Ki-tae awoke in the tiny infirmary to find himself alone. He lay for a moment, trying to orient himself. It was harder than he expected. His head spun, and most of his memories were of him and Beau, panting, touching, rubbing, coming…But eventually he had to get up and find the bathroom.
“Anyone here?” he called when he came back out. He looked around for Devlin, but there was no sign. He couldn’t find any clothes either, so he wrapped himself in a blanket and headed over to the crew quarters he’d been allocated, only a few doors along, and went in.
Fifteen minutes later he emerged, showered, shaved, teeth brushed, and feeling almost human again. He paused and went back in for a zip-front sweatshirt to put over his T-shirt. The ship was strangely chilly. And quiet. For a moment he wondered if they were all in the cargo bay, dismantling the Enivakara. But the sound of voices from the mess drew him there. As he got closer the voices resolved themselves into Marz and Reynolds. Where were the others? Where was Beau?
“Hello,” he said, going in.
They looked around at him. “Finally he gets up,” Marz said. “Have a good nap while we all work, huh?”
“I’m not even sure what time it is.” He stifled a yawn and rubbed his eyes. Had to wake up…“Is there, um, coffee?”
“You want coffee?” Marz said. “Next you’ll ask for a bacon roll.”
He shuddered and dropped into a chair at the table. “Just coffee.”
Marz poured him a cup and pushed it over to him. “You okay?” she asked. “Because you look like hell.”
“I think I slept too long.”
“Are you sure that’s all?” Reynolds asked. “Marz is right. You don’t look too well at all.”
“I feel…hungover.” Something he hadn’t felt since that first night with Beau so long ago. Unfair to have it without drinking. It must be oversleeping. He hoped it wasn’t some aftereffect of that…thing. He sipped the coffee. He was no connoisseur, but it didn’t taste bad, and he hoped it would help him wake up and gather his wits. “Where’s Beau?”
“Sleeping,” Marz said. “Doug too, after all that time on the repairs. Me and Joy are heading down there after we eat. You can come too if you want to help.”
“Repairs?”
“Oh yeah, you missed it. We’ve got engine trouble. We got main power back, but the engine is still offline.”
Ki-tae stared at her, not sure he’d understood. “We have no star-drive?”
“Nope. We’re tooling along sublight and hoping we don’t run into any pirates.”
That couldn’t be a coincidence. Ki-tae drank the rest of the coffee quickly and dumped the mug in the washer. He almost ran from the room.
His first port of call was the cargo bay. He had to know if that thing was still aboard. But he found the place locked. He tried a few codes on the door, considered hacking in or finding Devlin and forcing him to open it. But force him how exactly? Anyway, the fact the bay was locked indicated the thing was still in there, and Beau wanted to keep it safe from Ki-tae maybe getting in and destroying it.
Which he would, if he could. He’d figure out a way to kill that thing. But now there was this engine trouble. What the hell was going on there? They just happened to have engine trouble with this thing on board? No way did he believe that.
If he couldn’t get in at the Enivakara, he needed to make the best use of his time until he could. That meant finding out what was happening with the engine because he was damn sure this was no accident. As he passed back through the crew quarters area, he thought of going to wake up Beau but decided to let him sleep. If Ki-tae found anything important, he’d wake him then.
He had to pause at the top of the ladder that led down to engineering as a dizzy spell took him. He should eat, dammit. He needed food or maybe more coffee. Or both. But this came first.
He found the engineering space after pulling himself together enough to continue. It was deserted. Marz and the professor weren’t hurrying down to work on it, then. So he took advantage of their absence. He checked readouts that showed the sequence of events. It was oddly familiar. Then he started exploring. The others had already worked on the engine. But they were looking for the damage to repair, nothing else. He was looking with his cop’s eyes. And he found it. A small device deep inside the circuits and burned black. No wonder it had been overlooked. It looked like another burned-out component, but it wasn’t. He knew the thing. When triggered, either on a timer or remotely, it gave off a burst of electromagnetism, destroying the circuits nearby. After that it used the ship’s circuits to spread the damage.
He was withdrawing the device when he saw the shadow on the console, looming over him, an arm raised. He reacted on instinct, rolling aside, lashing a foot out though missing the attacker. Doug, holding a foot-long metal bar, raised it again.
“Agent Park, what are you doing up?” He swung with the bar, and Ki-tae dodged again. He was so slow, his head still fuzzy as if—holy shit, as Beau would say—he’d been drugged! Doug had wanted to keep him off his feet when this all went down. That must be it. He dodged again and yelled for Beau. But it was Marz who appeared in the doorway.
“What the hell?” she demanded, and her voice made Doug turn. Just long enough for Ki-tae to attack. He took Doug’s legs out from under him with a low leg sweep and disarmed him, got him in an arm bar on the ground. The man struggled, and he was stronger than he looked, one of those older guys with ropy muscles. Dizziness still impaired Ki-tae. He shouted to Marz, who was staring at them.
“Help me! Hold him down.”
“Help me, Marz!” Doug cried. “He attacked me.”
Damn, she’d probably choose his side over Ki-tae’s, since he was one of the crew. “He sabotaged the ship,” Ki-tae cried. Doug was squirming free. Ki-tae didn’t currently have the strength and had no significant weight advantage to pin him for long. He considered taking the arm bar further and dislocating the man’s shoulder to incapacitate him. Then with a great heave, throwing Ki-tae off, Doug was free, scrambling up and running for the doorway, running for the open space beside Marz.
He didn’t make it. At the last second her arm shot out across the doorway. He had no chance to slow down, and she clotheslined him neatly and effectively at the neck. He went down hard, flat on his back, and stayed there groaning, the breath knocked out of him. Ki-tae knelt on hands and knees, searched around the deck until he found the sabotage device again. He looked up at Marz, panted when he spoke to her.
“Help me secure him, please. Then someone wake up Beau.”
* * * *
Head pounding, mouth like sandpaper, Beau stumbled into the mess, futilely trying to zip closed a hoodie as he did. Couldn’t seem to make the two halves of the zip meet. He stumbled over the raised threshold of the door.
“Whass going on?” he asked, voice slurring, not understanding why.
“Drink this,” Devlin said, putting a glass in his hand. It looked a bit cloudy. Beau didn’t usually question his good luck when someone handed him a drink, but he looked at this one dubiously, especially given the source.
“Drink it,” Ki-tae said. He was sitting at the table, looking a bit rough, with an empty glass in front of him and a blanket over his shoulders. “You’ll feel better. You’ve been drugged.”
“I…what?” Beau gave up arguing about it and drank. It was nasty, but he was deeply thirsty. “Right,” he said, when he’d finished shuddering. “I have a medical need for coffee right now.” His brain had apparently been replaced by chewed cotton wool. He slumped into one of the chairs around the table and tried to understand what he was seeing. Ki-tae, as previously noted, Doug, sitting with his hands cuffed, Marz standing behind him, arms folded, holding a metal bar. “What the actual fuck is going on?”
Ki-tae held up a small device, badly scorched. He pushed it across the table to Beau. “I found this EMP emitter, right in among the main boards for the engine’s computer. The ship was sabotaged, Beau, and he did it.” He pointed at Doug, who instantly launched into a denial.
“You’re going to believe this agent over me? He’s the saboteur! I found him trying to remove the evidence. He’d made us helpless so his cop friends can find us.”
“That’s a lie,” Ki-tae said, voice level and unruffled. “He attacked me when he saw I’d found his bomb.”
“I thought he was sabotaging the engine! I had to stop him.”
“So that’s my word against his,” Ki-tae said. “Yes, I could have planted it. That’s no great feat of engineering.”
“But I’ll tell you what is,” Marz said. “What only Doug has the skills to do—pumping anesthetic gas into the crew quarters—and only into those rooms. That’s why you feel so bad. You’ve been drugged.”
“He tried the same thing in the infirmary, to drug me,” Ki-tae said, picking up the story.
“But the gas did trigger a sensor in there,” Devlin said. “And the room went into positive pressure mode, forcing the bad air back out. Guess he forgot about that system. It’s not something we’ve had to use before. So the infirmary is clean, but all the sleeping quarters still have a high level of this gas in them.”
“Gas…” Beau couldn’t believe it.
“And the monitors to detect bad air and sound an alarm about it are disabled,” Marz said. “Aside from Doug, the only other person on board with the computer skills to do that is me. And I know I didn’t do it.”
“He expected us all to go to bed one by one and…stay there,” Ki-tae said.
“To kill us?” Beau asked, sick horror stealing over him.
“The concentration isn’t high enough to do much more than keep people asleep,” Devlin said. “But all drugs have the potential to have unpredictable effects on people. If respiration was depressed too much, say in someone the professor’s age, they could go into respiratory arrest. Or if someone reacted to the gas and vomited, they could choke to death. So, yes, there was a chance it could have killed one or more of us.”
Beau stared around, still finding it hard to accept what he was hearing. He noticed Bubble sleeping on top of one of the counters.
“Is the cat okay?” he asked. The gas might only induce sleep in a human, but Bubble was a lot smaller. If she’d been in the crew quarters…
“If she wasn’t okay, this bastard would have suffered several more injuries by now,” Marz said.
“She was down in the hold at the time,” Joy said. “Mr. Devlin checked her. She’s fine.”
“Beau,” Ki-tae said. “Even if you believe I could sabotage the ship to keep you here to be arrested, you know I’d never do something like this. It would exceed my authority as a police officer and risk people’s lives. You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“You want any more convincing?” Marz said. “I’ve been checking Doug’s computer access the last few days. Shortly after we lost power, he sent out a message with our location and course. I don’t know to who, but he hid it effectively, sending it out via the shuttle’s comms system so I wouldn’t spot it in the main computer.”
“Have we…”
“I changed course,” Marz said, anticipating his question. “But we’re still moving pretty slowly. They’ll pick up our trail again soon.”
“Who’s they?”
She poked Doug’s shoulder with the metal bar she held. “Ask him.”
Beau turned to Doug. The mists of his drugged sleep were wearing off, thanks in part to Devlin’s magic elixir and in part to the wake-up call he was getting here.
“Who are you working for?”
“Boss,” Doug said. “Come on, you can’t…”
Beau jumped to his feet and banged the table—though his head swam alarmingly. “Who are you working for? And as a fucking follow-up question, is anyone on this damn boat working for me?” He glared around at them. Devlin looked away, ashamed. Marz shrugged.
“I’m a partner, not an employee.”
“And I’m technically a consultant,” Reynolds said. “But, yes, I’m still working as a consultant for you, Beau.”
“There’s that, then. Right.” He turned back to Doug. “Are you going to tell me, or am I going to beat it out of you?”
“Hey,” Ki-tae protested. “He’s my prisoner.”
“I think I actually took him down,” Marz said.
“Yes, and thank you for your assistance,” Ki-tae said. “But I arrested him. He’s in my custody.”
“Fine,” Beau said. “Then you beat it out of him.”
Doug shook his head, a sneer on his lips. “You two. It’s either fight or fuck.”
Beau’s skin crawled, and he wondered if Doug had overheard them in the infirmary together.
“Okay,” Marz said. She grabbed Doug by the back of his shirt and hauled him up. “If he’s not going to talk, I guess it’s time he took a short walk out the airlock.”
“Hey!” Doug struggled, but he was cuffed and she was stronger. “Hey, hey, Park, you can’t let her do this!”
“Then tell us,” Ki-tae said. “It will help at your trial, I promise you.”
“I met a woman once who survived seventeen point eight seconds of exposure to vacuum,” Marz said conversationally. “Though her eyeballs did burst after about twelve. I wonder how long you’ll last.”
“You wouldn’t…”
“If you cooperate, I won’t let her,” Ki-tae said. Beau almost had to hide a grin, to see how easily Ki-tae had slipped into the role of good cop to Marz’s bad cop. “But you’ll have to talk because I still feel quite weak and I’m not up to fighting her for you.”
“Okay, okay! It’s King, okay? It’s King.”
“What are you talking about?” Beau said. “We’re all working for Mr. King.” Ki-tae cleared his throat. “Most of us are working for Mr. King,” he clarified.
“I had a special assignment,” Doug said. Marz dumped him hard back into his seat. He glared at her and went on. “Once you got the artifact, I had to make sure we lost star-drive before we could get back to the hyperspace port.”
“What? But…why not wait for us to deliver the thing?”
“He thought there was too much chance of something going wrong. Someone like him showing up, for a start.” He nodded at Ki-tae. “Or that you’d double-cross him and sell it to someone else. Or the authorities at the hyperspace port might confiscate it. Or a hundred other things. So he’s coming to collect it and pay us off out here.”
“Pay us off?” Beau said, incredulous. “You honestly are stupid enough to think that he’s going to come out here and pay us?” He banged a fist on the table again, because he had to channel the urge to plant said fist right in Doug’s face. “He’s coming to kill us. He doesn’t want anyone else to know he’s got it. He’ll kill us all, and he won’t spare you because you were dumb enough to work for him.”
“No…he told me himself, nobody will be hurt. He’ll pay us and let us go. He swore.”
“Are you seriously that stupid…”
“Desperation makes a man stupid,” Ki-tae said. “Desperation over debts, for example.” He turned to Beau. “I almost tried to recruit him instead of Mr. Devlin. But frankly, I couldn’t obtain a big enough informant fee from the Institute to cover what he owes. Gambling debts. I suspect if I investigated who currently holds those debts, I’d find Ronnie King at the end of that trail.”
“And your investigation didn’t find out he was working against us?” Marz asked.
“That was over a year ago. He probably wasn’t then.”
“He approached me right after you took the job,” Doug said. “I…didn’t have a choice. All that money…The chance of being free and clear wasn’t something I could pass up. But, I swear, he won’t kill us.”
“He can’t,” Devlin said. “He can’t kill Park. Park’s a cop!”
Beau put his head in his hands for a moment, despairing of the idiocy level around here. “I swear, next trip out, I have to employ smarter people.” If there ever was a next trip. “As far as anyone else knows, Park died in his crashed ship. They’ll probably go back and put his body in…” He trailed off as his still fuzzy brain managed to spark an idea. “Fuck…you sabotaged his ship, didn’t you?”
“What? No,” Doug said, but he looked damn shifty to Beau when he did so.
“You got access to it on the hyperspace transport, and you planted another of your EMP bombs.” He looked at Ki-tae. “Would that make sense with the way your ship went down?”
“Yes, and I already thought of that myself,” Ki-tae said. “When I read the logs of the engine failure here—a sudden massive computer failure, which cascaded through all the systems. The same as on my ship.”
Beau surged to his feet, toward Doug, fists clenched, wanting to smash the bastard right in the teeth. “Yeah, that stroll out of the airlock is sounding more like a good idea all the time.” But a wash of dizziness made him drop into his seat even as Doug tried to cringe away from him and Ki-tae rose and put out a restraining arm. Beau calmed himself with a couple of deep breaths.
“Okay, whatever; so however it happened, Park’s already dead anyway, so far as anyone knows.” The thought made him shiver. “As for the rest of us, we flew off into the badlands and never came back. That includes you, Doug. You’re a loose end King can’t leave flapping about. We all are.” He looked around, though he was looking at only Ki-tae, Marz, and Reynolds. The ones who understood the significance of the artifact. “You all know that there isn’t a collector in the galaxy who wouldn’t kill every one of us to get hold of that thing.” They nodded, sobered. “When will he get here?” Beau asked Doug.
“It’s in your interests to tell us,” Ki-tae said. “Beau is quite right. King is coming here to kill us. If you help us…”
“He’s about seven hours away,” Doug said. “I kind of panicked and set off the device early. I heard Park talking about wanting to destroy the artifact. I couldn’t risk that happening.” Beau exchanged a glance and a wince with Ki-tae. Doug had been eavesdropping on them in the sickbay. Ugh.
“What would he do if he got here and we had destroyed it?” Devlin asked. “Maybe he’d let us go.”
“And maybe pickles might fly,” Beau said.
Reynolds leaned across the table. “That’s pigs, Beau. Not pickles.”
“Yeah, whatever. A selection of comestibles of your choice might grow wings and fly. It’s as likely as King coming here and finding we smashed it, then not killing us all out of spite. Okay,” he said, turning again to Marz, Reynolds, and Ki-tae. The smart people in the room. “Now what? Is the engine repairable?”
“Not without parts we don’t have,” Marz said.
“Then I guess this is it. King doesn’t get that device. I’d like to destroy it right now, but we’re going to need it as a bargaining chip. Right here on the Istrouma is where we make our stand.”