Bored in deep space - Novelisation -
Chapter 27 - Emerald Sky Marauders (6)
Vorn laid there, pinned by tiny particles of light, sweat and grease matting the sparse hairs on his head. The greed in his eyes warred with a lifetime of brutish suspicion. He rolled his head sways with a grunt, trying to glimpse at the man he'd followed into firefights and raids, the man he'd otherwise have called friend.
"Joric," Vorn's voice was a strangled, guttural mess. "Is any of this… true? You're really a Craven, you Void-damned snake?"
Riker didn't answer. There was nothing to say. His one good eye was fixed on me, burning with a cold, impotent rage, but it was a fire banked by a dawning certainty. He hadn't just been outmanoeuvred; he'd been blindsided. The game was over, and he'd never even seen the other player at the table. His silence was the confession.
An enraged roar ripped from Vorn's throat. It was the sound of a wounded lion. "Traitor!" He bellowed. "You lying, backstabbing son of a whore! I trusted you! I covered for you after that mess on Icarus Falls! I gave you half my take from the Orun raid! You bastard!" His fury spent itself in a torrent of curses, leaving him panting on the floor, the fire in his eyes now honed to a diamond-hard point of purpose. "I'll do it," he wheezed. "I'll take your damn deal! I'll get you a meeting with Torkan. My commander. You can talk it out all you want. You just tell him it was me that turned the rat in. I want to watch when they melt that chrome eye right out of his skull."
A slow, appreciative chuckle escaped my lips. "See, Vorn?" I said, my tone light, like a teacher congratulating a slow student. "Smart choice. Very smart. You just made the best career move of your life."
I looked down at the pathetic forms of both men, one dead spy in the waiting, the other a willing pawn. This was how it was meant to be. Push the advantage. Force the issue and make the opponents play the game at your pace instead of—
And then I heard it. The faintest whisper of displaced air, a high-pitched whizz that my ears barely registered. It wasn't a sound I identified consciously; it was the reptilian, caveman instinct, an ancient alarm screaming in the deepest parts of my brain: danger.
Before my conscious mind could even process it, Tama moved.
Her head turned, a shift of perfect, inhuman smoothness, her orange eyes tracking an imperceptible trajectory towards my face. Her right arm came up, not in a blur of motion, but as if she had been there from the start. Right in front of my face and between her fingers, a spinning silver shape appeared. A bullet. She had snatched it from the air.
My head swivelled. From a high gantry overlooking the hangar bay, a shadow detached itself from the metal rafters. Another glint, another whisper. Three more shots came, perfectly aimed at my head, a lethal staccato designed to overwhelm any defense. They never got close. Three more metallic slugs appeared in the palm of her other hand, caught mid-air as gently as fireflies in a jar. The hangar was suddenly silent, the only noise the faint tinkle of bullet casings falling to the deck from the distant sniper's perch.
She held the four projectiles in her open palm for a moment. Then, with a flick of her wrist that was as nonchalant as tossing away a fruit pit, she sent one of the captured bullets back.
There wasn't any loud crack of gunshot. Just a single, faint thwip. The shadow on the gantry slumped, a puppet who'd just lost his puppeteer. From the distance between us, I saw a small, neat hole in the sniper's helmet, right between the eyes.
He wasn't a pirate.
The professionalism was immediately made evident. The reinforced hangar doors suddenly slid shut behind us, their glowing neon consoles now a stark, ominous red. Locked. A smaller, concealed maintenance panel to the side was blown inwards in a shower of sparks and warped metal. A squad of figures poured through the opening.
These were definitely not pirates. The very way they moved -- the synchronised entry, the practiced aim as they fanned out -- screamed of military training. They were encased in sleek, matte-black tactical armour, their faces hidden behind impassive, reflective helmets and masks. The barrels of their rifles were fitted with what I could only assume was a futuristic silencer. The first sniper's rifle hardly made a sound too. They weren't here to cause a scene. They were here for a clean, efficient kill.
The air suddenly shook. The pressure that had been holding Vorn and Riker to the floor vanished. "Vorn, Riker, behind me! Now!" I yelled, diving for the cover of a stack of derelict cargo containers. Vorn, recovering faster, rolled to his feet and scrambled after me with a confused, animal terror in his eyes. Ricker was a heartbeat slower, but the instinct for survival was paramount. He lunged for cover just as a hail of suppressed rounds ripped through the space where they'd been lying.
From behind the shaking metal container, the huddled mess of pirate enforcer, turncoat, and god-woman pressed closed. Just then, Vorn's datapad, strapped to his belt, began to blare an obnoxious, jaunty ringtone. It was a jarringly cheerful sound in the sudden chaos. He fumbled for it, his massive, prosthetic hand trembling. He tapped on the screen, then the angry, heavily modulated tones of what I assumed was his superior filled the tense space, distorted but clear.
"What is it, Henricks? Report."
"Torkan, it's me!" Vorn growled. "We're under attack! Some kind of black ops soldiers just blew in the wall! They're trying to kill us!"
There was a pause on the other end, a silence stretched taut with implication. Torkan's modulated, metallic voice returned, but it was unnervingly calm. "I know, Vorn. I'm watching."
"Watching?! What in the Void are you talking about? These are your soldiers?! Call them off!"
Another pause. "I've been tracking our little friend, Joric… or should I say, Riker… for the better part of a month," Torkan explained. "I've known he was a snake. Just didn't have the proof. Couldn't risk taking out one of my own lieutenants on a hunch, so I placed a little tracker on you, listening into every conversation you've had. You were sloppy, Vorn. You trusted him. That makes you the fool."
Vorn looked from the datapad to Riker, who watched with an unreadable expression. For a second, he realised how the real world worked. I couldn't help but feel sorry for him, a tool that was thrown away once he broke. "But… the soldiers?" Vorn stammered. "What do I have to do with this? Torkan, I've been loyal! I was the one who uncovered the rat!"
The finality in Torkan's next words was absolute. "You're a casualty, Vorn." The voice then shifted, addressing me directly. "Thank you, stranger. You just saved me a lot of headaches, but I don't think we'll ever be meeting again."
The line went dead.
The datapad screen went dark. For a full second, Vorn just stared at it, his mind refusing to accept what he'd just heard.
There were four of them left.
My mind raced, instinct screaming out a tactical assessment. Four professional soldiers, a small but lethally precise kill squad, their weapons spitting suppressed whispers that gouged chunks out of our flimsy metal cover. They moved with a practiced, synchronised efficiency, their positions shifting, covering one another's arcs. They weren't pirates, drunk on cheap alcohol and bravado. These were men who were trained for this.
Another volley of suppressed rounds punched into the container, the impacts sounding like an ominous hail against a tin roof.
"Tama," I said, keeping my voice level, my eyes darting at the shadows on the advancing shapes. They kept moving forward, trying to flush us out of hiding. "Make them stop."
Tama's only response was a decisive nod. There was no dramatic pause, no preparation. Her form flickered, and then she was gone. Not running, not dashing. She vanished. A micro-blink, instantaneous, displacing her from the safety of our cover to the very heart of the kill squad's formation.
She materialised behind the two rearmost soldiers. And in her hand, she held a blade. It was forged from the same captured light she'd used to pin down the two men, but now it was solidified, condensed into a perfectly rigid, monomolecular edge of orange-luminescence. The soldiers sensed something; their shoulders tensed, their heads began to turn. But she was already moving.
The sword rose and fell in a single, silent, geometrically perfect arc. One moment a soldier stood, alert and dangerous. The next, his helmeted head tipped backwards, and then cleanly detached, soaring through the air in a graceful arc before clattering to the deck. Blood, in a fine, arterial spray, jetted from the neck of the headless torso, which stood for a full second before collapsing.
The shout of warning was a strangled, choked sound from the remaining three soldiers. Their reflexive training took over. They swung their rifles toward her, a storm of suppressed fire erupting. It didn't matter how skilled or lethal they thought they were -- they were just walking corpses at this point. The bullets designed to shatter bones and tear through armour, simply impacted her, flattening against her form with dull, metallic pings, before falling uselessly to the floor. They might as well have been shooting at a mountain.
Tama began to walk forward.
It wasn't a run or a charge. It was a steady, measured stride. She moved through the hail of bullets as if through a gentle spring rain, her focus absolute. Another soldier raised his rifle, panic finally overriding his training. Tama's blade flickered out, a horizontal sweep that took him across the midsection. The black armour split like cheap plastic, his body folding in on itself with a grotesque, meaty thud. The last two soldiers broke, firing wildly, trying to retreat. One was simply run through, the incandescent blade punching clean through the back of his armour. The last, attempting to dive behind another cargo container, was caught by a thrown blade that she'd materialised and launched in a span of a heartbeat. It impaled him to the metal wall, pinning him there like a butterfly in a collector's display.
It was over. Four soldiers, highly trained professional killers, were rendered inert in less than ten seconds by a woman whose entire method of violence was so silent and utterly devoid of effort.
"Jesus," I let out. "She's like an unkillable, scripted boss monster in a horror game," I mused. It struck me as I watched the carnage -- gleaming orange lights flickering against the dead, black-armoured bodies, the smear of blood across the hangar floor -- that I should've felt something more. Shock. Horror. Revulsion. I didn't. There was only a faint sense of clinical detachment, like I was watching an action movie. The adrenaline was singing, yes, but the sorrow was absent. They came here to kill me. This was just the transaction, the price of their gamble. A fair trade.
My fascination with the ballet of death Tama just performed was so absolute that I didn't even register the danger that still lurked behind me.
It was a single gunshot.
Not the suppressed whispers of the professional soldiers, but the loud, angry crack of a pistol at close range. An ugly, final report that echoed in the sudden, ringing silence.
I spun around and saw him. Vorn Henricks lay sprawled on his back, half-propped against the cargo container, his head thrown back. A neat, ugly hole punched through his forehead, right between his confused, piggy eyes. The cheap, brutish ambition in them extinguished, replaced by a final, vacant surprise.
Standing over him was Riker Raelus. The pistol's barrel still smoking. He lowered it slowly. "Murderous bastard," he whispered.
Then his eye met mine.
"Why'd you do that?" The question came out before I even thought to ask.
Riker let out a short, harsh laugh. "Why? Because my cover is blown. No thanks to you, stranger," he spat the word. "Besides, he was a liability; letting him live would've caused more trouble for the both of us." He gestured with the pistol towards the corpse. "Don't feel too bad for the idiot. Vorn was a complete and vicious bastard. He once put a bullet through an entire family on a cargo shuttle because their clumsy kid bumped into him. Said it was a lesson in respect. The galaxy's a cleaner place without that garbage." He spat on the body, a final, contemptuous punctuation mark.
His explanation was delivered with a chilling pragmatism. His hand twitched, the muscles in his jaw tightening as he stared at me. For a second, I thought he was going to do it. He was measuring the odds, the pros, and the cons. Take me out, a loose end. A witness.
But then, he shifted his gaze, darting for a fraction of a second towards Tama, who now stood motionless amidst the four fresh corpses. Her orange-glowing eyes turned towards him. A warning. Riker swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. He saw what I saw. He saw the impossibility of it. Kill me? Probably not. With the silver clip I was wearing, a point-black shot to the head would at least stagger me, but he couldn't have known that. At most, it might be a badass way to make a point. To go out on his own terms.
The pistol in Riker's hand sagged, the fight drained out of him. He wouldn't make it past two metres after trying something that stupid.
He dropped the gun and raised his hand.
"Let's make a new deal," he said, his voice suddenly clear, all the bravado and fury from killing his partner gone. "Vorn's now a literal dead end, but he's not the only way into the Marauder's inner circle. I'll get you in contact with my superiors, within the Cravens. I can see we have an aligned interest in taking those bastards down; no point in aiming guns at each other, right?"
There was no desperation in Riker's tone, but something far more valuable: a cold, hard pragmatism. He had the look of a professional gambler who'd just had his cards exposed, and was now playing the only remaining angle he had left, the truth. "I don't know how you did it, but you've already managed to dig out who I really work for. The Abyssal Cravens." He kept his hands held loosely in the air, a clear sign of non-aggression. "Our intelligence indicates the Marauders aren't just some random 'Red' rabble. They're amassing something. Off the books. That's why I was here, why I've been inside for four years. To figure it out."
He gestured with a sharp, economical motion towards the bodies of the black-clad soldiers. "But the rabbit hole seems to go deeper than anyone realised. Torkan has allies we didn't know about. This isn't just a pirate squabble anymore; this is a war brewing, and it's happening fast. I can't get you into the Marauder's inner circle directly. The moment Torkan finds out we're alive, he's going to scrub every known asset I could use. But I still have four years of accumulated intelligence. Meeting points. Safe houses. Secret codes. A complete list of corrupt officials on their payroll across three systems. It's a treasure trove, and it's yours if you agree to my terms." He paused, letting the offer hang. "Help me get out of here. Get me back to my people. You can talk to my superiors and establish a working relationship. Do that, and you'll…" he locked his one good eye with mine, "get your answers."
For a long moment, I just stared at Riker, a dead spy standing amidst a pile of fresh corpses. The marauders now knew he was a traitor, they'll be hunting him. He was offering me everything he had left: years of dangerous work, the keys to a covert war, all in exchange for a ride.
I turned away from him, my gaze seeking the one entity in the hangar whose opinion mattered. Tama stood motionless, a statue of white, her guise of Marissa Shirley now stained with blood. Her emotionless, neutral stare looking onto the carnage she'd orchestrated with a dispassionate ambivalence. The blood didn't seem to stick on her clothes for long however, they slid off like hydrophobic fabric, leaving her pure white lab coat completely unblemished. The orange light in her eyes was an unwavering flame, glowing intensely. She was probably going through millions or billions of different simulations on the next sequence of events derived from this attack.
"What do you think?" I muttered, my voice barely a whisper, the question meant only for her. She wasn't anywhere near me when I asked the question, but I knew she could hear me from any distance. "Are the Cravens worth the trouble? An entire organisation of backstabbing spies and corporate lawyers sounds like more of a headache than help. We could probably take down the Marauders ourselves… eventually."
Tama materialised beside me. Her liberal use of blinking sending a confused exasperation onto Riker. Her response was a calm, logical whisper that didn't seem to make actual sound but her words echoed in my ears. "Your assertion of my individual capabilities is correct; given sufficient temporal resources, I could autonomously infiltrate and dismantle the entire Emerald Sky Marauder network. However, your proposed path, which you eloquently described as 'pushing the advantage', is not merely a matter of capability, but of efficiency and strategy."
Her reasoning flowed as smooth as that magic coffee I drank earlier. "An alliance, however tenuous, with a known rival faction provides an easier access to the enemy and greater opportunities." There was a brief pause before she delivered her conclusion. "From a purely tactical perspective, there are no significant disadvantages to this partnership. He is a variable, yes. But a known, and currently, a highly motivated one. We are, for lack of a better term, buying a map instead of drawing one ourselves."
I turned back to Riker, my mind made up. His eye never left me. A bead of sweat dripped past his forehead as he waited patiently for me to speak. Admittedly, the thrill of it; a spy for an ally, a pirate warlord for an enemy. It was a mess, a chaotic, dangerous web of lies and allegiances. And it was exactly the kind of mess I was starting to enjoy.
"Alright," I said, my voice cutting through the silence. "I'll bite. You get your ride, but here's how this is going to work." I pointed a finger at him, a gesture of pure authority that I was beginning to relish. "You don't touch anything on my ship without my permission. You don't go anywhere without me or her," I nodded towards Tama. "You lie to me, you hold back, you even look at me sideways, and my friend here will turn you inside out. Am I clear?"
Riker met my gaze, returning a slow, cautious nod. "Crystal," he said. He swallowed. "I'm a practical man. I know when I'm outgunned and outmaneuvered. My life's the only bargaining chip I have left. I don't intend to cash it in prematurely."
"Good," I grunted, satisfied. I turned towards the hangar door, my mind already racing ahead to the next move. "Let's get out of this festering hole. Follow us back to the Eclipse."
He didn't need to be told twice.