The shaft was empty, all the way down the long axis of the station, and he drifted leisurely down towards the rear areas. He had plenty of contacts among the civilian population, and one of those in particular in mind. After twenty minutes, sirens began to sound, and he paused at a terminal, plugging in his datapad and getting a local status report. Apparently someone had abducted the station’s commanding officer, person or persons unknown. Which rather suggested which side the new commander of the station was on.
Right now, the local security had a lot of problems on their hands, and they weren’t going to pay any attention to a single spacehand drifting around the concourse, so he cautiously drifted down out of a nearby hatch, heading back into the traffic flow. This was more the station he remembered, crowds of people working their way between the stalls, arguments and debates in a dozen languages babbling through the air. Lilith’s was still there, the bright neon sign flickering on and off, a bouncer hovering in front of the entrance.
“No admissions,”
the bouncer
said, looking at him. “I doubt you could afford it.”
“Tell Lilith Logan wants to speak to her,” he replied with a smile. “And that I think they’re seeing through my disguise.”
“I’ve heard that before. Just another groupie. Get out.”
“It’s a pity that you’re planning on taking this attitude,” Logan said, drifting leisurely towards him. “Are you sure that I can’t change your mind?”
“Beat it.”
“Whatever you say,” Logan said, pulling out his datapad and entering a security code. The local fire suppression system activated, sending a burst of foam at high pressure into the man’s chest, sending him tumbling to the wall. Taking the opportunity, Logan pushed past, swinging over the threshold into a bar empty enough that the bouncer must have been paid to prevent him from entering,
and
he upgraded the urgency of his timetable accordingly.
Ignoring the look he received from the bartender, he swooped over the counter and through the door at the back, heading directly for Lilith’s office. Not wanting to wait, he tapped in an access code he wasn’t supposed to know, and the door slid open to reveal the woman herself behind a desk, a shady-looking individual in front of her.
“Logan!” she yelled, and the man turned; acting on instinct, Logan pulled his pistol from the concealed holster in his pocket, leveling it at the stranger.
“I don’t know what your business is, but I know mine is a damn sight more urgent.”
“So, you’ve hired a hitman,” the man said to Lilith. “My people are tougher.”
With a sigh, Logan said, “We don’t have time for this,” and fired, the man falling limp where he stood. “Tranq dart,” he said to Lilith. “New issue. I guess you can have someone take this piece of trash out.”
“He’s from the local Mafia,” she said. “Do you know what you just did?”
“Cut out the crap?” he replied. “Look, never mind these petty underworld rogues, I need your help, and I need it right now.”
Fury leaping across her face, she said, “You probably just cost my staff and I their lives, Logan, and you need my help?”
“That depends if you want the Confederation to
f
all to a military coup and a Cabal fleet to swoop through here destroying everything that moves or not. If that’s fine with you, I’ll go.”
Visibly deflating, she replied, “What’s going on, Logan?”
“It’d take me too long to explain right now, but I’ve got to get back to Mars, and I need to do it in a hurry. You must have a ship around that can take me back. I’ll pay – once I get the Intelligence accounts open again.”
“You’ve been quarantined?”
“I think my boss has taken an executive decision to sit this one out.”
Shaking her head, she replied, “Things are getting bad, Logan. All this security activity is doing very bad things for my business.” Pointing at the drifting figure, she said, “He was here to collect a quarter million credits, or repossess the bar, whichever came first. Probably both.”
“Lilith, I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. It was inevitable that
s
omeone would start paying attention to the station eventually; the good times couldn’t last forever. Though that bastard Watson’s made things a lot worse. Why did you leave him in charge?”
“You’ve got an inflated idea of the influence I wield, especially at the moment, but that at least has been dealt with. Don’t you have any way of getting me to Mars? Any contacts?”
“With all the fleet ships that have been back and forth here lately? The only people moving in here are too damn honest. Or they’ve been infiltrated themselves by your bad guys. I presume Watson was one of them. The only smuggler that’s still operating left yesterday, and didn’t have any of my cargo on board.”
“Damn,” he replied.
“Can’t you get a ride back in that shiny battlecruiser of yours?” She shook her head, and said, “You didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I never had a chance! One of my friends had almost been killed, and…,” he paused, took a breath, and said, “Look, I’ve got to get to Mars now. Alamo can’t jump for five days, but I can be there in plenty of time. We’ve got to move on this before it is too late.”
Looking around the room, Lilith said, “I need to know something.”
“What?”
“That you’ll help me get past the consequences of this. That you’ll make it good. I’ll trust that you’ll find a way, but I want your word on this.”
“I don’t let my friends down,” he replied. “Which is pretty much how I got into this mess.”
“That makes a crazy kinda sense.” She tapped a control on her desk, and said, “Harry, we’re closed. Get all the customers out, and do it right now. Tell everyone except you, Boris, Janet and Clyde to go to their quarters; they’ll find their next three months’ pay deposited in their accounts when they get there.”
“Boris is working for you now?” Logan asked.
“Watson fired him, insubordination or something like that.”
“Right, boss,” a tinny voice replied. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
“It does,” she said. Turning off the communicator, she looked up at Logan and said, “Come on. Let’s go to my quarters.”
“Do we have time for this?”
With a smile, she replied, “Men. All the same. Trust me, I have an ulterior motive.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ve got someone else coming.” He tapped a control on his datapad, and an image of Esposito flashed up on the screen. “Make sure she’s let in when she arrives.”
Lilith glanced down at the face with a brief glare of irritation, and reached over to tap a few controls, sending the image and instructions to her bartender. That done, she drifted out of her office, gracefully swinging from handhold to handhold to the forward section, and opened the door to her quarters with a passcode she took care to ensure Logan didn’t see. The hatch slid wide, and the two of them drifted in, looking at the huge viewscreen that filled a wall.
“Over there,” she pointed, “You’ll find systems control. Start turning everything on, and tell me if we get any red lights. I’ll start feeding power to the primary feeds.”
He looked at her, eyes wide, and said, “This is crazy, even by my standards.”
“This bar was originally a United Nations scoutship,
remember
. I always made sure to keep everything maintained, including the hendecaspace drive – and in direct contravention of security protocols, it’s even fueled up for a single jump. I always thought I might need a get out of jail card one day, and I guess that day has come.”
Logan pushed over to one of her tables, taking the cover off to reveal the control station below. The systems were archaic, decades out of date, but as he started to run the power-up procedures, everything seemed to be working properly, one step after another winking green to confirm activation.
Boris drifted in through the far door, the engineer still wearing his battered uniform jacket, and said, “Logan? Might have known you’d be involved in all of this.”
“Is everything ready?” Lilith asked.
“Sure, Cap’n,” he replied. “I’ve prepped the seals to pop when we give the word, and the airlock is sealed. We don’t have any passengers on board, just the five of us.” Frowning, he replied, “That’s not many people for a dimensional transit.”
“We don’t have time to recruit a crew.”
“One thing we can do,” Logan said, opening a communications channel. “Logan to Lieutenant Race. You there, Pete?”
The voice of Alamo’s astrogator replied with a yawn, “What’s going on? Do you know what time it is?”
“Time for you to do something for me. I need a course from here to Mars, to Titov Station, calibrated for ninety-eight minutes from now.”
“Ninety-eight...never mind, I’ll get on it right now, feed it through your datapad.”
“Thanks. Much appreciated.” He looked up at Lilith, and said, “Astrogation, oddly enough, is not one of my talents. It’d be better for us to end up at the right place. I figured Titov rather than Mariner, a hell of a lot less traffic.”
“Fine by me,” Lilith said, tapping a control. A series of lights flashed on, and the room now looked a lot more like the bridge it once was, wall panels flickering on, reading
s
spilling out across the viewscreen, the focus switching to the hendecaspace point. “We’re not going to get any pursuit, are we?”
“Not from Alamo,” Logan replied. “We’re going to surprise the hell out of everyone, though.” Looking down at his station, he said, “All power systems look good at my end.”
From the rear, Boris said, “Hendecaspace drive is primed, ready to go. We just need to know where we’re going. Where are we going?”
“Mars,” Logan said. “I’ll explain later.” Turning to Lilith, he said, “You don’t have to go this far. I’ll think of something else.”
“Little late for that now,” she said. “Don’t worry, I was thinking about changing my base of operations anyway. That’s why I hired Boris, I wanted someone to do an overhaul of the systems, make sure they were all working.”
“Are they?” Logan asked Boris.
“The ones I checked. I’m only about half-way through.”
“Great,” he said. “Just great.”
“Clyde here,” a voice loaded with a heavy burr said over the ceiling speaker. “The woman Logan was waiting for has arrived. Should I send her up?”
Looking at the status monitors, Boris said, “We don’t have time, and you’re going to need the help with the internal engineering relays.” Looking at Logan, he asked, “She does know some engineering, right?”
“Just the usual basic training.”
“That’ll have to do.”
“Stand by to undock, then,” Lilith said. “Logan, that’s you.”
“Out of purely academic interest,” Logan replied, “What’s this going to do to the rest of the station? This bar...ship...has been docked here for years.”
“Probably nothing much,” she replied. “The maintenance gangs will have to spend a few days tidying up, but I don’t think the integrity of the station itself will be compromised.” With a smile, she asked, “Cold feet?”
“I’d really
prefer to
not destroy the station on our way out if we can help it,” he said with a levity he didn’t feel.”
“Relax,” Boris said. “It’ll be fine. I’m far more worried about whether this ship will fall to pieces once we undock.”
“Very reassuring,” he said, looking down at his board. “We’re ready for separation. Main engines are primed and all systems show green. Undock at your discretion.”
“Let’s get this over with,” Lilith said. “At least I didn’t have to pack.”
With an ear-splitting grind, the sound of metal tortured almost beyond its limits, half a dozen clamps that had not moved in nearly two decades ripped open, sending the erstwhile bar tumbling forward, away from the station. Boris and Logan hastily ran through the engineering telltales, but astoundingly everything seemed to be working.
“I guess they built this girl to last,” Boris said, shaking his head.
“Let’s see what happens when we turn the engines on,” Lilith replied. “Hang on.”
She manipulated a control, and Logan started to feel heavy as the acceleration built. Something dropped on his head, leaving a scratch, a piece of loose metal, and the accumulated debris of years of zero-gravity rained down all around them, but the ship began to slowly move onto the calculated trajectory, heading for the hendecaspace point. Looking across at the unoccupied communications station, Logan saw a host of incoming calls, all of them listed as urgent. Tapping a control to slave that station to his, he opened a channel to Alamo.
“What the hell is happening over there?” Marshall yelled. “Station maintenance is having a heart attack, they thought there was a structural integrity failure!”
“There might be,” Boris said from the back. “Tell Chief Hooper that he should have someone check the superstructure in that area right now, and he’s going to need to do something about the power grid in that module as well.”
“We’re on our way to Mars, Danny,” Logan said. “Has Race finished that course yet?”
“I’m sending it over to you now,” Race said, breaking into the channel.
“Thanks, Pete. We’ll keep a seat warm for you at the bar when we get home. Logan out.”
“He seemed a bit upset,” Boris said.
“Commanding officers often like to be kept informed of changes to the mission profile, and besides, my original plan was to sneak away from the station. We’ve traded secrecy for speed, but as long as we have enough of it, I think everything will work out.”
“Hendecaspace drive coming on-line,” Lilith said. “This is the big jump.” The engine faded out for a moment, sending the three of them drifting forward, Boris banging his head on a ceiling panel.
Logan, swinging himself back behind his console, said, “Fuel feed malfunction. I can bypass it. I guess that was one of the systems Boris hadn’t gotten around to yet.”
“Good guess,” the engineer replied, rubbing his head. The engine roared into life again, sending him careening back to the far deck, slamming his elbow into the wall. “Damn it, I think this ship wants to kill me!”