Book One of the Shades of Humanity series
Trace has more planned for her crew’s next “tour” than the usual idle piracy. She’s after a fleet of her own, stolen from under the noses of powerful religious zealots. But when a virtual stowaway is found on board, it threatens to derail the entire heist. Or it might be its only chance of success.
PROLOGUE
Captain Trace Abraxi ran down the hallway, hooves sliding a bit as they tried to find purchase on the hard ceramic. In one hand she carried her sword, and the other dipped slightly with the weight of the heavy hard drive. Her fur was disheveled under her stolen jumpsuit and her long ears swiveled around on high alert.
Her First Mate, Riktik, ran beside her, his much shorter Crix legs taking three or four steps to a single lope from Trace. The bright lights reflected back many times in his compound eyes, and part of his own jumpsuit was burned away to reveal reddish chitin. Blue plasma bolts splashed against the wall behind them, and Riktik fired back a few of his own.
“Months of planning,” he said. “Months! Why does every job have to end with us being shot at?”
Trace ignored the question and asked one of her own. “Where is Nillik?”
“On board the Duchess, cover intact somehow,” he said. “What possessed you to yank out that drive now?”
She ducked under a low spot and shoved a maintenance worker out of the way. The worker’s armful of pipe sections clattered noisily to the ground. “Sorry,” she said to Riktik and the stranger. “I saw an opportunity and took it. Did you really want to wait here another two weeks?”
“YES,” he said, his lone antenna quivering in exasperation. “The server upgrade was our best shot to grab it and get out undetected.” He fired another few shots over his left shoulder and loaded a new energetic magazine with deft claws.
“Well how was I supposed to know pulling the drive would trigger an alarm?”
“It was in my tactical evaluation!”
Trace was rescued from continuing that conversation by a pair of guards that came out of a side door in front of them. Riktik fired a trio of bolts at one guard’s own gun, melting the barrel with hot plasma. Trace fell into a slide beneath the other guard’s own barrage and cut at his leg as she passed. He screamed and went down to one knee, then Riktik leapt up and took him the rest of the way to the deck. While the first guard fiddled with his ruined gun, Trace swung the heavy drive at his head, and they collapsed in an awkward pile. Trace sheathed her sword and pulled out her Screen.
“Tuula,” Trace yelled into the handheld as they resumed running. “We’re gonna need a pickup — fast.”
“Pulling away, Captain,” Tuula said, her low voice oddly tinny over the radio. Nillik and I are strapped in. Where are you?”
Trace ducked another energetic shot that splashed against the wall, cooling quickly. “I’ll send the coordinates. Be ready to bring us in from the cold.”
“That bad, huh?” Tuula laughed and Trace cut the connection, stowing her Screen in a pocket.
A few junctions later, Trace and Riktik arrived at their rendezvous point to find Aado scrambling around with Suits and a small cadre of Bots. Without his direction, they walked, rolled, and hovered aimlessly around him. Aado looked up as they raced around the corner, then quickly tapped a Screen of his own. In response, the heavy doors at each end of this section of the station slammed shut, leaving the three of them alone. Trace could hear shouting and ineffectual bolts on the other side.
“You’re early,” he said. The Triga engineer stood on three sturdy legs, and his three matching arms were busy stowing gear and pulling another Suit from an emergency locker. Despite his few words, Trace could tell he was agitated by the way his fur tufts stood up against his dark skin.
“Yes, my…my fault,” Trace said. She and Riktik both breathed heavily from their sprint through the station. “Change of…of plans. Again. No time to wait for the airlocks to cycle. We’re going to have to override them.”
Aado’s three eyes went wide as he looked back and forth between her and Riktik. Riktik had discarded his little pistol and was already pulling on a Suit, its one-size-fits-all fabric hanging loose around his little body. Aado grunted, nodded, and began doing the same, though his didn’t hang quite so loose around his bulk.
Trace took note of the sign above their airlock and keyed a quick message to her pilot. She trusted Tuula to catch them before they went spinning off into the abyss. She’d done it before, but not while they were moving with the force of an explosive decompression behind them. Trace gulped, then handed off the drive to Riktik to pull on her own Suit, hers tight against her long Elgin frame.
The three of them snapped on their helmets and pressurized their suits, each one pulling snug against their bodies, compressing any excess material with vacuum efficiency. Trace looked down at her Screen, visible in an interior window at her wrist, and saw that Tuula was almost in position. Aado had the interior airlock open and was jamming a wrench into an exposed panel. He stomped over to the other side as they all piled in, hand hovering over the release lever.
Trace opened a connection to the Duchess through her Suit radio. “Hey, Tuula. Catch!” She nodded at Aado, and he pulled down hard on the lever. The exterior doors slid apart in an instant, and all three of them were blasted out into space, buffeted along by all the atmosphere in that little section of station. They tumbled and spun, and Trace hoped Riktik kept hold of the drive.
Trace’s view was a quickly alternating black sky full of stars and outer structure of the station, each replaced by the other as she spun, though the station did begin to shrink as they were carried away. On one rotation, the darkness was replaced by the patchy hull and wide-open cargo hold of the Dicey Duchess. The little ship loomed as they tumbled toward it, and Trace wished she had a thruster pack to right herself.
Another few dizzying spins and Trace crashed into the bulkhead. She bounced a little as she floated, finally grabbing a handhold to steady herself. Riktik, Aado, and his Bots all floated nearby. Aado’s helmet had a worrying crack near the top and he looked a little dazed, but was otherwise unharmed. Riktik was already making his way for the central lift shaft, the drive enormous in his tiny claws, as the exterior doors began to close. Trace pushed off and followed.
As the shaft slowly pressurized around them, Trace called Tuula on the radio. “We’re all aboard. Time to go.”
“Can’t do that,” Tuula said. “They launched a gunship. Just get up here as quickly as you can.”
Trace cursed and looked down at the others. They’d heard the news over their own radios, judging by the expressions on their faces. Riktik held the drive out at arm’s length, surveying it.
“I’m starting to think our employer severely undersold the value of the information on this thing,” he said, mandibles working in frustration.
Once the lift was filled with atmosphere, Trace popped off her helmet and stripped out of her Suit. If things were about to get hot, she should have kept it on in case of a hull breach, but she’d never been one for protocol. It seemed Riktik and Aado weren’t in the mood for it either, as they quickly followed her example. The lift began to rise, leaving the cargo hold behind and passing decks quickly, each one oriented perpendicular to the thrust that would soon come from the main engine all the way aft.
When they reached the bridge, they split apart, Aado and Riktik heading for their usual stations. Trace took the drive from Riktik and stowed it and her sword in a locker before taking up her command station. The stations were spread around the edge of the circular deck of the ship, though most faced a “forward” main Screen. As they took their seats, the hydraulic sections of their modular chairs rose to meet their very different bodies. The seats would do their best to protect them from high levels of acceleration, but they had their limits.
“…power down and submit to boarding,” a voice said over the comms. “Horan Station security will place you under arrest and a Commission lawyer will be assigned to your case. I repeat…”
“Turn that off,” Trace said. “Where is this gunship?”
“I’m keeping the station between us,” Tuula answered. Her long blue-gray tentacles spread over her console, some wrapped around control sticks and others simply hovering over buttons and switches. “Now that you’re strapped in, I have a few more options, but not many.” As if on cue, the entire ship jerked starboard as thrusters fired, the mechanical sections of their chairs hissing and clicking as they compensated. Trace felt her sense of down change and saw Tuula’s large aquatic head droop toward the bulkhead. The Scularan had lower limits for thrust changes, but it never stopped her from making extreme maneuvers.
“Can we outrun them?” Trace asked. She tapped a few keys and brought up the few glimpses of the other ship the Duchess had recorded with its telescopes.
“Not unless we want to pass out while trying to shoot down their missiles from here to the next Gate,” Tuula said.
“What about a disabling shot?” Trace asked. The ship jerked again in the other direction, and Trace felt her stomachs turn.
Tuula shook her head. “Can’t get a clean shot without giving them one, too. And I think their guns are bigger.”
“Nillik, any ideas?” Trace asked her diminutive hacker. He was Crix, like Riktik, but unlike her First Mate, his chitin was a mottled green and both antennae were intact. He’d been quietly tapping away at the Screens that surrounded his station ever since Trace and the others arrived.
“With a few hours I could maybe cause some trouble on their ship,” he said, mandibles clicking. “The Adamant Rook is a contractor. They use a completely different operating system than the station, so I’d have to start from scratch writing a virus.”
Trace clicked a knob on her console to take stock. The Duchess was low on fuel but not dangerously so. It had plenty of plasma for the turrets, but a missile could still get lucky no matter how many bolts they sent its way. They only had a pair of missiles of their own, and she was sure the Rook would send many more in kind if they fired one to loop around the station. She clicked the knob again to bring up a local map. Horan Station didn’t orbit a planet or moon, so there wasn’t any other cover nearby. It wasn’t far from the Gate in the Durok system, but Tuula was right that they’d have a rough time running. They just needed an opening.
That gave Trace an idea. “Nillik, can you hack the airlocks on Horan?”
“I wouldn’t call it hacking,” he said. “I’m still a technician in the system, so I have access to maintenance and troubleshooting commands—”
“Can you do it or not?” Trace asked, raising her voice. Tuula shunted the ship hard to starboard, and Trace wasn’t the only one that groaned under the pressure.
“Um, yes.”
“Good,” she said. She keyed in a list of decks and two airlocks on opposite sides of the station and sent it to Nillik. “Make sure these are locked down and no one is in the corridors. Then open the locks.”
Nillik nodded and got to work. She could see camera feeds flicking through his Screens, each depicting a hallway with flashing emergency lights and some with panicked crew heading for safer junctions.
“We don’t have time for this,” Riktik said. “Let’s just rush them and unload everything we’ve got. They’ll never expect it.”
“Nobody dies today,” Trace said. Her eyes were on her own Screen, trying to find a pattern in the Rook’s movements. “This was supposed to be a bloodless job, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Riktik started to speak again but Trace interrupted him. “You’ll still get to shoot someone, just aim for their engines. Get ready to thread the needle.”
Realization dawned on Riktik’s face and he turned to his console, claws flipping off the missile launch safeties and engaging a few turrets for good measure.
“Locks open,” Nillik announced. Trace could see the small puff of air venting into space on their side of the station. Rikitk didn’t wait for an order and immediately fired a missile. There was no target lock, so he piloted it manually straight into the open airlock. The warhead zipped through the empty corridors of vacuum and out the other side directly into the main engine of the Adamant Rook.
“Tuula, now!” Trace shouted. She felt herself being pushed to one side as Tuula flipped the ship and then she was pulled down toward the deck as their engine fired, a long, white-hot plume carrying it around Horan Station and past the disabled Rook. Once the mercenary realized what was happening, they fired missiles of their own, but Riktik was ready. He painted them with bolts from the energetic turrets as they rocketed away, each exploding at a safe distance.
Trace strained at the thrust gravity but didn’t tell Tuula to slow down. Her pilot hooped and hollered, and the others joined in, lost in the speed and the thrill of escape.
