Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2) (12 page)

Then again, she'd gotten to know herself a little better over the last couple years, too. For her, too much downtime, and the walls started to close in. As long as she kept plowing forward, the shadows couldn't catch up.

Marcus excused himself to his bunk. They'd searched him before leaving Earth, but MacAdams eyed him anyway.

"What do you think?" the big man said. "He came along mighty easily."

"I've heard of that happening with fugitives. After being on the run for a while, looking over your shoulder every minute of the day, getting caught is a relief."

"Didn't hurt to convince him an assassin was on his heels, either. How do you suppose he'll react when he finds out that guy's dead?"

"By that point he'll already have told Toman everything he knows. Who cares what he thinks? MacAdams, didn't you used to be a mercenary?"

MacAdams raised a thick eyebrow. "That means I can't have a conscience?"

"I'm far less concerned with your soul than I am with the billions that will be affected by whatever FinnTech's up to with the Swimmers. That's why I'm not worried about lying to Marcus. Besides, Toman will take care of him. Keep him safe from Finn."

He watched the stars on the screen for a long moment. "Could be. But you got to be careful about what you're willing to do in the name of the cause. I bet Thor Finn thinks he's doing the right thing, too."

Rada sat back. MacAdams looked like a pit fighter. A guy who could juice your head with a flex of his biceps. This was far from the first time she'd heard him talk like a monk, yet every time it happened, she was still surprised.

It would be two more days before they arrived at the Hive. She leaned back her chair and stretched out, device propped in her lap, and called up the latest on the Locker. Facts were still thin on the ground, but enough tidbits had trickled out to confirm there'd been some kind of rebellion. Apparently successful. In response, the shipping market looked like a shot of the Himalayas, complete with glacial valleys. Some companies were taking advantage of the temporary lack of pirates by shipping all they could, free of Lane fees, but others had seen their stock prices tumble, money's natural response to any chaos in the world.

The device fell to her chest. She'd nodded off. She knew she should sit up, or at least set her device somewhere safer, but she couldn't convince herself to move.

"Rada." A voice from the blackness. "Hey, Rada. What's this orange dot mean?"

Her eyes flew open. A small orange wedge had appeared on tactical. It was far enough away that she couldn't get a hull profile yet, let alone an engine signature, but the readouts indicated it was going to get a lot closer in the next few minutes.

"Well?" MacAdams said. "What is it?"

"Small corvette of some kind." Rada pulled up more readouts. "At present course, we won't come within combat range."

"We're in the middle of open space, not an Earth freeway. The only time you bump into somebody out here is when they're looking for you."

"Could be a freighter. With the Locker temporarily out of commission, the shipping companies have been going to town." She frowned, head still fuzzy from sleep. "Except there are still plenty of pirates inside the Asteroid Belt."

"Could it be one of them?"

"Let's find out." She poured power into the
Tine
's engines. The readouts adjusted, widening the projected gap between where the two ships would come closest. The number stabilized. A minute after that, it began to shrink. "Go wake up Webber."

MacAdams' face hardened. He jogged from the bridge toward the bunks. He could have roused Webber via comm, but he was a hands-on guy. Either that, or he knew Webber well enough to know that it would take more than a voice to roust him from bed.

In other circumstances, Rada might have dared the UFO to come at them. She'd take the
Tine
against anything its size. Today, though, her cargo was too precious to gamble. She accelerated harder yet. Inbound at an obtuse angle, the other vessel picked up speed and altered its vector.

"Screw you," Rada muttered. She opened the engines as wide as they would go, peeling away. The estimated intersection gap increased briefly, but began shrinking again an instant later.

Boots thumped into the bridge. Webber slung himself into his chair. "What's up?"

"We've got an admirer," Rada said. "And I can't shake them."

MacAdams squinted. "I thought that little add-on of ours meant nothing could out-accelerate us."

"You're right—unless they've got a Motion Arrestor, too. And bigger engines to go with it."

"Oh shit," Webber said. "There really
is
a FinnTech assassin after us."

MacAdams strapped in. "Should we split the ship? Triple-team it?"

"We're not set up for that," Rada said. "Tell Marcus to strap in. We're headed for a dogfight."

While MacAdams spoke into the comm, Rada fired a Needle to the Hive, including what limited information she'd gathered about the incoming ship. She angled to put her tail to the enemy. Flying ahead of a chasing enemy was a huge advantage: while their missiles had to catch up to you, fighting upstream, your missiles would be going downstream, working against the enemy's momentum and giving them less room to maneuver.

She pinged the UFO, but nobody responded. It was now close enough to make out every detail of its V-shaped hull. It had the expensive look of a craft that could handle atmo if it needed. As it neared the green zone—the screen's translucent green sphere around the
Tine
that marked effective missile range—Rada sent a final warning. She got no reply.

She gathered the records of her efforts and sent a second Needle to the Hive, then fired a salvo of missiles behind her.

Green dots pricked the screen, speeding toward the orange representation of the oncoming vessel. A slew of orange dots materialized from its bow. On tactical, defensive solutions sprung into being; if Rada didn't select one manually, the
Tine
would do so itself. She opted for Blue-Nine, an ammo-conservative strategy that would maximize their advantage of flying in front.

The two waves of missiles streaked toward each other. On a second screen with a live view of space, explosions blossomed in red and white tatters. Rockets lurched to avoid contact with the bursts. The change in direction left them vulnerable to counters, which darted forward, triggering a second wave of explosions.

"Are we winning?" Webber said.

"Haven't died yet." Unimpressed by the enemy's standard attack, Rada detached two missile drones. These arced to either side of the
Tine
, forcing the UFO to divert fire.

Rada watched the exchange with a strange form of anxious boredom. In truth, you couldn't tell who was "winning" until the endgame. When somebody started to run low on missiles. Rada thought the introduction of the Motion Arrestors would make dogfights less about materiel and more about maneuvers, but so far, she hadn't seen any real evolution of tactics.

The UFO knocked down one drone. As soon as the second vaporized, the ship unleashed a torrent of rockets. To conserve her own, Rada swerved across two axes, forcing the enemy missiles to line up behind her, where each of her counters could knock out several at a time.

The enemy changed course, too. Far more sharply than Rada's broad turn. It closed on them. On tactical, patterns of red lights indicated they were being fired on—by kinetics. Bullets. Sprayed in an erratic yet sophisticated cluster that was chewing up a vast swath of space. Hemmed in by an arc of rockets in one direction and the kinetics in the other, Rada swerved down.

The UFO anticipated her turn, shaving off yet more distance, firing another long, space-chewing string of kinetics, followed up by another round of missiles. Rada swapped to a highly aggressive defense, spewing rockets behind her. Explosions flashed on the secondary screen, blindingly close. Radiation-sensitive damage sensors perked up on tactical.

"I know we're still alive," Webber said. "But was that one as close as it felt?"

"Any closer, and you'd be gathering your component atoms."

As soon as the explosions faded, she turned as hard as she could and fired a salvo in return, meaning to drive back the other ship. Open up some breathing room. Her rockets lanced forward with unusual speed. Around the FinnTech ship, its counter-rockets seemed to hesitate a moment before swooping to intercept.

Rada ordered the computer to run an analysis of the last exchange. The numbers it kicked out were crude, but she didn't have time to plug in anything as advanced as she needed. What it did give her confirmed what she'd felt during the last exchange of rockets. The timing had been off. Wrong. Like when she was practicing on a sim and the graphics hung for a frame.

She dribbled rockets at the enemy, then punched her engines, as if to flee. Like before, the other ship corralled her with a net of missiles, hemming her in on another side with a barrage of tiny bullets. She dived away; the enemy matched course.

She fired minimal defenses. Lights began to blink on tactical, demurely at first. Suggesting her attention. A few seconds later, they were glaring, demanding her eye. A klaxon whooped. On tactical, the incoming missiles streaked toward the red sphere nestled beneath the vast, translucent green sphere surrounding the
Tine
. The red sphere marking the point beyond which Rada's defenses wouldn't have time to react.

She flipped to starboard with everything the
Tine
had. A moment later, she reversed to port just as hard. Without the Motion Arrestors, the
Tine
would have broken itself into a million tiny pieces. With it, her tail lashed like a whip. At the height of its acceleration, Rada fired off all the remaining rockets housed there.

From her fleeing position, missiles would normally have to fight against her terrible forward momentum. But these ones worked with its sudden, brief reversal. They leaped forward like they'd been stung. The FinnTech ship's counters hesitated, caught flat-footed. By the time they recalibrated their course, the first of Rada's rockets snapped past them, closing on the enemy.

The other vessel vanished in a burst of blue light.

"Nailed 'em!" Webber jumped from his chair, pumping a fist at the fireworks. "What did you just
do
?"

"I learned something," Rada grinned. "You should try it sometime."

She hung around just long enough to scoop up an engine sig and scan the debris, then boosted away, back on course to the Hive.

* * *

"You'll be safe here. For as long as you like." Toman folded his hands on the table in the clean white room. The screen to his left showed a view of what was outside of the wall: a silvery orbital ring attached to a tiny green and blue microplanet just a few miles around. "You could take my word for it, but if you prefer, I have also prepared a document so legally binding I can't even read it."

He nudged his device across the desk. Marcus glanced at the document on the screen. "Which means I can't, either."

"I'm sure my lawyers would be happy to interpret it for you." Toman smiled toothily. "I really don't mean to sound ominous. But FinnTech
is
after you. I'd like to stop them. If you can't trust me enough to work together, I'd be happy to drop you off on the nearest inhabited rock."

Marcus' leonine face dropped. "It's too late. If you wanted to stop them, you needed to start twenty years ago."

"They can't have been dealing with the Swimmers for twenty years. Someone would have noticed by now."

Marcus gave Toman a look of deepest contempt. "Where do you think artificial gravity came from? Think we invented that one on our own?"

Toman blanched. "Holy galloping shit. I've always wondered how we made that leap. No wonder we've barely been able to refine it."

"They've had a generation to prepare for this. All the while, Earth and every habitat in the System has been happy to empty their wallets and swallow their questions. You're just getting started, but FinnTech's already into their end game."

Silence smothered the cushy room. Typically, Toman's confidence was unflappable—you didn't become one of the System's youngest billionaires without it. Now, he gazed out into starry space, face drawn with grave lines.

"Maybe you're right," Rada said. "Maybe they've got too much of a head start. Too many resources. Too many allies to overcome. Insane alien technology that makes us look like monkeys with sticks. Well, here's my question for you: so the fuck what?"

Marcus pinched his upper lip. "What's the point in standing against that?"

"If people had accepted defeat when the aliens hit them with the Panhandler, we wouldn't be here today. Crazy odds doesn't mean you give up. All it means is you have to fight back with all the crazy you've got."

"And if necessary, I am prepared to escalate to full-bore lunatic," Toman said, regaining his composure. "Besides, if you're a dead man either way, you might as well go out in a blaze of glory, eh?"

Marcus grinned, light returning to his eyes. "Do you understand what they're gunning for? A monopoly on next-gen space travel. The upside is that'll mark the end of piracy. The downside is they'll have a lock on everything: shipping, travel, immigration. And here's the kicker. Every military fleet in the System will be provided by them, or powerless against them."

"What's the Swimmers' role in this? Why would they help us after all this time?"

"That's the big unknown, isn't it? I think they're grooming us to be pawns. A servant race, dependent on their favor. But for all I know, this tech is a trap. A way to connect us, make us vulnerable to a second plague." He shrugged. "Or it's secretly embedded with bombs the Swimmers can set off whenever they like."

"Finn must know this could be the setup for a betrayal. Either he thinks otherwise, or he's arrogant enough to think he can turn it against the aliens."

"I couldn't say what Finn thinks. Maybe he does suspect the Swimmers. Could be that's what the secret fleet is about."