Venatoris
“The fast lane I am flying down is one
with no end in sight
filled with reckless adventure and
paved with dangerous delights.”
— Ashley Young
YUZHOU LI ORBITAL STATION
Shi Shen Stellar System
1,080 Parsecs from Earth
March 2317
“DOUBLE BOURBON, STRAIGHT up. Double everything. Except the ice. Don’t double the ice.”
Alexis Solovy glanced down the bar in idle curiosity at the source of the dramatic pronouncement. A woman with frizzy black hair and pale, bleached skin sagged off a stool and onto the bar, arms splayed out in defeat. She looked familiar, but damned if Alex could pull a name out of anywhere. “Bad day?”
The woman didn’t lift her head from where it lay propped sideways on her elbow. “My ship is trashed. A mangled heap. Bloody asteroid spun out when I tried to grapple it. I limped back here like a crippled monkey, jack shit to show for my trouble.”
Alex raised her glass in contrived sympathy and turned away. If the woman didn’t have any useful leads, it wasn’t worth the pain of engaging in conversation, polite or otherwise.
Intel was the only reason to come to this godforsaken place, the sleaziest bar on the sleaziest space station for two kiloparsecs. Tidbits. Information. Leads. On a good night, contracts.
Her eyes roved over the room in search of better prospects. The bar was nearly two-thirds full—loud and busy, but not so full as to preclude card and target games and the occasional display of bravado. Bad synth blaring out of the speakers made it feel rowdier than the reality.
Alex knew half the people on sight. Some she was on a last name basis with; others, an epithet basis. Many were interstellar scouts, freelance—same as her, while a few were traders, smugglers, or both. But she didn’t see any corp reps or brokers. Was no one in this cursed place doing business?
“Alex, doll, you need something stronger than… what are you drinking?”
She leveled an unimpressed scowl in Bob Patera’s direction as he leaned on the bar beside her. “A Carina Nova. They make it in civilized places like Earth. Luckily, the bartender’s visited civilized places.”
He nodded with as much vigor as his inebriated state allowed. “Still need to get you something stronger.”
“Can’t. I’m working.”
He stared at her skeptically but couldn’t seem to think of a suitable response. Finally he took a long, fulsome sip of his drink, a dark and frothy concoction. “Go on a date with me.”
It had to be at least the seventy-fourth time he’d asked in the two and a half years since she’d met him. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you think you’re a space pirate, Bob.”
“But I am a space pirate.”
She laughed in spite of herself. “My point exactly.”
“You dated that Ethan Tollis guy, and he thinks he’s a synth star.”
“He is a synth star.” And the dating happened years ago, before Ethan found well-deserved fame, but she wasn’t inclined to correct him.
He looked genuinely offended. “I am a space pirate.”
Patera was a good guy; a functioning drunk and a righteous lech, but a good guy nonetheless. He took the odd scouting job mostly to entertain himself and to have tales to brag about at any of a staggering variety of bars, of which this was only one.
“Oh, clearly. But—”
She recognized the man the instant he stepped in the bar and made sure she was the first person he made eye contact with. “Sorry, Bob, got to go. Working.”
The man sat down at a table in the corner near the door. She stood up and headed for it with an air of deliberate casualness. It wouldn’t do for anyone else to notice him and beat her there, but she also didn’t want anyone else to notice her running for him.
She made it to the table scot-free and slid in opposite him. “You have a job?” Perhaps not the smoothest greeting, but she rarely had the patience for pleasantries.
He didn’t appear to mind. As a respected and experienced broker for numerous Alliance corps, he presumably knew interstellar scouts weren’t always the most socially well-adjusted people.
“Astral Materials is getting ready to post an open contract for rare, high value elements at a newly discovered pulsar in Messier 71.”
Messier 71 lay a considerable distance from Shi Shen, out in the void beyond settled space. She was okay with that.
“What’s special about it?”
“It’s a millisecond pulsar with three suspected planets identified. The scientific data is so promising they already gave it a name: Shanshuo. It’s the Chinese word for—”
“Scintillation. I know. And it’s an open contract?”
“Should hit the boards in the next hour or so. You did a great job on the contract for Palaimo last month, so I thought you’d be interested in a little forewarning.”
Pulsar planets were rare, and rare was interesting. Better yet, millisecond pulsars were very, very old, which meant lots of opportunities for elements to bake, mature and transform. The odds leaned toward something lucrative waiting at Shanshuo.
She harbored no doubts she would find that something if it was there to find, but she also had to find it first. “What’s the payout?”
“Depends on what you find.”
Her gaze bore into him until he made a prevaricating motion. “200K to 1.2 million.”
She managed to stand up without sending the chair skittering across the floor. “Appreciate the tip.”
Then she slinked out the door, hoping no one noticed her exit, and hurried down the curving walkway of the station’s outer torus as she messaged Kennedy.
Ken, where are you? It’s time to quit partying and start working.
The response took several seconds to come in.
Are you sure? I literally just met a delicious merchant from Arcadia. He sells custom wide-band decrypters fabbed onsite.
And he needs you to come to his hotel room so he can show them to you?
Actually I suggested the hotel room.
Alex reached the transfer lift and hopped aboard as it departed.
Hey, it’s your vacation, but you said you wanted to come on a job with me so you could, and I quote, ‘See what I did with all my free time.’ Here’s your chance. You can stay and bed Don Juan if you want, but I’m clamps off in twenty.
Oh, fine. I’ll meet you at the ship. I’ve got to disentangle myself here.
Twenty, Ken.
* * *
The hangar deck did not look to be in compliance with any safety regs from this century, and certainly not Earth Alliance regs, which Shi Shen claimed to be subject to. Maybe the jurisdiction got fuzzy once one breached space? Alex knew better, though. Her mother—Queen Admiral of the Universe, Earth Alliance Strategic Command Division—would have an apoplectic fit if she saw the wreck this place was. But her mother did not deign to frequent places such as this.
A third of the bays were filled with half-broken ships while their owners, bots and assorted mechanics tried to put them back together. Two men were busy installing a new impulse engine in the ship next to hers, right there on the deck. She shook her head and strode past them.
The Siyane sat at the end of the left row. Sleek, aerodynamic lines gleamed panther black, giving it a predatory appearance. It wasn’t the largest ship in the bay, but by God it was the most beautiful. As well it should be, since she’d designed it herself. Built to spec by the company Kennedy worked for, it represented nothing short of perfection.
… Except for all the upgrades and customizations she desperately wanted to make but could not yet afford. Step by step, day by day.
Kennedy came rushing up behind her, a mess of golden curls bouncing around a flushed face as she repositioned the straps of her jade slip dress on her shoulders. She skidded to a stop in a huff. “You’re not on board yet? I could’ve gotten—”
“You can tell me on the way, Ken. Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“On an adventure. Trust me, it’ll be fun.”
* * *
SIYANE
Messier 71
PSR J1952+1846
4,220 Parsecs from Earth
Many people believed humanity’s mere presence in the stars beyond its home planet had rendered space civilized.
Superluminal travel allowed them to hopscotch over the void on their way from one colony to the next. Half the time they didn’t even bother to glance out a ship’s viewport and note it was the stars they journeyed through.
But out here, twelve hundred parsecs from the nearest settled world—which happened to be the most uncivilized world of them all, run by gangsters, murderers and thieves—space revealed its true nature. Vast. Untamed. Dangerous.
In other words, her playground.
Alex noted all this with a brief smile of anticipation as she increased the thrust of the impulse engine and accelerated into the stellar system hiding in a far corner of Messier 71. Not the venue for idle musing.
The race was already on. Word of the contract had spread across the width and breadth of the freelance scout network by now, and she’d be deluding herself if she thought she’d be able to close this deal without competition.
The rules for claiming ‘property’ in unexplored, unowned space were straightforward: plant a beacon at the location detailing the extent of the claim and the name of the claimant. Once the broadcast reached the relevant authorities—a matter of seconds—the claim was certified. Period, full stop. It was the only practical way to handle development of the forty billion star systems still unexplored in their little corner of the galaxy.
The various governments generated much to-do about their new discoveries. Corporations, however, simply took what they wanted.
Well, it would be more accurate to say corporations paid people to find and claim what they wanted for them. People like her… .
“Oh, chyertu.” Alex groaned as the long-range scanner picked up the telltale signs of another vessel in the system. A database check identified the owner of the ship bearing that particular emission signature.
“Problem?” Kennedy muttered as she ascended the spiral staircase from the personal quarters below wearing far more appropriate sweats and a tee.
“Joaquin Kyril’s here.”
Her friend leaned against the cockpit half-wall and crossed her arms over her chest. “Who?”
“Asshole extraordinaire. Not a scintilla of hunter skills to his name. He wouldn’t recognize a neutron star glitch if it sauntered up and slapped him across his peevish face.”
Kennedy’s eyes narrowed in contemplation. “Wait, is he that guy we bumped into on Demeter last year? He was cute.”
“Really, Ken? I offer a string of insults by way of introduction, and you go straight to ‘cute’?”
“I didn’t say he was nice or upstanding. Just said he was cute. I can’t believe you haven’t put a second chair in the cockpit yet. Where am I supposed to sit?”
Alex shrugged. “The floor? The couch back in the main cabin? You’re the only person who ever comes out with me.”
“What about Malcolm?”
She snorted. “We’re nowhere near the stage where he goes with me… anywhere that isn’t on Earth. Seriously, he hasn’t even seen my bedroom.”
“Here on the ship or at your apartment in San Francisco?”
“Either.” She’d been on two dates with Lt. Col. Malcolm Jenner in the past month; the third might have happened this week, were she not out here in the void. Perhaps it would happen next week, if she didn’t die out here in the void.
He wasn’t her type. For one, he was military—a Marine of all things—which she’d been swearing off since… since a long time. He was upstanding and proper and gentlemanly to a cringe-inducing fault.
But he was also smart, considerate and funny in a self-effacing way. And handsome, even if he did have to keep his hair shorn in an annoying military close-crop. For reasons she hadn’t yet found the words to articulate, she liked him. Maybe. She’d worry about it later. Right now she had to work.
Kyril wandered around five AU out from the pulsar… searching for the outermost planetary body? If so, he was searching in the wrong place.
Shanshuo hadn’t been receiving scientific attention long enough for the eccentricity to be accurately measured, but the orbit appeared wildly erratic. Kyril was guessing.
Alex studied what data existed on the sequential orbits of the third body.
ORBIT 1: Inclination: 12.3°; Ω: 147°; Period: 3.8 years
ORBIT 2: Inclination: 17.6°; Ω: 132°; Period: 4.1 years
ORBIT 3: Inclination: 9.5°; Ω: 153°; Period: Incomplete (859 days as of yesterday)
She ran through some calculations then killed all the screens to stand and stare out the viewport.
They weren’t able to see the pulsar, of course, as it emitted primarily X-rays. A spectrum filter engaged over the viewport to rectify the deficiency in their eyesight.
“Ooh, that’s pretty.”
“In a manner of speaking.” Like a lighthouse on an ampaKhat high, the X-ray beam spun madly, strobing across the viewport faster than she could blink. It was hypnotizing, and she let it cast its spell. She watched without seeing as her vision blurred under the mesmerizing rhythm.
There.
She dropped back into the cockpit chair, strapped in and set a course for there.
* * *
Cold gas giant, 0.8 the size of Jupiter, sporting a standard hydrogen and helium composition. Likely a captured planet, although with an orbit this close it must have been falling into Shanshuo for billions of years. Still, gas giants, whether cold, room temperature or hot, ranked among the most common non-stellar bodies in the galaxy.
“Ugh. Boring.”
Kennedy now sat on the floor, propped up against the wall eating roasted almonds. “Are you kidding? Look at those colors, at the way the clouds swirl together. This planet is spiffing art.”
She didn’t disagree, but… . “I know, but we’re not here for art. We’re here to find elements worth money to Astral Materials, and as lovely as this planet may be, it’s not lucrative. One day I’ll have earned sufficient credits to be able to spend days gaping in wonder at such sights, but that day isn’t today.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… .”
She spared Kennedy a quick, closed-mouth smile. “And I didn’t either.” Kennedy, or more specifically her family, was wealthy beyond the numbers to count it, but it hadn’t mattered since seven minutes after they’d met as freshmen at university.
With a sigh she started to pull away and shift her focus to the inner bodies when the scanner beeped to inform her of another vessel in proximity.
She glared at the screen incredulously. Kyril was ghosting her?
Shit. His ship was faster than hers, one reason she desperately needed the proceeds from this contract. If he could track her, he’d be able to leapfrog her the instant she struck figurative—or possibly literal—gold and sling a beacon. He could steal the discovery out from under her while she watched in impotent fury. And he would do precisely that without a moment’s hesitation.
“Dammit, I should have spent last month’s money on a real dampener field instead of a new ionized gas analyzer.” The dampener field was on the list, but the list was a busy place. And now she floated out here with no way to mask her engine’s emission signature and no way to shake Kyril’s tail.
“You know, IS Design recently introduced a new prototype dampener field which is nineteen percent more effective at eighty-one percent the power requirements of the previous gen model.”
“Did you design it?”
“I helped. A lot, in truth, but I’m still too low on the corporate ladder to get the credit for it.” In response to Alex’s questioning gaze, Kennedy grinned smugly. “Soon.”
“I’ve no doubt.”
Alex pretended to be scanning the planet below, like there might legitimately be something worthy of finding, while she racked her brain for a solution to the problem that was Joaquin Kyril.
It seemed she was not going to be allowed to explore the system, investigating every object for possible valuable elements. She’d only have one real shot at finding and claiming the mother lode.
So where could the mother lode be hiding?
She leaned down and grabbed a handful of Kennedy’s almonds. The second suspected planet had, by the timing measurements, a notably strange orbit. She considered it a minute… and palmed her forehead with her free hand.
“I’m an idiot.”
“Not usually.”
“The second object the researchers detected isn’t orbiting Shanshuo. It’s orbiting this planet. It probably got brought along for the ride when the gas giant was captured.”
“So?”
“So regardless of whether it’s a moon, planetoid or true planet, it’ll be small and rocky. Small and rocky is—”
“Boring?”
Alex chuckled. “Well, yes. Okay, this leaves the innermost body. It’s zipping around at an orbital period of 3.2 hours, which means it’s close to the pulsar. Damn close.” Dangerously close, at least for a puny little personal scout ship.
She imagined the Siyane protesting the insult with an aura of miffed indignation, and apologized silently. It certainly was not puny to her; it was, in point of fact, everything she had ever wanted.
“The type of relationship exhibited here—a tight, rapid orbit in the shadow of the pulsar—pegs it as a companion star rather than a planet. A white dwarf having its matter leeched away by the primary star?”
“Were you directing the question at me? ‘Cause I’m an engineer, not a space junkie.”
Alex mumbled a distracted reply. White dwarfs were a dime a dozen and as boring as the gas giant. But if it was a true white dwarf, the researchers should’ve been able to identify it as such relatively easily.
She swung toward Shanshuo in feigned casualness so as not to pique Kyril’s interest, tuning out the voom-voom-voom strobe of the pulsar in favor of trying to catch sight of the orbiting companion.
She blinked.
There.
Blinked again. Gone.
But it had been there, a tiny dot of absence racing across the X-ray light. She readied the spectrum analyzer to take a broad spectrum reading. She’d filter out the pulsar’s spectrum signature afterward to reveal the companion’s data.
The scanner panned until she relocated it. Fantastic. Effective surface temperature estimated at… .
She frowned. “That can’t be correct.” Either the white dwarf was older than the universe—a dubious supposition—or the pulsar had siphoned off the outer layers completely, evaporating the star and leaving behind naught but its core.
Possibly its exotic carbon diamond-like core? What were the odds?
Vanishingly low, but higher than they had been a few minutes ago and doubtless higher than the first option.
Kennedy stood and peered out the viewport. “What’ve you got?”
“Maybe, just maybe, something wonderful.”
She didn’t elaborate for now; she’d been dallying for too long, and Kyril would be getting suspicious. And now she really needed a plan.
The small, rocky planet orbiting the gas giant had a thin atmosphere and varied terrain. Terrain she’d be able to lose Kyril in for several seconds at a minimum. Since her in-atmo pulse detonation engine didn’t emit an identifiable signature, it might be enough.
“I need help. I need someone else. Who else is here?”
“I’m here.”
Alex laughed. “I mean another ship.”
Kennedy shrugged and returned to the floor. “Ah. Can’t help you then.”
The potential payout marked this as an enticing contract, if a marginally risky one. Pulsars didn’t qualify as friendly environs for humans. The ionizing radiation alone, not to mention the powerhouse X-ray beacon, meant an early death for anyone not in a strongly shielded vessel.
Luckily for her, she did have those shields. The best radiation shielding last year’s money could buy.
She tuned the emission sensor to its farthest range and filtered out the quite noisy pulsar radiation. Kyril’s ship showed up immediately, right up her ass, leading her to growl a particularly colorful Russian curse under her breath.
“Your dad teach you that word?”
“Not intentionally.”
After another pass two additional dots materialized, which earned another, nearly as colorful exclamation.
Once the targets were pegged, she refined the scanner’s parameters until she had definable signatures then fed them into the ship database. The first one didn’t match any entries, but the second… .
Alex sent a secure comm hail. “Hey, Bob. What brings you to the void today?”
“Solovy? Dammit. Whatever brought me here, I’m not going to get it now, so I might as well turn around, head home and go get plastered.”
He wasn’t wrong. Bob Patera may be a better scout than Kyril, but that wasn’t saying much. “Glad to see you accept the inevitability of my triumph, but don’t rush off yet. I’ve got a proposition for you.”
“Be still my heart.”
She rolled her eyes. “Simmer down. It’s not that kind of proposition. Joaquin Kyril is glued to my ass and I need to ditch him. Help me do that long enough for me to find elements which will satisfy the Astral contract, and you’ll get ten percent of the proceeds.”
“Fifteen percent.”
“Twelve percent.”
“Twelve percent and you have a drink with me next week.”
She drummed her fingers on the dash. “All right. But a drink means a drink, nothing else.”
“Oh, come on. We should at least have sex, if only to get all this sexual tension out of our systems.”
Kennedy arched an eyebrow in interest, but Alex shook her head in a vehement no. “There is no sexual tension between us, Bob.”
“Sure there is.”
“Those are your dreams. This is reality. So are you in?”
“Point the way.”
She exhaled in relief. “Terrific. You’ve got a Genyx VII impulse drive, right?”
“I won’t ask how you knew that. Yes, the C2 model.”
Alex toggled the comm and waved Kennedy up off the floor. “Can you figure out what he needs to do to his engine to make it approximate my emission signature?”
Kennedy nodded and jogged to the data center in the main cabin.
Her outward demeanor made it easy to forget—especially when the woman was in full-on vacation mode—but Ken was smart. Exceptionally smart. And she knew more about all the major components of starships than anyone Alex had met. Odds were she had the specs on the Genyx VII drive memorized, along with the specs for all the other commercial engine models.
Alex switched the comm channel back on. “In a minute I’ll send you some adjustments you need to make to the power flow to your engine and a tiny tweak to its negative mass regulator.”
“You want me to mutilate my engine?”
“Improve it, actually. You’re going to pretend to be me. Once you’ve made the adjustments, move to the far side of the middle body and wait there until I tell you to come in-atmo. When you get close, I’ll go dark. You’ll take my place, then bail and get back to the gas giant.”
“This body is… where? In case you hadn’t realized it, I legitimately meant ‘point the way.’”
It wasn’t his fault he was a bad scout. Not even a bad scout, really—merely an ordinary one. “It’s orbiting the gas giant, inclination 27.6° off the pulsar’s reference plane at 1,722 megameters, give or take.”
“I can work with that. What are you planning to do once I lead Kyril astray?”
She hesitated. She liked Bob as far as it went, but it didn’t mean she trusted him. Not when hundreds of thousands if not millions of credits were at stake. “I’m going to go earn our riches.”
Kennedy returned to the cockpit and, at Alex’s gesture of approval, input the calculations and sent them to Bob.
“Fine, don’t tell me. I’ll just fly around jerking off until you decide I can stop.”
“What you do on your ship is your own business.”
“It most definitely is. Got your instructions. Give me five minutes.”
Alex veered around a bit to make it look as if she were chasing down a potential find, shaking her head when Kyril followed like a proselyte. Still, he had to be getting suspicious by now. But what was he apt to do? Find anything of value himself?
Abruptly she stood and paced through the main cabin to burn off a fraction of her mounting nerves. She needed razor-sharp reflexes for what came next, not the jitters.
“So, where are we running off to once you lose this Kyril guy?”
Alex pointed out the viewport in the direction of the pulsar.
Kennedy canted her head to the side. “Sure. Why not?”
It took six and a half minutes, but Bob reported in. “I’m on my way to you.”
She returned to the chair in a flash. “I see you. Come in under the planet’s profile so he won’t pick you up.”
“Yep. You truly hate this guy, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?”
“He’s a gilded-spoon prick, no doubt.”
“He’s a thief. He lets others do the work then finds underhanded ways to steal what he can from them. And he is brutal and unrepentant about it.”
“Fair assessment. I guess I don’t take it as personally as you do.”
One of a thousand reasons why she was better at this than him, and would soon be the best.
Alex accelerated away from the gas giant and toward its satellite, and this time she smirked when Kyril followed behind at some distance. Did he honestly think she didn’t know he lurked out there?
The atmosphere turned out to be even thinner than she’d expected. She glanced at Kennedy. “Will the pulse detonation engine operate in this weak of an atmosphere? I mean it should, right?”
Kennedy scrutinized the HUD screen displaying the gas percentages and cringed. “Uh… probably?”
“Good enough.” She pointed the nose of the ship down and dove. When the atmosphere began to fight her she reached over and activated the transition from impulse power to the pulse detonation engine. They held their breath.
The ship jerked as the engine struggled for a minute… then began humming quietly.
The meager cloud cover dissipated to reveal a mountainous terrain. Perfect.
She leveled off a kilometer above the surface. “You’ll want to strap in to the jump seat.”
Kennedy’s eyes widened. “Should I get a drink, too?”
“After.”
Her face contorted into a grimace as she retreated to the main cabin.
Alex guided the Siyane toward the mountains, seeking out a path through the crests and valleys.
Kyril’s ship was faster than hers in space; she had to assume it was faster in-atmo as well. But she could fly circles around him in her sleep using nothing but her left pinky. It wasn’t arrogance; it was fact.
Perhaps a smidge of arrogance.
She cracked her neck and dipped until she cruised thirty meters from the sloping incline and tilted the belly of the ship toward it. No trees softened the scenery, and boulders rushed past in a blur.
Ahead, a ridge split into a deep fissure, more gorge than valley. She plunged into it, staying close to the ground.
Kyril emerged from the bluffs behind her. He’d drawn far closer, which represented a problem. He must think she was zeroing in on a find.
This gorge was doing nothing for her. She spotted a narrow cleft to the right. Too narrow? Nah.
She increased her speed, flipped the ship sideways and slipped into the gap.
“Alex, the hell!”
She gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate on flying. The gap hadn’t widened yet. “I did tell you to strap in.”
Reluctantly she spared a brief motion to activate the comm channel. “Bob, get down here and head to… 33.2° N, 114.1° W.” The coordinates lay a hundred kilometers northwest of her current location. It should work.
“I’m not finished yet.”
“Bob.”
“Right. Heading there now.”
Finally the terrain opened up, though the mountains grew far steeper. Jagged spikes jutting up from a dead landscape.
She swerved to the left to dart between two peaks then dropped down as low as she dared.
Kyril’s blip followed. Motherfucker.
But it stayed more distant now. He was flying safely. “Coward.”
Emboldened, she sped onward, dipping and weaving through the range. When another fissure came into view, she pivoted hard and raced through it, a mite too snugly for comfort. She was glad Kennedy wasn’t up here to see how near to the cliff walls they flew.
On the scanner, Kyril slowed almost to a stop, handing her the break she needed. She found a basin on the topography map six kilometers to the northeast.
“Bob, shift to 33.8° N, 113.9° W and get ready.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
One last corkscrew turn… and… .
She decelerated hard and plummeted toward the ground; when ten meters remained she killed the engine. “Now, Bob—17.8° N heading, then get back to space ASAP.”
The ship shuddered roughly as it slammed to the ground. A couple of yellow warnings flashed across the HUD, but nothing critical.
“You are one crazy woman, Solovy.”
“Thank you. I’m flattered.”
Kennedy’s voice sounded shaky behind her. “Um, did we crash?”
“Not technically. It’s not crashing if it’s on purpose.”
Kyril had begun moving again and closed in on her location. Alex peered up as he passed overhead, but the paltry light didn’t allow her to make out his ship. Keep going. Keep going.
He kept going, following Bob’s blip into the darkness.
Bob did a surprisingly decent job of picking up where she left off. She was moderately impressed, not as if she’d tell him so.
But if she reengaged the engine too soon, Kyril’s scanner might pick up the energy flare.
She breathed in. Out. Waited.
Slowly, cautiously, she lifted off the surface, spun and climbed through the atmosphere in the opposite direction from where Bob had flown.
They exited on the opposite side of the satellite from the gas giant, at which point she had no choice but to run the impulse engine for a minute or so.
“You can unstrap now.”
Kennedy stumbled into the cockpit. “Okay, that sucked. What’s next?”
Alex didn’t answer. Better for her friend not to know until it was already done.
No time to reconsider. She activated the sLume drive and executed a pinpoint superluminal traversal to barely outside the not-a-white-dwarf-not-a-planet’s orbit.
The warp bubble had hardly formed around the Siyane when it evaporated. Only then did the surge of adrenaline hit her.
A 2.7 AU superluminal trip was not a maneuver one did every day, mostly due to the fact it was dangerous as all hell. If she’d delayed another second—three-quarters of a second—before disengaging the sLume drive, they would’ve found themselves inside the pulsar. And dead.
“Did you… oh my God, you did. I think I’m… yeah, I’m going to go back to the couch and faint.”
Alex grinned a bit wildly. “What? It worked, didn’t it?”
“And if it hadn’t?”
“We’d never be the wiser.”
“Because we’d be vaporized.”
“Yes. Now I don’t have a lot of time, so hush.”
Kennedy nodded weakly and wandered off. “Couch. Fainting. This is the worst vacation ever.”
Alex blinked and worked to focus the adrenaline rush on productive endeavors such as catching up to the object, whatever it was, and matching its orbit. Something else guaranteed to be fun, since it was moving fast.
At such close proximity the pulsar taxed the radiation shield, but it would hold. She hoped. If this panned out, Astral-owned industrial vessels equipped with far stronger shielding would be able to hang out here for weeks at a stretch, but she couldn’t risk staying more than… she checked the diagnostics… twenty-four minutes.
She had a solid bead on the orbital path of the object now, and she accelerated into a parallel trajectory. It gained on her from behind; she continued increasing her speed until she’d matched its velocity and it whisked along a sliver under four megameters off her port.
Trajectory stabilized, she blocked the massive X-ray radiation of the pulsar from the viewport and looked over.
She’d seen many interesting things in her three years of freelance scouting. Beautiful things, terrifying things. She needed a little sleep and a lot of drinks to process what she saw now, but she suspected this topped them all.
“Ken, get up here.”
“But I’m still fainting.”
“Whatever. Get your ass up here.”
The planet-sized body—a quick measurement suggested a 40-50K kilometer diameter—appeared to be composed of a crystalline mineral so clear it was nearly transparent. The sole reason she was unable to see all the way through to the other side was that eventually, thousands of meters below the surface, the inner core darkened into an extremely dense form of carbon. Beyond the brilliance of the outer material, the body retained no more than a trace of natural luminosity. Plainly no longer a white dwarf; not for millennia.
The result of it being stripped of its outer layers then its stellar nature was a surface and outer core which looked a great deal like diamond but was likely something far more precious.
“What… ohhhh.” Kennedy brought a hand to her mouth. “This is the most exquisite thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Pretty much.”
“You upgraded your radiation shield, right? Because I can get you a next-gen kit for cost.”
“Let’s do that. Soon as we get back.”
Many white dwarfs had carbon-oxygen cores, but humanity thus far lacked the technology to harvest stars. Cold planetoids, on the other hand?
A dozen so-called carbon planets had been stripped bare to minimal riches for companies long forgotten, but only one other true ‘diamond planet’ had ever been discovered, orbiting the Fyren pulsar. A hundred twenty years ago the Magellan Aeronautics founder had made a fortune and funded an entire generation of interstellar private spacecraft by being the first to reach it and mine it.
Alex jerked out of the reverie. “Crap, the beacon!”
She’d been mooning over the splendor of the singular object speeding alongside them to the point of forgetting her mission. She hurriedly programmed in the details she hadn’t known until now and launched it directly at the body.
The beacon plummeted to six kilometers above the ground, then decelerated and adopted a low-altitude orbit and began transmitting to everyone in the galaxy who mattered. Alex sank in her chair with an exuberant cackle.
“Bob, you and I are going to be rich—well, I’m going to be rich. You’re going to be slightly more affluent.”
Kennedy’s face lit up in excitement. “If you’re truly earning that much money from this find, I have got so many ideas—”
“Assuming you survive the next few minutes. Kyril just turned tail and made a beeline for the pulsar. Or for you. I’m guessing for you.”
Couldn’t she spend five seconds enjoying her success in peace? Apparently not.
She straightened up in the chair and began to retreat from the planet. Her shield only had eight minutes worth of full functionality remaining before it started failing. She needed to move to a safe distance, and soon.
“Solovy, you bitch! You think you can get away with such a bullshit scam right in front of me?”
“Nice to talk to you, too, Kyril. Oh, wait. No, it’s not. So sorry your plan to ghost then leapfrog me didn’t pan out. Better luck next time. Or preferably, worse luck.”
“Is that a bloody diamond planet? No. No way are you stealing millions from me. Not this time.”
“He wouldn’t dare try to shoot you down, would he?”
“Strap back in.” She killed the heat and lights in the cabin and diverted the extra power to the defensive shield and increased the distance between her and the pulsar. Another couple of megameters and she’d be distant enough to engage the sLume drive and disappear—
—the Siyane shuddered as the laser hit it full-on broadside.
Kennedy’s shocked gasp echoed behind her. “That bastard shot at you!”
“Not so cute now, is he?”
The shield held, but it had depleted to thirty-eight percent from the single hit. Kyril had top of the line everything it seemed, including weaponry.
Alex hit the comm. “Goddammit, Kyril, if you shoot at me again you will regret it.”
“It would be such a shame if you accidentally got too close to the pulsar and met an unfortunate demise. Astral Materials will mourn your death while they pay me for the contract.”
Fuck, no. Not going to happen.
She frantically pulled power from everywhere she could find it to recharge the defensive shield faster, located Kyril on the scanner and locked on.
She returned fire. The laser skimmed off his hull.
Nose down. Fired.
Hard port. Fired again.
She arced above him in a high-g maneuver, firing the whole way.
His shield had to be getting low. Hers had climbed to seventy percent, which was a good thing as he finally managed to track her and return fire. In a flash she was down to nine percent shields… .
“Hit him again. I got your back.”
Bob arrived out of nowhere above Kyril’s ship, bless his drunken soul. She fired once more.
So did Bob.
Hers hit first, but it was Bob’s shot that broke through the shield and caught the port rear of the ship. Hard.
The force of the strike sent Kyril’s ship hurtling toward Shanshuo in an uncontrolled spin.
No blip on the scanner appeared to indicate the launch of an escape pod or chute as the ship was swallowed up by the pulsar.
Alex threw her arms on the dash and dropped her head onto them.
“Okay, Bob, twenty percent… and two drinks. You earned it.”
“I didn’t actually mean to kill him.”
He sounded almost remorseful; she got that. “He intended to kill us. If you try to show mercy to someone like him, they will twist it back on you and use it to destroy you.”
“When you put it that way… frankly, in your sultry voice it’s kind of hot. Drinks—when and where?”
She sighed in weary amusement. “I’ll be in touch. Promise.”
When she lifted her head from the dash, Kennedy was standing beside her staring out the viewport. Her hands trembled at her sides. “Is it always like this?”
“Scouting? Nah. Sometimes it’s dangerous.”