Jason LaPier - Under Shadows

“She did,” Thompson said. “Got her leg all fucked up in the process. Missed the attack in Eridani, but now she’s good to go.”

Dava nodded. “Close-combat specialist. And what does Seven-Pack mean?”

With a quiet shudder, a revolver appeared in the woman’s hands, the barrel pointing skyward. She flipped open the cylinder, spun it with a flick. “Six,” she said, then flicked it closed and triggered an unseen switch. With a tiny pop, a blade as long as her hand sprang from the side of the barrel. “And number seven, never runs out of ammo.”

Dava watched the gun slide back into its holster and noted that Seven-Pack’s belt was well stocked with cartridges. She definitely approved of the blade, but was glad to see the shooter wasn’t going to run short on ammo. They would need every bullet.

“Next up.” Thompson reached up to thump the chest of a tall and lanky baby-faced man. “This is Half-Shot. Younger brother of Professor One-Shot.”

“Half-Shot.” Dava snorted. “Z’at mean you’re half as good?”

The boy slowly unslung a long and expensive-looking rifle from his back and hefted its barrel across the front of his chest. “Raymond’s specialty was sniping. Headshots, when he could get them. Vital organs when he couldn’t. One bullet, one kill.” He raised the gun an inch. “Fuck those old-fashioned bullets. These motherfuckers cut through everything. One shot, at least two kills.”

Dava reached out and touched the gun, felt the heat coming through the casing even while it was powered down. Her eyes flicked up to meet his. “Sorry about your brother. He was a good capo. He didn’t deserve to get shot by some piece-of-shit Mister.”

Half-Shot’s eyes narrowed, and she could see his pupils jitter. Like they wanted to shoot glares elsewhere, but he was keeping them in check. “Yeah, well. It was a lucky shot.”

“Uh. Sorry about that.”

Dava turned to see Lucky Jerk behind her, tipping sheepishly from side to side. The Poligart story was coming back to her. Lucky had once been a Mister. Press-ganged into their crew, if she were to believe his story. In any case, he’d found himself as one of the few left alive. Thompson would have liquidated him, except that he could fly a ship and she needed a pilot.

Half-Shot grunted. “Was he shooting at you?”

“Well, yeah,” Lucky said.

“Then what’s done is done,” he said. Dava looked at him for a long moment to try to decide whether what was done really was done. The burn of her stare stirred him to speak again. “Tommy-Gun brung him on. I ain’t gonna cross her.”

“Good. There’s few of us here and we need to be solid.” Against the far wall, there leaned a massive figure with ghost-white skin. “Who’s the big guy?”

“That’s Polar Gary.”

“What, like a polar bear?” Lucky said with a knowing nod. “All big and white.”

“A polar bear?” Thompson flared at him, causing him to flinch. “No one has seen a fucking polar bear in four hundred years, asshole. We call him Polar Gary because he’s bipolar. So don’t piss him off.”

“Sorry, Tommy.” Lucky straightened up to give a nod in the direction of the big man. “Sorry, Polar Gary.”

“Whatever.” Gary’s deep voice was more vibration than sound.

Dava could hear Lucky whispering to Thompson, “Does he med? Why not just get gene therapy?”

Thompson’s reply was low and weighty. “When he was a domer, yeah, he was medicating. He came to us to get away from that pacification bullshit.”

The word pacification jolted Dava with déjà-vu. A teenager from Earth, orphaned, forced to live in the domes. Always getting into trouble. Always troubled, always troubling. They’d put her on a special diet, which she’d seen at first as straight discipline, another form of forced conformity. When she caught herself staring blissfully at the fake clouds in the sky, she realized they’d been drugging her food. The confrontation with her guardians that followed was muddy in her mind; most memories from that time were hard to solidify.

Pacify her .

“So.” Thompson’s voice jarred her back to the present. “That makes five grunts: me, you, Seven-Pack, Half-Shot, Polar Gary. And Lucky, if we need a pilot.”

Dava looked around at them. It was a small outfit, but that was good. She didn’t know all of them well. She had no choice but to trust them, but that seemed easier at this point. Was it desperation? Or was it that they’d be easier to leave behind if she cared less for them?

Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. There was a job to do, and though she hadn’t gotten any order, she knew it needed to be done.

“I assume we need a pilot,” Thompson prodded.

“We need several.”

“Get ready for the next hop.” The pilot, Ayliff, was losing enthusiasm quickly. “Ninety seconds.”

Granny sighed and checked her straps. “Better get in the back, kid,” she said to Jax with a nod.

McManus pouted in his nearby chair, already strapped in. “Let’s get it over with.”

Jax tugged on his tether, pulling himself back toward the harness at the rear of the cabin. They’d unstrapped him at the end of the ten-day drag between systems, but decided they didn’t want him to have free run of the ship, so he was bound by a long, thick cord to a locked fastener along the back wall. This allowed him some limited movement; not that he was any good at zero-G locomotion. In that sense, the tether was not only to keep him from escaping, it kept him from drifting into something important.

He wrapped the harness belts around his legs and then his abdomen. He made sure to get the mask on nice and tight before pulling the upper straps over his head and shoulders. It was strange how quickly the action had become routine, had become ritual. They’d explained it once to him, then told him if he did it wrong he would die. He’d asked how, but they’d given no details, leaving him to imagine terrible things himself: crushing asphyxiation, organs being pulled out through his throat, exsanguination via explosive depressurization. A myriad of bloody images in his head, he decided not to forget the instructions, and managed the four times after that.

“Thirty seconds.”

He tried not to hold his breath, but it was almost impossible. It was a terrible shock, jumping to Xarp speed for a time, then dropping back out, only to jump again. He had no idea how long each leg was, but he guessed they could be measured in hours.

At first he didn’t understand why they were Xarp-jumping after an already extensive Xarp trip from Eridani. After a few of these hops, he remembered that first Xarp experience, when he and Runstom absconded in a Space Waste dropship. Runstom had been jumping, changing trajectory, then jumping again; several times, to throw off their pursuers. Yet who were McManus and his crew pursued by? No one, as far as Jax knew.

He thought about all this in the stretches of nothing during each jump. Eventually it came to him: they weren’t bouncing because they were shaking off a tail, they were bouncing because they didn’t know where they were going. In between each hop, the crew would sit around grumpily, taking the downtime to suck food from tubes and use the vacuum-powered lavatory. McManus would periodically punch unenthusiastically at one of the consoles in the corner.

A communication unit of some kind. Jax figured the cop was getting coordinates for the next hop. Wherever they were headed, someone was sufficiently paranoid to keep it well hidden. And that paranoid someone was X.

They came out of the last Xarp and they all slowly picked at their straps.

Jax had been trying to gauge how loyal McManus’s crew was. It was hard to tell. They seemed to take every order, and though they complained a lot, they never disobeyed. Maybe they weren’t smart enough to be suspicious, or maybe they just didn’t care.