Mission Inadvisable: Mission 13 (Black Ocean) Read online

  # # #

  It was Carl’s turn on watch. He could have begged off, gotten Archie to sit and watch the cockpit’s consoles and indicators, and slipped back into bed beside Amy.

  Sometimes, though, there was too much of a good thing. Carl felt as if he were holding the key to eternal happiness in the palm of his hand, and the path before him was strewn with marbles. For his own good, he wasn’t going to plow forward recklessly, no matter how close he appeared to finding the lock that key would fit.

  Beatles music crooned from the cockpit speakers. Listening to “Strawberry Fields Forever” reminded him of the flavor of Amy’s lip gloss. That cheap, gift-shop-grade goo had done Carl a favor that night, and he wasn’t willing to let that memory fade into a haze of hops quite yet.

  Life was good.

  With the take from the heist, they could be picky about their next job. And even if they weren’t, there was now a second world that would take them in as vagabond guests, no questions asked. Agos VI was even in ARGO space, with human-owned chain restaurants and civilized connection speeds to the omni.

  Carl considered using the astral drive to drag them back into realspace just to admire the stars. It was his ship, his cockpit, his turn on watch. Not having to ask Mort was a welcome bit of freedom Carl had forgotten long ago. If the Mobius could drop below 4 AU on its own, he might have considered it.

  They weren’t in any rush, now. This was the calm between storms. There was no heist about to go down that they needed to stop. No one was kidnapped or stranded. The Mobius wasn’t even wanted on any current warrants, as of the last purge of their criminal records.

  Had it been Mort all along, gumming up the works?

  Carl hated even thinking it. Mort had bailed them out of more jams than he could count. But it was hard to ignore the coincidence that this was their first job without the lovable old coot, and the first one that had gone off with only minor hiccups since before Esper had joined the crew.

  A brief mental struggle ensued as Carl tried to think back to the last time they’d walked away with their crew uninjured, the Mobius undamaged, the money secured, and nobody trying to arrest, kill, or otherwise make their lives shorter and less pleasant.

  The comm panel lit with an incoming message. The funny, squiggly markings preceding the sender ID belonged to Yomin’s marker, indicating that this comm had filtered through her anonymizing routine. That meant that it wasn’t from anyone who knew who they were.

  On behalf of Earth Interstellar Enhanced Investigative Org, thank you for your assistance in the capture and prosecution of Howard D. Carter and Jonus K. Brewster on charges of antiquities smuggling and violation of the Primitive Worship Act. Your recovery of Mr. Carter’s data core has led to many other avenues of prosecution for these two and many of their associates. Most importantly, we have all the information we need to bring a Convocation rogue to justice. We’ve spent years trying to build a case for antiquities smuggling and cultural plunder, but this is the first time we’ll have probable cause to raid the reclusive wizardess’s fortress compound.

  My personal thanks, loyal citizen,

  Captain Montague P. Snead, Earth Interstellar Enhanced Investigative Organization

  Carl read it twice.

  There was just enough there for the familiar feeling of dread to set in. This was the other shoe he’d been expecting to drop. This was the news that threatened to ruin the good mood this job had put them all in.

  Punching in the coordinates for Champlain VI, Carl waited for the nav computer to spit out a new course. In the meantime, he got on the shipwide comm, not caring who he woke from a sound sleep.

  “We fucked up, guys. That core we gave Earth Interstellar didn’t just nail Carter and Brewster for this job. Earth Interstellar tracked down the buyer on this job, and they’re heading to arrest her. We may have just ratted out Keesha Bell.”

  # # #

  Esper sat at the foot of her bed, a set of headphones covering her ears. Through the technology tucked away inside, she could hear the voice of Mindy Mun trapped in the amber of digital purgatory. Memory alone told her that wasn’t really the case, but the logical portion of Esper’s brain told her that for Mindy Mun’s voice to be in her headphones, the singer herself must be missing it.

  Meditation was never easy. Just the sideways notion of where the voice existed had thrown Esper from her state of utter concentration.

  The headphones helped. Being made of technology, they forced Esper to keep herself within the boundaries of objective reality. The muffs blocked out most of the ship’s extraneous noises. The songs themselves were as familiar as her mother’s face; she’d grown up with both as part of her daily existence.

  Swaying gently in time with the beat, Esper sank back into the welcoming blankness and willed away the inside world.

  The outside world was keeping to itself well enough these days. The rest of the Mobius crew seemed happy. Extramarital copulation was way up, but she held out hope that some of that would sort itself into proper familial bonds one day or another. The gloom following Mort’s supposed death was even on the wane.

  It was Esperville and its orbiting moons that were her present dilemma. Mort was tearing through Esper’s mental barricades with increasing ease. The former priestess had taken on the role of jailer and rehabilitator, but Mort was staging the first-ever jailbreak via siege.

  Esper woke from her trance with a start when one earphone pulled away from her head.

  “I said, I need your help,” Carl shouted. He was standing in her room, the door flung open behind him.

  Esper snatched the earphones away, and the comforting voice of Mindy Mun faded to a tinny, distant warble dangling from her hand. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Snapping you out of la-la-land to do your job,” Carl barked, pointing to the common room.

  Blinking and rubbing her eyes, Esper struggled to piece together what she was missing from this scenario. “I thought you were happy being at the depth we found the Harpoon Gale.”

  “Got a comm from our buddies at Earth Interstellar,” Carl explained, chest heaving but voice slowing to sub-avalanche speeds. “It was supposed to just be an atta-boy for tossing them Carter and Brewster hog-tied and ready to prosecute. But the investigator threw in a little detail at the end.”

  He tossed Esper a datapad. She flipped it around until the letters were right-side up and read the message.

  “Oh.”

  “‘Oh’? Is that all you’ve got?” Carl asked, grabbing the datapad out of Esper’s hand. “They’re obviously going after Keesha Bell, and it’s our fault.”

  Esper pursed her lips a moment and gave a thoughtful frown. “Why? It sounds like Keesha hired these people herself. I mean, Earth Interstellar is investigating a crime she committed, not taking the fall for some job of ours.”

  Mort stormed into existence beside Carl. “Oh, no you don’t!” the wizard thundered. “You’re her apprentice. She stood before the Convocation and swore up and down that you were her student. Got you admitted. Took your oath. You can’t just let Carl limp there at techno-speed and arrive a day late and a lifetime short. Convocation justice isn’t pretty. Bloody me, don’t I know it.”

  But Carl wasn’t idle during Mort’s soliloquy. Paying more attention to the angry wizard hallucinating in front of her, Esper caught snippets of convoluted Carl-logic about how if they hadn’t interfered, Keesha Bell would never have fallen into Earth Interstellar’s sights.

  For diplomatic purposes, Esper nodded along. At the end, she threw in a non-committal “uh, huh.”

  “Well?” Carl asked, his voice coming in loud and clear now that Mort had shut up.

  “Well, what?” Esper asked innocently.

  Carl jabbed a finger even more emphatically out at the common room. “Get out there. We’ll have Amy stop the ship, and you drop us as deep as you can without getting us lost forever.”

  “Risk it,” Mort said. “Lost forever is better than damned as a tr
aitor.”

  “Are you sure about this?” Esper asked, twisting her lips up to give Carl her rusty Teacher’s Glare. But it worked poorly on ten-year-olds, and by all indications was a net loss when used on outlaw starship captains.

  “MOVE!” Carl ordered.

  Esper blinked. She wasn’t accustomed to being ordered. Carl usually wheedled. No one else dared. Even Mort’s rantings were just hot air.

  “So help me, young lady,” Mort warned. “If you don’t get this ship to Keesha’s planet the quickest way you know how, I swear by Lucifer’s hairy ass-crack that I will find a way to make you regret it.”

  Esper flung the headphones across the room to smack into the wall with a plasticky crack. “Fine,” she snapped, looking Mort in the eye as she stomped out of the room. “You want deep, you’ve got it. Amy!” she bellowed. “Stop us dead.”

  There was a quiet yawn from the direction of the cockpit. “OK. Gimme a sec,” Amy shouted back, yawn still lingering in her voice.

  Esper covered her mouth with the back of her hand—even at this distance, the yawn was contagious.

  “Full stop. Let ‘er rip,” Amy called out. She leaned from the pilot’s chair with a thumbs up, and Esper could see that she was dressed in pajamas.

  Carl edged around the outskirts of the room, keeping out of Esper’s way as she chanted to demand that the universe deliver them to the border of the gray and purple astrals. It was one thing when Mort had gotten them there by accident. Now that Esper knew of the place, she could be more specific about their destination.

  As she finished her chant, Esper wiped at her mouth and came away with a trickle of blood on the back of her hand. The demonic language she’d learned from the Tome of Bleeding Thoughts was the eldest language Esper knew, but it was hell itself on the throat and soft tissues of the mouth.

  She heard Carl in the cockpit.

  “Where are we?” the captain asked.

  Amy said something too soft to hear in reply.

  Carl came back to the common room, shaking his head.

  “How’d I do?” Esper asked.

  “Could hardly have done better myself,” Mort cut in.

  At the same time, Carl was answering. “Nav computer is running numbers, but we’re over sixteen deep. Ballpark, I’m thinking five or six hours.”

  The ire had drained from Esper with the working of the fell magic of the book. Nothing in it related to astral travel, but the language it taught was nothing if not versatile. Still, it had taken more of a toll on her physically than an hour working out in the cargo hold with Tanny’s martial arts dummy.

  “Good,” she replied. “I think I need a nap.”

  # # #

  Carl lay on the couch, fingers laced behind his head. Through the domed ceiling, he watched the astral gray flow past, imagining the minor whorls of purple were landmarks, same as stars.

  It was quiet in the common room with no holovid on and no one else around. The refrigerator hummed. The ship thrummed. From the cockpit, he could faintly hear the sounds of Amy working.

  In that quiet, it would have been near impossible for Amy to sneak up on him. He heard her bare feet on the steel floors as she approached. The couch sagged near Carl’s feet.

  “Whatcha thinkin’?” Amy asked casually.

  Carl shrugged.

  “Come on,” Amy cajoled gently. “No one stares into the astral without something on their mind. Well, wizards, maybe, but they see more out there, I think.”

  “Nothing,” Carl replied.

  “Don’t give me that,” she scolded. Carl felt a hand on his stomach, then Amy’s face loomed over his. “I want a real answer. Save the bullshit for everyone else.”

  Carl chuckled. “I’ve got enough to spare, don’t I? But I mean, I’m trying to stop thinking. Nothing’s the goal, not the blow-off it usually comes across as.”

  “OK. That’s at least plausible. But why?”

  Carl tried to sit up, to put himself on equal ground, but Amy kept him pinned to the couch. If her plan was to get him distracted, she might pull it off. All he could think of pulling off was that thin flannel pajama top she wore, held together in the middle by three oversized buttons.

  “I don’t know if we’re cut out for this,” Carl admitted, slumping back in defeat. “I mean, we pulled off the perfect crime. We’d robbed a couple guys guilty of worse stuff than us, and let the authorities clean up the mess. Dust hands. Walk into sunset. Roll credits. Start shooting the sequel. Right?”

  Amy craned her neck down for a quick kiss. “Sounds wonderful.”

  This time Carl mustered the strength and willpower to sit up, taking Amy right along with him. “But there’s a problem. We just fucked over Keesha Bell in the process. She’s never done us any wrong. Sure, maybe a job she brokered once went sideways, and we damaged some stuff and only got half a payday once. But, I mean, that’s business. This business. That’s how it goes, especially for us.”

  Amy sighed. “Usually.”

  “This time, we tried to do a little good and pad our mattress bank accounts at the same time. And look what it got us.”

  “And you’re going to put it right,” Amy said. She sounded so sure of herself that Carl almost believed her. Unfortunately, a liar can’t be fooled by confidence and hearing what he wants to hear.

  “How, exactly?” Carl asked. “All I can think of is beating Earth Interstellar to Champlain VI and getting her offworld.”

  “Want me to try comming her again?”

  Carl pinched the bridge of his nose. “No. If they’re jamming at her end, there’s no point. Even Yomin can’t break through plain old interference. Earth Interstellar has her boxed up. All I can hope is that they don’t have a Convocation strike team close by. If I learned anything from decades of hiding Mort, it’s that the Convocation takes care of its own messes. Best case, we swoop in and whisk her away before the angry wizards show up to blast their way into her compound.”

  “What’s the backup plan?” Amy asked, throwing her arms around Carl’s neck.

  How could he disappoint her? Then again, how could he not? It wasn’t as if Carl wanted to be out of options.

  “We don’t have Mort anymore. With him around, maybe we could take her back by force. But this is the post-Mort era now. We don’t have an ace up our sleeve. Esper’s solid. Better than solid. But she’s not Vlad the Impaler in a mustard-stained sweatshirt and sneakers.”

  “Ever think that maybe accounting for Mort’s way as your backup plan is why things went wrong so often? You didn’t need a great plan because even a shit plan wasn’t going to get you killed.”

  Carl scowled. There were times when he wondered whether that precog business was the only magic talent Amy really had. “Yeah. I’ve considered it.”

  “Maybe instead of moping here, you should come up with a few brilliant plans.”

  Carl tapped a finger on the tip of Amy’s nose. “Or maybe we just don’t have it in our DNA to be the good guys.”

  Her reply was a lopsided grin and a giggle.

  “What?” Carl demanded.

  “I’m just laughing at the fact that I live in a galaxy where two counts of kidnapping, assault, piracy, theft, breaking and entering, and whatever the hell Esper did to Carter to get him to give up those access codes… that it all still makes us the good guys.”

  Carl cleared his throat. “I, uh, also may have mistaken a sacred spring for a urinal at that banquet in our honor.”

  Amy pulled up one of the couch cushions and slugged Carl in the face with it. Sending up a cloud of stale starship dust. “You did not!”

  Carl laughed helplessly as she continued to pummel him with the cushion. “No. One of the priests gave me directions. But I could have.”

  As Amy discarded the cushion, she fell atop him, face flushed and grinning to the ears. This was why he loved her. She’d chased away his doubts and fears and made him laugh. All he could think about now was the distance from the common room couch to their bed.
/>   He could feel the heat of Amy’s body through her pajamas. Carl didn’t want to make her cross the cold steel barefoot again. This was his ship, after all. The common room was as much his as the bunk the two of them shared.

  As Carl’s fingers undid the buttons down her front, Amy pulled Carl’s shirt over his head.

  # # #

  The chair was comfortable—its wood culled from Rai Kub’s adopted homeworld of New Garrelon. Unlike every other piece of furniture aboard the Mobius, it was just his size, suited to a stuunji’s larger posterior and more substantial mass.

  As the stuunji stared out the window of his quarters, the blankness of the astral stared back. The words of his grandfather echoed in his ears from when Rai Kub was just a boy. People are good or bad not because of what they do, but also because of what they don’t do.

  Lately, it seemed, Rai Kub was getting the two lists confused.

  Returning a stolen relic from an occupied people spoke to his heart. That much was true to the path he wanted to tread. Every other step along the way seemed wrong.

  Absently, Rai Kub munched on a bale of wheat dusted with cinnamon. It was part of a supply from New Garrelon that he knew wouldn’t last. Despite their welcome there, he understood that the crew of the Mobius didn’t fit in there. Just as he didn’t fit in here.

  Looking after the vish kinah people, that was noble and right. That was the Savior Carl that Rai Kub had always imagined. Perhaps men were never meant to meet their heroes. The deeds and tales will always be larger than the hero himself. No man can be expected to match in daily life the heroism of his finest hour.

  Two criminals packed up and sent for justice. That much Rai Kub agreed with, even if the methods of their capture amounted to kidnapping and piracy. Those were the acts of a man who placed justice above law.

  “Why are we rescuing the mastermind?” he asked himself aloud, as if by putting the words on the breeze—as his grandfather would have said—he could hear them the way the mountains heard. Of course, the only breeze was the gentle current from the life-support vents; the nearest mountain was on a planet lightyears away.