Mission Pack 2: Missions 5-8 (Black Ocean Mission Pack) Read online

  It was a constant struggle for Carl to keep reminding himself that he needed to lose. The Mobius was waiting for him out of bounds just outside Turn 01. He had to find an excuse to lose control and shoot off into the asteroids where they would pick him up and swap out the dummy Squall. Putting on a clinic for how to prevent a pass was no way to do any of that.

  As Turn 13 approached, Carl took a deep breath and made the tough call. He was going to leave Gthaa the opening to take the lead, and this time the sitharn would get his wish. Flipping his Squall around, he made it look like he was desperate to shake Gthaa, going into his trademark reverse thrust turn after waiting too long to slow down.

  But Gthaa was ready for him. The sitharn mimicked Carl’s maneuver, but didn’t take an alternate line. Instead, Gthaa turned right behind him, which was to say, right in front of him. As Carl slowed, he received a full ion wash from Gthaa’s Squall at close range, forcing him back and providing an extra reaction mass as deflected ions ricocheted back into Gthaa, giving him even more thrust.

  “Holy shit!” Carl screamed as the ion wash momentarily blinded his view out of the cockpit.

  The G-forces Carl felt were punishing, but he was adapted to them. He had years of training and experience, learning how to adapt both physically and mentally to the strain. But Gthaa was a sitharn, and he could take more of that same force naturally. The increased thrust didn’t crush the sitharn’s chest cavity or explode his heart. It didn’t make him black out. It put him into the lead.

  Well, to be accurate, it put him ahead of Carl. While it was an aggressive move against a single opponent, Gthaa had forced both himself and Carl well outside the optimal line for Turn 13. As the two of them accelerated through the curve, Jordan and Gurdi both passed them.

  “You crazy little bastard!” Carl shouted, not caring whether Silde Slims had taken that moment to be broadcasting his comm feed live.

  # # #

  Carl had just fallen to fourth place. The sitharn racer had taken both of them out of the running, by the looks of it.

  “Time to button up,” Roddy said. “Carl’s got his alibi. He’s paying off Jordan Myles like a good boy. He should be here any minute.”

  “You ready for this?” Tanny asked, locking eyes with Esper.

  Esper nodded. “All I have to do it get us moving, then you come up and do the rest.”

  “Remember, we’re not using the comms, even the intra-ship,” Tanny said. “You just watch for us to close the cargo ramp. When the system monitor shows it sealed, shout for Mort to get us out. Once we’re astral—”

  “I pick a direction and get us out of the system,” Esper said, nodding along. “Got it.”

  Mriy, Roddy, and Tanny sealed up their EV helmets as they piled through the door to the cargo bay. The clomping of their heavy boots seemed like a liability until she remembered that without a medium to broadcast across, sound couldn’t travel in vacuum. They could shout themselves silly and no one would know they were tucked away among the asteroids.

  “This would have been so much simpler with me down there and Tanny flying,” Esper said.

  Mort shrugged from his seat on the couch and took a mouthful of popcorn, his gaze still fixed on the race. “Well, they were worried you’d have issues with jettisoning a clone of Carl to make the dummy ship seem like a real wreck.”

  “They what?” Esper shouted. “How did they… I mean, where did they… WHAT?”

  Mort jabbed a lazy finger in Esper’s direction, eyes still glued to Carl’s race. “Yeah, that’s the kind of issue. Exactly.”

  “But—”

  “You’re squeamish, to use Mriy’s term for it,” Mort said. “You had a nice upbringing. You didn’t have to get your hands dirty hunting, fighting in the military, or doing half the keerschvarzz I’ve had to in my years on the run.”

  “Keer… what?”

  “Keerschvarzz,” Mort replied. “Slang term. Sounds like an ancient word that means bullshit, except not quite exactly, and it’s fit to make demons blush. But that’s beside the point. You’re flying the Mobius because that’s one of two jobs on the ship right now that won’t dirty a nice clean soul, and you’re not qualified to do mine.”

  “Oh,” Esper said.

  “Indeed,” Mort replied. “Oh. Now go on up there and wait for the signal Tanny mentioned. And don’t forget about that magical tantrum at the zoo. July mentioned it to me on the sly. We’re going to talk about that, but not now, and not when there’s anyone else around.”

  Esper just nodded and headed for the cockpit. She could feel her cheeks flush. It should have been her that mentioned the incident to Mort. A nice, quiet time when no one was risking life and limb in a race to crash a clone to steal a ship that they might or might not end up selling. Maybe if she were willing to shovel clones out the backs of starships, this would all be simpler. But trying to keep six bickering, kleptomaniacal children off the path to hell while actively enabling their criminal lifestyle was getting complicated.

  # # #

  Roddy had tapped into the audio feed for the race and had all the EV helms listening in. It was just a waiting game. The Mobius was open and ready, a mechanical baby chick waiting for mama to come feed it one Squall so it could regurgitate another. They shouldn’t have had too long to wait. Based on the race position, Carl ought to be coming any time now.

  “And here they come into the home stretch. Lap three ends with Myles half a ship length ahead of Gurdi, with Ramsey coming on strong and Gthaa not far behind.”

  “Any time now, Carl,” Roddy muttered, though with the comm off, no one could hear his echoing voice. The lead racers were coming straight toward the Mobius. All any one of them had to do was go off course into the surrounding asteroids. By design, that ‘any one of them’ was supposed to be Carl.

  “Aaand, Gurdi takes the inside position and slips past Jordan on Turn 01. Ramsey takes a huge gamble, but manages to evade Gthaa and uses his special reverse thrust turn to close the gap. It’s now a three-way dead heat for first place.”

  Something heavy hit Roddy in the back of the shoulder, sending him stumbling. He turned to see Mriy standing there, throwing her arms up in the air. Roddy shrugged in reply. Tanny put a hand over the faceplate of her helmet.

  Mriy made a looping motion with one finger, then raised three fingers and cocked her head to the side. How many laps? Was that what the azrin was asking?

  Roddy nodded, then counted off on his fingers: one, two, three, four, five. It was a five-lap race for the finale. But instead of taking the chance while he was out of the lead, Carl was fighting like a dying boar to get back into first place.

  # # #

  Jordan Myles was in the lead. Fuck. That. It was one thing letting Gthaa get the best of him. Carl had a grudging respect for him, a sitharn in an all-primate contest. But not that weasel. Not that punk. Not that…

  Carl ran short of ready insults to think about Jordan Myles. He was too busy trying to race the kid into an early grave. But there seemed to be an unspoken alliance between Gurdi and Jordan. While neither seemed to be giving a millimeter of ground to the other, they acted like a united front anytime Carl made a move to work between them. Up against either one of them, he would have liked his odds. But with both working to shut him out, he was finding it a challenge to contest for the lead.

  “Don’t race like pricks,” Carl muttered. “Lemme through.” Of course, he didn’t need to be working himself up over it. Winning was the last thing he needed. He didn’t want the racing contract. He didn’t want his deal with Harmony Bay going public. He just wanted the Squall.

  They weren’t going to let him keep it. That thought nagged at him ever since he’d conceived the new plan where he had to throw the final race. That prize money had been the steak to throw the guard dog. Now he was just sitting in a high-tech wad of terras waiting to be sold off on the black market somewhere.

  But that was only if he lost. After all, if he died in the race, what good was exposing his d
eal with Harmony Bay? Jordan would keep his head down and remember how bad an idea it might be to poke a trans-galactic megacorporation with an embarrassing stick. Tanny—as she was fond of pointing out—was still listed as his next of kin. If she could inherit the Mobius, she could inherit his winnings. Besides, he still had that bet with Mort to fix his hair after he won. After all that had happened, he had almost let his original reason for entering the race slip his mind.

  By Turn 08 of lap five, he had convinced himself that he had to find a way to pull out a victory.

  But how could he manage against two adversaries dead set on keeping him in third place? Collusion was hard to prove, and he had no way to lodge a protest from beyond the grave—especially a fake grave, where he wanted as little attention on him as possible.

  On Turn 09, he edged in for a hybrid move, angling in hard on the outside and reversing thrust to come out of the turn with as much speed as possible, but the line of the turn just didn’t give him enough to work with. If anything, he lost a bit of ground trying.

  Turn 10 was barely a turn at all and not a great spot for Carl’s racing techniques to make a difference. Gthaa took an aggressive line, nearly clipping the asteroids, to close the gap behind him.

  Gthaa…

  That was the key. Carl needed the teardrop shape of Turn 13 to make his move, the same trick Gthaa had used to knock him out of the lead. Now he just needed his tail clear of one sitharn bogey before he could safely pull it off.

  Carl used Turn 11 and Turn 12 to bait Gthaa into passing him. He shied away from one of Gthaa’s reckless maneuvers, making it look like the sitharn was too dangerous to be around, even for him.

  When they passed the holographic gate announcing the approach of Turn 13, Carl was the only one not to slow down. Instead, he took a line directly at Jordan and Gurdi—ignoring Gthaa and slipping right past the sitharn. He spun his Squall around so hard that his vision went red, but he kept on course. When he jammed the throttle to full, he threw a wash of ions over both of their ships, ruining the lines of their turns, and gaining extra reaction force from their hulls. The force of the turn compressed his chest until he couldn’t breathe. His vision went completely dark, but somehow he retained both consciousness and his grip on the control stick.

  A few seconds later, his vision cleared and he was alone in first place. A nagging part of him expected to get a call from Stacy on the comm, berating him. But there was nothing. He checked his scanners and he had a two-second lead on Gthaa, and Jordan and Gurdi were scrambling for third.

  A slow laugh erupted from deep in Carl’s belly. As he crossed the checkerboard gate, he let out a whoop. “Woo! Haha! I did it!” Remembering the plan, he put the Squall into a victory spin, a maneuver just like his reverse thrust turn, but without stopping the spin after 180 degrees. He just let it keep spinning, shouting elated nonsense over the comm like an idiot. It was just as much fun as it sounded like.

  “Thank you to everyone who believed in me,” Carl shouted. He hit the maneuvering thrusters, ostensibly to end his spin, or at least attempt to navigate Turn 01, but actually making his awkward flight path even more erratic. He entered the asteroid field backward and spinning. “Whoa! Hold on. Dizzy. Maybe I should’ve… No, I got this. I got this. Holy shit! No… wait… SHIT! Get out of the way. Get out of the way. I’ve got this… Ahhhhh!”

  Halfway through his scream, Carl reached down and pulled the wires inside the panel he had exposed during the countdown. A red indicator on the console confirmed that his comm was out. He straightened the ship out and brought it to a halt within fifty meters of the Mobius. He couldn’t tell how well they could see him, but he waved anyway.

  # # #

  An amalgam of spare parts in the shape of a Squall slammed into the asteroid. Its feeble ion drive winked out, and a silent spray of debris drifted from the crash site. The lone passenger was never alive enough to have died. A moment later, a nearly mint condition Squall settled slipped inside the Mobius as the cargo ramp raised behind it.

  Carl opened the cockpit as soon as the red lights stopped flashing in the cargo bay. There was a hiss of unequal pressure, and his ears popped. He couldn’t have pried the grin from his face with a crowbar.

  “Haha! We did it!” he shouted.

  Roddy pulled off his EV helmet and threw up his hands. “Yeah, and we just had to sit here waiting while you pissed our plan down the waste chute.”

  “Did not!” Carl said. “Come on, someone toss me a helmet with the live broadcast. I gotta hear this.” He motioned for Roddy to hand over his EV helmet, but the laaku whirled and hurled it into the far corner of the cargo bay.

  “You fucking won the goddamn race!” Tanny shouted. “What part of ‘Jordan Myles is blackmailing me’ was so hard to understand? And how do you expect to collect that prize money, dead guy?”

  “Who’s going to blow a scandal on a dead guy?” Carl asked. “As for the prize money? You can collect it once word reaches wherever-the-hell we hide out that I’m dead. Merry Christmas. It was two days ago—”

  “Three days ago,” Roddy corrected.

  “Three days ago,” Carl said. “And I didn’t get you guys anything. The prize money is a surprise Christmas present for all of you. And for Mriy, consider your 3-job debt paid back. As for the Squall?” Carl grinned. “Merry Fucking Christmas to me.”

  # # #

  It was quiet in the common room. In and of itself, that wasn’t unusual. It tended to happen overnight, when everyone but the pilot on watch was sleeping. But tonight it was both quiet and occupied. Tanny sat on the couch, staring into the blank space where the holo-field was normally projected.

  Esper stumbled from her room half asleep, in pajamas and slippers. She didn’t acknowledge Tanny or show any sign of having noticed her there. Instead she beat a path straight for the pantry.

  “Is that where my chocolates have been going?” Tanny asked.

  Esper jerked to a more wakeful posture. “Sorry, didn’t see you there. Can’t sleep?”

  “It was one thing when I thought he was off playing with fuzzy animals all day,” Tanny said. “Now all I can think about is him locked up by some creep like Gologlex again.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t make her tell me where he is,” Esper said. “But she did seem pretty convinced he was somewhere they would take good care of him. I don’t think it’s another crazy super-villain zoo.”

  Tanny sniffed a single chuckle. It wasn’t enough to overcome the malaise. “But you don’t know. And that’s the thing, not knowing.”

  “Well, we can’t do anything right now,” Esper said. “So let’s put on a holo, eat chocolates, and fall asleep exhausted.”

  “Nothing weepy,” Tanny replied. “I can’t take weepy right now. And nothing with dogs in it. Or racing. Or heists.”

  “Light, dog-free comedy it is!” Esper announced. Her goddamn cheerfulness was contagious. Tanny felt the corners of her lips twitch, despite herself.

  A chiming from her pocket prompted Tanny to pull out her datapad. It was a comm ID Tanny didn’t recognize. That could mean bad news. The middle of the night didn’t tell her much. Anyplace planetside would be using local time, not Earth Standard. Hell, not even all spacers used Earth Standard. Carl’s policy was to always answer the ship’s comm unless they knew it was someone they didn’t want to hear from. This was Tanny’s own datapad, but despite it being a policy of Carl’s, she found herself answering. She blamed the late hour, the lack of sleep, and a gnawing curiosity.

  “Hello? Who’s this?”

  “Mommy? Is that you?” Kubu asked.

  “Kubu!” Tanny shouted. “Where are you? How did you get on the comm?” It was a freaking miracle. All the time she thought she had wasted trying to teach Kubu her comm ID in case he got lost. He had actually learned it!

  “Kubu is at lady-Roddy-person’s house,” Kubu said. “It’s nice here and lots of food is good. But Kubu wanted to see Mommy and lady-Roddy-person said no.”

  “It�
��s all right, Kubu,” Tanny said. She wiped a sleeve across her eyes. “I’ll come find you. Can you tell me where you—”

  “Kubu? Who are you talking to?” an unfamiliar voice asked. “I’ve told you to leave the comm alone. Looks like I’m going to have to encode it.”

  “You leave him alone, you heartless monster,” Tanny shouted. “I’m Kubu’s Mommy. I won’t give up until I get him back!”

  “Oh dear,” the voice said. “Kubu, that’s not your Mommy. She’s a fake. I’m your Mommy now.”

  Before Tanny could scream a readied stream of obscenities to the woman on the comm and reassurances to Kubu, the comm went dead.

  “We can probably work with that,” Esper said. “We can dig up where that comm originated.”

  “Oh, you can fucking count on that.”

  # # #

  Astral space could get lonely. Even well-traveled shipping lanes could seem desolate, thanks to the distortion of distance and the lack of interaction between different depths. Chance meetings between vessels were fairly rare.

  Hiroshi Samuelson watched the cockpit chrono. Now and then, his eyes would dart to the navigation computer to confirm their coordinates, but they hadn’t changed in more than half an hour. “Any minute now…” he whispered.

  “What do you think the odds are that this works?” July asked from the copilot’s seat. She looked good with a blaster strapped to her thigh. “I mean, His Holiness’ favorite niece plotted these routes.”

  “Esper’s a good girl, but I trust she wasn’t steering Ramsey wrong,” Hiroshi replied. “He’s her meal ticket. Worst we can expect is nothing at all.”

  “What if your guy doesn’t come through?” July asked.

  “Relax,” Hiroshi said. “I’ve done this sort of thing before, you know. Plan B is just a little more work.”