluding the watchful eye of supervisors and the ever-present security cameras.

It didn’t last. Discipline did not come easily to Seth and he had chafed under the daily routines to which they were subjected. His aversion to authority was decidedly at odds with the regimented career that Nova had chosen. Eventually, it was assumed, either Seth or the administrative body of the academy had decided to terminate his training there.

She had missed him, then loathed him and then missed him some more. It had taken a while before rumors had settled and she was able to put him out of her mind. Since then she had accepted one tour of duty after another, honing her skills, becoming a Hunter Class pilot and doing her part to help rid the Trans-Targon sector of an increasingly bold and dangerous rebel force. She had learned not to look back, on anything.

"Are you all right?" Seth intruded upon her memories. "You seem tired." He sat back down and opened a box of medical supplies. She pulled away when he reached for the crude bandage on her neck. "Oh, hold still," he said. "You're the one with the gun."

She took a deep breath, engaged the safety switch on the weapon and tossed it into a recessed lounge tucked into the wall of the cabin. He was right - she wasn't about to shoot him and probably wasn't equipped to take his ship by herself through this rebel-infested sub-sector.