The Absconded Ambassador Read online

  “I think Zoor was their tech.” King chuckled. “Jam is up, but I think they’ll notice her right quick. They’ve been spamming radar pulses like rats on an endorphin lever.”

  “Closing distance. Keep the jam up, and hold on to something.”

  Roman grabbed the stick again and floored the thrusters, punching out of the field of dead freighters and looping down out of the debris to make a hard half-Immelman and come at the fighter as it broke from its route and made for the jump node.

  Roman pushed the thrusters to cut off the merc ship’s escape.

  “Weapons systems spooling up,” he said, vocalizing the actions as he tapped through the menu to activate the lasercannon. Years of running with heavily armed packs and working around vehicular weaponry had prepped him to think nothing of saying aloud every single thing he did. There was a long while where he had to keep from announcing, “Brushing teeth,” and “Taking a dump,” which was fair, since several of his pack-mates took to doing just so, sharing every little bit of their lives with the squad out of a clownish perversion of group cohesion. Hellish circumstances made for weird traditions.

  “They’re rabbiting. Impressive speed for a ship that size. They’ll lose us in . . .” King ran the numbers. “Five minutes. Let’s hope that cannon we picked up can pick them off in time.”

  “Ready to fire in five. Take the wheel?” Roman asked.

  “Assuming navigation control,” King said, grabbing his control stick.

  “Releasing control,” Roman answered, wrapping both hands around the firing stick, exaggerated curves around the hand and into the base, three buttons on top, wired to activate up to three different weapon systems. Roman had only bothered with the one, and hoped it’d have the range to pick off the merc before they could get to a jump point.

  “Locking on,” Roman said, holding the ship in his sights. As the targeting circles clicked into place, the ship started banking and juking, responding to the incipient lock.

  “They’re evading. Pursuit pattern beta,” King said, matching their movements to the merc’s.

  King was rated for this class of ship, but Roman was the one with the real stick time. But when you were the top gun and the top pilot . . .

  “Sorry, boss, this isn’t going to work. Resuming navigation. I’ll have to dogfight them. Keep on the jammer, in case they’ve got a copilot and try to get sneaky.”

  “Roger,” King said, releasing the controls, slipping back into drumming on the console to work the sensor suite.

  With piloting and gunnery back under his control, Roman leaned back into his seat and found his happy place. He’d logged more flight time than any active North American Genrenaut, though not nearly as much in the field as he’d prefer. The simulators couldn’t quite match the way the G-forces work, never gave the full suite of randomness that a real sortie always brought.

  Roman opened fire, without a lock, hoping to shoot into the mercs’ evasive maneuvers.

  But their pilot was no slouch, either. The merc ship banked and twisted and looped through and around his laser fire. Roman followed a deep sloping turn, letting up on the stick and hoping for another lock, the merc ship flipped stern over prow and floored its jets, coming right for them.

  “Bold,” Roman said, hauling the stick to one side and firing the attitude thrusters, moving them off to the side as the merc ship unleashed a barrage through the empty space where they had just been.

  “Come on, then. Show us that all of that simulator time was worth letting you slack on your readings,” King taunted.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” Roman pushed forward, flying at a relative forty-degree incline to the merc ship, then tapped the attitude thrusters just so, a quick burst to turn and then stop, leaving him cutting through space at the same angle, but with their nose (and cannon) pointed down.

  These ships were single-chair fighters, no cargo capacity. The ambassador would be held on a transport or freighter.

  Which meant he didn’t have to worry about fragging them.

  Roman squinted, leaning forward and waiting for

  Just.

  The right.

  Moment.

  He squeezed the trigger, and the pulse cannon spat out a tight trio. The merc ship tried to bank, but caught two of the blasts along the undercarriage. The ship went up like a firework, a genre concession given the fact that there wasn’t enough of anything explosive in the ships to detonate.

  “How’s that for justification?” Roman said, righting the ship and looping around to confirm the kill and grab salvage.

  “That’ll do. Now, let’s see if their IFF is intact . . .”

  * * *

  Leah waggled her head in her best aping of the Jenr manner. “But of course, Your Honor!”

  The crowd roared. And while her crowd was a mere three people—all junior diplomats and attachés like her—it was the most welcome and acknowledged she’d felt since touching down on Ahura-3.

  When in doubt, go with what you know.

  It hadn’t taken long to slot this dimension’s races and cultures into existing material—everyone had stereotypes about everyone else, and most of the time, they didn’t vary that much.

  The Yai thought the Nai were lazy, the Nai thought the Yai were callous and greedy. Most people thought the Gaan were a little slow, the Nbere ambassadors were super-standoffish but had their secret proclivities, and only the Gaan didn’t think the Xenei were unnerving.

  Her colleagues, a Nai, a Gaan, and a Jenr, chuckled again, but softer, probably remembering themselves. Gut-busting laughter was apparently Just Not Done, even at cocktail parties that were, as far as she could tell, all about gossip.

  Darei, the Nai, leaned in to the other women and said in a low voice, “Don’t tell anyone I said so, but the Yai do that, too. But when they do it, they use both hands!”

  That got more laughter, which Leah answered. Darei was the talker, which meant Leah didn’t have to hold up the conversation by herself, which would be just about guaranteed to reveal the spaceship-sized gaps in her knowledge.

  “We do not have such problems, but then again, just one trunk,” said Haaja, the Gaan, gesturing with her prehensile trunk. Haaja, like the prelate, used her trunk to gesture, grip food, and to shake hands. It was all Leah could do to not flash back to YouTube videos of elephants rollicking on the beach. On top of being dangerously amusing, Haaja was loose-lipped.

  “You just had dinner with the prelate, did you not?” Haaja asked.

  “If by ‘had dinner,’ you mean tried not to even look at food, then yes,” Leah said. “It was my sixth dinner meeting, and if I’d had one more bite, I swear I’d have exploded.”

  Ufa, the Jenr, crossed her lower arms. “We had the same. Every race with their own dinner times and customs. I wish the translators we use could let us all agree on one way to eat.”

  “It’s a wonder all of us diplomats aren’t as round as a beach ball,” Leah said.

  “Beach ball?” Darei asked.

  “Oh, you don’t have beach balls?” Leah said, forgetting her mission more than a little bit. She set her drink on the railing to the stairs she and the junior diplomats had taken as their perch and held her arms open wide. “It’s a plastic inflated ball this big, and you use it to play games on the beach.”

  “That would be very large for a playing piece,” Haaja said.

  “Do you have different colors to indicate the castes for Uga?”

  “I’ve never played Uga on the beach, so I couldn’t tell you. But as a kid, I mainly just kicked it in the water and splashed around, screaming with joy.”

  For lack of a specific agenda, Leah was happy to just hang out and shoot the shit with the three women. And she figured that having the ear of assistants to a vice-prelate, an ambassador, and a gray speaker would be useful over the next couple of days as diplomatic push came to shove.

  Leah picked Shirin out of the crowd, then noticed the woman was heading right toward her.

  And sh
e looked pissed.

  “Sorry, friends, business calls,” Leah said, picking up her drink again. She shook, hugged, and waggle-nodded to her new space-friends, then matched step with Shirin as she made a beeline for the door.

  “What’s up?”

  “Emergency. Bhean, the Nbere ambassador, just blew up at Laran and said he’s leaving the station to head home. We need to intercept him so that Laran can follow up and talk him down.”

  “And do we know where he is?”

  “Somewhere between the Nbere sector and the VIP dock.”

  “So how do you delay an angry Nbere ambassador?”

  “Very carefully.” The pair turned into the hallway and headed for the nearest lift.

  “Wait, did you say his name was Bhean?”

  “That’s right,” Shirin said, her voice sounding uncertain.

  “I know that one!” Leah rewound her memory to the conversation with her fellow junior diplomats. “He likes dancing boys. Jenr dancing boys.”

  Shirin stopped, and looked at Leah dead on. “Where did you hear this?”

  “From one of the junior attachés. She said that her boss arranged for some special kind of dancing boys to join them at a negotiation a while back. The guy was a total ass, except with those . . . she called them something.”

  “Verene?”

  “That’s it.”

  Shirin pulled Leah in and kissed her on the cheek, once again assuming the role of classy aunt. “You’ve earned your gold star for this mission, newbie. We’ve got some calls to make.”

  * * *

  After a short jaunt out into space with the ship’s EVA suit, Roman returned and sat in the copilot’s seat, working on the IFF box while King kept watch as the autopilot continued them on their course for the Dark Star base.

  The thing was well and properly slagged. He knew this dimension’s tech, but that didn’t mean he was a miracle worker.

  “Three hours out. How’s it coming?”

  “It’s not. The circuit board is half-melted, and I’ve got maybe a one-in-three chance of being able to strip the IFF without it breaking entirely.”

  “Any chance of just hooking it up as is?”

  “This kind of IFF has to be slotted. Makes it harder to trick.”

  “So that’s a no.”

  Roman flipped the box around and eyed it from the other direction, holding a penlight on the connections between the board and the IFF transponder.

  “Pretty much. I’ll try to pry it out, but the problem is, we could slot it in and patch the Dark Star signal over our own, but if the transponder is slagged, we won’t know until the mercs open fire on us or set off whatever traps they’ve got.”

  “So we assume it won’t work, then celebrate if it does.”

  “Pretty much,” Roman said, setting the box on his lap and reaching for the flat-head screwdriver.

  Tongue peeking out of his mouth, Roman fiddled, pushed, and pulled, popping the IFF transponder out of the circuit board. He set the board aside and leaned over to pop open the control console.

  “Keep an eye on our course. These small freighters can lose autopilot when someone’s monkeying around with the transponders.”

  “That’s not ominous, no sir,” King said from the pilot’s seat.

  “I could just toss this thing out the airlock and declare that entire EVA a waste.”

  “You still get to log it on your chart.”

  “Almost a complete waste, then.” Roman shone the light into a mess of cords. Even though they had fancy super-Bluetooth and wireless wearable computers, the innards of the ships on this dimension were a huge tangled hassle.

  Just one of a hundred things about the dimension that didn’t make sense, thanks to the uneven conceptualization of the genre world. Hi-tech, but with inconsistencies galore. Not unlike home. But where this region had hi-tech, he had “whatever you could cobble together from whatever you could salvage.”

  “Ready with the stick. Splicing transponder now.” Roman reached into the morass, working by touch. He found an open space on a circuit board, then held the position as he twisted to the side, resting on his hip, and brought the hand with the transponder in to find the slot. There was no way he could get any light in there, so he worked by touch, rotating the piece and slotting it in. He heard the soft click, then leaned out and shone the light on it.

  “Looks good,” Roman said. “Any problems?”

  “Two hours, fifty-seven minutes. Nicely done.”

  “Save the celebratory shot until we blow by their security.”

  “Will do. Want the wheel back?”

  “Need to shake out my hands. Why don’t you pull your weight for a little while?”

  “Remind me to never let you take lead on another mission unless I can help it.”

  “I forgot to remind you the last time you asked, so don’t hold your breath. I’m going to take a nap.”

  Roman headed aft, rearranging his duffel into a pillow. “Yell if something breaks, okay?”

  Eight: Hide and Go Zap!

  JUST UNDER THREE HOURS later, their ship reached the rings containing the Dark Stars’ station.

  The coordinates placed the base in the middle of the ring, giving them natural cover and concealment from casual sensor sweeps and pursuit.

  But with Zoor’s coordinates, they practically had an invitation.

  The yellow-orange planet overwhelmed their viewscreen, rimmed by a planetary ring. Seen from a distance, it looked like a rocky beach at the edge of a spherical sand castle.

  Roman, back in the pilot’s seat after his power-nap, eased the ship in through some outliers of the ring, knocked off-course somewhere along the line, but not out of the planet’s orbit.

  “Keep that sensor suite working. I need to know as soon as they see us. There’ll be more than one ship this time, I guarantee.”

  Several minutes later, as Roman flew just above the plane of the ring, the sensors chirped positive contact.

  King read the screen. “Three contacts, each around fifty thousand klicks from the base. All the same configuration as our last friend.”

  “Three? I can do three,” Roman said, pushing the throttle a bit higher. Especially if the IFF worked.

  “They’re holding formation for now.”

  “Even if the IFF fails, they’ll likely stay together, let me come to them. They’ll know the rings better than I do. But we’ve got a few surprises of our own. Activating stealth package.” Roman tapped through the menus, and their ship disappeared from all conventional sensors. “The outfitter said the cloak should hold for ten minutes. So I’m betting that means we’ll get maybe five.”

  “Sounds about right. You bought this from a Nai?” King asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Five minutes it is. And we are four minutes, thirty seconds from the base’s coordinates.”

  Roman held his trajectory, using a soft touch on the controls to limit their heat signature, only small bursts from the maneuvering thrusters.

  As they came up on the first ship, its orbit bringing it within laser range, Roman said, “Taking the opening shot. See if you can jam the other two while we’re at it.”

  King worked the controls, then made a constrained growl of frustration. “The rings here are going to make that a lot harder than around the ship graveyard.”

  “Do what you can. Laser spooling up.”

  Here we go. Roman moved one hand from the wheel to the firing stick. As soon as he started locking on, the ship would know. He led the shot, focused on their arc of movement, and shot without a lock. It was like hip-firing a sniper-rifle at a hundred yards. There were maybe three Genrenauts worldwide who could make the shot.

  Roman was one of them.

  The shot arced after the ship once it’d already turned its focus away, and snuck up on it, shearing off a wing. The ship went into a spiral and crashed into a nearby meteoroid in the ring.

  “One down. Now to see if we can pick up the other two in the confus
ion.”

  “They’re transmitting an SOS back to base. Jamming is doing bugger-all. They know we’re here.”

  “Copy that. Coming up on the second ship.”

  Roman started to line up his next shot. The angle on this one was no good for a manual shot, however; the deflection was too high. He’d need a lock, or he’d need to be much closer.

  And so he waited as the ships cut through the space that separated them, his trigger finger waiting, his whole body settling into the ship, the controls, the anticipation.

  The second merc fighter broke right and started coming around at a different angle.

  Right toward them.

  “Stealth package is down,” King said.

  Roman gave a gallows grin. “That’s the problem with pessimism. Even when I’m right, I still hate the result.”

  “At least it dropped now and not when you’ve just flown yourself into their crosshairs.”

  Roman banked and wove, moving into the ring to take cover as well. Now the fight would get truly interesting, the proximity of the meteoroids limiting their speed and maneuvering. Moments like this were what he was born for.

  “That’s the spirit. Keep an eye on the other one for me, okay?”

  “Third ship is at ten o’clock, thirty thousand klicks out.”

  And so they went into cat-and-mouse mode. Roman cut in and out of the ring, trying to throw off the mercenaries as he closed the distance. But the mercs played their home-field advantage, using hiding places and the cover from moonlets to throw him off.

  He caught the second ship banking around a meteor, trying to flank the Genrenauts, and sheared the merc ship in half with his lasercannon.

  With two down, the last merc ship vanished off of their sensors, finding a choice hiding spot somewhere else.

  So Roman made for the merc base, weaving around and through the meteorites, the shattered portions of the planet that had been broken off but never truly lost to the yellow-orange body that loomed large above them all.

  As they came around a large meteorite, time slowed as Roman saw the third merc ship again, perfectly positioned to watch the corner. The mercs launched a cluster of missiles directly into their path. That same time dilation gave Roman the edge he needed to pound the attitude thrusters, giving them a burst of movement “up.”