RJ nodded her head towards the door leading to the rest of the ship, and Poley walked over to it. He pried the cover off the control panel with his fingertips and shorted the wiring out so that the door opened with a shower of sparks. He looked back at RJ and smiled.
"Let's move. The party isn't over yet, boys." RJ took point, and Poley brought up the rear. As they rounded a corner they ran into a troop of armed soldiers following a security droid. RJ hit the droid with her chain making it fly into a hundred pieces. With the laser in her other hand she killed one of the soldiers.
"Geee-od, it's RJ!" One of the soldiers screamed. The troop turned and ran in the opposite direction, firing over their shoulders.
The rebels gave chase.
Michael closed the door to the flight deck. He was out of breath, and his leg was smoking. He slapped at his pants putting out the fire there. He was so scared his limbs were trembling, and he felt like he was going to vomit. He punched the buttons and opened a channel to the moon base.
"We are under attack! Repeat. We are under attack. The rebel RJ is on our ship! Repeat. The rebel RJ is on our ship, and we are under fire. Please open hatches and send reinforcements immediately!" Michael screamed into the receiver.
Laughter was his answer.
"I'm not fucking kidding!" Michael said in disbelief.
"No, but you are fucking screwed," a voice answered back.
"Who the hell is this?" Michael screamed.
"It's me."
The door behind him crashed in with a shower of sparks. The woman stepped up on the fallen door, her wrist communicator held to her smiling mouth.
"Over and out," she said as she snapped the chain into his head.
Janad could hear them right outside the closet door. It wouldn't be long now. She could pretend to be dead. Or maybe if she didn't put up a fight they would just chain her up again, and she could live to fight another day.
She heard someone's hand on the locker handle and froze still not sure of her course of action.
RJ and Levits had headed for the flight deck. David, Topaz and Poley had headed for the mess hall where Poley detected a second security droid and they presumed more men.
They weren't disappointed.
David had assumed that the soldiers were looking for them, but it was pretty obvious by their shocked looks that they had no idea that they had been boarded. There were six of them and the droid. The combat ready rebels took them down as fast as they could fire their lasers.
Topaz looked at the size of the mess hall. It was huge, and that just didn't seem right for a cargo ship.
"This can't be a cargo ship," Topaz said. "Why would they need a mess hall this big, and why are there so many soldiers on board? A cargo ship only needs about six people to run the whole show, and we've already killed more than twelve ourselves."
"This isn't a cargo ship," Poley said matter-of-factly. "It's a military troop carrier."
"What the fuck is going on?" David asked.
Topaz shrugged.
"Come on. Let's find RJ," David said.
They left the room at a run.
Janad poked her head out of the closet. The metal rolling thing was smoking, obviously broken, and all of the soldiers lay dead. Whoever those people had been they didn't like the Reliance any better than she did. But she wasn't about to come out until she knew a lot more than she did now. She closed the door, curled up in a ball and went back to sleep. She knew instinctively that these people were not going to be interested in hunting for her.
On the bridge RJ checked out the ship's log. "Did we kill twenty-five men?" RJ asked.
"Yes," Poley answered.
"We're being hailed from the freaking base," Levits said. "We have to answer them. We are still tethered, and we have to have them un-tether us. If we say the wrong thing
. . .
we are so freaking screwed."
"Then talk to them, and don't screw up," RJ said.
Levits gave her an angry look. RJ took more chances these days. She didn't care what happened. She wasn't afraid of dying. In fact Levits got the idea that she would welcome death. What she seemed to forget on a regular basis was that
they
would die a lot easier than
she
would, and he for one didn't want to die. Not yet. Hell, he didn't feel like he'd even had a chance to live.
It had been a long time since he'd piloted a star ship. The last time he'd done it everything had gone horribly wrong. He wasn't as sure as RJ was that he even knew the right thing to say to moon base control. He sure as hell wasn't as sure as she was that he was up to flying this thing.
Levits looked at Topaz who nodded his understanding and raised his wrist-com to his mouth, "Marge, clear the channel."
"Done," the mock female voice squawked over his transmitter.
"What the hell's going on over there, Thomas?" the space traffic controller's voice screamed.
"Had some trouble with the communication system, but we've got it fixed now, and we're prepared for takeoff."
"I was beginning to think you guys had been attacked by rebels or something," the guy said in a joking tone.
"No, everything's fine here. We're prepared for un-tether."
"Roger. Un-tether in five. . . four. . . three. . . two. . . one. . ."
They felt the ship jerk as the tube that tethered the ship to moon base and allowed the ship to be loaded and unloaded was detached.
"Commence undocking," the space trafficker said.
"Powering up front thrusters and undocking
. . .
now," Levits began backing the ship out of the dock. It wasn't easy; it wasn't a procedure the computer could do. You had a read-out with a picture of your ship between two lines, and you had to stay in just the right spot. Jerk even one centimeter one way or the other, and you could strike the docking bay tearing a hole in your ship and ripping the bay apart. Not exactly the stealth approach one wanted to take when you were stealing a Reliance ship. When they had backed out of the dock without incident he breathed a sigh of relief.
"Moving toward the jump gates now."
"You're all clear. Take off when ready. Safe flight," the tower informed them.
"Thanks," Levits answered.
Levits powered the ship up and started to move slowly away from moon station and toward the jump gate. When he got a good look at the gate Levits relaxed a little. The jump gate was big enough to hold three battle ships at once. If he couldn't hit that hole then they all deserved to die in the cold vacuum of space.
RJ sat next to him accessing the ship's database. "Twenty-five men to man a freighter; that makes no freaking sense at all," she said.
"This isn't a freighter. It's a military troop carrier," Poley and Levits said in unison.
"Then why the hell are they using it to haul cotton fabrics to a third class planet like Beta 4? Hell, Beta 4 is a planet that both the Reliance and the Argy's consider to be too useless to conquer. What are they getting from the planet that they find it necessary to use a military ship with full armaments and manned by twenty-five armed soldiers?" RJ asked absently of no one in particular as she continued trying to find the part of the manifest which would tell what the ship was picking up on Beta 4.
"Maybe the Argy have been trying to cut off supply routes," David suggested.
RJ nodded. "Yeah, that's a good answer. But it's too easy, and for some strange reason the older I get the more I distrust easy answers." She scrolled back a page. "'Live stock.' The manifest says that they just delivered a shipment of 'livestock.' We're supposed to pick up another shipment of 'livestock' this time round."
"Well that explains the extra manpower anyway," Topaz said thoughtfully.
"But it doesn't explain why they're using a military transport," RJ said. "And it doesn't say what sort of 'livestock' they are taking from Beta 4. Besides, we were in the ship's hold; it didn't smell like shit to me."
Levits didn't want to deal with something as trivial as missing shit. He had enough to worry about hitting the gate and slinging this thing into hyperspace in less than five minutes. "They sterilize every ship that comes in as soon as it's unloaded. When a cleanup crew gets done on a ship like this
. . .
"
"There would still be some trace of shit," RJ said getting out of her seat. "Then there's the problem of the livestock itself."
"What do you mean?" Topaz asked.
"Well, the way I understand it, the only animals that populate Beta 4 are lizards and a few small mammals. Nothing worth transporting across the vastness of space," RJ said thoughtfully. "Poley and I are going to go down to the hold and see what we can find."
"RJ, I'm getting ready to make the jump to hyperspace in less than five minutes, and just between you and me, I'm not at all sure that I remember how to do this," Levits said. "I thought I would be piloting a freighter. I had Marge give me a crash course on freighters, and now I'm flying a freaking troop carrier. They aren't the same."
"I have faith in you," RJ said turning to smile at him. "If you can't hit a jump gate that big, we deserve to die in the cold vacuum of space."
Levits mumbled obscenities under his breath as RJ and Poley left the flight deck.
David and Topaz stood at a view port looking out at the planet Earth. Both men were transfixed, momentarily forgetting everything except the fact that they had traveled through space and were now looking down at the planet of their birth. It seemed surreal.
Topaz who had spent hundreds of years on the surface of the planet looked at Earth set in space and thought about the beauty of it. To think that when he was a child few men had ever seen this view first hand, and interstellar travel was only a dream. As a child he had dreamt of going to the stars and conquering new worlds, but by the time interstellar travel had become a fact he was already in hiding from the Reliance. Now he was finally going on a real adventure. He was finally in the heavens, leaving the Earth behind, seeing truly different things, and having completely different experiences. He couldn't wait till the Earth disappeared from view.
David on the other hand looked at the Earth with longing. Something told him he had better take a good long look because he was never going to see Earth again. In a few minutes the ship would take off, and the Earth would vanish from view. He was never going home. He really didn't know where they were going or why. He was leaving behind everything that was familiar, including the free country he had dreamed of and fought for. He was going off into space on a mission that he didn't understand and that was probably impossible to execute. There was nothing under his feet but several metal floors and empty endless space. It felt to him like he was standing on a string over a bottomless pit. Thinking about it left a weird over-empty feeling in his stomach. Of course that just might be the residual effects of the terror the trans-mat had thrown him into.
David hadn't understood the way the trans-mat worked. He assumed that the box simply moved through space somehow. He certainly hadn't been prepared at all to have his body completely disassembled and its particles flung through space to be reassembled. It was over in a matter of seconds, but he didn't think he was ever going to get over the filthy feeling it left him with. It was as close to being dead as he could imagine being. Levits and RJ seemed to take it in stride, and he hadn't expected the robot to react. Topaz' reaction was one of pure adulation. In fact upon completion of the reconstruction of his body's atoms, he had yelled
Cool!
so loud that RJ had immediately clamped a hand over his mouth, and they had all prayed that they hadn't been detected.
David didn't want to leave Earth. He knew he wasn't important to this mission that he didn't understand, and he would have preferred staying on Earth. But he was damned if he was going to be left behind, and he didn't want to stay in Alsterase alone. Couldn't, in fact, have stayed there without the others if he had wanted to because someone would have killed him.
RJ was leaving, and he was sure RJ had no intention of returning to Earth. David could barely remember his life before RJ, and although the closeness they had once shared had been shattered, he still couldn't imagine being separated from her now.
The ship jumped into hyperspace with a jerk that almost knocked David down, and the Earth was gone from view. He took a deep breath and quickly wiped the tears from his eyes. It was way too late to change his mind now even if he had wanted to.
David wondered if he would ever get over this horrible feeling that there was nothing substantial under him. He wondered if he was ever going to get used to the fact that he was basically nowhere. Wondered what he was expected to use as a point of reference for his existence. Was he here? No, he had moved and now he was here. No, moved again! The whole thing was weirding him out.