“Science experiment,” said Nate. “Old one. We’ll cover that later.”
“Is it important for now?” said El.
“There was a Queen there,” said Nate. “Killed it. Apparently Penn would become a Queen too? Bit of an expansionist program in the ol’ Ezeroc world. Also, they think I’m infected with an alien parasite.”
“Are you?” said El. Nate saw she had her hand on the old hand cannon by her side.
Careful, Nate. She might be in pro mode but she’s still jumpy. “That’s between me and my parasite,” said Nate.
“That’s a negative then,” said El, relaxing her hand away from her gun. “Penn didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor before he popped.”
“Popped?” Nate was working his console. “Okay, I see what you’re saying. Lots of rocks. Like they want to flush us out.” He pointed at the holo, where the big Ezeroc asteroid — or ship, or whatever the fucking thing was — orbited. “At least we got visual on the big bad monsters.”
“Why?” said El. “They got a parasite on you, or so they think. Couple more hours in the oven and you’ll take over the ship. You as the alien, I mean.”
“I figure them wanting us to bust a move back to human space,” said Nate. “I figure that what we have here is longer-range thinking than we’ve given them credit for.”
“Okay,” said El. “So what are we going to do?”
Nate thought about that for a while. Dust off, but with what purpose? He thought about the dead city they’d left on the other side of planet, about the dead colonists, about the hundreds of thousands of people who were no more. Nate thought about Penn, who was involved in all this up to his eyeballs before he was infected. He thought about the old research facility masquerading as a transmission tower, or science outpost, that had been here for a long, long time. That was overrun with Ezeroc. And he thought about a giant asteroid that these aliens used as a starship. The way he figured it, there had been some kind of advance contact years back. The Ezeroc met humans for the first time at that old facility. Something went down, a science experiment either side might have started. And then the Ezeroc had sent a colony ship.
So had the humans. The difference was that the Ezeroc came prepared; Penn hadn’t told any of the humans what to expect. Penn, or someone very much like him, had set an entire colony up as a petri dish in which to grow alien spores. Penn, who was a spy for the Republic. He’d got his, but there was no doubt plenty more culpability to go around.
“Cap?” said El. “What are we going to do?”
“I’m not sure,” said Nate, “but the plan starts with killing them all.”
• • •
“This is your captain speaking,” said Nate into the comm. “We’re about to lift off from this rock and go to war.”
El gave him a sideways glance. “We’re in a cargo ship,” she said. “The Tyche is a heavy lifter. She’s not a fighter.”
“You keep telling me,” said Nate, “how good a pilot you are. How you can make our girl swoop and soar.”
“But,” said El, then went silent.
“Cap,” said Kohl’s voice from the comm, “are we going to fly up into space and shoot some aliens?”
“My plan exactly,” said Nate. “How you feel about that?”
“Not amazing,” said Kohl, “because the Engineer drugged me with something, but I figure I can get back to that messy business when this other messy business is dealt with.”
“That’s the story,” said Nate. “Hope? You with us?”
“Engineering is online and good to go,” she said. “Engineering wants to know why you’re taking the Tyche to war. She’s a freighter, Cap.”
El gave Nate a raised eyebrow. He ignored it. “She’s the Goddess of Luck, Hope. And don’t you feel lucky?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve been knocked out by an alien psychopath, stuck to a wall with goo, and I don’t know what is going on.”
“Well, great,” said Nate. “Strap in anyway.” He clicked the comm off. “El, how many planet busters do we have on board?”
“We have exactly zero,” she said.
“Wait, what?”
“Zero,” she said. “We are a cargo ship.”
“I know, but—”
“What we have, courtesy of the fine Republic, is a full load of ship-to-ship torpedoes.” She sniffed. “Which will scratch an itch on that asteroid and not much more.”
“The long game,” said Nate.
“I wish you’d just tell me what you were planning,” she said.
“Wish I could,” he said. He held the sword up. “Blocks espers.”
“Good to know,” she said. “Must help conversations with Grace.”
“The Ezeroc,” said Nate, “are espers. It’s a whole race of aliens that read minds.”
She looked at the sword, then up at his face, then back to the sword. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”
“Get us in the air, Helm,” she said. “Try not to hit any of the big falling rocks while you do it.”
“Aye aye, sir,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It wasn’t the same as flying a frigate, but that was the only thing that would keep them alive. El’s hands worked her console, firing up the Tyche’s systems, bringing systems online. The ship was telling her about a ring of alien insects surrounding them outside, which she told it to ignore. In about two minutes, they’d be barbecue anyway, so not worth the PDC ammunition it’d take. Besides, the way El looked at it, there were plenty more where they came from. You needed to snip this kind of thing off at the source.
That was the captain’s plan, unless she missed his intent. She got why he wasn’t telling them about it. Mind reading aliens was a thing that could set a woman’s teeth on edge. If she knew the plan, the bugs knew the plan, and that would delete the surprise factor.
A mind reading human could set a woman’s teeth on edge too. She thought of Grace. She thought about how there was some unfinished business there. But she also got the cap’s basic direction of travel on this. Fix the alien problem first, that was the critical issue, and then worry about the shipboard squabbles. And, she admitted in the quiet of her own mind, Nate had a point. Grace had done no wrong by them. Not yet, and maybe hadn’t planned to. Grace had done quite a bit right by them, and that bothered El. Espers weren’t to be trusted. Those assholes had torn down the entire Empire before the rest of humanity had built a pyre and burned them on it.
The Tyche’s deck hummed to life, reminding El of the job at hand. Rocks coming out of the sky: priority one. Killing the aliens: priority two. Working out how to stop Kohl from killing Grace, or whether they should let that run its course: priority three.
El hoped Kohl thought that too. She’d been on a bridge crew trying to fly in a war zone while an insurrection panned out across the galaxy, and it hadn’t been a big bowl of fun. It had been a big bowl of we’re all going to die, and that as a general rule was why she tried to avoid being on planets. Planets were where you went to die. Flying a ship? Totally different. Totally.
“Hope?”
“You’ve got Hope,” said the Engineer over the comm.
“We good?”
“We’re good,” said Hope. “I’d have told you if we weren’t.”
“I know,” said El. “I worry about our girl, is all.”
“She’ll do right by you,” said Hope.
“I know she will,” said El, clicking off the comm. She put her hands on the sticks. Here goes nothing.
The Tyche grumbled in her belly as the drives came up. The antigrav pushed them away from the planet’s crust, all the extra juice from the Ravana’s stolen heart making it seem effortless now. An alarm blinked on her console, a feed getting too much power, and she cleared the alert. That would keep happening for as long as they had a bigger power supply, which probably meant forever. More power was always better power.