Wings of Retribution (12 page)

Dallas glanced at the flashlight in her lap.  “Yeah.”

“So why’d you stay?”

Dallas glanced up, surprised.  “How’d you know?”

Squirrel shrugged.  “Smallfoot liked you well enough.  Figure you had a flashlight when you woke me up, so you must have been awake before the lights went out.”  She glanced back at Dallas to gauge how well her remarks were hitting home.

Dallas nodded and Squirrel turned back to the wires.

“A pilot like you can get work anywhere,” Squirrel continued after awhile.  “Me, I’ve got a history.  Can’t get legitimate work.  But you… You could have your own ship in a few years.  Why’d you stay?”

“I didn’t wanna leave Beetle without a pilot,” Dallas said.  “Just in case Dune gets her running again.”

Squirrel scoffed.  “Dune’s not gonna get it running again without power.  The best chance is to divert some of the backup life-support into the com system.”

Dallas’s brows lifted.  “Is that wise?”

“Do I ever ask you if you’re flying straight?”

“No,” Dallas said.

Squirrel touched two wires together, producing a loud snapping sound, then twisted them tight.  She shut the panel with a triumphant snap and moved over to the console.  “You mind?”  she said, motioning at Dallas’s chair.

Dallas got up and watched as Squirrel sat down in the pilot’s seat.  She picked up the handheld and slid the earpiece over her head.  Then she started rattling off distress calls, switching the frequency every few minutes.  Only a resounding static answered her.

Squirrel lowered the earpiece in frustration.  “Damn it, Fairy, where the hell did you leave us?  There isn’t even a whisper out there.”

Dallas bit her lip.  “Sorry.”

Squirrel made a very unladylike grunt and went back to her distress calls.

Dallas sat down in Goat’s seat and watched, anxiously picking at a peeling bit of lettering on the dash.  After twenty minutes or so, Squirrel turned on her again.  “Do you mind?  You’re making me nervous.  Go check on the captain or something.”

“I already told you,” Dallas began, “The Captain’s—”

“Dead.  Yes, I know.  Go check on her anyway.”

Narrowing her eyes, Dallas got up and left the helm.

She intended to head down the stairs and see what Dune and Goat were doing, but she heard a crash from Athenais’s room.  She froze, her beam of light quivering over the open door.

The crash came again, followed by a curse.

Heart in her throat, Dallas tiptoed to the open door and peered inside.

Captain Athenais Owlborne blinked back at her like a deer caught in the headlights, completely whole, without so much as a scratch marring her head.  Even her scars were gone.  The wall behind her was clean.

I’m losing my mind
, Dallas thought.

“
Get that goddamned light out of my face
!”

Dallas lowered the light, still staring.

The Captain got up and staggered to the door.  When she reached Dallas, she took the flashlight out of her hand. 

“Where’s Ragnar?” she barked down at her.

Cringing, Dallas babbled, “Smallfoot gave him to the Utopis.”

Lips set in a grim line, Athenais’s eyes came to rest on the dark electronics in the hall.  “And he took the power-core.” 

Dallas nodded, mouth open. 
And he killed you,
she thought, staring.

“Hell.”  Athenais cursed and stormed off to the engine room, leaving Dallas the choice of either following a ghost or staying behind in the darkness with what could very possibly be a dead body in the next room.  She decided to follow the ghost, because the ghost had taken her flashlight.

Down in the warmth of the engine room, Goat and Dune were muttering over a small boxlike contraption that they were hooking up to the fuse-box with a tangle of multicolored wires.

“What’s the rat’s nest?”  Athenais asked.

Neither Goat nor Dune looked up.  “Buggy battery,” Goat said.

“And what’s that?”  Athenais demanded, pointing to the manual in Goat’s hands.

“Racing guide,” Goat said with a grin.  “Did you know you can make a hundred thousand credits if you win the big race on Helius?”

“Don’t get him started,” Athenais said with a sigh.  She inspected the black box that was dangling haphazardly from the wall by its tangle of wires.  “Squirrel got power?”

“She hasn’t come down to yell at us, so yeah,” Dune said.

Athenais grunted and trotted back up the stairs, leaving Dallas with Dune and Goat.  Dallas turned and realized both of them were grinning at her.

“She looks like she seen a ghost,” Dune said.  They both guffawed.

“I saw her
brains
on the
wall
,” Dallas babbled.

“The Capt’in’s different,” Goat said.  He shrugged at her confused look and went back to his magazine.

Realizing they weren’t going to elaborate, Dallas swiped a flashlight and headed back to the helm.  She found Athenais sitting at the pilot’s seat, radioing for help.  When Squirrel saw Dallas, Squirrel shook her head once.  That was all Dallas needed.  They were going to die there.

Simple Stuart

Stuart was pulled from an uneasy sleep by the sound of Ragnar cursing.  “…self-serving bastard, Foot!” Ragnar was shouting.  “You’d sell your own mother if it made you a credit!”

Opening his eyes with a groan, Stuart tried to remember how he’d fallen asleep.  He had been in a conversation with Morgan about the plan to hit Millennium and then someone at the helm had started throwing the engine into overdrive, and then…  Nothing.

Then Stuart discovered that he couldn’t feel anything below the neck, and his senses came back online in an instant. 

Stasis shell,
he realized, which, while a Very Bad Thing, was also a bit of a relief.  Had he been drugged, he would have been completely trapped.  At least this way, he was still semi-mobile.

So, the pirates decided to go for the bounty after all, eh?  Typical.  Ragnar had been too close to the situation and Morgan was too much of a romantic to really take a logical look at the whole picture.  Stuart, for his part, had lost all his romantic tendencies centuries ago, and if he’d had his way, they wouldn’t have been in the same
Quadrant
as Marceau’s daughter, much less on her ship.  Like father, like daughter, and when he had confronted them about it, not one of his companions had denied the fact that the pirate they were trusting with their lives was utterly insane.

Then Stuart realized that they couldn’t be on Athenais’s small, cramped ship.  The rumbling growl of the engine reverberating through the sterile white walls belonged to a vessel much bigger than the spry little
Beetle
, and he was pretty sure the sanitized, blindingly-white linoleum didn’t belong to a group of hygienically-challenged space-pirates.

“Oh, give it up shifter,” someone shouted.  Stuart strained to remember, after brief introductions.  The
doctor
.  A Utopian agent? 

“You lost,” the doctor continued, in a sneer.  “Stop wasting air for the rest of us.”

Though his stasis shell was pointed in the opposite direction, Stuart twisted to see.

The short, gorilla-like man that Ragnar had called Smallfoot stood near the door with three blue-uniformed Utopian soldiers, pointing out locations of interest on a hardcopy star-chart. All three of the soldiers wore officers’ lapels. One bore the red starburst of Species Operations. 

Upon sight of that crimson, eight-pointed star, Stuart felt a lead weight hit the pit of his stomach.  Not good.  Not good at all.

To his horror, the S.O. officer noticed that Stuart was awake.  Stuart watched him cross the sanitized white room, hoping his terror wasn’t visible in his face.

What are they planning?
he thought, all sorts of horrible scenarios suddenly playing through his mind, making him sick.

The six-foot, clean-cut S.O. officer came to stand in front of him, hands clasped behind his back around a roll of maps.  The man wore his uniform like a badge, with every crease ironed into attention and every bit of brass gleaming.  He had a crew-cut that had been clipped tight to his skull, and he bore a rack of medals on his chest that would have made Marceau himself jealous. 

Stuart’s eyes caught upon the purple Xenological Special Warfare Commendation, which had a silver crescent denoting multiple awards, and he realized he was finally, categorically, never going to see the light of day again.

The Species Operations officer gave Stuart a long, hard stare, which Stuart returned in silence.

“I am Colonel Howlen, Species Operations specialist from Millennium.”

“I don’t care who you are.”

The colonel laughed, which made the medals on his chest jingle.  “Of course you do,” he replied.  “So humor me a moment.  Do you have any concept of the severity of your crimes?”

“Depends on who you ask,” Stuart replied.

The S.O. officer gave him a flat stare.  “Did you know you were traveling with three shifters, boy?  Do you know the penalties for consorting with banned life-forms?”

Stuart blinked. 
That
was the extent of his crimes?

Colonel Howlen took Stuart’s surprise to mean that he hadn’t.  He waved his roll of maps at his friends, all of whom were trapped in their own white egg-shaped stasis shells.  “All three of them.  They were living on Penoi, from what we gather.  You’re a colonist there, correct?”

Stuart flinched and glanced at the others.  Morgan and Paul were watching him in mute silence.  Ragnar was still scowling at Smallfoot.

A roll of cartographer’s hardcopy slapped Stuart’s stasis shell, wrenching his attention back to the colonel.  “I asked you a question.”

Stuart blinked at the S.O. officer.  “Yeah.”

“Where did you find these three?  What town?”

Stuart glanced back at his friends.

“Don’t look at them, look at me,” the S.O. officer snapped, slapping his shell again.  “Where did you meet them on Penoi?”

“Lerriton,” Stuart lied.

“Look it up,” Howlen said over his shoulder.

One of the two officers standing at the door ran it through the computer, then looked up and shook her head.

“Describe Lerriton,” Howlen said.  “Is there another name for it?  What’s the population like?  What part of the globe?”

“It’s a town on Penoi,” Stuart replied.  “It’s got people who live there.  In houses.”

Colonel Howlen gave him a long look.  “We can execute you.”

Stuart snorted.  “Go ahead.”

“We will, eventually,” Howlen assured him.  “Unless you cooperate.”  He paused, watching Stuart with a calm intelligence that gave Stuart chills.  After a moment, his face seemed to soften a bit.  “Look, boy.  I know you’ve formed emotional ties to those three, but they’re not
people.
  They’re
things.
  Animals that can take human form.”

From his own stasis shell, Paul scoffed.