Escape

“Okay, go ahead and start it up,” Amiri yelled from the back, something clanging loudly as she wrestled with whatever she was working on. “Hold off on the ‘punch it’ part, though.”

Flipping up the cover, I mashed the ignition. All of the interior lights brightened, and I pulled back on the flight stick to raise the craft as I slowly increased the throttle.

The shuttle started vibrating hard and immediately tilted to the right, rotating slightly.

“Oh shit.”

The engines vibrated so badly my teeth rattled.

Then the enforcers opened fire.

Amiri clanged and bashed something behind me.

“Shit, why won’t you fucking… Oh, oops.”

I heard the ramp shut the rest of the way.

The shuttle was still rotating and listing to one side when a loud screech told me we’d hit one of the other shuttles. The impact made the vibrations even worse.

I scrolled rapidly through the menus until I found the structural integrity field and pressed it.

Immediately, the shaking calmed down and the gunfire became muffled.

As we continued to spin, the other shuttle came back into view. One side of its landing gear buckled, dropping it hard before the whole thing toppled onto the ground.

Looking down at the display, I noticed the thruster indicators were red and showing only thirty-seven percent efficiency.

“Uh, we have a problem!” I shouted as I finally wrestled the shuttle out of the spin and we began to rise.

The hail of rounds striking the hull was starting to concern me. Eventually, they were going to damage one of the belly thrusters and make our escape very short-lived.

Amiri yelled something muffled from the back, followed by a loud cheer.

The thruster efficiency suddenly shot up to seventy-eight percent.

“Okay, punch it!” she yelled from somewhere inside the shuttle, her voice echoing through the open compartments. “Carefully!”

I pushed the throttle forward and moved the flight stick forward. The shuttle accelerated hard, pressing me into the seat before the inertial dampers caught up.

Amiri cursed behind me, and I heard her rushing toward the cockpit. A moment later, she leaped into the copilot seat beside me and started buckling her harness.

That was when I realized I hadn’t done mine.

Keeping one hand on the controls, I started pulling the harness over my shoulder.

“Keep flying, newbie. I’ll take care of your harness. Once we clear the atmosphere, we probably won’t be alone up there.”

She buckled me in, then strapped herself into the copilot’s seat and started working on the console beside me. The viewscreen was almost completely dark, but the instruments told me we were climbing toward space at about sixty-two degrees.

“Okay, we’re almost out,” Amiri said without looking up. She frantically moved through menus as she spoke. “We’re a small target, and their targeting computers will have a damn hard time getting a lock. That doesn’t mean they won’t start firing at us blind.”

She paused and turned toward another monitor to her left, studied it for a moment, then looked back at me.

“I want you to do something stupid, okay?”

“Uh, I don’t like this,” I squeaked out in the manliest voice I could manage.

She smiled and looked down at the telemetry. “We have a cruiser and three frigates up there, from what I can tell. I need you to get as close to that cruiser as you can. It’ll confuse their sensors, and the frigates won’t fire at us.”

“Uh…” I gulped. “I don’t think I can do that. You should probably take it from here.”

“Can’t,” she said quickly as she looked at the engineering console. “I have to regulate power. The integrity field is drawing way more than it should be.”

“Quick question,” I said, looking at her for a moment. “How exactly were you planning on doing this by yourself?”

She snorted and shook her head, her fingers never stopping as they flew across the panels. “This craft would’ve been in a lot better shape, and I wouldn’t have been escaping under fire. But no, you had to drop into my life and complicate things.”

“Can’t we just hit micro-warp and get out of here?” I said, gripping the controls tighter as we neared the edge of the atmosphere.

“Working on it. There’s a magnetic-field imbalance keeping the drive from firing up. Give me a minute or two.”

Just then we cleared the atmosphere, and I was immediately struck by the stars. I had never seen them before, and for a moment I could only stare at the endless field of light stretching across the viewscreen. A streak flashed past us, and I frowned in confusion before realizing we were already being fired at.

I started rolling the craft immediately and spotted the cruiser on the sensors. I turned toward it because fuck it, she hadn’t been wrong so far.

The damn cruiser started firing at us. Railgun rounds, plasma, and laser sweeps filled the space around us as I kept rolling and changing course, trying to fly as unpredictably as possible. I still hadn’t seen a targeting lock when we reached the cruiser, so I dove toward it, overshot, then flipped the shuttle and pulled back toward the hull. We glanced off the cruiser hard enough to shake us violently.

“Hey, watch it! This thing is held together by hope!”

Looking over at her, I noticed she had her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth while she squinted at a panel.

“Slow down a bit,” she said, moving her hands carefully across the screen. “I’m almost... Got it. Micro-warp, now!”

I quickly checked navigation, entered coordinates for empty space near an asteroid field, and engaged the micro-warp drive. The shuttle rattled so violently I thought it was going to tear itself apart. The cabin started heating up, and a warning about the inertial dampers overheating appeared before the drive forcefully dropped us out of micro-warp.

The lights flickered, and we came out spinning sideways through space. I caught the asteroid field on the sensors before everything went dark. Sparks snapped somewhere behind me, and smoke started filling the cabin.

A moment later, the emergency lights kicked on, and Amiri unbuckled and pulled a mask from behind her seat.

“Put this on,” she said as some kind of helmet unfolded from her collar and sealed over her head.

She pushed off and floated toward the back while I struggled to get the mask on.

“Not as bad as I thought. I can fix this in about thirty, maybe forty-five minutes. Just hold tight.”

Sitting there with nothing better to do, I poked at the consoles in front of me to see if I could get something working. “So, Amiri, what exactly is the plan?”

I could hear her moving around in the back, pulling panels open. “The plan before you showed up was to go straight to the system jump gate and leave. I suppose that’s still the plan, though. Not really much else we can do.”

“What are the odds that Aethis won’t be there waiting for us?” I said with a bit more sarcasm than I intended.

She laughed somewhere behind me. “Oh, I don’t know. About zero. They’ll certainly be there waiting for us.”

My body sagged into the chair as the lights came back on and the artificial gravity came online. The sudden sensation nearly made me sick.

“Ugh, that was fast. Thought you said it would take thirty to forty-five minutes?”

“It will,” she said, sounding annoyed as she closed a panel, or maybe opened another. I couldn’t tell. “The micro-warp drive is way out of alignment, and I need to repair the inertial dampers. Oh, and figure out why our structural integrity field is drawing so much power. I’m going to have to check the whole spine of the ship, and I have to go outside to work on the micro-warp drive.”

I unbuckled and stood, turning to look at her. She had half her body inside an open panel.

“So, what are we going to do? Just fly right to the gate?”

“Yep,” she said as she slid out of the panel. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

I looked at her flatly, not believing what she’d just said, while she closed the panel and brushed off the front of her overalls.

“That’s crazy. They’ll see us coming a mile away! They’ll blow us to bits!”

She moved across to the other side of the compartment and stopped in front of another panel. “No, they won’t.”

“What?” I protested while she calmly slid the panel out of the way. “Why wouldn’t they?”

With a grunt and a clank, she wrestled something loose before opening the panel beside it.

“Because, Lucas, they wouldn’t dare attack an unarmed shuttle near faction-controlled assets.”

I watched as she wrestled with some tubing inside the panel and gave something a hard twist. A moment later, the life-support system kicked on, and the smoke began to clear from the cabin.

“That makes no sense. Why would the faction protect us if they have a warrant for me?”

She shook her head and moved toward the corridor between the cargo bay and the cabin airlock. “Because factions couldn’t care less about a corporation’s warrants. They aren’t the law.”

She wrestled with a hatch, and I realized she might need help with it, so I made my way over to her.

“You mean corporations like Aethis are just pretending to be sovereign authorities?”

“Yep,” she grunted as she yanked hard on the hatch. “Well... no, I guess. They have authority over their own assets, and that planet is one of them, but they don’t have any real authority over people. Especially people who don’t work for them.”

I grabbed the hatch, and we yanked together until it finally popped open with a rusty screech.

“So I still don’t get the plan, though. You think a faction will just let me go through with what’s in my head?”

She bent down and peered into the space. “Good. We didn’t blow any regulators.”

She stood, shut the hatch, and headed toward the ramp. I followed.

“Not likely. I don’t think your implant is black market, but it’s still a risk... for both of us, it would seem.”

I gaped at her for a moment while she moved to another panel, then realized there was nothing I could do about it. That was when it struck me that we were heading toward an asteroid field.

“Uh, I don’t like the plan. The plan sucks, but that won’t matter if we slam into an asteroid.”

She completely stopped what she was doing and turned to stare at me. “A what?”

“An asteroid!” I shouted unintentionally before clearing my throat. “Just before the screens blinked out, I saw our trajectory, and it was heading toward the asteroid belt I sent us to.”

She burst out laughing, bending over with her hands on her knees. “You fucking dirt newbie.”

She started laughing again before she could continue. “Did you happen to see how far they were away?”

“I’m glad you’re amused,” I said, looking at her flatly. “No, I did not happen to see how far away they were. They looked close, and there were thousands of them.”

“Reality check,” she said, opening her helmet to wipe the tears from her face. “The asteroids you’re afraid of are, what, two million kilometers away? And there might be thousands of them, but they’re spaced anywhere from a hundred thousand to a million kilometers apart. So if we sat here for...” She paused and started doing math on her fingers. “What, forty-some days? We’d have to have the worst luck in the universe to actually hit one.”

I looked toward the cabin for a moment, then back. “Then why the fuck did the computer make them look like they were right in front of us?”

She shook her head and turned back to the panel she was messing with. “It didn’t make them look that way. You perceived it that way. It was giving you sensor data, that’s all.”

“Sensors!” I shouted, suddenly realizing Aethis could find us. “Why doesn’t Aethis just find us with sensors?”

“Nope.” She turned, shaking her wrench, or whatever the hell that thing was, at me. “You have lost all privileges to voice fear. You keep bouncing from one catastrophe to the next, and that stops now.”

She turned back, stuck her hand into the panel, and the whole ship suddenly lurched sideways, slamming me hard against the frame of the ramp.

“If something bad is going to happen, I’ll tell you. Now move to the other side of the bulkhead and close the door.”

The helmet on her suit flipped shut again.

“I have to go outside, and you don’t want to be on this side of that door when I decompress this area.”

Raising my arms in surrender, I stepped into the cabin and shut the door. Air hissed as the pumps hummed, decompressing the cargo area beyond. I heard the ramp buzz and clang loudly before turning and sitting in the pilot’s seat.

I picked lazily at the dusty, cracked material beneath my hands and wondered what this thing had looked like when it was new. It was a dirty brown now, but after tearing off a piece, I guessed it had once been beige.

The main viewscreen suddenly flicked on, drawing my attention upward. I realized Amiri must have fixed the gyros earlier when the ship lurched, because we were no longer spinning.

“Well,” she said as her helmet slid back again, “that should hold together long enough to get us to a station.”

A moment later, she dropped into the copilot’s seat.

I looked down at the controls, then over at her. “You want to fly from here on out?”

She flipped through the diagnostic panels for a moment. “No. You need the experience if you plan to survive in space.”

I frowned and looked back at the controls. “But it seems like I already know how to fly.”

She had the structural integrity field pulled up and was flipping through its diagnostics.

“Sure, the implant gave you all the theory you need, but you still need experience. Knowing how to fly and knowing what it feels like to fly are two different things.”

“Fine,” I said, exasperated, while buckling in. “But if I crash us into something, it’ll be your fault.”

“Mmmhmm,” she mumbled distractedly, already flipping through another diagnostic. “What is causing this power leak?”

Shaking my head, I set a course for the jump gate. I knew how to do it, but I didn’t really know how I knew. I was just doing it.

Maybe that was what she meant. My brain still needed to catch up with the knowledge the implant had given me.

“So...” I started, trying to make small talk and hoping she wasn’t still upset with me. “When we get there, what should I expect?”

She looked up at me and furrowed her brow. “Right, you’ve never been to a gate before. When we get there, the gate will ask permission to take control of the ship. Grant it immediately. That should make us look less suspicious.”

She paused, then added before I could respond, “Not that we’re suspicious, for that matter.”

I pointed at my head. “And what about my implant? You don’t think it’ll raise an alarm?”

She shook her head and looked thoughtful for a moment. “I’ve been thinking about that. Something about calling it black market bothered me, and now I know what it was.”

“Yeah,” I said with a bit more venom than I intended. “So what was it?”

She frowned at me, and for a moment I thought she was going to throw me under a carrier.

“Black-market implants simply don’t exist.”

Out of all the things I thought she’d say, that wasn’t one of them.

“What do you mean? Surely there are black-market implants. Unless the old man was telling the truth and this really is one of the original implants from before the corporations took them over.”

Her eyes lit up, and she nodded. “That actually would explain it. If that’s true, then the myth of the first implants isn’t a myth at all. But damn, how did he get a fabricator that could build one? They take really specialized fabricators, and all of the blueprints are encrypted somehow.”

I wasn’t convinced that actually helped me. “And why does that make sense?”

“Because,” she said, now completely focused on our conversation, “black-market implants don’t exist. No one can make one without killing the person who tries to implant it. Trust me, people have tried.”

The console beside me beeped, warning that we would drop out of micro-warp in two minutes.

“Do they have a way to tell what kind of implant it is?”

She nodded slowly, looking thoughtful again. “Yes... they can query the implant and check the serial number and manufacturer, but I doubt they’d bother. With black-market equipment, they’d more likely scan the whole ship looking for it than assume the implant itself was black market. But I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve ever dealt with this kind of situation before.”

The ship dropped out of micro-warp, and the forward thrusters immediately burned hard to bleed off our velocity. The deceleration lasted about eleven seconds before they eased back, but the gate was already coming up fast. A line of shuttles, corvettes, frigates, and cruisers waited ahead of us while small groups of ships vanished through the gate. The gate itself was a massive, thin ring surrounded by large gun emplacements, their turrets twitching rapidly from target to target. One of the lower turrets swung toward us and stopped, sending a cold chill up my spine. “Please allow gate control to assume command of your vessel,” a smooth synthetic voice said over the comms. I immediately granted control to the gate AI and gave Amiri an apprehensive look.

“Don’t worry,” she said as she scrolled through something on the screen I didn’t recognize. “This is completely normal.”

Suddenly, our ship maneuvered away from the lines and settled beside a large block-like structure on the side of the gate I hadn’t noticed earlier.

“Salvaged vessel, Aethis Heavy Industries has issued a hold on this vessel under Faction Law 8162-12, Subsection C, and 1781-1, Subsection A. Please remain in place while we investigate these allegations. Thank you for your patience.”

“Right,” I said, looking at Amiri flatly. “This is part of the normal you were talking about?”

She gave me a sheepish smile. “Well, this isn’t normal, but we expected something like this.”

A few moments later, a new voice came over the comms. She sounded older, maybe late forties or early fifties. She carefully enunciated every word, as if she had no intention of being misunderstood, but somehow still sounded almost bored.

“Pursuant to the aforementioned statutes, we are obligated to investigate the validity of Aethis Heavy Industries’ claims. The first claim falls under 8162-12, Subsection C: possession of black-market electronics or stolen company assets, including but not limited to bio-hacking devices, security-breaching devices, and devices capable of circumventing detection.”

I looked at Amiri, and she cracked a smile. Nothing in that list mentioned implants.

I frowned back at her. I was pretty sure the including but not limited to part covered that.

“We are authorized to scan for the contraband mentioned. If you choose to refuse the scan, we will take you into custody, where you may be appointed legal counsel or hire legal counsel if you so wish. Do you agree to the scan? A simple yes or no will suffice.”

My heart started pounding, and I glanced over at Amiri. She just gave me a quick nod.

“Fine. Um, I mean yes.”

My blood pressure had to be through the roof, and looking at Amiri wasn’t helping. Her straight face was actually starting to piss me off. How could she be this calm? I supposed that was easy when she wasn’t the one in danger here.

The entire shuttle lost power for about three seconds before everything hummed back to life.

“Thank you for your cooperation. Please stand by while forensics examines the data.”

“I’m so fucked,” I blurted out after killing the comms. “I’m so fucking fucked. How the hell can you be so calm right now?”

Amiri threw up her hands, looking surprised by my outburst. Then her face softened, which somehow pissed me off even more.

“Calm down, Lucas. It’s going to be fine.”

I wasn’t sure if it was the stress or the adrenaline, but it felt like she was patronizing me.

“Calm the fuck down? They’re going to drag me out of this ship and, and... hell, I don’t even know what they would do. How the fuck do you expect me to calm the fuck down?”

I was about to slam my hand down on the console in front of me when a comms ping stopped me. I gulped, then flipped the comms back on.

“Thank you for your patience, and I do apologize for the inconvenience. Our scans could find no evidence of black-market or stolen technology. However...”

Fuck. Here it comes. I’m so fucked.

A bead of sweat rolled down my face while fucking Amiri cracked a smile. Again.

“Your implant registers to a Lucas Cadalain, but...”

Goddammit.

“Your implant does not appear to be registered to a corporation or faction.”

I held my breath. This was it.

“That isn’t illegal, of course. Just something we noticed. Now, regarding the murder charge, during our scans we also found an Amiri Stardust aboard. Is that correct?”

Amiri cleared her throat and leaned over. “Yes, ma’am, that is correct. I am the owner of the salvage title for this vessel. I can confirm that it was legally purchased from Gerald and Sons Premium Scrapyard and repaired by me.”

“Thank you for the clarification. However, due to the circumstances, I do need to ask: are you being held against your will or otherwise being held hostage?”

Amiri abruptly burst out laughing.

The woman on the comms spoke again. “Thank you for the confirmation. Given that you are, in fact, alive and well, Miss Stardust, I only have one final question. Do you have any grievances against Aethis Heavy Industries?”

Hell yeah, I do,” she shouted into the comms. “They fucking shot at my unarmed shuttle!”

“Grievance noted. We will handle it from here. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and have deducted one hundred credits from your gate fee. I’ll send you and Mr. Cadalain the invoice. Have a safe trip.”

The comms went silent, then the AI voice returned.

“Your craft will now be queued.”

The shuttle’s thrusters fired, and a moment later we settled into line among a cluster of other shuttles, just ahead of three cruisers positioned near one another.

A message blinked in my vision, and I let out a long breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I was shaking, and I bent over, feeling sick.

Amiri’s hand touched my shoulder, and I flinched.

“It’s alright, Lucas. You’re fine, okay? I’ll pilot from here if you need me to.”

My shoulders started bobbing as I laughed, still bent over. “I’m not fucking flying. The gate computer is.”

She snickered. “I know.”