The Cypher
“Out here, there’s a whole long list of possible loyalties. The one that usually wins, if we’re being honest, is the one that pays.”
(Part 4 of the “Cypher Sigma” series)
Denver had escaped the murder scene undetected. She was still invisible, courtesy of the Trasp suit she and Kilty had acquired from an unexpected visitor to their ship. But she well knew the suit wasn’t perfect. Nor did it make her footfalls silent or the signals from the helmet undetectable. It was a calculated risk that had paid off in the short term, but spying on the very soldiers she was supposed to be helping had turned out to be a far more hazardous endeavor than she’d expected, and they still weren’t back to the ship yet. She had to find a way to get Shad Pozzer and Jahn Farq-Sen back aboard without the cartel tracing them directly there.
For Pozzer, she could see, it wasn’t going to be a problem. She’d had him double back after he’d walked out of the zero district. He sat for a drink and a plate of sumira while Denver walked a slow perimeter, making certain he’d somehow managed to walk away from the tavern without a tail. Farq-Sen, on the other hand, had not. The only question in her mind was how heavy-handed the Rexes intended to be. And considering what they’d just done to the two dead LSS starship commanders back in the tavern, Denver presumed they had no qualms about murdering any potential witnesses they perceived to be even loosely connected to whatever it was the LSS was pursuing out here.
A big, fine, deadly mess you’ve gotten yourself into, Captain Gennaro, Denver thought as she hustled to catch up with Major Farq-Sen. She was only just beginning to formulate a plan to get them all out of it.
“Shad,” she said, pinging the Lieutenant’s earset again. “Take your time and get back to the ship when you’re done eating. I’ll handle getting the Major back aboard. I’ll just need to talk to him. I need you to ping me through.”
Shad must have been eating, and, she could tell, the scare in the tavern had given him plenty of incentive to be cautious. Shad Pozzer’s response came in by text.
“He is not going to like that, Denver.”
“He’ll like it a hell of a lot more than whatever the cartel’s killers have in mind for him. So hurry up and connect me, and I’ll worry about the fallout if we get him off this cylinder alive, okay?”
“You’re going to have to explain all this, you know?” he wrote back. “I’m connecting you. He’ll think it’s me, coming from my earset.”
“Fine. Keep it on,” Denver replied.
A few seconds later, she heard a beep, a tone, and then breathing, Farq-Sen sounded like he must have been walking at a decent clip.
“Where are you, Jahn? This is Denver.”
“Gennaro? Why are you calling?”
“Because I have no intention of allowing you to drag cartel killers back to my ship. You do realize they’re following you, right?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I guess that means you don’t realize they’re following you. Great. Don’t stop walking. Get me your coordinates. I have an idea to get you out.”
“How do you know I’m being followed?” he asked.
“Because I heard the cartel bosses order the guys who killed the Baird’s commanders to find the guys who were watching them. I don’t think we want to find out what they have in mind for you when they do.”
“I find that highly doubtful on every count, Gennaro. Pozzer and I still have work to do here to track down Goff and Aerro.”
“No you don’t, Jahn. They’re plant food. I just told you. I watched it happen. I’ll explain everything, but we need to get you out first, and then we’re all going to have a talk. Whatever you’ve gotten us mixed up in is much more than you understand.”
There was a long pause as Denver could hear Farq-Sen breathing. She presumed he was having a good, long look around him trying to see if he was actually being tailed. She didn’t have a lot of faith that he’d know it if he was, not in a cylinder like Gamma-Penzies.
“What’s your angle?” he finally responded.
“Getting us off this cylinder alive. That’s my only angle here, Jahn, and for the time being, if I’m overreacting or totally wrong, the worst that can happen is you waste a little time on your way back to the ship.”
There was another long pause.
“What do you propose?”
“The district where I picked up the package—head that way and I’ll direct you when you get close. I’ll be able to see them following you in.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll talk about it when you get there, Jahn. Just don’t stop if anyone approaches you, okay? If someone comes up on you—anyone, no matter how innocent they look—don’t slow down. Keep moving no matter what.”
Denver had Andrew ping a guide path to Farq-Sen, who continued along that route toward the apothecary’s neighborhood. By the time he got there, Denver was waiting to observe. She saw the Major walk quickly into the area, and following him at a distance was one of the killers from the bar.
She waited a few minutes and circled the area, looking to see if she could locate the other man.
Jahn pinged her from the interior of the flat where she’d suited up about an hour before. She instructed him to lock the door and wait. His pursuer walked right through the narrow alley where Farq-Sen was holed up, ready with his sidearm if the cartel killer had any designs on adding a third LSS officer to his list of victims that day.
Fortunately, though, he continued through the residential causeway, seemingly missing the fact that the Major had stepped inside one of the abandoned homes that made up the dusty old neighborhood.
The second man appeared on the outskirts of the neighborhood. Denver realized she hadn’t thought it through all the way, as the first man was now doubling back on the alleyway where Farq-Sen was hiding, checking doors for an open one. He seemed to be a bit more cautious, looking over his shoulder at least considering the possibility that the hapless onlooker from the bar might not have been as hapless as they’d figured him to be. Farq-Sen seemed to have vanished into thin air. But now, as Denver watched, she realized that with those two canvassing the neighborhood, it was going to be nearly impossible, invisible or no, to open the door to that flat without it being a dead giveaway.
She looked around for something to knock over or throw, hoping that the noise would draw the pursuers for long enough to sneak back to the Major and slip inside the door. Luckily, as she was scanning the area, she noticed the apothecary vendor stepping away from his little hut in the middle of the nearby square. That was the break they needed.
Denver tucked in behind the counter, unzipped the front of her suit, and zipped one of the glass containers from under his counter into her suit, stepping back out quietly, careful not to make any noise with her footfalls.
She watched the two pursuers surveying the neighborhood, waiting till they were both out of the line of vision to the flat. Then Denver tossed the glass jar farther down the causeway, where it exploded onto the street. Both of the cartel gunmen turned toward the sound to investigate, and Denver doubled back and slipped into the flat, where Farq-Sen was waiting to open and close the door quickly and quietly.
Jahn Farq-Sen’s eyes grew wide, as he felt a presence rush in through what appeared to be an empty crack in the doorway, his hand clunking off something solid in front of him. Denver pushed her way through and turned, closing the door behind her quietly and disengaging the suit’s outer camouflage.
“Oh,” he said. “That explains a little.”
“No time for explanations, Jahn. We’ve got to squeeze you into this suit.”
He looked at her doubtfully as she shoved the helmet into his hands.
“It’s big on me,” she explained. “And it stretches.”
“What about you? Even if I get this thing on, you’ll still be stuck in here.”
“They’re not looking for me, Jahn. And we’ll figure that out later.”
“I could take these guys out.”
“We don’t want to start a fight with the Rexes we can’t win out here. Put that helmet on.”
He didn’t look happy about it, but the Major attempted to squeeze his head into the helmet.
“It’s tight.”
“I’ll hammer it on you if you don’t stop complaining and hurry up.”
He pressed the helmet down, finding it tight to his chin as Denver quickly unzipped the front of the suit.
“You’re full of surprises, Gennaro, I have to say.”
“We’ll talk about all that later.”
She kicked her feet out of the suit and handed it to him, quickly turning to the front window to get a look at the alleyway outside to make sure it was still clear.
“Fast, Jahn,” she insisted.
“It’s not that easy,” he replied, yanking on the pantlegs of the suit, struggling to get it up to his waist.
Denver helped him, arm by arm, then pushing his clothes inside as he zipped it. She helped him clip it to the bottom of the helmet, instructing him on how to engage the cloak.
“Okay, go,” Denver said. “Quiet feet. Slow and steady once you’re out.”
She opened the door and watched for any anomalies in the air, and after a second, she shut the door quietly again. Farq-Sen was out and headed back to the ship. Denver put her back to the door and sat.
Denver Gennaro waited quietly, debating whether to chance a walk from her hiding spot. Surely, they were eventually going to get traced back by the cylinder’s surveillance, given that it was all but certain that the Rexes had somebody watching the cameras at each port gate in the same way they had people watching each corner of the zero district. The question was how long these killers would wait before getting frustrated and trying to trace Farq-Sen back to his ship. An hour or two tops, Denver figured.
She knew one of the killers had to be watching the street. For the moment, she just sat, pondering how each choice she’d made since they’d decided to pick up Santos had brought them deeper and deeper into a mess that all could’ve been avoided.
Kilty pinged. “Jahn’s back. They both are, he and Pozzer. So where are you, Denver?”
“Ask Andrew,” Denver whispered back. “He knows exactly where to find me.”
Denver figured maybe fifteen minutes had passed. Time was ticking away on them.
“I’ll get you out,” Kilty said. “Hang tight right there until you get word from Andrew.”
“Stay in the ship, K. I’ll take care of it.”
“Uhm, no, Captain. I’m not leaving you out there. If they were onto the Major, it won’t be long before the cartel’s onto the ship.”
“I’m aware, Kilty.”
“Yup. Stay put.”
“Shit,” Denver replied, exhaling as Kilty cut out.
That was the cost for stepping into trouble like that. Now her sister was going to step into it to try and extricate her. And who knows what Kilty had in mind?
It seemed to take forever. Denver heard heavy footsteps outside the door a few times over the minutes she was waiting. It couldn’t have been anyone but the Rexes’ guys, not in an abandoned neighborhood like that.
About fifteen minutes had passed before she heard a girl’s voice laughing and shouting.
“No, stop!” she heard what she thought was Kilty’s voice through the door. “Come back here you little ...”
She listened for a few more seconds. Laughter again, followed by, “Santos! No. Come back!”
Denver got up on one knee, peeking out the front window to see Kilty dressed up like a proper civilian, barefoot, spring dress, her hair in a wrap—cute in a way she and Kilty rarely got to be—and she was chasing the cat past the front street like a child playing with her pet.
“No, don’t go up that way!” she heard another voice shout to her. “You don’t have shoes on, girl. Come back.”
It was the apothecary.
Kilty was shouting back and forth with him as he tried to explain that there was broken glass all over the street that way.
“But Santos. I have to catch Santos.”
“Are you ready to move, Captain?” Andrew’s voice pinged into Denver’s earpiece.
“Can you help me?” Kilty asked someone in the distance loudly.
“Say when,” Denver responded to Andrew. “Tell me she didn’t let that cat loose on this cylinder.”
“I could tell you that,” Andrew replied. “But I would be lying.”
Denver shook her head.
“On my mark, you may step out and head left. Quickly, but do not run.”
“Understood.”
Kilty’s antics with the cat proved just enough of a distraction for Denver to exit the alley unseen. Andrew was watching from the main causeway that led back to the ship.
“The cat, Andrew? Really?”
“It seemed like the best option. And here you are.”
“Keep eyes on her. If anything happens—”
“Nothing will happen unless you insist on lingering here any further, Captain.”
Denver scowled at their android and began to walk back to the ship at a clip. She didn’t like it, Kilty out there exposed like that. But mostly, the Rexes left regular people alone, especially kids, and Kilty was certainly playing one convincingly out there, chasing that cat around.
By the time they were halfway back to the ship, Andrew pinged her with the good word. He and Kilty were clear and on the way back to the ship with Santos.
She waited for them at the gate, half an eye down each end of the walkway leading out to the ship, a plasma rifle tucked behind the inner airlock door, just out of view but not out of reach.
Before long, Kilty and Andrew came walking back as casually as anything, as though out for a stroll, and just in front of them, his head and tail high as he jogged along, was Santos.
“Mama Pilot,” he said, embarking as though he knew just where to go.
Kilty saw the shock on Denver’s face as Santos scurried past Denver into the ship. “Mama Pilot,” Kilty echoed as she stepped inside. “How about we shove off before they figure out what happened back there?”
“Get dressed for flight,” Denver said. “Then strap in.”
“You’re welcome,” Kilty replied, waving to Denver as she stepped toward the midship.
“He follows commands pinged to his helmet,” Andrew explained as he stepped inside. “Surprisingly well.”
“At least someone does,” she replied, then tilting her head at Andrew. “Present company excluded, of course. Please seal that hatch and get the ship ready for flight.”
Denver had hardly made it up through the midship before she heard footsteps behind her.
“Strap in for flight,” she stated, not even turning to see which one of the LSS officers it was.
“I have orders,” she heard Farq-Sen’s voice as he followed fast behind her.
“Well, I have orders to bring myself and my sister home alive, Jahn, so for now, as far as I’m concerned, the LSS can stuff it. We’re burned here.”
“We have a mission.”
“Not here we don’t,” Denver replied, turning and slipping into the captain’s chair. “Andrew?”
“Rear hatch is closed and locked. Inner doors locked and secured through three.”
“Right. Let me know as soon as Kilty has the cat back in his box.”
“Hey!” Farq-Sen said, trying to claw back Denver’s attention from her pre-flight flow sheet. “I need an explanation here, Gennaro.”
She turned her head. “Sit and strap in unless you want to ride the aft wall, Jahn. We can talk when we’re out of here.”
He huffed and sat beside Denver.
“Clear in the midship,” Kilty’s voice came over Denver’s panel. “The GGs are in too.”
“Clear to push off,” Andrew’s voice followed immediately after.
Denver took the controls, and the rear magnet clamped-off with a pop, followed by the thrusters pushing them loose from the cylinder.
“Gennaro,” Farq-Sen said as she was slowly engaging the sublight engines.
His tone of voice was decidedly different, like something was bothering him. Denver got a sudden feeling she couldn’t explain. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
“What the hell is that?” the Major asked, his head lunging forward in the flight seat, his whole body contorting to port.
“Something’s out there,” he stated. “Hard to port.”
Denver looked at her instruments, and there seemed to be an area of interference—some sort of anomaly.
“Hard to port,” Jahn repeated.
Denver couldn’t see it, but something in her gut told her she wasn’t going to like it if she turned the ship that way.
Still, she cut a strong arc to port and rolled, bringing the area into the center of the front screen.
“Holy hell, that thing’s bigger than we thought,” Farq-Sen exclaimed. “It’s bigger than a colony ship.”
It was their mystery ship—the one that had jumped in to the Byard, or at least it looked just like it, only bigger and closer than Denver had ever wanted that behemoth to be.
“Circle. Circle. Let’s get some images,” Farq-Sen said
“Yeah. Not today, Jahn,” Denver replied, turning the ship away and engaging the FTL. “You’ll thank me later, I’m sure.”
It wasn’t as though they had a destination. Denver doubted she knew the Gammas nearly as well as the GG Rangers in her midship, but she knew they couldn’t stay at Penzies. Jahn Farq-Sen didn’t utter a word for nearly twenty minutes after she engaged the FTL. He wasn’t shouting orders at her or yelling, so she figured the situation could be worse. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized it could’ve been a lot worse. They were all alive, and they were putting distance between themselves and that dreadnaught from hell, or whatever that ship was. Not to mention the cartel. It was not the type of situation Denver ever wanted to get into with the Rexes. Ideally, the best one could do was to escape their interest. The real question at that point was how much interest the cartel would have in tracking down who Jahn was and finding her ship. And Denver couldn’t begin to guess that until she knew what the Major was after.
“I’d like to drop out near Delta-Fina,” she announced to the Major. “It’s close enough that it’s a short jump but it’s not obvious from our departure vector.”
“Why would you drop out there, Gennaro?”
“The way I see it, that ship is either following us somehow I can’t figure, or they were onto those two officers from the Byard. Otherwise, how would it show up in both places? If they come after us again, we’ll know.”
Farq-Sen let out a huff that was half laugh, half scoff.
“Something funny about that?”
“You’re pretty quick on your feet, Gennaro,” he replied. “Not much for following orders so far, but I suppose that’s to be expected somewhat.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He looked over at her and shrugged. “You’re a civilian. Young. Captain of your own ship. You do your own thing, I guess.”
She frowned. It wasn’t exactly the cutting insult she’d been expecting. It was about the most charitable interpretation of her actions she could’ve expected out of him at that juncture.
“We don’t really understand one another yet, Jahn,” she replied. “Maybe we won’t get to. I’ve got different priorities maybe, but I’m still accountable to the people and things that matter.”
“All right.”
“Delta-Fina. I’ll plot a secondary course.”
“You’re still the captain, and this is still your vessel,” Farq-Sen replied.
Jahn called the GG Rangers into the midship, where he, Denver, and Kilty were waiting for them. The ship was gravity free in mid-flight, and there were only four spots at the table, so Kilty tucked herself into the space across the table from her sister, between Ellis Ames and the wall. Denver could see something was a little odd with those two—a weird energy, but nothing she could put her finger on initially. It had been about a half hour since they’d jumped out of Gamma-Penzies and five minutes since her course change to Delta-Fina. They had some time to get things straight.
“So that didn’t go as well as it could’ve,” Farq-Sen started. “I’m not even sure what happened back there, but we still need to catch up with Goff and Aerro somehow ... or at least their co-conspirators if Captain Gennaro’s account is correct that they’re dead.”
“They’re dead, Jahn. I saw it with my own eyes. I was in the tavern.”
“Yeah, the suit,” he replied.
“Yeah, the suit,” Pozzer echoed. “What the hell, Denver? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“It’s complicated, Shad. I guess the moment never felt right, and you thought we might have been working for the Trasp. What better way to prove that correct than pulling out our top-secret frontline gear from the Protectorate, right?”
“So you had that suit the whole time?” Ellis asked, his voice seemingly somewhat sluggish to Denver’s ears. “Does that mean that ... Hey wait? Was that ... back in Alpha-Richard, was that you at the stairs—how we got away?”
“That was Andrew,” Denver replied. “I sent him out after you. And that was why I locked you in the closet, Shad. I figured you two would be off the ship in an hour, safe and sound. No reason to reveal secrets at that point. I just wanted to rescue Ames and Kilty and part ways.”
“How did you come by that tech, Captain Gennaro, if you’re not working for the Trasp?” Farq-Sen asked. “Not that I don’t believe you at this point. I don’t think you’re an agent. It’s just improbable.”
“We came by it by chance, Jahn. We picked up a kid who’d pulled the suit off a dead Trasp moon ranger at Mingo as he was running away from the city. Ironically enough, we met him in the Gammas—Gamma-Merced, actually.”
“There’s a Merced in the Gammas?” Farq-Sen asked. “I thought it was just the Alpha.”
“Sure,” Pozzer replied. “A small outpost. Planet, not a moon, but small. Dusty, I hear. I’ve never been myself.”
“I find that odd, by the way, but that’s a deeper conversation,” Denver said.
“You find what odd?” the Major asked.
“The fact that you barely know your way around out here and the LSS sent you of all people to infiltrate the Rexes. That’s odd.”
“We can talk about that,” Farq-Sen replied. “But, please, the suit?”
“Well, anyway, the kid used it to sneak onto our ship to steal our cargo, and we caught him in the act. He had a pretty tough story and we ended up giving him a lift back to the Kappas. I bought the suit off him for two thousand LCr. I figured the best-case scenario if I told Shad about the suit was it’d get confiscated and I’d be out two grand. Little did I know the LSS could take the whole ship and everyone in it.”
“So wait. The whole reason you were being weird with us back at Alpha-Richard was that you didn’t want us to confiscate your suit?” Shad Pozzer asked.
“It wasn’t just that, Shad,” Denver said. “It wasn’t like you two made the greatest first impression on us. You didn’t even believe us about the cat. So we were supposed to just trust that you’d believe us that we weren’t spies?”
“I suppose that’s fair.”
“The kitty,” Kilty said, grinning.
“What’s wrong with you?” Denver asked, glaring at Kilty. “Look at me, K.”
Kilty grinned and started laughing. Denver slapped her hand on the table and pointed to her sister, commanding her with a gesture to look her in the eyes. Instead, Kilty looked over at Ellis Ames, who returned a goofy look, and instantly both of them fell out laughing uncontrollably while Farq-Sen, Denver, and Shad Pozzer all looked at each other in disbelief.
“Are you two drunk, Kilty?” Denver asked. “What did you do?”
They were still laughing too hard to answer.
“I was sitting with them the whole transit out,” Pozzer said, shaking his head. “They seemed okay when Kilty came in.”
“Mama Pilot,” Kilty managed to utter between laughs.
Ellis Ames looked like he was about to suffocate.
“Kilty!” Denver stated.
“Mama Kitty,” Ames said, and both of them could hardly breathe.
Andrew was magnetically locked to the floor in the rear corridor looking in. “They appear to be intoxicated.”
He disengaged and floated over, grabbing Kilty by the chin and struggling to hold her still while he shined a light in her eyes.
“Not drunk,” Andrew said, waving a finger in front of her eyes, one at a time. “What did you ingest, Miss Kilty?”
“Chocolate,” she replied grinning.
“Chocolate? What Chocolate, Kilty?” Denver asked.
“The one from Penzies.”
“From Penzies?” Denver replied, shaking her head. “You mean the box I brought back from the apothecary? There was chocolate in there? Andrew, what was in there? What did you two order?”
Shad shook his head and looked at Farq-Sen.
“It was a dummy box,” Jahn replied. “Just a pretext. You idiots weren’t supposed to eat it.”
“It was good,” Kilty replied still giggling. “Expensive chocolate.”
“Doubtless with some psychoactive affects,” Andrew replied.
“Why would you eat that?” Denver asked.
“Why not?” Ames answered.
“Andrew what was in it?”
“The bill of lading reads, ‘edible product, sp. Nightwalker Gr. 2500 ppm.’”
“What the hell does that mean?” Denver asked.
“Uncertain,” the android replied.
“Ames, why did you two eat that?” Pozzer asked his young officer.
“Like the Major said, we weren’t even going to deliver it. Why throw it out?”
“It’s really good chocolate,” Kilty added. “Seemed like a waste.”
“That box wasn’t candy, Kilty,” Denver added. “You know that, right? I got it from an apothecary.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You do know what an apothecary is?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Ames?”
“Sure. We know.”
“Kilty, what’s an apothecary?” Denver asked, looking directly at her grinning sister and insisting on an answer with a glare.
“It’s a really ... uhm. A really expensive chocolate place.”
Pozzer exhaled. Denver shook her head. Farq-Sen put his in his hands.
“Andrew, see if you can identify whatever the hell it was they took, and how much of it,” Denver said. “And watch her.”
“Why are you guys so angry?” Ellis Ames asked, a slight grin on his face as he looked over at his superior officers.
“And you watch him,” Major Farq-Sen ordered Pozzer, pointing at Ames.
“This is some fine operation,” Denver grumbled. “The Lettered Systems are sure safe in our hands. About sums up the day, I’d say.”
“I want to let the cat out, Denver,” Kilty said. “He’s funny. I like Santos.”
“I bet he thinks you’re funny too,” Denver answered, looking over at Andrew and nodding. “Why not? Go ahead and let the damn cat out.”
Denver was up on the flight deck by herself when Jahn approached, he had food, enough for two, and as he strapped himself down beside her in the FO’s chair, he extended a thermal bag.
“I noticed you didn’t eat,” he said. “Understandable considering how crazy this day’s been, but you should eat. You’ve been underway a lot.”
“It’s my job,” she replied, but she took the food. “Thanks, Jahn.”
“So, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and you can tell me if I’m wrong in my thinking, but I imagine it must’ve been about equal parts frustrating and confusing how everything went down back at Penzies. Not ideal.”
Denver laughed. “No. Not ideal. That’s a fact.”
“First thing I want to tell you is thank you, Gennaro. The proper truth is that you saved my ass back there, I’m pretty sure. I wasn’t so sure at the time, but that’s one of the surest ways to end up dead is to not understand what the hell’s going on. I’m grateful one of us did.”
“Don’t you worry about that, Jahn Farq-Sen. I have my moments when I’m the last to know. For instance, today I learned that my kid sister has a gaping hole in her vocabulary, which I’m hopeful she’s never going to forget if she can still remember today come tomorrow.”
Farq-Sen laughed. “They’re going to be fine according to your android.”
“So I heard. At least from the substance anyway. Her captain may be another matter.”
Farq-Sen grinned before changing the subject. “Another thing I imagine you’re wondering about is how I got sent out here on this mission, Ms. Gennaro. It’s vital, by the way. We can’t abandon it. But we’re definitely going to need to rethink things.”
“A little more subtlety would be in order, Major. That would be my humble suggestion.”
“Yeah,” he stroked his chin. “In the moment, Command didn’t think we had that luxury, and we’re trained to follow orders exactly on most things.”
“Don’t you mean everything?”
“Yes, but there’s a ‘but’ in there sometimes—or at least a ‘however.’”
“What are you trying to tell me, Jahn?”
“I’d like to explain.”
“I’ll listen.”
“I imagine you must think we’re pretty incompetent? Or at least that I am, right?”
Denver shrugged. “It’s not my place to say.”
Farq-Sen laughed. “In politics that’s called a non-denial denial, I think. And, yes, Captain, I’m certain it’s exactly your place to say, seeing as we’re ordering you to fly us into danger. And it’s fair. Based on that sample size, I’d think I was as incompetent as hell too.”
“Yeah, I just don’t get it. You’re not the only one thinking about what happened back there, Jahn, and honestly, I don’t understand what you thought was going to happen.”
“I’m not incompetent, and I’m very well trained, Gennaro. I just wasn’t trained for covert recon in our own territory. That’s the issue. We actually don’t have a lot of people like that. Ideally, we’d have pulled someone from the area. The problem was, they didn’t have anybody on the Ovidio-M, and we needed to get somebody out there immediately in the middle of the chaos of the Richard infiltration, because we had some extremely troubling intelligence that was time sensitive, so in the absence of any good options, we accepted a bad one.”
“That is not a great way to operate, Jahn.”
“No, it is not. But we didn’t make wrong calls on everything.”
“No?”
“No. I think Pozzer was a good decision, considering his specific knowledge of Goff and Aerro, and he suggested we use you. That was at least partly the right decision.”
“Partly?”
“Yeah, you want to know the part that went really wrong, from my perspective as a commanding officer, that is?”
“Sure, Jahn, I would just love to know what you think.”
He paused, noticing that Denver hadn’t even touched her food yet, so he gestured, smiling—the first genuine smile she’d seen from the guy perhaps since he’d come aboard.
“It’s going to get cold,” he said.
Denver shrugged and opened the thermal bag, poking around and picking out a pouch.
“I should’ve told you everything, because the way I see it—in hindsight—my guess is that you would not have advised us to walk into that tavern like that.”
“Your guess is correct.”
“I’d like to think I’d have listened,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “It might be slightly better than fifty-fifty that’s true.”
Denver raised her eyebrows and nodded, her mouth full.
“What are you trained for, Jahn?” she managed to ask without spitting out her food.
“I’m an intel operative. Covert.”
“A spy? Really?”
“Yes. Really. That’s why they asked me to go to Penzies.”
“But I thought you said ...?”
“Not in the Letters. In the Protectorate. I lived for five years out there—Carhall, Heinan, even made it to the Ariels.”
“No shit?”
“I’m not supposed to tell anybody that, but I figure if you wanted me dead, you could’ve made it happen back on Penzies.”
“Maybe,” Denver replied. “You are growing on me a little, Jahn, I have to say.”
“We were after the Byard’s commander because there was a piece of comms equipment the LSS was testing. Top secret. I’m not supposed to tell you—this is the but-slash-however part of the following orders thing, by the way.”
“I figured that may be the case.”
“Yeah. Sure is. But you learn to use that but-slash-however veto pretty selectively when you’re undercover, a little here, a little there, and hopefully you make it back alive. Usually, choosing the right times to use it correlates pretty well with getting back alive.”
“I could maybe see that.”
“Allegedly it was random, but nothing that’s random is actually random in my experience.”
“You lost me, Jahn,” Denver replied continuing to eat.
“There were twenty comms portals in this network they were testing, ten ports and ten ships, all across the Letters. One of them was on the Byard. In our briefing—mind you we didn’t get the full story because it was sourced intelligence—but we were told the commander and possibly the LC were exploring ways to profit from the system somehow. We weren’t sure how exactly, but it became extremely suspicious when their ship was hit at its drop point—and with those two allegedly escaping minutes before their ship got destroyed. Command thought the Rexes might be involved, and that original source had mentioned something about Penzies and that cartel chapter out there—very senior lieutenants of Mirsong Rex, that tavern, et cetera. All that. And if I had told you this?”
“I’d have told you that you shouldn’t go walking into that bar, sticking out like an Athosian in the Sigmas.”
“I figured as much. You and Kilty have a lot of experience out here moving around, blending in. I should’ve taken advantage of that. It’s an asset.”
“Is that why you’re telling me all this?”
“Partly. The other part is to try and explain, to maybe make amends. We do have to go forward, and we do have to trust each other. I hope it’ll be easier to do that if we understand each other. This is me taking a first step.”
“What’s the gear?” Denver asked, turning toward Jahn suddenly.
“The gear?”
“Yeah, the top-secret comms gear. I mean, what is it? Why is it important?”
“It’s a ... well ... honestly, Gennaro, I don’t know what the hell it is or how it works. Some kind of quantum cypher that theoretically encrypts and decrypts based on quantum entanglement and a bunch of other theoretical physics stuff that I never had any knack for.”
“What’s the point of it, though?”
“To talk to each other. The LSS probably doesn’t want people knowing how fragmented everything is, but it is. We say the Letters like it’s a coherent entity, but that was our problem to begin with anyway. You’re from what, the Kappas? And that’s about like thirty or so distinct different cultures that mostly understand each other, I think. Maybe.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Sometimes not so much.”
“Hell. Pozzer and Ames are from the Gammas, and they looked like total foreigners on Gamma-Penzies.”
Denver nodded.
“We don’t think the same,” Farq-Sen continued. “We don’t want the same things. We don’t act like the same people. And the LSS is supposed to be a coherent fighting force? The cypher was designed to at least get us talking on the same frequency at the same time. Even that? There are people out there willing to kill and die to keep that from happening. That’s what that whole situation on Penzies was all about.”
“A common cypher?” Denver asked. “We don’t have something like that already?”
“I think it’s an uncommon one.”
“Fitting that we’re chasing it then, I suppose,” Denver replied.
“Pozzer knows most of that—what I told you. Ames doesn’t know anything. What you choose to tell Kilty, I guess I’ll leave in your discretion, which is to say ...”
“Yeah, I’ll be discrete, Jahn. At least until she figures out ... well, how to act like an adult maybe.”
“Now imagine you got a whole fleet full of them,” Jahn said, shaking his head. “Kids.”
“Yeah, it’s a wonder, isn’t it?”
“What? How we ever get out of port with a bunch of kids flying the ship?”
Denver looked back over toward Farq-Sen again. “Oh. That too. I was more wondering when that stopped being me—us, you know? Life was much more fun when I could afford to get in trouble. And then I couldn’t anymore. Or maybe I just choose not to. I don’t know.”
By the middle of the following morning, the ship had dropped out just outside the Delta-Fina system. Denver and Farq-Sen had discussed the likelihood that the monster ship was after them and decided it was much more likely that it had been tracking the Byard’s commanders somehow. Still, the possibility was so threatening, they decided to sit for a while and make sure they weren’t being tailed. They couldn’t figure how, but then again, they couldn’t figure the size or shape of that mystery ship either. A lot of strange occurrences had unfolded in the Letters in the preceding months. It was impossible to guess what might be connected to what.
Ames was awake again around lunchtime, and though he seemed a bit more subdued than normal, he insisted he was all right, and he insisted that it was an honest mistake, neither his nor Kilty’s idea, just a conversation that started innocently enough and ended innocently enough, with what they thought was the two of them sharing part of an ordinary albeit expensive chocolate bar.
Kilty had a tougher go of it through the night. The compound had hallucinogenic properties derived from natural fungal origins, which were used in moderation in certain religious rites among the Tressians and some of the gnostic groups in the Alphas. Kilty and Ames had each taken what amounted to a triple dose, which would’ve been a modest helping if it had just been chocolate. The effects kept Kilty up into the early morning seeing shadows and hearing voices. Then she began crying non-stop—to the extent that Andrew had Denver come in and sit with her until Kilty finally fell asleep around daybreak. And shortly after Ames got up, Kilty appeared too, very sullen-looking, with a dark bearing on her face—a stark contrast to the uncontrollable laughter of the previous day.
Denver, Jahn, and Pozzer had discussed the incident that morning over breakfast while Ellis and Kilty were still sleeping. None of them saw any point in making a big deal out of it. Denver and Jahn had largely agreed that the whole trip to Penzies had been one error after another, every last one of them. The best thing to do was to learn from their mistakes and figure out how to press on, not blame the youngest of them because it was the easiest thing to do.
The plan was to sit for a day in Delta-Fina monitoring the chatter within the system. If there was any sign of that monster ship, everything would have to change. Denver had a strategy for that contingency that she’d shared with Major Farq-Sen, but they all hoped they wouldn’t have to employ it. If all was clear by then, she and Jahn had come to another agreement. They were going to treat the outer Letters like the outer Letters, not a war zone. Things got done differently out here, even from the Alphas and the Betas, and though Denver didn’t have all the answers herself, she had an idea who might.
Mid-afternoon the following day, with no sign of the mega-ship, Denver set a course for Kappa-Nira. It was a big system far enough out from Alpha-Richard that the news of the Trasp infiltration would be hitting hard, but the Kappas were far enough away from the war that it was doubtful there was any direct threat—at least from the Trasp or Etterans anyway. And, as Denver had explained to Jahn, the person they really needed to talk to was on Kappa-Nira, an old family friend, Massimos Colby.
Uncle Colby, as Denver and Kilty knew him, was a mentor to their father when he came into the business. He’d sold his own shipping company at a relatively young age, was retired for several years, and was talked back into returning to work by the sisters’ father. Both girls had spent time as crew on Massimos Colby’s ship as they were learning the ropes, and no driver they knew, including their father, knew the outer Letters better than him.
It was welcome news to Kilty, who was happy to be stepping off ship and seeing family—as both sisters considered the Colbys. And for Ames and Pozzer, it would be a first trip to Nira, one of the great cities of the Lettered Systems. Jahn-Farq Sen was satisfied that it might be a positive step forward. Knowledge of the environment was the key, and Gamma-Penzies had taught him that he didn’t have it. Denver assured him that Colby would.
Kappa-Nira had a reputation in the Letters as an inner Battery world in an outer Letters system. It wasn’t Gracia, Io, or Moses-Mesui, but Nira, especially the city center where the Colbys lived, was a spectacle of modern spacefaring civilization.
The focal point of the city was its connection to the stars—a space tower that was unique in the entire Battery. Not only was the monumental Nira Space Tower the beating heart of the magnificent metropolis below, but the space port at the top of the tower was nearly as vast and impressive in the distance it extended into space, rising almost an equal distance above the atmosphere once it reached space, as it did from Nira’s city center to her cosmic boundary. And that bustling spaceport atop the Nira Tower was one of the busiest in all of the Lettered Systems.
Denver left Andrew with the ship, but Kilty didn’t want to leave Santos, so she carried him in a bag tucked under her arm with his head sticking forward as they walked through the terminal. Even the spaceport itself seemed a city to the Rangers and Jahn. To the girls, it was familiar territory as they led the way from the gate to the passenger elevator cars. They got a last look at the city below before boarding, but Kappa-Nira’s tower was built more for function than spectacle, with a final look at the silver city spreading out at the base of the space tower from above before stepping into the hour-long tube ride down.
At the base, it was still another fifteen-minute walk out of the tower complex along moving causeways before they finally got a look at the city.
And though all three of the soldiers had visited cities before, none matched the spectacle that downtown Nira was. From that distance, the space tower seemed more like a feature of the landscape than a structure—as though the planet had an outgrowth that extended up forever into the night sky. The buildings around it, though, were also towering edifices, with cool city lights reflecting and refracting off their sparkling glass. There were trams, cabs, and vehicles of all sizes hovering over the magnetic streets. And the bustle along the causeways kept everyone’s head moving in all directions as they negotiated the busy streets of downtown Nira.
The Colbys lived in a posh flat in the Chirman District with enough elevation to have an enviable view of the city in two directions. Massimos had done well enough through his own company to live almost anywhere in the Battery, and he liked the outer Letters, especially Nira. He claimed there was as much culture in Nira as in Hellenia or even Dreeson’s System, and Massimos Colby had traveled enough to know. “You just have to wait a little longer for it to get to you,” he would retort whenever anyone mentioned all the new music and art and trends that always took time to get out to Nira from the inner Battery.
The girls had to stop to catch their breath halfway to the building. Gravity again. Real gravity. Nira wasn’t a lightweight like some outer moon, and the girls had been out for a good stretch even before they’d met the GG Rangers at Alpha-Richard. None of the soldiers minded the break in the walk. It was a chance to take in the city and catch their breath as well.
They were greeted at the ground floor by the building’s housebot, a David, who’d been told to expect the girls and remembered their faces from their many prior visits.
“Massimos and Clara are expecting you, Ms. Gennaro,” the bot said to Denver, who entered first. “Though they did not mention anything about your friends.”
“Nor will you, David,” Denver replied. “We’ll see ourselves up.”
“Yes, certainly. Lift four to the left,” he replied, opening the door to the elevator and gesturing to the party to proceed.
“You said this guy’s a currier?” Pozzer asked Denver, looking around the luxurious building with wide eyes.
“He owned his own fleet,” Denver explained as they stepped inside the elevator car.
“A large fleet,” Kilty added. “Plus they invested wisely, the Colbys. He always talked about it. ‘Be smart with your money, Kilty. Always put something away.’”
Denver grinned. She’d gotten the same speech, word for word, just like all the Colbys’ own children had.
The car opened to the Colbys’ great room where Massimos and Clara Colby were awaiting their arriving guests. It was immediately clear to the soldiers how much the Colbys cared for the Gennaro girls. The embraces were deep, long, and sincere, before finally, both the hosts turned to greet the girls’ companions.
“Three handsome young men,” Clara Colby said, smiling at the soldiers. “What have you two been up to out there?”
“Mama Kitty, hello!” Santos piped up from under Kilty’s arm. “I’m Santos.”
“Somebody doesn’t like it when he’s not the center of attention,” Kilty said, petting Santos while the Colbys greeted the three LSS officers.
“Nice little companion,” Massimos stated, smiling and reaching out a hand toward Santos. “Yours?”
“Cargo,” Denver explained. “Long story. One of many.”
“I can’t wait to hear,” Mr. Colby replied. “Dinner first, though. You’ve all been out for a bit. A good meal is always the first order of business.”
To the LSS soldiers, the meal felt like being welcomed into a family’s home, and it exposed a new facet of the sisters’ lives they hadn’t been privy to. It was self-evident that Denver and Kilty cared for each other. Until they saw how the Colbys treated the girls, though, it hadn’t been self-evident just how loved they were by the people who’d brought them up in the ports where their lives had unfolded.
After dinner, Mrs. Colby took Kilty and the GG Rangers shopping for more fitting civilian clothes to help them blend in while in those outer Letters ports. Massimos took Denver and Major Jahn Farq-Sen out onto the outer balcony of the Colbys’ 147th-floor penthouse overlooking the university district and the tower. It was certainly the most spectacular place Jahn had ever gotten an intel briefing before, and that was how Denver had framed it—that Massimos knew the Letters like nobody else, not just the ports and the space between them, but he also had a sense for the character of the colonies, the people in them, the homes, the neighborhoods, and the plans for the future of the territories. It was an opportunity to put into action the claim he’d made to Denver—that he was open to breaking protocol if it meant using all of the resources available to him. After all, he’d have done the same in Trasp territory—develop relationships with sources. Why not do the same here at home?
Massimos sat and listened as Denver explained the situation in a general sense: something secret and important had been stolen by Ellis and Shad’s commanding officers—something valuable. That pair of traitors had tried to connect with the Rexes in Gamma-Penzies and ended up dead. Now they needed to know how to get hold of the missing object before the Rexes did. That was how the conversation began.
“Penzies?” Massimos Colby said after Denver had finished outlining their problem. “Any chance you left something out of that story, young Captain?”
She shrugged. “I left some details out. Sure. Why do you ask?”
“Stay right here,” he said, stepping back inside.
As he did, Santos stepped out onto the balcony through the cracked-open door Massimos left behind him.
“Pretty. Pretty. Fly,” Santos said, which Denver thought was simply the cat confusing the balcony’s height with the flight deck of a great, stationary vehicle. “I like to fly.”
Then Santos leapt from the floor onto the railing, eliciting a gasp from Denver and Jahn, whose hands reflexively rose to shoulder level before he realized there was nothing he could do, until a moment later, they both inhaled a sigh of relief as they realized there was nothing to do. Santos was sauntering along the railing on all fours looking down over the edge to the street below without the faintest hint of fear for the danger a human would, walking along a surface the width of a fist, hundreds of meters off the ground.
“A little daredevil,” Massimos said as he returned, grinning.
“Santos,” Denver stated calmly as he strode along the railing. “Would you come down from there, please?”
“Mama Pilot, fly, fly.”
“I know. You like to fly, but it makes me very nervous with you up there like that.”
The cat looked over at her and then over the edge of the railing, seeming to consider the situation for a moment.
“Mama Pilot, okay.”
“Smart little guy, isn’t he?” Massimos noted.
“I’m a cat.”
“A very smart cat.”
Santos jumped up onto Denver’s lap. “Yes. Smart cat. Okay.”
Massimos placed a small holo-board on the railing where Santos had just been walking and opened a floatscreen.
“This came over the N-hub a few hours ago. Might be hard to watch.”
Denver and Jahn watched as scenes unfolded from Penzies, mostly video from ships fleeing the cylinder, likely very shortly after their own departure, and in those scenes, they could see their giant mystery ship expand into a ball of frenetic energy, as its outer panels all became winding projectiles that hovered around the central mass of that enormous approaching ship. And finally, with a definite object for scale, it was possible to see just how gigantic that mystery ship was. Because of the chaos of the moment there wasn’t a clear shot of the attack, but the aftermath could be seen—a gaping hole in one of the ends of the megastructure that opened the Vera Cylinder to space.
They watched the report, taking in the scenes, hearing the same questions they’d asked themselves being echoed by the presenters—what is this ship? Who is flying it? Why would they attack such a little-known, sparsely-populated outpost like Penzies? What can be done? Can anything stop it?
“Gamma-Penzies,” Massimos finally said. “As I stated, I feel like you might have left something out, Denver.”
“Yes,” Farq-Sen replied as he and Denver exchanged a long look. “It’s possible we might have left a few things out.”
At Mr. Colby’s request, Denver went back and talked through their story much more thoroughly. This time, the only thing she left out was the actual nature of the object the officers had stolen, only specifying that it was of great strategic and security value to the LSS.
She even told Massimos about the suit the girls had been reluctant to tell Shad and Ames about. She mentioned how close she’d gotten to the dead officers.
“You were in the room?” Massimos asked Denver. “You saw it happen?”
He noticed Denver swallow and take a deep breath as she nodded.
“Give us a moment please, Major,” Massimos said in a tone that conveyed it was not a request.
Farq-Sen sat back for a moment and then stood up, gesturing toward the door, as though to ask some unspecified question. Massimos seemed to understand.
“I’ll let you know when,” he replied.
Farq-Sen sat inside the glass, looking out onto the balcony. He couldn’t hear anything, but he could see that suddenly Denver grew emotional in a way he hadn’t expected. Before long, she was sobbing in Massimos Colby’s arms. Farq-Sen opted to turn to look out the other great glass wall toward the other side of the city. He was at the window so long, gazing, taking in the view and thinking, that when the door opened again, it caught him off guard.
“Something to drink?” Colby asked him.
Farq-Sen declined. Colby fixed two drinks. Denver and Colby began to sip some sort of red tonic on ice.
“Those officers, what kind of men were they, Major?” Massimos Colby asked.
“They seemed like good officers. Their records were exemplary. No major red flags.”
“There are always red flags before something like that. Just nobody saw them is all. I ask that to ask you this: if you were going to risk your life and your career on something secret, as you say they both did, and then entrust whatever you stole to somebody, as they did during the meeting on Penzies, then who would you trust to keep that item and keep your confidence, Major? How many friends like that do you have?
“I’m not sure.”
“Seriously. Think about it. In all my life, apart from Denver and Kilty’s father, and maybe one other guy, and I mean maybe ... well, that’s it for me. But then again, I don’t have any brothers.”
“Brothers,” Farq-Sen repeated, stroking his chin.
“If I wanted to find that item, that’s where I’d start,” Massimos Colby concluded. “Better get to them before the Rexes do.”
“The LSS has records on the family,” the Major replied. “There’s an LSS archive here on Nira, I’m sure. Personnel is almost certainly copied across the system for redundancy. That’s extremely helpful, sir. Thank you.”
“You know,” Denver added, “we might have gotten lucky.”
Massimos and Jahn both looked at her as though puzzled.
“Well, yeah,” she continued. “Of course we got lucky, getting out of Penzies when we did. But I mean ... those Rexes ... the ones who were following us? If they even made it out, survived, I’m sure they’ve got other priorities than tracking us down now. It’s possible all the surveillance for the cylinder got lost in that attack too. Odds are at least fifty-fifty the cartel couldn’t even tie us back to our ship if they wanted to.”
“Hmm? I hadn’t thought of that either,” Jahn replied, nodding.
“If it means never seeing that terror ship again, I’d be satisfied to not get lucky again, though,” Denver said. “Not that way.”
Denver took her drink and stepped back outside to the balcony, inviting Santos out with her before waving the door closed behind them. There was a long silence between the two men as Massimos Colby sized up Major Farq-Sen.
Jahn broke the silence. “If you don’t mind me asking, sir, before, outside just now?”
“These girls are people,” Massimos answered, sternly. “Regular people, Major. I taught them both to keep their heads up and act the way you need to act to not get walked over by the people in our business. But that’s the delivery business—civilian business. Maybe you’ve seen people get killed and murdered in your line of work ... maybe not ... but I can tell you for certain she hasn’t. I’m helping you because the sooner you do what you do, the sooner these girls can get back to their regular lives. The LSS shouldn’t have dragged them in, but they’re in now. You should do everything you can to get them out of it. That’s my opinion.”
“I understand, sir.”
“And by way of helping you further, I can see, even in the short time talking to you that the LSS has given you a false sense of ... I don’t know how to say it exactly.” Massimos Colby paused, looking at Jahn carefully, almost as though inspecting him visually could reveal the flaw he was picking up in the Major’s viewpoint. “All right. It’s like this. The farther out you go from the lines and all the major systems in the Alphas and Betas, this place, out here, each colony not only has its own character, but it has its own priorities. And the LSS makes you forget that—makes you think that Alpha-Bassur and Kappa-Aynor have even remotely similar interests, and for the most part, they don’t. A lot of regular citizens don’t care for the LSS any more than they care for the Rexes or the other cartels. Maybe even less.”
“It’s a fair point,” Farq-Sen replied. “One that’s not entirely lost on me, Mr. Colby. I wonder why you mention it at the moment.”
“Your officers. You seem to wonder how or why they might have turned traitor? Committed treason? Turned their backs on the LSS? However you want to phrase it. They might have done what they did out of loyalty to their system, their world, their family, their cylinder. Depends on where they came from. But if they came from out here, there’s a whole long list of possible loyalties. The one that usually wins, if we’re being honest, is the one that pays. Simple as that most of the time.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, as well as ... everything else,” Jahn gestured to the balcony where Denver was seated in a chair with her back to them, Santos relaxing comfortably in her lap. “They’re great girls, Mr. Colby. I promise you I will do everything in my power to protect them.”
“You’d better, young man. Their family has friends like me in every port in the Letters. There won’t be a place you can turn—”
Mr. Colby stopped and took a sip of his drink.
“Let’s go enjoy the view,” he said. “Talk about better things.”
Farq-Sen grabbed both Rangers when they returned to the Colbys’ home. They went back out directly to report in to the LSS’s main headquarters on Nira. The military had dedicated LSS port space at the top of the space tower, and they had administrative offices in the city. Elsewhere on the planet, there were forts, training facilities, schools, and weapons warehouses. But Farq-Sen and the GG Rangers sought out the administrative offices.
Jahn thought it was likely they’d run into administrative roadblocks, but was pleasantly surprised, that once his clearance was scanned with a tag directly from Ovidio-M, the functionaries on call, including the colonel the Precops called in, snapped-to with alacrity, treating Farq-Sen’s presence like a matter of utmost importance. Not only did they get him everything he needed to research Goff and Aerro, they called in an embodied Precops to help him and the GGs as their personal assistant, and they opened a secure research suite and woke up an enlisted JO to serve as their personal valet for the duration of their time on the premises.
Jahn didn’t have any sense for how long it was going to take him to compile intelligence files on all of Goff and Aerro’s immediate family members, but his initial plan was to try and grab as much data as they could, cast a wide net, pick a first target, and have plenty of options if that first target proved to be a miss.
But as the night wore on, signals began to converge. Aerro made more sense. Goff was the commander of the Byard. He wouldn’t have needed Aerro to get the cypher off the ship. He was a genuine third-generation Taukler—which was the LSS slang for the graduates of the Tauk Academy, the LSS program in the Millennial College at Richard-2—one of the most prestigious universities anywhere in the Battery outside Dreeson’s System. The Goffs were a well-regarded, wealthy family from Beta-Aurelius. Commander Goff had two brothers, one the executive officer of an agriculture cylinder group in the inner Alphas, the other a satellite systems engineer who’d lived on Hellenia for nearly two decades. Commander Goff’s background told a clear story. He needed Aerro for the second part of their plot—selling the device once they got it off the ship.
The problem with Stanton Aerro wasn’t whether he had a brother with shady contacts in the Letters to connect Goff with the Rexes, the question was which one.
Lieutenant Commander Stanton Aerro had five brothers: Calimacho, Lowry, Kohl, Oreg, and Baer. His two sisters were also in the LSS and were on duty during the infiltration at Alpha-Richard. Stanton was the third brother and was able to attain a commission after entering a satellite academy in the Kappas and excelling. However, all of that almost got derailed while on a break. He and Kohl were apprehended and charged for the theft of a ship. Kohl admitted guilt in order to exonerate Stanton Aerro, and since, the two continued to be close, with Stanton even bankrolling Kohl’s flat in the Thetas when he was finally released. And having spent nearly eight years in custody at a Dinzer-C work camp, Kohl would’ve had plenty of opportunities to make connections with cartel members. Oreg and Lowry, the youngest brothers, were both known to work odd spacefaring jobs with Kohl Aerro, but the information in the archive was telling Jahn from multiple angles that Kohl Aerro was the likeliest point to reacquire the stolen LSS cypher. And they had a probable location for him on Theta-Mir.
Even after they had their prime target, Jahn had the Precops continue to suck up as much data as they could find on Aerro’s family, including known friends and bunkmates from all of Kohl’s time in custody. Jahn didn’t know when they were going to have access to an archive like the one on Kappa-Nira again. The GG Rangers weren’t thrilled about the Major keeping them up all night while the girls were back at the Colbys’ suite sleeping, but he was quick to remind them who the soldiers were and who were the private citizens whose lives they’d disrupted.
“We’ll rejoin them at breakfast, and we can sleep on the way to the Thetas,” Farq-Sen commanded.
At breakfast, the tired soldiers did their best to act like all was normal—a nice family meal with a few added guests. The fate of the Letters could be compartmentalized until they’d eaten and shared a cup of coffee with their gracious hosts.
After they’d finished eating, Jahn announced that they’d be cutting their time on Kappa-Nira shorter than he’d expected. Duty called. Massimos Colby pulled him onto the porch quietly.
“Where are you off to?” he asked Jahn.
“The Thetas. Mir, specifically.”
Colby shook his head and grimaced. “There’s a lot of empty territory out there. Claim staking is almost free out there from what I can remember. Administrative fees only, I think. Few cities, and rough ones at that.”
“I figured it might be like that from the information we gathered.”
“A place like that, you keep my girls on the ship, not just for their protection but for yours. People like that will use your own decency against you. I don’t think you can possibly understand how ugly those cartels can be, and they’re the civilized ones out there.”
“Understood, Mr. Colby. Thank you again for your insight.”
“Best of luck, Major.”
Before they returned to the suite again, Massimos Colby looked at Farq-Sen with the weight of a concerned father. He didn’t say what didn’t need to be said. The two men understood each other.
After their trip back up the space tower, they rushed out of Kappa-Nira toward Theta-Mir. Jahn wanted to get there before Kohl Aerro and any co-conspirators who were with him had time to disappear. He presumed they’d already have made it in, having fled the destruction at Gamma-Penzies. Considering the way Goff and Aerro had been so ruthlessly dispatched by the Rexes, Jahn figured that they’d regroup and quickly look for a place to lie low.
“If they were looking for a hiding place, why would they go home?” Kilty asked him as he was explaining the urgency to get to Theta-Mir.
“Goff and Aerro clearly didn’t anticipate that kind of trouble from the cartel,” Jahn answered. “If they were taken by surprise so easily, they probably didn’t prepare to have to hide from the Rexes. They presumed they’d be working together, I think.”
Kilty was sitting at the table in the midship, fidgeting with the empty pouch from her early dinner. She was visibly dissatisfied by Jahn’s answer.
“But, I mean, we don’t even know that they know, right?”
“Know what, Kilty?”
“So you’re presuming Goff and Aerro were there on Penzies with this other brother, and you think he drove the ship that took them to the cylinder?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, we only know they got murdered by the Rexes because Denver was in the tavern. If the brother was there on the ship, he might not have any idea the Rexes killed them. Maybe he thinks they got killed when that megaship attacked the cylinder. Maybe he even got caught up in it himself. That’s a remote system. Who the hell knows who got out of Gamma-Penzies alive or not?”
“Those are all valid questions,” Jan Farq-Sen replied. “It’s our best lead for now, and we have to do our best to track down our target, even if that takes us back to Gamma-Penzies where it may have been destroyed.”
“Or picked up by that megaship,” Kilty added. “There are a lot of possibilities.”
Just then, the hum of Santos’s belt whisked through the midship as the cat flew from the back corridor, over the table, and up toward the flight deck. The cat didn’t even pause to acknowledge the people in the room on his way through.
Pozzer, who was strapped in across from Kilty and Ames, began to laugh quietly. Jahn looked down at him after his laughter continued to build.
“Lieutenant?” Farq-Sen said.
Pozzer shook his head. He’d clearly just woken up following a long nap. Shad hadn’t even rubbed the sleep out of his bloodshot eyes yet.
“I was just thinking. We all have to write up reports about all of this, Major. Of all the unbelievable shit, I swear, the damn flying cat.”
“Mama Pilot, okay!” they all heard his helmet echoing from the flight deck.
Pozzer just pointed to the front of the ship, shaking his head.
It wasn’t a total surprise to find Kohl Aerro’s compound empty when they arrived at Theta-Mir. The property had the feel of an isolated off-grid hideout—the type of place a genuine loner might set up a solitary life in the outer Letters. It was so far from any of the small cities on Mir that it was hard to imagine anyone ever going out there except by ship. The nearest property that had any buildings on it was over a hundred kilometers away.
Denver took a set of daylight images from orbit, and after examining them closely, Jahn estimated that the property had been vacant for at least two weeks prior. How they could’ve estimated that was beyond Denver, but it did look abandoned to her eyes.
She and Kilty were sitting together on the flight deck, Santos floating between them. They were talking about the Colbys. They’d instructed Mr. and Mrs. Colby to keep quiet about what they were doing, the LSS, the fact that they’d been at Penzies, at Alpha-Richard, and the fact that they’d been pulled in as privateers by the military. Denver and Kilty both knew Massimos well enough to know that he’d already have talked to their father, probably pinged him casually and dropped it in the middle of the conversation, “Oh the girls dropped by for dinner and a bed for the night. And they had a talking cat with them. Would you believe it? Some strange cargo. Yeah, they looked great. In wonderful spirits.” The sisters were creating the conversation line-by-line, back-and-forth when Jahn came in. He’d analyzed the visuals and the sensing data on the property below.
“How much do you ladies know about surveillance?”
“Probably not nearly as much as we’re going to,” Denver answered.
“That’s the spirit,” Farq-Sen replied, smiling. “We’re going to cast a wide circle and close in slowly. Don’t want to get caught in any traps before we get a chance to put down our own.”
“Just let us know what we can do to help,” Denver said.
“His brothers—they’re coming,” Jahn Farq-Sen replied, looking at the panel where a wide-angle view of the compound was still up on the in-board display. “I can feel it. And when they get back, we’ll be ready for them.”
“Ready,” Santos echoed. “We fly ready. Yes. Yes.”
“Yes, we do,” Farq-Sen replied, looking down at the funny little creature. “Wherever we are needed, we fly. Let’s get a little lower, Denver. High entry just over the horizon from the Aerro compound. Then you can start bringing us in slowly.”