* * *
Beckett patently refused the belief that the
Marity
was anything other than a hard-used private hauler; she argued loudly up to the point when her screens displayed a maneuver that should by
Marity's
aged specs have destroyed the integrity of her hull. Caught midsentence in denial, the com officer paused, closed her heavy jaw, then recited the formula that outlined the effects of inertia upon the
Marity's
supposed limitations. 'Bits,' she finished heatedly. 'We should be looking at flying bits of wreckage.'
Cracked ribs prevented Jensen from rounding on her in a fury. As a result, his instructions to his pilot came out with unintentional control. 'Tail her. And set our coils charging for transit to FTL. If
Marity's
going to jump, we jump with her, or blow our coil condensers trying.'
'Bloody hells, Commander, whatever for!' interjected Beckett. 'We've an assigned post, and despite the provocation, I see no reason to abandon our position.'
Jensen moved a foot and swiveled his chair toward her. He glared the length of the bare, functional bridge compartment. 'Are you questioning my direct order?' he demanded with a rage that burned entirely inward; his face stayed deadpan, and his eyes, unflinchingly level.
Beckett's rough complexion reddened. 'I question unreasonable judgment.' Nonplussed, her huge hand flicked the switch that assured her words would be monitored and incorporated into the ship's official course log.
The fresh-faced ensign beyond her followed the exchange with an interest that could damn, if the issue ever came to court-martial.
Frostily stiff, Jensen said to his pilot, 'Carry on, Sarchev. Follow the
Marity'
Later, when the craft of MacKenzie James initiated FTL, the
Kildare
followed suit.
* * *
'Hooked,' murmured Gibsen when the queer hesitation in human time-sen
s
e passed, and the darkness of FTL settled like a hood over both of the
Marity's
analog screens. 'Your boy commander's taken the bait.'
On the adjacent chair, which
had a tendency to leak its stuffing out of several haphazardly stitched rips, Mac James turned his blunt-featured face. Red-lit by the array of the
Marity's
instruments, he showed the smile of a sated predator. He flexed his coil-scarred fingers with the method of old habit and murmured, 'After the tangle we made of Jensen's plot at Chalice station, did you ever think that he wouldn't?'
Gibsen lounged back in his crew chair, his long-lashed eyes deeply thoughtful. He did not say what he felt, that the more you messed with a man's obsessions, the more dangerous he was likely to become. The corollary required no emphasis: Jensen's hatred of MacKenzie James was no longer rooted in sanity.
* * *
On the control bridge of
Kildare,
Communications Officer Beckett whacked a ham fist against her thigh. 'You're crazy, and a goddamned danger to all of us.'
Jensen regarded her outburst with no other reaction beyond a blink. 'Question my authority one more time, and I'll see you stripped of your rank.'
His total absence of passion was all that made Beckett back down. Surrounded by taut stillness that gripped the two other crew members present, she looked down and fiddled a few adjustments on her board. The next instant the chime that signaled departure from FTL sounded across silence.
'Short hop,' murmured
Kildare'
s pilot, and the next instant everybody on the flight deck had their hands full.
The engineer called in to report a power failure in the main drive. 'Coil leakage,' he said tersely. 'No way of predicting the stress crack that caused it. But FTL's a closed option until the system's been drained and patched.'
Even as Jensen drew a pained breath to express his annoyance, Beckett delivered worse news: their precipitous flight after
Marity
had landed them all but on top of the leading edge of a war fleet.
'Identify,' Jensen snapped back.
The greenie ensign did so, in tones surprisingly steady. 'Syndicate, sir. On a projected course toward Khalia.' He would have added the pertinent facts, concerning numbers of dreadnoughts and formation, but Jensen's next order prevented it.
'Where's
Marity?'
'Sir?' Now the ensign's voice did quaver. Naively inexperienced, and fearful of questioning a senior officer, he added, 'We should inform Fleet Command, sir. The skip
-
runner's presence is secondary to the defense of Khalia.'
'Mac James's presence indicates involvement with the enemy,' Jensen replied with a patience he did not feel.
'Now find me
Marity
, fast, because in case you've forgotten your notes, draining the coils means we'll be without shields. We're a sitting duck right now for a trigger-happy skip-runner, and
that's
our first concern.'
Almost in defiance, Beckett stabbed at her board. The analog screen flashed in response and gave back an image of scuffed paint and rust-flaked vanes, and the faded letters of a registry code that the years had weathered unintelligible. 'She's off our bow,' Beckett added sardonically. 'Close enough to be in bed with, and right where we have no weapon to bear, and where our attitude control systems are too perfectly crippled to maneuver. That's not luck. I'd say this was a prearranged trap.'
She did not belabor the point that
Kildare
was well within range to be detected by the approaching fleet. Despite the fact that she was a conversion from the private sector,
Kildare'
s weaponry specs readily identified her as a Fleet vessel. In seconds rather than minutes the
Kildare
and her
crew of seven would be nothing better than a target.
The particulars of that dilemma had scarcely registered when a voice horned in through the security net that should have kept
Kildare'
s com bands shielded from outside interference.
'Commander, I'd say your survival options are limited to one,' came an intrasive drawl that made the skin on Jensen's arms roughen to gooseflesh. He knew the inflection, would recognize that grainy timbre anywhere for the voice of MacKenzie James. 'Unless you'd rather get slagged by a plasma charge,' the skip-runner captain continued, 'I'd advise that you surrender your vessel unconditionally to me.'
Jensen's jaw muscles knotted. The moment held clarity like a snapshot, preserved in time by preternatural awareness of the bridge compartment, with its gray drab walls flecked with lights thrown off by the controls, and set in that dance of shadow and reflection, the faces of his officers, all staring. The pilot wore a stupid expression of surprise; the set of Beckett's outsized jaw showed cynicism; but of them all the greenie ensign was worst, with his wide-eyed, choked-back fear that implied utmost faith in his commander's ability to produce a miracle.
Feeling the stabbing ache of his ribs and a gut-deep hatred that made him shake, Jensen licked white lips. When he did not immediately speak, the voice of MacKenzie James elaborated.
'Boy, you'd better decide fast.'
'Damn you,' Jensen cracked back, though with no channel open Mac James could not hear.
Beckett said nothing. The ensign looked near to panic, as his awe of his superior officer became shattered before his eyes. Only
Kildare'
s pilot managed the wits to speak. 'The skip-runner could be bluffing. He's got no protection, either, and the whole Syndicate fleet is bearing down.'
Which was not only naive, but stupid, Jensen raged inwardly. MacKenzie James never backed himself into corners, except by clearest design. This skip-runner had sold Fleet secrets to goddamn Syndicate spies, and since he was uncannily reliable when it came to trafficking classified material out of the Alliance, the enemy dreadnoughts bearing down on Khalia were unlikely to advertise their presence merely to take out a contact likely to be useful against the Fleet. Nor would they blink at a prize ship stolen from an adversary. Wise to the ways of the skip-runner and determined to stay alive to best him, Jensen gave the only answer that left him any opening.
'I
surrender the
Kildare
and all her crew to the master of
Marity,
without condition.' Through the heat of his own humiliation, Jensen was aware of his ensign trying desperately not to cry, and a glare of vitriolic contempt from Communications Officer Beckett.
* * *
Mac James's pilot had the hands of a monkey when it came to dismantling a control board. His narrow, sensitive fingers could reach and unhitch and disconnect circuitry behind narrow, cramped panels that by rights should have invited curses. Gibsen whistled, oblivious.
The sound set Jensen's teeth on edge, as did the quiet, deliberate voice of Mac James as he commandeered a communications console as yet unmolested by Gibsen's tinkering. It did not matter to
Kildare'
s former commander that the skip-runner, of his own volition, was following through with the duty first urged by the baby-faced ensign now bound and gagged in the back bay of the flight deck. That the message torp bearing word of the Syndicate fleet's vector toward Khalia was fired away under Commander Jensen's own cades did not matter; that Admiral Duane would receive the communication in time to give Fleet forces the edge in the coming battle to preserve the Khalian planets did not matter.
Jensen's mind centered on one thought.
MacKenzie James was a criminal. He did not act out of heroism, but only callous self-interest. If he wanted Khalia defended, that could only be because the two-faced Weasels who'd surrendered made a healthy, lucrative market for traffic in illicit weapons. Gunrunning being second only to state and military secrets on the list of Mac James's transgressions,
Marity
would be involved to her top vanes. Jensen stared at the stubble of hair that furred the crown of the skip-runner captain's head, just visible over the com station. Hatred and rage had both given way to a patience unforgiving as stone.
Tied to his own command chair, unmoved by Beckett's grunts of discomfort from the corner where she lay bound alongside
Kildare'
s ensign and pilot, Jensen waited in motionless tension like a snake coiled before prey.
Gibsen muttered a query from behind an opened cowling.
'Gun turrets next,' Mac James said in drawllessly succinct reply. 'We'll want the coil regulator and the magneto banks, but leave life-support intact.' The salt-and-pepper crown of hair disappeared briefly as Mac James leaned forward to toggle a switch. His next instructions to his mate were buried under a drift of garble from the com, most likely cross-chat on a Syndicate command channel.
Jensen ground his teeth.
Gibsen straightened with his hands full of circuit boards; and the foreign speech paused in an inflection that framed a question. MacKenzie James answered in the same lingo, and the response that came back was mixed with laughter.
There followed an infuriating interval while Gibsen and his skip-runner captain stripped the
Kildare
with sure, no-nonsense efficiency. Jensen found the pain of cracked ribs less intrusive than the pain of humiliation. He sat, strapped helpless on his own flight deck, unable to face away from the analog screen somebody had carelessly left operational — the screen that showed the passage of the Syndicate fleet bound to attack the planet Khalia, dreadnoughts and their fighters arrayed in formation like some grand, silent procession.
A few of the behemoths winked their running lights in salute of the
Marity
and her latest act of sabotage against the Fleet.
Blackly murderous, Jensen chafed at the lashing on his wrists. He considered a thousand ways to kill the skip
-
runner captain MacKenzie James, all of them lingeringly bloody.
The Syndicate fleet departed, leaving the black of space on the analog screen. Hours passed. Jensen's hands were numb. His full bladder became a torment. His wrists stung and his shoulders ached, and his ears had long since stopped hearing the thump and bump, and the hiss of flushed air from the lock belowdecks as the
Kildare'
s heavier components were off-loaded to the hold on board
Marity.
The tap of footsteps coming and going ceased, replaced by one incongruously light tread recognizable as that of MacKenzie James.
At the entry to the bridge he paused, and called instructions to his mate and pilot. 'Go back to
Marity
and power up the coils. Syndicate's about reached Khalia by now, and when they find Duane there to give a hot welcome, I want to be gone from this system.'
Gibsen said something that rang with cheerful sarcasm.
Then MacKenzie James strode across the metal floor plates, rounded the central bulkhead that divided the rear half of the bridge into two compartments, and ended by looking down
a
t the commander still strapped to the central crew chair. He studied Jensen with an intensity that unnerved. For once, Mac's coil-scarred hands were still. A faded, mu
c
h creased coverall covered his muscled shoulders, the cuffs unhooked and turned back where they'd bound at sinewed wrists through the hours of hanging in the wreckage waiting to spring the trap. Although the only one of
Kildare'
s original crew without a gag, Jensen waited for the skip-runner to speak first.
'Boy, the message torp giving the Syndicate war fleet's vector to Khalia went out under your codes. For that, your brass might overlook the fact that you were careless enough to get your ship boarded and stripped. If you've got the guts and the glibness to lay your story right.'
Jensen regarded the captain he reviled with every fiber of his being. His career standing did not trouble him. That concern would arise later. Now, only one question burned to be answered. Staring into an expression like chipped granite, Jensen asked, 'Why should you send that message torp? You're not a man who does favors on principle.'
Mac James gave back a rogue's grin that harbored little humor. 'Who else could have done the job and been ignored through the passage of the entire Syndicate attack fleet?'
Unsatisfied, Jensen said nothing.
The coil-scarred fingers flexed, one by one in succession with the familiarity of long-established habit. Mac James qualified on a note of dubious sincerity, 'Say I didn't want Khalia scragged.'
'Did it have to do with your market for illicit weapons?' Jensen demanded, burningly fierce.
The most-wanted skip-runner captain in space awarded his adversary a half shrug of dismissal. 'You have one outstanding asset, boy. Your thinking is simplistically accurate.'
Since the comment was the last that Jensen might have anticipated, he was left without ready rejoinder.
Untouchable, untraceable, and infuriatingly confident, MacKenzie James turned on his heel. He stepped off the stripped bridge of the
Kildare
and departed through the lock for his transfer back to
Marity.
Moments later the same accursed analog screen showed the skip-runner ship's departure.
Yet the last word came over the com channel the captain had deliberately left open.
'You have no propulsion system, no firepower, and no communication or navigational equipment left aboard,' observed the blunt tones of Mac James. 'However, in the aft console where message torps are stored, you'll find one Gibsen left behind. That should be sufficient to see you rescued, when the fight winds down over Khalia.' A moment later the skip-runner captain added an afterthought: 'Oh, yes, and your engineer, is it Officer
Dak? He's locked in the emergency escape capsule. You'll want to let him out. Apparently he pissed off my mate some, and the air supply in the capsule was left off. ..'