ONCE ON THE BLUE MOON

 

KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

 

ONE MAN CRADLING one large laser rifle stood in the doorway of the luxury suite. Colette sprawled on the threadbare carpet. Her dad had shoved her behind him when he saw the guy at the door, and she had tripped over the retractable ottoman.

Good job, Dad, she nearly said, because that was her default response when he did something stupid, but she didn’t say it, because her gaze remained on that rifle. And so did her dad’s.

Dad had probably wanted her to run into one of the bedrooms, and that would’ve made sense if the guy at the door with the rifle hadn’t seen her, but he had, and then he had said something softly and beckoned at someone else.

Mom was standing beside the door, actually threading her hands together. Colette felt both a growing fear and a growing irritation. Fear, because she had probably caused this. Day One, she had swiped one of those stupid tablets that the concierge on this level used to keep track of everything on the ship.

The lower levels, without the suites, used holographic screens for the guests, or some lazy person could call up a holographic face to make suggestions.

But here, real people were actually in the passengers’ business, as if the Blue Moon was still one of the most luxurious starliners in the solar system.

It wasn’t luxurious. It had been luxurious, maybe, in the Good Old Days when her grandparents had been kids. Dad said the ship had a “mystique,” whatever that meant, but Colette had investigated the ship on her own and found the ad that had probably gotten Dad’s attention:

Travel in luxury at one-thousandth the price!

Apparently, if you didn’t care what kind of cargo the ship carried, then you could have a luxury suite on your trip from wherever to wherever. Theirs was from a starbase beyond Saturn to some place called Montreal because that was the last boarding school that could handle someone like her.

All of this had been Mother’s idea, even though all of it had been Colette’s fault.

Another man arrived at the door. He was small, barely taller than Colette, and she hadn’t reached her full growth yet. (Mother had said that she would when puberty hit, which could be Any Minute Now.) The man had glittering black eyes, a leathery face, and thin lips that quirked upward when he saw her.

“A kid,” he said, as if he was surprised.

Colette almost said, I’m not a kid! and then thought the better of it. Maybe she’d get a pass on stealing that tablet. Children couldn’t be responsible for their actions after all.

“I didn’t realize there was a kid on board,” the man said, musing. “I didn’t think children were allowed on vessels like this.”

Yeah, Colette had seen that regulation too, and she knew that her dad had gotten it waived. They needed to get to Earth yesterday, or so Mother had said. It was never hard for Dad to get things waived.

The family didn’t have money—yet, Mother said—but they had access to it, and they had some kind of influence that her dad would flash around whenever he needed it, as, apparently, they had needed it to get on this ship to get Colette to Montreal to the boarding school before the beginning of the semester.

Which seemed stupid to her, because she had started other schools in the middle of the year, and had always, always outperformed everyone in her class. It never mattered whether she arrived with one month left or five, she could work her way around the entire system and do better than anyone else, once she figured out what was needed.

“Take them,” the guy with the intense eyes, gesturing at Colette’s parents.

Then he took one step into the suite, and looked down at Colette.

“You, little girl, can stay here, if you’ll be good.” He actually spoke in some kind of fake sweet voice, as if she would be fooled by his tone, even though he had just ordered some guy with a rifle to take her parents.

Colette opened her mouth so she could tell the guy with the intense eyes where he could stick his “good,” and then she saw her dad’s face. It was drawn and tense.

Her mother was shivering. Her mother often looked terrified over stupid stuff, but she never shivered.

And her dad—tense was not his normal way of dealing with anything.

He frowned at Colette as their gazes met.

“She’ll be good,” her dad said to the guy, but didn’t look away from Colette. “My daughter, she’s perfect.”

Colette actually felt tears prick at her eyes. Her dad never said that, not with feeling. He was always telling her how impossible, intractable, and stubborn she was, how she could do better if she only settled down. And sometimes he would despair, and say,

Colette Euphemia Josephine Treacher Singh Wilkinson Lopez, you have every opportunity and you’re always the smartest person in the room. Why are you constantly throwing that away?

His disappointment pissed her off, and made her work harder at doing the best she could and causing trouble. He never noticed the best, but he always noticed the trouble.

She’d been waiting for that perfect word from him her whole life. And now he said it, to some guy with intense eyes and another guy holding a laser rifle, and the weird part was, Dad seemed to mean it.

Then he really scared her, because he mouthed, I love you, and took a deep breath and said to the guy with intense eyes, “What do you need from us?”

Dad sounded calm, even though he clearly wasn’t. Well, clearly to Colette, probably not to the two men.

“I need you to go with him,” the guy with the intense eyes said, nodding toward the guy with the laser rifle. Not saying his name, either, which was a bad sign. “We can restrain you and take you if need be.”

Dad gave Mother a hard look, and she swallowed visibly, then nodded.

“No restraints needed,” Dad said. Then he and Mother walked out of the door as if being taken by guys with laser rifles was an everyday thing.

The guy with intense eyes gave Colette one last glare.

“Be good and you’ll be fine,” he said. Then he closed the suite door—and stupid idiot that he was—turned on the parental controls.

Which she had already monkeyed with Day One, in case anyone got Ideas. Her parents knew better than to use something that simple on her, but the concierge and the ship’s crew didn’t.

And neither did the guy with the intense eyes.

She waited a good thirty seconds before moving, and then she went into her room and lay on the bed, because she knew that would be what the guy with the intense eyes would expect—some kid, paralyzed by fear.

She’d show him paralyzed.

She’d show him fear.

Once she had him all figured out.

 

 

A KID.

Alfredo Napier thought kids weren’t allowed on ships like the Blue Moon. Adults knew the dangers they were undertaking when they traveled on a ship like this, but kids? They were under the age of consent, and even if their parents thought it was a good idea, the Starrborne Line, which ran these old ships, did not allow kids on the Titan-Plano to Earth-Houston run.

The company’s explanation was pretty simple: in order to make good time on that run, it had to travel older, lesser used routes, not as well policed, and without as many stops or amenities.

In reality, the route these ships traveled was the only route that allowed hazardous cargo. If a ship got into trouble out here, it was twice as likely to be abandoned as it was to be rescued.

Napier had always taken that fact into consideration when he chose his targets.

He also appreciated the fact that everyone on board had signed a waiver, protecting the Starrborne Line from liability should something untoward happen. Not that he really cared if the passengers had given permission for their own deaths on an ancient ship without the proper protections against certain kinds of hazardous cargo, but because he almost felt as if the passengers had given him permission to run his own business the way he wanted to.

A kid.

He shook his head as he hurried to the bridge. A kid changed everything and nothing.

She’d seen him. She’d seen them. But she was what? Ten? Twelve? Young enough that no one would believe anything she said. So all he had to do before they blew the ship was put her into one of the lifepods and jettison her with quite a bit of force toward the Martian run. If she survived, then good, and if she didn’t, she would die in the pod, not in his custody on the ship.

And he wouldn’t have to think about her.

That was the problem with kids.

They haunted a man in the middle of the night, interfering with his sleep.

He made a small fortune doing his work.

The last thing he needed was to second-guess himself. The last thing he needed was to lose even more sleep.

 

 

COLETTE SAT UP on the bed. She already hated this room. Square, boxy, brown, the bed one-tenth as comfortable as the bed she had had at her last school. She felt like calling up some paint program and trying to permanently deface the walls.

Maybe if she was trapped in here forever. In the meantime, she had the tablet.

Colette had stolen the tablet because it had basic access to every single part of the ship. No one had figured out she swiped it; the stupid concierge had believed he had misplaced it, and they had issued him a new one, since the first thing Colette had done was shut off the locator on the tablet itself. Basic Survival Thievery 101.

The second thing Colette had done was taken that basic access and amped it up to full access in every shipboard department she could. The only areas she couldn’t access were navigation, engine controls, life support, and all of those other things that someone could sabotage and kill people with.

She would need Captain’s Codes for those areas. Or at least senior officer codes.

In the weeks that she’d had the tablet, she hadn’t been able to crack those codes. She had been beginning to think she couldn’t access any of that important stuff from a passenger cabin because of location controls. But if she got to the bridge, she might have been able to do it.

The option of going to the bridge was gone now.

She needed to remain confined to quarters until she figured out how to spoof the system, and make it think she was confined to quarters while she roamed the ship.

Before she did any of that, though, she activated the automated distress signal. Every tablet had access to the distress signal, and, she suspected, so did all of those holographic concierges on the lower levels.

She hoped someone else had activated the automatic distress signal as well, but she also had taken a measure of the guy with the intense eyes. He looked like someone who didn’t let a lot go by him.

He had probably tampered with access to the automated distress system before he had started into the passenger cabins. Because Colette and her parents hadn’t realized something had gone wrong on the ship until the guy with the laser rifle had shown up.

She doubted any other passenger noticed something wrong either. People were pretty self-involved on this ship, which had worked to her favor, until today.

She took a deep breath. She was going to pretend that today was no different than any other day, because if she thought about her parents, she would panic, and panicking would get her nowhere.

So she scrolled through the back end of the tablet, the stuff hardly anyone outside of engineering knew how to use, and found the manual distress signal.

She had hoped it would be relatively easy to operate. Instead, it contained an array of choices, many more than she expected. She scrolled through all of them, until she narrowed it down to three: she could notify other ships; she could notify specific rescue units throughout the solar system; or she could notify a single person.

She had no single person to notify, and if she notified other ships randomly, she would probably notify Intense Eyes Guy’s ship as well as some other passing vessel.

All of the choices required the Blue Moon’s exact location to be input manually. Which made sense, since she was asking for a rescue, and the system had no way of knowing that the rescue was needed because people with guns had boarded the ship, rather than some systemic breakdown somewhere off the beaten path.

Colette dug, found the ship’s exact coordinates, discovered that they were deep inside the Asteroid Belt, and that made her stomach jump. Right in the middle of nothing at all.

And, to her unpracticed eye, the ship looked like it wasn’t moving at all.

She didn’t like it.

Focus, focus, focus.

She made herself go through all of the components of the secondary manual signal slowly, entering the exact coordinates of where the ship was right now, which route it had taken, but not the route it was expected to take. Because she didn’t know if Intense Eyes Guy was stealing the ship itself.

She set the secondary signal to repeat in half-second bursts, and programmed it to go only to the rescue units on Mars, the Moon, and Earth.

Her heart thumped as she activated the secondary signal—and prayed it would go through.

 

 

NAPIER MADE IT to the bridge just in time to see the distress signal beacon activate. The damn thing glowed red on the navigation console. He smashed the blinking light, then pressed the comm chip embedded into the pocket on his chin.

“One of those idiot crew members activated the automated distress signal. Someone jettison the thing off the ship, and send it closer to Mars.”

He had to explain where he wanted the beacon to go, because on a previous job, the genius who had taken a similar order had ripped the beacon off the ship, and let the still-active beacon tumble into nearby space.

That hadn’t ended well for anyone, although Napier, as was his habit, managed to avoid the authorities, more through luck than anything else. The genius who hadn’t thought the order through, however, wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Since his luck had run out.

Napier’s hadn’t, yet, but he didn’t like how this particular job was going. He really didn’t like this bridge. It was narrow and had a high ceiling made of two different materials—one clear, so that the crew could see the starlight (or probably show it to passengers who paid a premium). The other material was an exterior cover that fitted over the clear material and gave the bridge double protection against anything and everything.

It also made it pretty easy to find. Napier had originally thought of sending a contained burst torpedo into the bridge, taking out the crew in one quick action, but he hadn’t done it. Because he had done his due diligence and discovered that the Blue Moon, as an ancient passenger liner, didn’t have a secondary bridge like most cargo ships.

There had been an actual possibility that the explosion would have destroyed all of his access to the ship’s systems, and he didn’t have an engineer on his team. If the engineering sector on this ship had been as old as the ship herself, then Napier would truly have been screwed.

Of course, someone had updated the entire interior. The passenger cabins had gotten a facelift, but the rest of the ship had been completely rebuilt—and off-books too.

At least the weapons system on this ship hadn’t been upgraded. It should have been before someone got the brilliant idea of transporting a Glyster Egg on this vessel. Because Glyster Eggs were the holy grail for people like him. If he had a Glyster Egg, he could raid ships to his heart’s content.

Of course, no one was supposed to know that the Egg was even on board. He had only found out because he had paid informants in every single outpost that launched vessels into this part of the solar system. If he managed to get his hands on the Egg, the informant who sent him here would get a really big bonus.

If.

Napier hadn’t been able to find out if the Egg was actually on board, and if it was, where it was. Each cargo bay was supposed to list the cargo on its exterior manifest, but ships like this, which carried hazardous cargo, rarely did. That’s why he needed the internal cargo manifest, the one only the senior officers got to see.

And that, Napier was beginning to realize, was going to be harder than he expected.

 

 

THE AUTOMATED DISTRESS signal shut off after five minutes. The tablet listed the distress signal as damaged, but Colette suspected someone had tampered with it. She had expected that.

She also figured, given that laser rifle, that the bad guys had come for something in particular. She was guessing, based on the history she’d studied (trying to keep up with Dad), the entertainment she consumed (trying to ignore Mother), and the crime reports she’d examined on the sly (trying to learn new tricks) that these guys weren’t here to steal the ship. If they had been, they would have locked every passenger in their cabins and dealt with the passengers once the ship left the established shipping routes.

Colette figured they were taking something from it. If they had planned on kidnapping a passenger—well, first, they wouldn’t have come to a ship this low rent, and second, they would have known that a kid was on board. She was on the passenger manifest, after all, even if her age wasn’t alongside her name.

But if the bad guys were trying to take people, they would have wanted to know who they were up against amongst the passengers—or, at least, she would have wanted to know.

She knew it was a fallacy to expect every criminal in the universe to be one-tenth as smart as she was. Dad always said that if they were smart, they wouldn’t be criminals, and Colette agreed with him when it came to crimes of opportunity, but the bands that worked the shipping routes—or rather, the bands that successfully worked the shipping routes—had to have a lot of smarts because they terrorized the routes, and never seemed to get caught.

So she wasn’t going to get anywhere by underestimating the intelligence of the people who had taken over the ship.

Hazardous cargo would seem like a no-no for these people, but not all hazardous cargo made everyone sick. Some hazardous cargo was dangerous in the wrong hands.

On her very first day with the tablet, she had searched through the cargo manifest, trying to find whatever it was that had knocked the per-passenger price on this vessel so low. When she had seen the ad for this vessel, and its “reasonable” prices, she wanted to see what kinds of diseases Dad had signed her up for.

She had planned to throw that in his face when he left her at that boarding school in Montreal. She had even planned the speech:

Not only are you confining me to some Earth backwater, but you’re guaranteeing that I will die of [insert disease here] at [insert average age here].

It had taken her three days to find the correct cargo manifest, and another three hours to break into it. To her great disappointment, she hadn’t found any disease-creating items listed. Instead, she found a tiny weapon that shouldn’t have been on a ship like this at all.

That weapon, called a Glyster Egg, should have been in layers and layers of protective material with a protected cargo seal inside a protected cargo unit inside a protected cargo bay. Instead, the Glyster Egg was in some kind of box that “in theory” protected it from any kind of accidental detonation.

The thing was the theory wasn’t that grand. She’d found at least three other ships that had been victims of accidental detonation of Glyster Eggs in the five years since the stupid things had been on the market (or invented or stolen or released by some dumb government or something). Those ships had floated dead in space, in one case for a year, before anyone found it—because the stupid thing had been designed to disable all the functioning systems on spaceships with one simple movement.

A handful of other weapons could do that, but none were small like the Egg, and none had an actual targeting system. So if she wanted to—if she could get out of this stupid room without being noticed, and if she trusted herself to touch the Egg, and if she could figure out how to use it, and if she knew exactly where the bad guys’ ship was—she could enter the coordinates into the Egg, then squeeze the Egg’s activation system, and voila! the bad guys’ ship wouldn’t work at all, ever again, end of story.

But she didn’t like all those ifs-ands. She couldn’t quite calculate the odds—there were too many variables—but she had an educated hunch that she would be better off trying to get to the bridge or engineering or somewhere and wrest control of the Blue Moon from Intense Eyes, before ever trying to activate the Egg and make it work for her instead of against her.

Of course, she didn’t actually know if he was here for the Egg. But he was stupid if he wasn’t. Because if she were a big bad thief who preyed on ships coming through the Asteroid Belt, she would steal the Egg.

That was assuming that Intense Eyes had her brains. She wasn’t sure he did. Yeah, he had taken over the ship, but he hadn’t known about Colette, which meant he hadn’t researched the passengers, which meant he didn’t know that he was about to get into really bad trouble—if even one of her distress signals had gotten through.

Those odds she could calculate.

Because as of this moment, no one had noticed the manual distress signal.

So it was still broadcasting.

Which meant that help might actually be on the way.

 

 

THE AUTOMATED DISTRESS signal, half-choked off, arrived at the 52nd Mars Relay Station. Two versions of the same automated distress signal, intact, arrived at the 13th Moon Relay Station. No versions of the automated distress signal made it to any of Earth’s Relay Stations, at least not in recognizable form.

Within thirty seconds of the automated distress signal’s arrival, the 13th Moon Relay Station evaluated the signal, and determined that the distressed ship was located in the Asteroid Belt. The ship had an old registration, marking it as inconsequential, even though the ship was owned by Treacher, Incorporated, a large entity that had funded many Martian building projects. Treacher also had ties to three different Martian governments.

But the ship had taken an unusual route, never traveled by ships with highly insured passengers or cargo. The route was by definition dangerous, and anyone on board would have signed a waiver agreeing to rescue only in financially advantageous circumstances.

The age of the ship, the route, and the lack of insurance did not make this a financially advantageous circumstance.

But Treacher’s ownership did flag the system, so the 13th Moon Relay Station followed protocol for difficult and iffy rescues in the Asteroid Belt. The 13th Moon Relay Station sent copies of the automated distress signal to its counterpart on Mars.

Then the 13th Moon Relay Station sent the automated distress signals to its archives.

No one on the Moon even knew that an automated distress signal had arrived, been examined, and passed back to Mars. And no one on the Moon would have cared.

 

 

WHAT COLETTE HAD to do was buy time. If the bad guys were on the Blue Moon to take the Egg, then she had to hide the Egg from them.

The problem was... what if she was wrong? What if they were here for something else?

She didn’t have a lot of control with this particular tablet. She was working to get more access, but she needed to spoof her own position here in the suite, and that would take time.

She tried to delete all of the cargo manifests, and couldn’t delete any of them. She didn’t have the clearance.

She sat cross-legged on her bed for a good minute, trying to figure out how to stay one step ahead of these very bad people.

She had to convince them that they were in trouble on this ship, and she had to keep the Egg from them.

Those were two different tasks.

She called up the passenger manifest to see if she could locate anyone else who might be able to help her. She flipped manifest to its location-based listings, and saw, without looking at names, that all of the passengers were in the large buffet, scattered around the room, as if they were sitting at tables.

All of the passengers except her.

Before she could stop herself, she flipped the data again, saw her parents’ names and personal shipboard identification numbers. Then she flipped back to location-based information. Two little green dots, with her parents’ shipboard identification numbers, blinked from the side of the buffet, near the kitchen. They weren’t moving, but then, neither were the other passengers.

Colette didn’t want to even guess what that meant. She hoped they were all sitting quietly, depressed at the circumstances, rather than being unconscious or injured or dea—

Focus, focus, focus.

She opened the tablet to the cargo manifest. The correct one. She took the contents, copied it into another file, marking that new file Sanitation Refill Schedule. Then she opened one of the cargo manifests without the hazardous materials, and copied the data from that manifest, and pasted it over the original manifest.

Then she simply saved it. When she opened it again, the information on the Egg had vanished.

And that had been too easy. Someone should have realized just how simple it was to make mistakes in this system, not that it was her problem.

But the bad guys might figure that out. So, she moved the cargo manifest out of its normal file and into the food service files. Some searches would bring up the cargo manifest, but someone would have to know what kind of search to conduct.

She needed to figure out how to distract the bad guys until the rescue ship got here.

And she needed to be able to do so from inside this suite.

 

 

FOR A MOMENT, Napier had thought he found one of the cargo manifests, and then it had vanished on him. He had a device that easily broke the surface codes on the bridge’s systems, but the device didn’t give him what this system called the Captain’s Access Codes. For that, Napier needed five forms of physical ID, which he had planned for.

He already had his men getting that for him.

In the meantime, he searched. He felt a slight time pressure, but knew that because of the distances out here, he had more time on this job than he would have had he been closer to Mars or Earth’s Moon. He had an internal clock, and at the moment, it allowed him to feel some leeway.

He paused his search for the cargo manifest to find a way to retract the captain’s chair. The damn thing rose in the middle of the narrow bridge like a throne, and he wanted it gone. It irritated him, particularly since it turned to offer him a seat every time he brushed against it (which was much too often for his tastes).

He finally found the controls for the chair, but as he did, he also saw something else. A blinking emergency light, buried deep in the manual controls.

He touched the light with a bit of hesitation, worried that he would activate the wrong system.

Instead, he found that a second distress signal had been sending for more than an hour. Why a ship like this would have more than one distress signal, and why this one wasn’t attached to the beacon, he had no idea.

Shutting it off was a simple matter. He toggled the controls to the off position. The system didn’t even argue.

For a moment, he wondered about the secondary signal. Then he decided it was probably part of the automated distress signal’s system, not something he had to worry about.

He needed to spend his time finding one tiny piece of cargo in six cargo bays stuffed with material ultimately bound for Earth.

He had a dozen people on his team, but that wasn’t enough to search all of those cargo bays. And he was searching for the Glyster Egg, which was a delicate system in and of itself. He had no idea if his own equipment would accidentally activate it.

He didn’t want to take that risk, not this far out. What if the Egg had a broadcast feature he didn’t know about? What if it not only disabled this starliner, but his ship as well?

That was something he didn’t want to suffer through.

So he needed to proceed with caution.

And he needed to find the cargo manifest.

 

 

SOMETHING IN THE automated distress signal that arrived at the 52nd Mars Relay Station activated the review process.

The review system sent a notification to the starbase beyond Titan where the Blue Moon originated, asking for a passenger manifest. Calculations needed to be made. The system needed to do a proper cost-benefit analysis of the rescue. Could the rescue vehicle arrive on time? Could it save the ship/cargo/passengers? Were the lives/cargo/ship worth the cost of the rescue?

Such an analysis could not be done without passenger names and histories.

As the system waited, the message from the 13th Moon Relay Station arrived. Now, the Martian system noted that the Moon would not conduct a rescue or even contemplate one, should one be needed.

Only the Martian system would take the risks involved, which changed the calculations yet again.

The system was about to reject the rescue request, even without an answer from the starbase, when several manual distress signals arrived, evenly spaced from each other.

But each manual distress signal contained a signature, proving that someone on board the Blue Moon had crafted that distress signal by hand.

That someone was named Colette Euphemia Josephine Treacher Singh Wilkinson Lopez.

Treacher.

A quick analysis showed that Colette Euphemia Josephine Treacher Singh Wilkinson Lopez was a distant Treacher relative, not involved in the corporation or in any local governments, but still on tap to receive a portion of the Treacher Trust when she came of age.

A second Treacher was on board as well, another woman, also in line to receive an inheritance from the Treacher Trust.

Treachers were protected throughout the solar system because of the family’s great involvement in many businesses and governments from Mars to Saturn and maybe beyond.

The review’s purpose changed. The routine review no longer had relevance.

Two Treachers on board a ship, any ship, anywhere within the reach of Mars Rescue Services, required an immediate and adequate rescue response.

The information got forwarded to Mars Vehicle Rescue (Space Unit), along with all available information, including the amount of time lapsed.

Given the hazards of travel through that part of the Asteroid Belt, and given the kinds of emergencies that happened there, the time lapsed changed the chances of success from more than 80% to less than 50%.

Which meant, given the costs of rescues that far from Mars itself, all Mars Vehicle Rescue (Space Unit) could spare would be one large rescue vehicle, with a crew of twenty.

The systems in Mars Vehicle Rescue (Space Unit) had determined likely outcomes, and decided that the most possible outcome was this: The rescue vehicle would arrive to find a destroyed ship, dead passengers, and no rescue needed.

But the presence of Treachers meant the possibility of lawsuits. The possibility of lawsuits meant that it would be good to get the DNA of the dead Treachers, just to prove that their portion of the Treacher Trust was now available for some other distant relative.

Mars Vehicle Rescue (Space Unit) did not want to be liable for anything to do with the Treacher Trust, so the rescue ship numbered MVR14501, but known to its crew as Sally, left its docking ring on the way to an out-of-the-way shipping route in the Asteroid Belt.

Instead of a crew of twenty, the Sally had only ten crew members. If they had had to wait for the remaining ten crew members to arrive from their scheduled time off, departure would have been delayed another three hours, something the system calculated it did not have.

It didn’t matter that the crew was small; the chances of success were small too.

The crew of the Sally looked at the rescue attempt as a drill, not an actual job.

And that was a mistake.

 

 

THE STUPID PASSENGER identification system seemed hardwired to the life reading of that particular passenger. Colette didn’t remember signing up for that but she was a “minor” who “had no rights” without “suing for them” so she had no idea what her parents had done to guarantee her passage on this ship.

Whatever it was, she couldn’t spoof the system and if she couldn’t spoof the system, she couldn’t get out of the suite.

She stood because her butt was falling asleep on the bed’s hard surface. She moved the tablet onto a little holder built into the wall, and wished she could use a holoscreen instead.

Something pinged in her brain about holoscreens, but she let that marinate. Because what she really wanted to do was get the tablet to tell her where the bad guys were, and so far, the tablet was refusing.

Well, it wasn’t refusing, exactly, because that would have meant it had some kind of sentience, which it did not. What it was doing was refusing to acknowledge their life signs, since they were not paying passengers.

Apparently, crew, staff, and service personnel at any kind of starbase stop were beneath the notice of the concierge level. She dug into the systems, and tried to see if she could get a reading on the non-paying passengers, even if they only appeared as some kind of shadowy coordinates on the ship’s map.

She couldn’t, any more than she could detach her own heartbeat from the passenger manifest, but she could reset the holographic concierges on every single floor.

That discovery made her heart race. She couldn’t reset the concierges to “forget” anyone, which was probably good from the ship’s point of view, but she could set up the concierges to interact with every human being they encountered.

She dug deeper into the controls. She could actually set up the concierges to follow anyone unregistered with the ship. Some of the more sophisticated concierges could follow the unregistered person until someone in authority dealt with them, even if that meant following that person off the ship.

Well, she couldn’t get out of here and harass the bad guys herself, not without getting caught, and she couldn’t get the Egg and figure it out without getting caught, but she could do this.

She only hoped it would be enough.

 

 

NAPIER WAS ABOUT to contact his second, Grizwald, when the man walked onto the bridge. He was larger than most of Napier’s crew, but size had its uses, especially when it came to intimidation.

And intimidation wasn’t the only thing Griz was good at.

Griz handed Napier a small box containing everything he needed to access the Captain’s Codes.

“We got some problems,” Griz said.

“No kidding,” Napier said and opened the box. It had the skin gloves, and some other bits and pieces of the captain himself, no longer bloody, but cleaned up so that Napier could use them.

“I mean it.” Griz’s tone was harsh. “Look.”

Napier frowned with annoyance, then looked in the direction that Griz was pointing. A head floated behind him.

For a moment, Napier thought maybe Griz had brought him the captain’s actual head, but he hadn’t.

“What the hell?” Napier asked.

Griz slid his hand toward the head, and his hand went through it. The head vanished for a half a second, then returned.

“You are unauthorized,” it said. “If you do not leave this area, you will be subject to discipline.”

“Discipline?” Napier asked Griz. “From who?”

Griz rolled his eyes. “The crew,” he said.

Well, that wouldn’t happen. Part of the crew was trapped in the so-called brig (really, two emergency cells that would get troublemakers to the next base) guarded by three of his people, and the rest of the crew was piled in an airlock, awaiting Napier’s order to have the bodies join the rocks floating around this part of the Asteroid belt.

“So what’s the problem?” Napier asked.

“It’s following me,” Griz said. “And it won’t go away.”

“That’s not a problem,” Napier said, by which he meant, That’s not a problem I need to deal with right now.

“It’s blocking access to crew quarters and other parts of the ship,” Griz said. “Once it started following me, everything shut down when I got near it.”

Napier felt a surge of anger rush through him. “So you came here?”

He glanced at the bridge controls, and sure enough, they had all shut down. He would have to redo all of his work.

“Get out,” he said to Griz. “Now.”

“You both must leave,” the head said to Napier.

“And take that thing with you,” Napier said to Griz.

Griz shook his own head, then scooted around the holo-head, and went out the door. The head remained for some reason Napier did not understand.

“You must leave,” the head said to him.

“Not happening,” Napier said, and opened the box. The ship required a minimum of five forms of physical identification from an officer to access certain parts of the controls.

The most basic was active fingertip control, which the ship would test to see if the finger was warm, attached, and belonging to a crew member.

Napier had stolen a number of items over the years that made warm and attached and belonging into three different things. The ship would think that his hands were the Captain’s hands.

“You must leave,” the head said to Napier.

“And you’re going to get shut down,” Napier said, as he placed his index finger on the bridge control board.

“Not happening,” the head said, mirroring Napier’s earlier response, which worried him more than he wanted to think about.

He decided not to look at the stupid head anymore.

Instead, he went back to work.

 

 

HALFWAY TO THE coordinates in the Asteroid Belt, Dayah Rodriguez, who was in charge of the Sally’srescue team, finally got a reading on the Blue Moon.

The ship didn’t seem to be in physical trouble, although it hadn’t moved from the location cited in the distress signal. But one small ship floated around it, constantly bouncing and shivering the way that some of the illegal vessels did to avoid standard tracking units.

Fortunately, Sally didn’t use standard tracking.

A jolt of adrenaline shot through Rodriguez.

She suddenly realized they were understaffed and perhaps lacking the proper amount of firepower.

“Speed up,” she said to Hamish Sarkis, who was piloting the Sally. “And send a message back to headquarters. We have pirates. And if we want to catch them, we’re going to need some help.”

They were going to need a lot more than help.

They were going to need a lot of luck as well.

 

 

NOW, COLETTE WAS obsessing about her parents. Because they still hadn’t moved. No one had. Why weren’t the passengers fighting back? What was going on?

She was pacing around the bed, trying to figure out if breaking out of this stupid suite was worthwhile.

And then her breath caught.

She had set up the concierges to follow the bad guys.

She just needed to locate the concierges. When she found them, she would know where the bad guys were.

Which would help her escape, but then what?

She flopped on the bed, grabbed the tablet, and thought about it.

She had access to a lot of things on this little device. Maybe some of them would help her slow those bad guys down.

 

 

THE HEAD WAS proving to be a problem. The thing stuck to Napier like some kind of weird glue. He couldn’t shut it out of the bridge, because every time he closed the door on the head, it floated back inside.

And every time he tried to use some piece of the captain to provide identification, the head stated, quite calmly, “You are not Captain Ekhart. You lack his height, weight, and appearance. I have instructed the system to remain unfooled.”

Unfooled. What kind of word was that, anyway?

It was as annoying as the head was.

To make matters worse, Napier’s internal clock was warning him that he was almost out of time for this job.

He needed that Egg, but he couldn’t access anything.

His personal comm vibrated. He pressed it, and Johnston, the only member of his team still on the ship, said, “We just got a ping from the security system. We’ve been scanned by something with an official government signature.”

Napier didn’t even have to ask what that meant. It meant that either a security vehicle or a rescue ship was on the way. Or something larger and more important—some kind of government transport—was coming to or traveling along this route.

Which meant he was done, if he didn’t find that manifest right now, if he couldn’t get the Egg right now.

He reached for the head, and his hand went right through it. Had that head belonged to a human, it would’ve been slammed against the wall until it shattered.

“You are unauthorized,” the head said obliviously. Clearly, it had no idea that he would have killed it if he could. “You do not have access. You are not Captain Ekhart. You must leave.”

Napier glared at it. The thing looked like it made eye contact with him, but he could see through it, so it probably didn’t.

But had it sent the information to the authorities?

He had broken into a number of ships similar to the Blue Moon, but never one of this vintage. Sometimes older ships had technologies he hadn’t seen or even imagined. Things attempted and then discarded.

Like annoying heads that floated after people and yelled at them. This couldn’t have been a popular feature.

“Can you figure out who scanned us?” Napier asked Johnston.

“Been trying. I have no idea.” Johnston was good with all of the equipment. Not great, but better than some of the idiots Napier had brought with him. Those idiots were good for scaring civilians, and that was what he’d been using them for. And for figuring out how to put an entire room full of people into a deep sleep, so they wouldn’t fight back.

“I can’t find them with our scanners,” Johnston was saying, “but here’s what I’m worried about. They’re coming from Mars, and they scanned us far enough out that we can’t read them. So they have powerful equipment and they’re coming fast. There might be a whole bunch of them, for all I know.”

If Napier didn’t get out of here now, he might actually get caught. He slammed his fist on the captain’s chair that he had forgotten to retract. It bounced and jiggled toward him, almost as if he offended it, which was a lot more satisfying than trying to grab that stupid head.

“Hey, you,” he said to the head, “who did you notify that we had arrived?”

“I sent a message to those in charge, as per my programming,” the head said primly.

“And who might those in charge be?” Napier asked, hoping that maybe he could buy some more time if the head identified them.

“I went through proper channels. You have accessed the bridge without authorization. You have attempted to impersonate Captain Ekhart. You will be dealt with firmly.”

He wasn’t getting any information from the head, and he wasn’t going to be able to find that Egg.

He had to think this through. He was good at cutting his losses when he needed to, but usually he had a bit more to show for a job this complicated.

Still, running was a lot better than getting captured.

He also needed to get rid of all of the evidence that pointed to him. A ship full of people who could identify him. Those head-things. Who knew what they had taken from him and his team? DNA? Imagery? Everything?

Now he was going to have to change his plan. He couldn’t remote detonate the Blue Moon because he didn’t have access to the controls. He would have to use regular explosives, the kind with their own timers.

They were a little less reliable than a remote detonation, but they would have to do.

Then his fist clenched.

The kid.

He thought of her for a moment, sprawled on that floor, looking helpless and lost as Mommy and Daddy got carted away.

He didn’t dare jettison her from the Blue Moon, not now, not with the authorities (or whomever) closing in.

This job was really screwed up. He was going to have to do things he didn’t want to do for no real payoff at all.

He punched the retractable captain’s chair one last time, then shoved his way past the head as he stalked off the bridge. Or, rather, tried to shove. Because the head moved with him.

How come he inherited the head from Griz? Because the head figured Napier was the greater threat?

Didn’t matter. He had to tell his team to dump the explosives near the passengers and surviving crew. There was no time for finesse.

He and his team needed to be on board his ship within fifteen minutes, so they could be as far away from the Blue Moon as possible when it exploded.

As far from the Egg as possible.

Because he had no idea what kind of damage it would do.

 

 

COLETTE TRIED TO work faster, to see what else she could find, what she could use.

She had almost given up when she found something weird.

Apparently, passenger liners from the old days had a lot of theft, and theft was bad for business.

So the holographic concierges were designed, not for the passengers’ comfort, but to spy on them. If concierges deemed someone suspicious, they harassed that someone on the ship. If that someone left the ship, the concierges shrank themselves down to a pinprick and became some kind of tiny spy that sent a signal so that the suspicious personages could be traced.

It was weird, and it was brilliant, and it was strangely appropriate.

Colette couldn’t prevent them from taking hostages. She couldn’t prevent them from getting the Egg. But she could help the authorities find the bad guys.

If they let her live.

A shiver ran through her.

It didn’t really matter if they could track her or not. Because she had to get out of this room and stop them.

Somehow.

She just didn’t know how yet.

 

 

THE HEAD THING vanished as Napier climbed into the only airlock that wasn’t stacked with dead crew members. His team had already gotten onto his ship and were waiting for him.

God, he was irritated. Hours, risk, a few deaths, and what did he have to show for it?

He was actually fleeing, something he thought he had become too sophisticated to do.

Well, he had learned his lesson. No more boarding a passenger ship of this vintage, not without a lot more planning.

He watched the exterior door open into the enclosed ramp his ship had set up, and it took every bit of effort he had not to dive through it.

He would have a little dignity here.

He would have to consider this a scouting mission rather than a failed attempt. He had learned something, and, if he had time to set it up, he would learn a bit more.

He would learn what happened when a ship carrying a Glyster Egg exploded.

He would have to set up something specific to monitor space around the starliner, but he could do that, and he could do it from a distance.

Then he would gather information, and with it, he could tell any possible client one of the many things the Egg did—more as a cautionary tale, with the explosion and all, but still. Information was information.

That was the kind of thing that clients liked.

He would have to remember that when the kid appeared in his dreams.

He slid into the airlock on his ship, shifting from foot to foot, hoping he would get through this quickly.

They needed to get out of here—and they needed to do so fast.

 

 

THE ENGINES WERE powering up on that second ship. Rodriguez sent the coordinates to the ships Mars Rescue had sent, hoping they would either veer off and catch the pirate ship.

She didn’t have time to think about capturing a pirate ship. She was kinda relieved that it was leaving. She commanded a rescue vessel, not a security vessel. The handful of times she’d gone after perpetrators hadn’t ended well for her. In all but one instance, the perpetrators had gotten away.

She hoped that the pirate ship wasn’t taking the Blue Moon with it. That would create other problems.

Right now, her scans showed that the Blue Moon was more or less immobile, moving forward ever so slightly, but not enough to measure as anything. Maybe on autopilot.

She wasn’t close enough yet to find that out.

But she would be in just a few minutes—and her team now knew this wasn’t a drill.

It was going to be life and death.

 

 

COLETTE STARED AT the tablet in surprise. It told her that bad guys had left the Blue Moon.

Maybe they had found what they were looking for.

Not that it mattered to her.

She had to get to her parents.

She snuck out of her suite, and ran along the corridor, bent almost in half, just because, even though she knew the monitors caught her every movement anyway.

The buffet that her parents and the rest of the passengers were in was on this level. She just had to get to it.

She hurried through the maze of corridors, going half on her memory and half on the map that showed up on the tablet, when she almost tripped on a small square block.

It wasn’t alone. There were half a dozen small square blocks just in this corridor.

She turned the tablet toward them, and asked it to identify the blocks.

The tablet did not respond. Maybe it didn’t have the programming.

So she needed to figure this out on her own. After all, she had seen a lot of things in all the various schools she’d gone to. (She had done most of those things as well.)

She crouched near the closest block, and peered at it. It smelled faintly of rust—the telltale sign of a kind of acid that would eventually eat through a casing, hit a trigger, and—

Oh, god. This was a bomb, one of the kinds she’d thought too damn dangerous to make.

The bad guys were off the ship, and they were going to blow it up. But they hadn’t taken the Egg and they hadn’t taken her and they hadn’t taken any of the passengers, so they must have been after something else, but what she had no idea, and now there was no time to figure it out.

She needed to get rid of these things. Somehow.

She reached for the box in front of her, then remembered: acid. She would have lost all the skin on her hand.

Focus, focus, focus.

There had to be a command that allowed the concierges, real or not, to isolate something dangerous in a corridor. Kids made smoke bombs, after all. And people sometimes tried to burn the materials in a ship.

Everyone on the crew had to be able to access that kind of security protocol.

She just had to find it before something happened.

 

 

RODRIGUEZ HAD BEEN right: the Sally arrived after the pirate ship left. The readings she got off theBlue Moon were some of the strangest she’d seen. The ship was completely intact. Some of the crew remained alive, and all of the passengers seemed to be breathing as well, but none of them were moving.

Except one of the Treacher women.

Was she in on the attack somehow?

Rodriguez brought two of her teammates with her, but let them move toward the room filled with passengers. Her entire team wore their environmental suits, and were armed with everything she could think to bring.

Sarkis remained on board the Sally and three more team members were heading to the brig to find the crew stranded there. The remaining three team members were spreading out between engineering and the bridge, hoping to get this ship moving again.

Rodriguez was going to handle the Treacher woman herself, not just because that person was still moving, but because Rodriguez didn’t quite believe the information the passenger manifest had sent her.

It said that this distant Treacher relative was only eleven. Which wasn’t possible, since no children were allowed on board ships like the Blue Moon.

Someone might have spoofed the file, which concerned Rodriguez more than she wanted to admit. Especially since the first thing she found when she came on board was the carnage in the first airlock she tried. She was lucky she hadn’t opened it, or bodies would have tumbled into space.

Bodies.

The pirates had clearly gotten something. You don’t kill that many people for the hell of it.

She rounded a corner and saw a corridor strewn with black boxes.

“Don’t move!” a panicked nasal voice said.

Rodriguez stopped and looked. She had seen the boxes, but she had missed the very small person crouched near the box farthest away.

A very small person who did indeed look like an eleven-year-old child, holding onto an old-fashioned rectangular tablet.

“Colette Treacher?” Rodriguez asked, trying to remember all of the girl’s elaborate name.

“Close enough,” the girl said. “You weren’t tagged by one of the concierges. Are they gone?”

“What?” Rodriguez asked.

“Who are you?” The girl’s tone was annoyed, as if Rodriguez was the dumbest person she had ever encountered.

And, to be fair, the girl couldn’t see Rodriguez’s identification. She was wearing a high-end environmental suit, not the ones issued by Mars Rescue. And the girl didn’t seem to be networked into any kind of Mars system.

Rodriguez introduced herself without using her name. Names weren’t important in situations like this. Jobs were.

“I’m with Mars Rescue,” she said.

“It’s about time.” The girl’s annoyance grew. “It’s been hours.”

Hours was miraculous, given where the Blue Moon ended up, and Rodriguez nearly said that, then realized the girl’s tone had made her feel defensive.

“What are you doing?” Rodriguez asked.

“Trying to diffuse a bomb,” the girl said. “What are you doing?”

That adrenaline spike hit again.

“All of these are bombs?” Rodriguez asked.

“I haven’t checked them all, but I would guess so,” the girl said. “They’re pretty mad.”

Rodriguez had a hunch the girl wasn’t talking about the bombs now, but the pirates. “Who?”

“The guys who attacked us. They wanted something, and I hope they didn’t get it. They left pretty fast. And now...” The girl ran her hands near the boxes. “This.”

Her voice broke on that last word, the bravado gone.

“I can’t find any way to diffuse them,” she said.

And that, the edge of panic in the girl’s voice, brought Rodriguez back to herself.

She contacted her team.

“Found half a dozen box bombs, type unknown,” Rodriguez said. “They’re not too far from the passengers. Check for other bombs. We need a scan of this ship, and we need to put every single corridor on lockdown.”

“Do you have some kind of shield program?” The girl shook the tablet at Rodriguez. “Because I can’t find one.”

Rodriguez wasn’t carrying any kind of device like the girl had, but Rodriguez had access to every single ship built in official shipyards in the past one hundred years. The failsafes built into each system, override codes along with physical identification, specific to each rescue service.

She hoped that would be on board the Blue Moon as well, even though the ship was pretty old.

She slid to the nearest door, pulled back a wall panel, and found the interior controls. Then she opened the secondary panel underneath, hit the override commands, and found what she was looking for.

There were no tiny shields on a ship like this. Only one big shield that would coat the corridor.

“Join me,” she said to the girl.

The girl stood slowly, giving the boxes a glance.

“Right now,” Rodriguez said.

The girl crept past the boxes, moving slower than Rodriguez would have liked. After what seemed like an eternity, the girl reached Rodriguez’s side, and Rodriguez released the shields.

They encased the entire floor, avoiding her and the girl, but trapping them in one place. It would take some maneuvering, but Rodriguez could get that shield and the boxes it contained out of the ship—if she could find an airlock without bodies in it.

Her comm chirruped.

“We found more boxes, and yeah, they’re bombs. We’re getting them out now,” said Lytel, who was handling the rest of the team.

“I got these explosives contained as well,” Rodriguez said. “Any word on the passengers?”

“They’re unconscious. The remaining crew too. Doing medical evaluations right now, but it looks like they’re just out. Guess the bombs were going to do the dirty work of actual murder,” Lytel said.

Rodriguez looked down at the girl. Her eyes were red, but there were no tear-streaks on her face.

“Do you have any idea what happened here?” Rodriguez asked.

The girl shook her head.

“How come you’re out and no one else is?” Rodriguez said.

“Some guy,” the girl said, “he was surprised there was a kid on board. He locked me in my suite.”

She shook the tablet at Rodriguez.

“That was his first mistake.” And then the girl grinned. The grin was a little cold, it was a little off, and then it trembled on the girl’s face and fell away, showing that it was more bravado than anything else.

“My dad,” the girl asked. “Is he okay?”

The shield reshaped as Lytel remotely prepped it to leave the ship.

Neither Rodriguez nor the girl should remain in the corridor while that happened.

“I don’t know how your father is,” Rodriguez said, putting her hand on the little girl’s back. The child was shaking so hard it looked like she might rattle out of her skin. “But I’m sure we can find out.”

 

 

NAPIER WAS ALMOST out of the Asteroid Belt when six ships surrounded him. All of those ships had official insignia, but not all of the insignia were from the same organization.

Different rescue and security companies, all government owned, all looking pretty official.

“What is going on?” Griz said from beside him. “We didn’t steal anything.”

“No, we didn’t,” Napier said. They had just killed half the crew. But they’d killed a lot of people out here before, and no one had come after them.

“So what the heck was different about this job?” Griz asked.

Napier didn’t have the answer to that. Except bad luck. And that bad luck started when he saw the kid.

Kids threw Napier off his game.

But he didn’t tell Griz that. Instead, Napier deleted all the records he had for theBlue Moon, and then contacted all of the security vessels.

Contacting them first might buy him some time. Although time probably wasn’t what he needed. Because he had violated his own code, and used bombs to kill that kid for no reason at all.

 

 

EXCEPT THAT HE hadn’t killed Colette Euphemia Josephine Treacher Singh Wilkinson Lopez. The ship didn’t blow up. Instead, the Sally guarded the Blue Moon all the way to the nearest Mars Rescue base where everyone reported their own truth about what happened.

The only truth the authorities listened to, though, was Colette’s, because it proved accurate from the moment the investigators had the tablet she had stolen.

That tablet had recorded her every move.

It also showed where Napier’s crew was, because of what Colette had done with the holographic concierges. She had turned them into location beacons.

Colette did not want attention for what she had done. She didn’t want a medal or recognition from the governments of Mars.

She wanted something else entirely.

Something no government had the power to give.

 

 

“I DON’T WANT to go to boarding school,” Colette said to her dad after all the officials left. “I want to go home.”

Her family was in a tiny hotel room on the base where the Blue Moon had ended up. Her mother lay on the bed, her forearm over her forehead. She’d had a headache ever since she’d woken up, something the medical personnel said was a pretty normal reaction to the gas the bad guys had filtered into the buffet.

Dad didn’t seem to have a headache at all. He was frowning at Colette, and she knew, she knew, he was going to make her go to that school anyway, just because he had no idea what else to do with her.

“All right,” he said quietly.

“What?” Colette asked, not sure she had heard him right.

“I’m taking you home,” he said.

Colette’s mouth opened ever so slightly. She hadn’t expected that.

“No, you’re not,” her mother said. “She’s more than we can handle.”

“You won’t have to handle her, Louise,” Dad said.

Her mother sat up on one elbow, her face pale.

“What?” she asked, in almost the same tone Colette had used a moment before.

Something crossed Dad’s face, something hard and fascinating.

“Colette saved our lives,” he said after a moment. “All of us. Even you. We owe her, Louise.”

Her mother made a dismissive sound and collapsed on the bed. Dad’s gaze met Colette’s and his eyes actually twinkled.

“We could send her away,” Colette said softly.

“My thoughts exactly,” he said just as softly.

Then he opened the door to the hotel room, and peered into the hall as if he expected to see a man cradling a laser rifle.

There was none—no man, no rifle.

Dad ushered Colette out of the room.

He was protecting her again. Like he had tried to do on the Blue Moon. Only he had failed.

And he would probably fail now. But that was okay.

Because Colette could protect them all.

As she had learned recently, she was really really good at that.