"Argh!" Alek Wa yanked on the control stick, trying to pull the Lyra in a sharp loop away from whatever danger had caused the ship to buck and the sirens to blare. The ship moaned its displeasure with what he was doing, and the stick shook in his grip. His shoulder muscles strained, and an old injury threatened to surface. Alek clenched his jaw, fighting the ship.
Despite being able to conjure a gate out of empty space, the Sisters of Elazir apparently couldn't check that the space it dropped them into was clear. Or didn't care enough to check. His lips pressed together and his nostrils flared.
"What the hell is that sound?" Captain Rebeka Mino loomed beside him, peering at the view screen, but it just showed the empty black in front of them. "Cass, a 360 sweep please."
"Rear cameras offline." The AI's calm voice drifted down from over their heads.
"Can you turn the bloody sirens off?" Kandi shouted as she punched a finger into her console. In an instant, an unnatural quiet fell on the bridge. "Here's the last image from the rear...," she started, her voice too loud for the sudden silence.
A slice of a space appeared on the view screen. In the distance, Alek could make out an object, like a doughnut around a post. A flutter rippled through his gut.
"Magnify." Rebeka stepped towards the screen, blocking his view. But he'd already seen all he needed to.
"Bleeding Hades."
A hand fell on his shoulder, and he turned his head to see Tink staring at the viewscreen. Her sentiment echoed his exactly, and tension wrinkled the space between her amber eyes. Alek pulled his gaze away before she caught him looking at her and resumed her usual standoffish demeanor.
"What is it?" Ish said, squinting at the screen.
"A Dominion station." Kandi tapped at her console. "We've been marked. They're sending ships."
"Can you get us out of here, flyboy?" Mino turned to peg him with a hard stare.
"Strap in." He arched an eyebrow. "It's going to be hairy." Rebeka and Tink both did as he said without argument, and he turned back to the controls. "Kandi, is there somewhere nearby we can hide?"
"Working on it." Her voice was tense, her words clipped.
"Looking for slip points." Ish's fingers moved over the holographic ripples in front of him.
"Can someone tell me where we are?" Rebeka's voice filled the bridge, edged with anger. "Besides just the Green Zone. You'd think with the tech to create a jump gate out of empty space, the Sister's could have dropped us somewhere not next to a Dominion station."
Alek's eyebrow quirked to hear her echo his thoughts. Even after minimal interaction with the Sisters in their Tower of Solitude, he got the sense that they had their own agenda. The Sisters at the Tower were the upper echelon of power in a powerful faction. They were different from those who served at the local sanctuaries, like the one near where he'd grown up. For one thing, the Sisters at that old sanctuary wouldn't have known him as Alek Wa. A flicker coursed through his intestines: maybe the Sisters at the Tower knew his real name.
"We're inside a solar system..." Tink voice came from behind him.
"Not a lot of help, Tink."
"I'm looking." Although he couldn't see her, he heard her fingers clicking furiously over her console.
"We're next to a gas giant," Kandi said. "There's a series of moons around it. We might be able to hide in there."
Alek didn't say anything as he pushed and pulled the stick, forcing the Lyra onto the course Kandi plotted. Something whined as the ship expressed its unhappiness.
"Don't break my ship." Tink's voice was quiet but her tone serious. The whine petered out as the giant blue-green marble appeared on-screen.
"Ship's incoming," Cass said just before sirens started sounding again. "They're sending a message: stand down and prepare to be boarded."
"Not too happy at having a ship pop into being out of empty space, I imagine." Ish sounded way too pleased at that thought given their current predicament.
Alek shoved the stick forward, maxing out the ship's impulse engines, pointing its nose towards a rocky moon that looked like a promising hiding spot. "Hold onto your lunches." He twisted the ship into a roll around the icy moon to their left, hoping the plumes shooting from it would scramble the signal from their pursuers' marks. Without damaging the Lyra or her crew.
"Rear cameras back up," Kandi said as a new slice of space appeared on the viewscreen. "They're Hogfish." Her smile infused her words. "Slow. Not very maneuverable. The dregs of the Dominion fleet."
"So easy for a hot shot pilot to outrun," Tink said.
When Alek turned to scowl at her, he saw she was smiling. The captain, however, scowled at him. He turned back around to focus on flying.
"There's a slip point outside the orbit of this gas giant. At phi -35°, rho 12, zeta 7."
Alek made a quick calculation. He waited until they were past the rocky moon, and into the shadow of the gas giant, then he tacked, changing course to head towards Ish's slip point.
The silent seconds ticked by and they watched the Hogfish recede into the distance.
"I think I know where we are." Ish's tone was subdued as he reached for the holographic map in front of him. With a flick of his fingers, the wavy lines of his slip chart morphed into a star grid. As he rotated it, lines appeared, bisecting the three-dimensional image. The flutter in Alek's stomach turned to icy rock.
"Canacus." The anger in Mino's voice turned cold. A blue blip showed their location near the edge of Dominion-patrolled space. At the far reaches of the Green Zone. Beyond that, the law of the Cartels ruled. But in between the two there was no law at all. And that's where Canacus sat.
"Why the Green Zone? And Canacus, right next to the last Dominion station." Alek stared at the coffee machine. At a sound overhead, he glanced up. Grim peered down at him, his jaws moving as he consumed something crunchy. Other than the cat, it was just him, Tink and Rebeka in the common room. Kandi had taken food and drink to Ish, who was on the bridge navigating them through the slipstream.
"What are we going to do?" Tink asked. "In the Green Zone?"
Alek understood the engineer's misgivings. A quadrant of space between Dominion hegemony and Cartel control, the Green Zone was a quagmire where anything was permissible, as long as you had the power to back it up. It certainly wasn't a place where honest people found honest work. In fact, honest people tended to live short lives out here.
Glass full, he turned to face the room. Rebeka stood opposite, leaning back against the glass overlooking the cargo bay, while Tink sat at the table, fiddling with something he couldn't see. Both women scowled. Alek walked over to the captain and handed her the coffee.
"Ta." Rebeka nodded at him, then took a big gulp of the hot liquid. Her eyes squinted at him over the rim of the mug, though he couldn't tell if it was the tension or that she still didn't trust him, even though he hadn't been their saboteur, and had, in fact, helped save the Lyra. She shifted her gaze to Tink. "What we always do," she said as he returned to the kitchenette to make another drink. "Find enough work to keep the ship running and ourselves fed. And maybe a little bit more."
Tink shook her head. "You think they could have dropped us somewhere safer." She slapped a metal tool down on the table. "Do you think the Sisters knew where we'd end up when they sent us through their gate?"
Alek recalled the shimmer of blue and lavender the Sisters of Elazir had conjured up out of empty space. Jump gates required a solar system's worth of energy to build and maintain, and theirs had popped into being in front of them. He opened his mouth, but it was the captain who answered.
"What do you think? They made a gate appear out of nothing." She took another swig of coffee.
"They knew exactly where they were dropping us." He leaned against the counter, wrapping his fingers around his warm mug as he took a sip.
Rebeka straightened and downed the rest of her mug. "At least they could have dumped us somewhere closer to a job." She strode over to him and placed her mug in the sink. She didn't look up when she spoke, but her hands went to her hips and her frown deepened. "But I might know someone in the neighbourhood who needs some odd jobs done."
Alek glanced between her and Tink. His stomach went cold despite the warm coffee. He was sure he wouldn't like this odd job, since the last one nearly got him killed.