Splinter Faction, page 13
It was only an instant, and the blade did come free, but in this sort of fight, instants are crucial. His axe slammed down on my left forearm, hacking through the vambrace and cutting into the b-suit beneath. Sealing foam erupted from the wound as the lingering shock numbed my arm. My armor had held off the blow, but only just.
Sometimes, fights come down to inches. In my case just then, a fraction.
I kept leaping back, opening some room so I could reassess things, recover my balance, and take a breath. A faint burn was starting deep in my muscles, and my breath had quickened. I was going to start flagging here soon, and that was bad—
The Wulgor sensed the shift in the fight’s energy. Howling, he raised the axe and charged—just as a slug slammed into his head, punching through the side of his helmet and turning the view into his visor from bared teeth and feral glare to damp red chaos. Two more rounds smacked into the Wulgor’s torso, then he slammed into me like an express train. I was again in the process of dodging, so I was able to spin with the impact, and although it slammed me into a console, the Wulgor’s body crashed against the bulkhead behind me, then slumped to the floor.
Gasping, I turned to the entrance to the bridge and saw Abel and Kellog—and Torina. She still had a slug carbine raised to her shoulder, while Abel and Kellog both brandished leveled slug pistols.
When the Wulgor was good and dead, Torina rushed forward. “Funboy, Van’s hurt, we need you,” she called, but I just waved a hand as I continued catching my breath.
“It—didn’t cut anything but—b-suit, I don’t think. See?” I lifted my arm. The sealing foam was snowy white, no splotches or flecks of blood.
“You know, if you’d just broken away from that bastard, we could have shot him a lot sooner,” she said, glancing at the fallen Wulgor. “You didn’t have to go all melee with him.”
“I’ll remember that for next time,” I replied, trying to sound all unfazed by it—but the truth was, I was a little fazed. I still practiced Innsu, if not daily then every couple of days, but despite that the fight against the Wulgor had felt—off. Innsu as a martial art to keep fit and flexible is one thing, but I hadn’t fought a scrap-to-the-death like this one in a long time. And it showed. I wasn’t as fast as I should have been, and I started sucking wind both sooner and more than I liked. I’d obviously been letting myself go a little, was going to have to start training a little harder.
I sheathed the Moonsword, recovered, and holstered The Drop. “Okay, is the rest of the ship secure?” I asked no one in particular.
“Ninety percent,” Kellog replied. “I sent a team back to make contact with Brankilin’s people, and they did, without trouble. We’re going to do a full sweep and make sure no one’s hiding out anywhere.”
I gave him a thumbs-up, then turned to Abel. “As for you, Adept Tudor—thanks for your help out there.” I flashed a grin toward Torina but kept my eyes on my son. “Looks like having kids finally paid off.”
Abel smirked back at me. “Hey, sir, the longer you stay alive, the bigger our inheritance is going to be.”
Torina just sniffed and shook her head. “What a touching family moment. Don’t tell him about the insurance policies.”
Abel raised a brow. “On you and Dad?”
Torina smiled like a fox. “On you kids. Now go be sassy somewhere else, Adept.”
12
Usually, in the aftermath of a victory like this one, we manage to glean a few tidbits of intel. Whether from captured crew, or from the cargo being carried or smuggled, or a deep dive into the ship’s data systems, we’re able to pry out a few pieces of useful information. Even then, whatever intel we get is normally just fragments, sometimes useful when combined with intel from other sources, or as corroboration of things we already know. It’s rare to find intelligence that stands on its own, much less something crucial.
And then there was the former destroyer, which quickly proved to be an intel bonanza. In fact, we gathered so much from the old ship that I had to wonder if it was a setup.
The first big prize was her data archives. It was almost a trope—we board the bad guys’ ship, and they immediately scrub said archives, then all we end up with is an empty cavern of memory space. That’s when Perry and Netty-P would normally go to work, seeing what they could recover from the deleted data, which usually wasn’t much. But the data archives on the destroyer were mostly intact. The Wulgor I’d fought on the bridge had, based on what we found on the workstation he’d been using, been trying to do a full archival wipe but had failed—because, it seemed, he’d forgotten his password.
“Unbelievable,” I said, watching the display on a nearby workstation as Perry scrolled through the memory schematics. “Everything’s here.”
Perry, his damaged wing still hanging at his side, nodded. “Almost everything. That Wulgor managed to delete the stuff in his personal workspace. When he tried to do a global wipe, though—well, you can see the problem.” He nodded his beak toward the terminal the Wulgor had been using. It was still asking for a passcode to authorize the wipe, and informing the now-dead Wulgor that he had three attempts left before he was locked out. It was a basic security function—you didn’t want just anyone to be able to come along and wipe your computer system clean.
But in the heat of the moment, it had been enough to stymie the Wulgor. A dent in the console suggested he’d gotten pretty frustrated by it, too. I couldn’t help smiling an admittedly evil smile at the thought of this hairy, muscle-bound killing machine frantically poking at the workstation with his claws as he tried to remember his password.
“Anyway, it’s going to take a while to go through all this stuff,” Perry went on. “Even though it’s mostly intact, a lot of it’s encrypted. I’ve asked Rab and Torina to get some data modules from the Fafnir so we can download a complete image of the ship’s archives, since I doubt you plan to tow this old tub back to Earth.”
I frowned at that. There might actually be value in keeping this ship intact. On the other hand, there might be a good reason to destroy it. I tapped at my comm, routing my b-suit’s signal to relay through the Fafnir. “Rektorr, do you have any idea how many other ships in this system might have witnessed this battle? Or how many might have witnessed the aftermath, with us boarding this old destroyer?”
“To answer your first question, I’m not sure,” he replied. “I had line-of-sight from the Prowler to nine other ships in the system when the battle was underway. That means they probably had line-of-sight to the fighting. Now, how much of it they saw, and in how much detail, I can’t really say. It depends on the quality of their scanners, the specifics of their sight lines, how much they were paying attention—”
“Sure. But some of these ships blew up, so they’d likely have seen the explosions.”
“Without a doubt. As for the aftermath, though… I’d say that five of those nine ships might have been in a position to see the Fafnir and the Frankie close on the destroyer. But they were a long way off. The closest was nearly ninety light-minutes, and there are a lot of rocks around here. Assuming they had standard, off-the-shelf scanner systems, I’d say, bottom line—while it’s not certain no one saw the Fafnir rendezvous with that destroyer, it’s probably not very likely.”
I sifted that, thinking. “Okay. So if we haul this old tub out of here, and the Stillness come along to check out the site of the battle, they’re probably going to notice it’s missing. And I don’t want that. If possible, I’d rather them not even know we were here at all. So let’s just grab the data and go—”
“Van, Kellog here. We found one of the crew alive, hiding out down in a machinery space behind the starboard cargo hold.”
“It’s not another Wulgor, is it?”
“Nope. In fact, it’s about as opposite a Wulgor as you can get. It’s a Fren-Okun, male. Says he’s a geological engineer.”
I looked at Perry. “That’s their technical expert,” he said. “They bought the story that the promethium was here, so they brought along a geological engineer to help recover it.”
Holy shit. Intact data archives, and now not just a living crew member, but one who didn’t seem inclined to sacrifice himself for the greater cause of the Stillness. What next, a list of Stillness agents tacked up in the break room? A map in a junk drawer showing the exact location of the Stillness stronghold out near the Pleiades?
Although, what I’d settle for right now was the answer to a single question, one that I had shelved since the battle began.
Who was doing the fighting? Was there another group in play, one either opposed to, or in competition with, the Stillness?
Or was the Stillness at war with itself?
That was the question, wasn’t it? A schism in the Stillness? On the face of it, that would be nothing short of a gift. I sure as hell wouldn’t say no to our enemies going to war with themselves. But do a somewhat deeper analysis, and the nuances start to show. If it was the Stillness battling itself, what was it about? Would one side be even worse for known space if they won, and if so, which side was that? Would it make the Stillness even more unstable and unpredictable? Or was it all staged for our benefit, some aspect of an even more convoluted scheme whose outlines we couldn’t see? We couldn’t rule that out, nor could we rule out the data we’d “secured” in the destroyer’s archives being doctored or faked. After all, we’d just used doctored data for our scheme, hadn’t we?
We needed answers to these questions, but I didn’t want to hang around Wolf 424 getting them. Once we’d copied all of the destroyer’s data, removed the Fren geological engineer and our own people, and were satisfied we’d gleaned everything from her we could, we set breaching charges on her antimatter fuel pod and scuttled her. She vanished in a single, blazing pulse of electromagnetic glory, most of her substance rendered down to photons and plasma. Enough should survive to allow her to be identified. To a distant observer, it would seem that one of the survivors of the battle had just finally lost antimatter containment. Or so we hoped, anyway.
We then quietly withdrew our task force, leaving the remains of the battle for the Stillness to puzzle over. I hoped it left them with lots of unsettling questions.
The Fren engineer proved to be most cooperative. Torina and I interrogated him on the way back to Earth, though it was more of a friendly chat. We sat with him in the crew lounge, just chatting, and amiably at that.
“It seemed quite improbable,” he said, sipping at a steaming cup of jugnon, a tea-like herbal infusion popular on Arminsu-el. Torina had developed a taste for it, but me—yeah, to me, it kind of tasted like a cup of dirt with a twist of lemon. But the Fren obviously enjoyed it. “Promethium simply doesn’t occur in significant concentrations in nature. But I was being paid well and”—he curled his lip—“my contract consisted of a gun pointed at my head, let’s put it that way.”
I smiled and nodded. I was kind of surprised. I hated to generalize about a whole species, but in my experience, most Fren-Okun males were morons. That’s not a value judgment, it’s just true. But you did meet the occasional one that was sharp as a tack, and this fellow was definitely that.
“Do you have any idea who attacked you?” Torina asked.
The Fren gave the Fren version of a puzzled frown. “That would have been you—wouldn’t it?” He looked from Torina to me, then shrugged. “I’m sorry, when the shooting started, I… hid. And when I heard you come aboard the ship, I hid even more.”
I smiled. “I don’t blame you,” I said, then pushed on with other questions. It was soon clear that our geological engineer knew little about the Stillness or their motives. He was obviously just hired expertise intended to help them recover the promethium they expected to find here. In fact, the one piece of valuable intel he did give us was so offhanded we almost missed it.
He was recounting his time for us, starting with when the Stillness first contacted him, and mentioned that after boarding the old destroyer in orbit over Dregs, it made an intermediate stop on its way to Wolf 424. That was a little odd—Dregs to Wolf 424 was a relatively easy, single-twist trip. He’d pushed on a full sentence or so before the significance of it hit me.
“Hang on,” I interrupted him. “Let’s back up. You made a stop on your way to Wolf 424? Do you know where?”
“I’m afraid not. I didn’t exactly have the run of the ship. I was confined to my cabin. In fact, all I know is the metallicity index of the star.”
I exchanged a frown with Torina. “How could you possibly know that if you were stuck in your cabin?”
“Oh, I needed to calibrate my instruments. My, um, employers were keen to know if there were other deposits of promethium besides the one they’d learned about, or if there was a way of predicting where other deposits might occur. I told them I needed to collect data to do that, including data about the host star. Wolf 424 is well-documented, I know, but some of the data was collected many years ago. So they gave me access to a limited amount of their scanner feed, and that included the metallicity data.”
“I’m sorry, and metallicity is—?”
“Essentially, it’s the proportion of a star’s substance that isn’t hydrogen or helium—in other words, heavier elements, expressed as a numeric value. You see, if the promethium deposit formed in situ, then the host star may play a role—”
“Yes, I get it,” I said, then leaned forward. “Is this metallicity value characteristic? Like, does each star have a unique value?”
“To a point, yes. I mean, many stars will have similar values, and many will no doubt overlap when taking margin of error into account—”
“But that particular star, the one you stopped at on your way to Wolf 424—could you potentially identify it, based on that metallicity thing?”
He frowned in thought for a moment, then gave what I knew to be a Fren shrug, which mostly involved his head. “Probably. My equipment is good enough to give quite accurate and precise values, and we’re talking about a very small subset of a few tens of stars. If you will give me some time, and access to published stellar data—”
“Perry here will help you, and so will Netty, our ship’s Created Person.”
“Yeah, hi,” Perry put in. “I’m the bird with the broken wing that will be assisting you this evening—”
“Perry, we’re heading straight back to Earth. You can get your wing fixed at the Nexus—like I’ve said, oh, six times now since we left Wolf 424?”
He held up his damaged wing. “It was five times, and Anvil Dark was closer.”
“And again, I don’t want to go to Anvil Dark—” I cut myself off. “I’m not having this argument again. Please just help our Fren friend—” I cut myself off again, smiling. “Fren friend? Fren-d?”
“Dear, did you smack your head during that boarding action?” Torina asked.
I sniffed. “I can’t help it if I’m a fan of clever wordplay—remember, nine credits of college English—"
For the third time, I cut myself off, though for a more somber reason. Clever wordplay made me think of Alexander Hawkes. And he was the reason we were heading straight back to Earth. Netty had informed me he wanted to see me—as soon as possible, at that.
“Anyway,” I went on, “Perry will hook you up with whatever you need to try to identify that star,” I said to the Fren engineer. “And after giving it some thought and examining the evidence we collected from that ship, I don’t see any reason to keep you in our holding cell. We are, however, going to have to ask you to stay on Earth until we resolve your case.”
“My case? I thought you weren’t charging me with—”
“Just standard procedure. We have no basis for laying charges, and you have no prior run-ins or convictions in known space. But we routinely ask persons of interest in major cases to remain available to us, for a few days, anyway, while we get everything wrapped up.”
“You may know something that will be of value to us, without even realizing you know it,” Torina added, smiling. “It won’t be long, and we have guest accommodation for you. Consider it… a sort of working vacation.”
This was an old routine, one we’d refined and polished over the years. Because “persons of interest” in cases, especially major ones, were awkward beasts. Not necessarily suspects—though they might be potential ones—they could also be possible witnesses, or even victims trying to have nothing to do with the law. Interstellar law allowed us to hold someone as a person of interest for up to three standard days, if we happened to arrest them in the course of an investigation. And since our Fren-d here had been aboard the old destroyer, and clearly not as a prisoner, we had arrested him. I really didn’t think he was guilty of anything other than being the expertise the Stillness needed, but I wanted to be sure. As soon as he left us, he could head off to any number of places, all of them many light-years away.
He finally shrugged his acquiescence and nodded. “Very well. I’ve never been to Earth, so I suppose this will be… interesting.”
I smiled. “Well, you’ll be in the middle of rural Iowa—but yeah, it can get pretty interesting at times.”
Perry nodded. “Especially with us there. We tend to make things interesting wherever we go.”
The Fren lifted a hesitant hand. “May I have access to a shower, if possible?” He was diffident to the point of being shy.
