Maybe she should have.
She worked the console. Was the tower causing the interference? No, not the tower. Something near to them. Something close to their location. In space? No, not close enough, and that would have put the fear of God into El. Because it’d have meant that damn Ezeroc ship had come around the planet and would drop rocks on them. No, this was much closer.
This was in the ship.
• • •
El’s gun was primitive. She’d picked it up from a collector for just that reason. She couldn’t shoot for shit, not anything smaller than a ship-to-ship laser. Just as the war was wrapping up she’d gone to a boutique gunsmith when she was in San Francisco. That was the first and last time she’d set foot on the rock that had birthed humanity. Nothing about the trip had endeared the place to her. Sure, the terraforming had worked fine. Blue skies. Clean air. Water in the oceans that was blue, or blue green, or — when she’d gone on an older style of ship that sailed seas instead of stars — clear as glass.
No, the problem was the people. They were fucking everywhere.
She’d been in an alley, a bunch of thugs — kids, really — had set on her, demanding coins. She’d been wearing the Old Empire’s colors, still carrying the Emperor’s credits, and they’d left her with some bruises (face and ego both) after she couldn’t give them anything. After that experience, she’d found a bar that sold liquor to spacers and downed more out of the tequila bottle than was wise.
The next morning — it may have been early afternoon by the time she’d shaken off the fumes and the haze and the need to throw up every two minutes — she’d gone looking for a gun. The usual places sold blasters, standard plasma weapons that were the bread and butter of personal defense (or offense) galaxy-wide. Some comedian had tried to sell her a stun gun, a type that used a lot of volts on contact to ruin someone’s day, and she’d explained that the whole point was not having people that close. If they were close, they could touch her, hit her in the face, take her coins, and that wasn’t fun.
It was always about the people.
The shopkeeper had flicked directions to her console. A friend, someone in Chinatown. El hadn’t been to Chinatown, and so she went.
Best part about San Francisco was Chinatown. There weren’t fewer people — more, if anything. It’s just that they were used to being around a thousand other people, so they made less of a big deal about it. It was easier to get to where she needed to go. The gunsmith’s shop was dim, not in a gloomy way, but in a way that said the sun was bright and hot and in here was quiet and calm. She’d liked the old man with his wrinkled face and serious eyes. He’d listened to her story, and then he’d said something that changed her life.
You are a coward, he’d said. Like he was surprised by it, to see someone still wearing the Emperor’s colors in his shop, wanting to buy shooting iron, but who wanted to be anywhere except where there was violence. Because her colors said death from above, her rank and role emblazoned on her chest. She flew destroyers for the Emperor, and killed his enemies. Except she did it from the air-conditioned comfort of a bridge.
El had wanted to get angry, but the old man wasn’t trying to get in her grill. He wasn’t trying to take her coins. He was trying to find out what she needed. So she’d half-agreed, using a nod rather than words, and the gunsmith had shuffled off to get a small step ladder. He’d climbed up to a higher shelf, found an old chunky plastic box, like a construction worker might carry their lunch in, and laid it out between them. When she’d opened it, she didn’t know what she was looking at, so he’d explained.
It’s a gun, he’d said. It fires bullets.
Solid rounds? Like a PDC? She’d been incredulous, because it was like looking at a dinosaur’s thigh bone. PDCs could fire plasma, lasers, or solid rounds where the bullets alone were the size of baguettes. This thing was chunky, but a lot smaller than a baguette.
Yes, but no, and he’d sold it to her for an extortionate sum of the Emperor’s credits, because the gun was rare, and because the exchange rate was already in the toilet. It was a pistol-sized shotgun, a weapon that fired tiny pellets instead of a discrete slug of metal. The barrel, he’d explained, was short, so that the pellets would spread out like a deadly basketball-sized circle of death at about ten paces. Useless for long distance, but great for a coward whose hands shook. Also great for use on a ship where you didn’t want to hole the hull. It held one round at a time, kicked like a mule, and would turn whatever part of a person it hit into airborne chum.
Primitive, but effective.
She pointed the nose of her gun out the flight deck’s doorway, into the ready room. The burble of the coffee machine was still on, three cups set out ready for use. Nothing unusual about that, Hope was the kind of person who made coffee for everyone when only she needed it. But Hope wasn’t here, and neither was Penn. Also not unusual; Penn had his own cabin — a shanty they’d rigged out of a store room, because the rest of the Tyche’s crew quarters were spoken for — and Hope was so high on stims she couldn’t sit still for more than two minutes. Like she needs the coffee.
There were only a couple of ways something inside the Tyche could jam the signal. One, Hope had a psychotic break and was sabotaging the ship. Ridiculous, because if there was someone who cared more about the Tyche than El or the cap, it was Hope. Two, one of those fucking bugs had got on board — unlikely — and was wreaking havoc. Three, it was Penn.
Smart money said Penn.
Motive? He’d snuck a message out and wanted them all dead now. Seemed reasonable for a spy, and El was pretty sure he was a spy. Or, how about: he wanted to take her ship. That also held water; he’d been right upset at the captain about Nate’s approach to solving their current set of problems. Deal with the crew (that was El and Hope), and take off when the lockdown was over. Penn would think Nate wasn’t coming back alive, and that was unfortunately a view that El shared.
The coffee machine hissed and spluttered, drawing the nose of El’s weapon like a magnet. With a kind of detached amazement she noticed her hands were shaking, and that made the gun shake too. It wouldn’t matter, because even if her gun was moving around like a weather vane in a hurricane, it’d still tear a hole in the general direction it was being pointed.
Her hands never shook, though. Shaking hands crashed ships.
There was a clank from further back in the ship. Could be the Tyche settling. El wasn’t sure she knew the sounds the newly rebuilt bird made as she slept, but she was also sure that wasn’t the settling of metal. That sounded like an airlock closing. She wished Nate was here. Or that Kohl was awake. Because this was their kind of deal. El was just the damn pilot.
• • •
The problem with thinking about Kohl was that it made El want to go wake him up. Find something in that sickbay that would jumpstart the big man like a rusty old combustion engine, the kind that Hope said were fun to work on. How something could be fun to work on that leaked oil everywhere was a mystery to El, but that’s why she flew ships, rather than grubbing around inside ’em.
She was babbling. Babbling in her own goddamned mind.
The gun still shook in her hand, but it seemed fine with leading the way so she let it. Her feet trod the deck plates of the Tyche, but slowly, one after the other, like making a noise would trigger instant death. It could, for all she knew. Internal comms were down, external comms were down. On this ship was one person she could trust but who was still basically a child, and another who she could not trust, not even to put the right amount of sugar in her coffee. El didn’t want to shoot the wrong one, but more than that she didn’t want to die, so the next few minutes would be hard for everyone concerned.