SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

They were close enough now that Olzan could read the name tags on their uniforms. The leader was Poldak 2484-Konradshope-023382. He had the red-eyed look of someone who had been blind drunk until taking a sobriety shot an hour or so ago, but right now the hand with which he held his gun was rock steady.

Olzan spread his hands out in a non-threatening gesture. The Thousand Names could afford to take a few passengers on to Santesteban. ‘We’ll get you all out of here. There’s no need for violence.’

‘Glad you see it that way.’ The man smiled, coldly, but didn’t lower his gun, which was now pointed at Olzan’s chest. ‘Has your shuttle got three spare suits?’

Olzan searched his memory. ‘Including the pilot’s, yes.’

‘Have him send them across. We’ll meet the shuttle at the lock where you came in.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Come on.’

‘I’ll have this lock working soon,’ Keldra said.

‘No. The lock you came in by is working now.’

‘We’re here on a job of our own,’ Olzan said. ‘We’ll give you a lift to Santesteban, but let us finish. We’ll all get out.’

Poldak glanced at the Seagull . ‘You’re here for that? Forget about it. We go now.’

‘It’s a Planetary Age spaceplane,’ Keldra explained.

‘Yeah, whatever. I’m the King of Belt Four. We go now.’

The man with the string of ears—Mardok, by his name tag—laughed again. It looked as though he could see Keldra’s discomfort and was enjoying it. ‘It’s ’Breaker dust now,’ he said.

‘We’ve still got time,’ Olzan insisted.

Poldak took a step closer to him. The gun was not quite touching his chest. ‘I don’t think you understand our arrangement,’ he said. ‘We’re not begging a lift from you. We’re stealing your ship.’

A bang made them both jump. Poldak took his eyes off Olzan to look for the source. Olzan felt his heart pound. It had been loud enough even inside the helmet. He thanked God Poldak’s finger hadn’t jumped on the trigger.

Mardok was standing beneath the Seagull , looking up at it, his gun raised and smoking. He’d placed a bullet hole dead in the centre of the circular blue logo under the spaceplane’s nose. As the echoes died away he looked round at Poldak, an inane grin on his face.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ screamed the third man. ‘We need to get out!’

Mardok shrugged. ‘Hey, lighten up. Just having some fun.’

‘Calm down, both of you,’ Poldak snapped. Then suddenly, ‘You! What do you think you’re doing?’

Keldra was back at the control panel, hiding it with her body while making some change to the wiring.

‘Get away from that!’ shouted Mardok, swinging his gun back to Keldra.

She moved away from the panel slowly, and it looked to Olzan as though she had made one final adjustment as she turned around. ‘I can still get it open in time,’ she said.

‘I said no,’ Poldak replied.

‘It’s valuable. Take it. I know of collectors who’d want to buy it to restore it.’

Mardok advanced on Keldra, grabbed her by the neck, his gun pressing into her abdomen. ‘The man said no.’ She didn’t move. Her face was locked in a snarl, angry rather than frightened; it looked as though she was deliberately restraining herself from pushing the man away.

‘We can come to an arrangement,’ Olzan said. ‘We’ll give you passage to Santesteban, and some money to get you on your feet. I can see if my employer can find space for you in his business there, good jobs. You don’t need to go to the trouble of taking over the ship.’

The third man—Soodok—was almost hopping from foot to foot. ‘Let’s go , already. They’ve offered us passage.’

‘We’re taking the ship,’ Poldak said. ‘Sorry, but I can’t trust you any other way. If you’re in control there’s nothing stopping you from slave-spiking us in our sleep.’

‘What’s stopping you from doing the same to us?’

‘My word as a gentleman.’ His smile was mixed with a slightly confused look, which puzzled Olzan. He hadn’t said it with the conviction of his earlier joke.

‘We can come to a deal,’ Olzan said. ‘My implant can be set to a conditional trigger. We’ll set it so that if any of you are harmed, it’ll wipe me as well. That’s a guarantee of safe passage. Right?’

Poldak blinked, slowly, keeping his eyes closed for several seconds, as if it took him that long to process what Olzan had said. ‘Don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust you to set up the implant right.’

‘All right. How about this? My ship has two grav-rings. They’ve got separate hab systems, separate everything. We’ll give you one of them, all the way to Santesteban or wherever you’d like to go. You can decouple the life support systems from the rest of the ship; disable the transit hub. Short of dismantling our own ship there’s no way we could reach you.’

‘That sounds…sounds reasonable. I think we can deal.’ He nodded, and slowly lowered his gun. His hand, previously rock steady, was wobbling in little circles. He stared at it as if seeing it for the first time, then blinked and shook his head. ‘Sobriety shot. Damn side effects.’

Soodok was hopping from foot to foot. ‘Told you, you shouldn’t have drunk. Now let’s go. Gotta go gotta go gotta go .’

Another gunshot split the air. Poldak’s and Soodok’s reactions were noticeably slower than before as they turned to look at Mardok. He was laughing raucously, once again pointing the gun up at the Seagull . The bullet hole was a good metre from his target.

Poldak’s expression slowly turned to a look of astonished rage, the first time he had shown an emotion other than arrogance. ‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know!’ Olzan said.

Mardok fired again. This time the bullet went through the Seagull’s wing. Olzan saw Keldra wince, but she didn’t move.

Poldak noticed Olzan looking at Keldra. ‘You did this, didn’t you? What did you do?’

Mardok barrelled into Keldra and grabbed her by the neck again. He moved unsteadily, almost unbalancing both of them. ‘What have you done?’ he shouted. ‘I’ll kill you, you—’

Mardok’s gun fired, but the shot went wide. Keldra had pushed his hand away. Now she pulled the gun from his grasp and shoved him away from her, kicking him in the chest and sending him sprawling drunkenly onto the ground. She raised the gun, her arm perfectly straight, and shot Mardok in the head where he lay. Bits of blood and brain spattered into the oily water.

Poldak and Soodok were raising their guns to shoot Keldra, but their responses were slow, held back by shock as well as whatever had been affecting them already. One of them fired—Olzan couldn’t tell which—but missed. Keldra turned and fired twice, putting a bullet in each of their foreheads, nearly deafening Olzan as the bullets went close by his head. Her face was a mask of cold fury; her hand was trembling just a little, in anger rather than fear.

Olzan fought to get his breathing back under control. ‘What happened?’ he said at last. ‘What did you do? It was you, wasn’t it?’

‘Check your atmosphere gauge.’

He looked at the read-out on his suit’s forearm. The pressure was normal, but the oxygen concentration was significantly down. ‘You suffocated them.’

‘Hypoxia. By the time you notice something’s wrong, you’re too light-headed to think straight. I used the airlock mechanism to cycle the oxygen out gently.’

‘You killed them,’ Olzan said again. The sound of the gunshots still rang in his ears. ‘Never mind. Let’s go. There’s not much time.’

‘We take the Seagull .’ Keldra was still holding the gun.