Blowback Read online

  “I’ll do that,” he agreed as he grabbed for his pants. By the time she walked out of the room he was mostly dressed and a girl stood by the door, cleaner in hand. Obviously they needed the room. His fantasy was over.

  Chapter Six

  Tom was almost back to the Kratos when Da’shay slipped out of the shadows and started walking beside him. All the relaxed joy he’d felt seconds ago vanished as every instinct turned on high. This was a killer and he wasn’t allowed to consider taking her out first.

  “Becca wanted cupcakes,” Da’shay said. Tom frowned, trying to figure out where that came from.

  “Listen, pea-brain, if you have something to say that makes sense, say it.”

  “Becca wanted cupcakes. Without damnation.”

  Tom stopped. “You’re just all kinds of crazy, ain’t you?”

  She seemed to think about that, and Tom stopped, turning so he had a better chance to draw his weapon if she decided to take offense at that. Genta were unpredictable at best and Da’shay was nuts.

  “Compared to human neurobiology, my brain is functional and well within parameters, but—” she physically cringed. “Prisms like spotlights reflect off surfaces, trapping me in the beams.”

  “What?” Tom backed off, pretty sure she had just slipped off the deep end.

  “Might be all kinds of crazy,” she said with a shrug. “Becca says unique. Easier to think now. New light through the prism, but sometimes the thoughts are all tangled like fallen yarn caught on the needles.”

  Tom understood that bit. His brothers would sometimes run around the house and trip on his ma’s knitting, tangling the yarn, sometimes so bad that she’d have to pull out all her work and start over. Tom had learned early that accidents like that led to a sore butt, but his stepfather didn’t seem to take offense to his own kids causing the mess. It was only Tom who had to be perfect.

  “I can’t get the tangled yarn separated from the neat stitches,” Da’shay said softly. Tom let his hand rest on his gun.

  “Do you get confused enough to kill?” he came right out and asked. She looked at with a blank expression. An innocent man defended himself. Actually, a guilty man did too; he usually got more angry with his denials. However, she only stared at him.

  “Dreams all tiptoeing through the occipital lobe and pons.” She turned her back to him and looked up at the stars. It wasn’t exactly a denial, but Tom sure as hell didn’t think Ramsay would listen to another argument. “Was lost out there so long. Trails vanishing into black.”

  They stood in silence, Da’shay looking up at the stars, her hands dangling at her sides. Tom watched her, his whole body coiled. “Easier to find myself in all the red,” she told the sky. Her tone almost sounded as if she was sharing some great confidence, but about the only thing Tom wanted was for her to get lost now.

  “I’m going to my bunk.” Tom edged away, not wanting to put his back to her. He’d gotten several steps before she turned and looked at him with nearly black eyes. Moving toward him, she didn’t stop until she was so close that Tom’s skin crawled.

  All the sated pleasure of the night evaporated as he thought of that drop of blood falling from Da’shay’s braid. The others might think she was one more genta, but Tom knew better. She was a dangerous woman. Tom wasn’t exactly a fluffy kitten himself, so he knew he didn’t have much room for complaining, but what she’d done turned his stomach.

  Da’shay’s hand found his arm, pulling him along with her while keeping her head tilted up to the stars. For a second, Tom considered drawing his weapon, but he couldn’t really justify it when Da’shay didn’t seem intent on anything but walking. The planet’s moon had set and another hour would bring dawn, but right now, the whole world seemed perfectly silent. “Like pricks in a purple velvet, light slipping through where the fibers break and fray.” She kept her head tilted toward the night sky.

  Tom didn’t risk looking up; he kept his eyes on Da’shay. “Guess so,” he agreed. He’d been flying in the stars long enough that he didn’t really see them that way. They were stars, no more and no less romantic than the sun that was about to rise in an hour or so.

  Da’shay gave up looking at the stars and stared at Tom. “Sunlight like anger,” she finished. Dropping his hand, she turned around to walk off in the opposite direction.

  “Wait,” Tom called. “Where you going?”

  She looked back at him and tilted her head to the side as if she couldn’t figure out the question. Tom held his breath. His hand was in his pocket, fingering the small disk. She stared at him and then up at the stars and then back to him, and in all that time, there wasn’t a single expression on her face that he could understand.

  “The stars are leaking through. I’m going to go think on stars and radiation and red shining through the dark,” she finally answered. She seemed calm for a second, and then all her body language shifted. She stalked closer, and stalk was the only word Tom could use to describe the predatory way she suddenly looked at him. The angle of her head as she lowered it and the roll of her hips as she closed in on him made him step back fast. Her hands caught his shoulders and held him.

  “Da’shay?” Tom asked, his mouth dry. His fingers closed around the disk.

  She shook her head and then she looked perfectly calm again. “The stars are pretty,” she said with a smile, and then she turned and walked away, a small metal disk clinging to the back of her shirt. Tom took another step back and leaned against the Kratos, his heart pounding wildly. Shit. Well, at least that decision was made for better or for worse. He’d have to pull the bug when she got back to the ship because it was damn visible where he’d put it, but with her being crazy, someone had to keep an eye on her and the captain wasn’t.

  Chapter Seven

  Ramsay walked along the length of the Kratos with Eli walking one step behind him in perfect military form. Tom figured Eli was so military that he’d keep on starching his shorts until Captain Ramsay told him to knock it off or the guy transferred away.

  “Tom, you seen Da’shay?” Ramsay called.

  Tom kept his face to his handheld as he checked numbers. “Nope,” he said honestly. He hadn’t seen her today. Hadn’t seen her since the wee hours of yesterday when she’d nearly scared him out of the ability to have children. Ramsay grunted as he checked the dock-side read out on the ship’s readiness. “We’re getting ready to go, so she’d better show up soon.” Ramsay walked away from the workstation and Eli slipped into the space he’d abandoned.

  “Yep,” Tom agreed. If they were all lucky, she’d go get herself a case of dead.

  “Eli, take second pilot.”

  “Yes sir,” Eli said, immediately shutting down the station and pressing the button that would lower the whole workstation into the deck where plating would protect it during blast off.

  “Tom, Becca has a faulty read on thruster two. Get in there and see if that new seal is holding.”

  “Checked the seal myself yesterday,” Tom complained, but he headed for the back.

  Kratos was rumbling, the engines warming as Becca prepped. After their last mission, Tom was really hoping someone else would be piloting for a good long time because the idea of Becca at the helm made his palms sweat, even if it wasn’t exactly her fault someone had rigged a crate to blow.

  Tom heard Ramsay’s footsteps coming up behind him and he pulled his handheld out before the captain could give him shit about not following orders. As much as Ramsay was willing to overlook certain regulations, he didn’t put up with people who didn’t follow orders. That was one of the things Tom liked most about working on the Kratos—the captain gave real clear orders. Tom didn’t even have time to fasten the handheld to his wrist before a blast slammed into him. His arms flew wide and his computer hit the ground with a hard cracking sound right before Tom crashed into the blast wall so hard he couldn’t breathe. He’d been hit by pulse guns in the past, but not often. They were the sledge hammers of weapons; one blast and you took out anyone in t
he area—friend and foe alike.

  Dizziness forced Tom to his knees, and he felt something cold lock around his wrist. Tom tried to twist away, but the blast had scrambled his brains.

  “You with me, Tom?” Ramsay slapped him on the face and Tom jerked at the chain that now held him. Ramsay backed off a step. “Talk to me, Tom. You talk to me about ship security.” Ramsay stood there with Tom’s own blast gun, the one he’d taken from his stepfather the night he’d run away for the last time.

  “What?” Tom asked as he tried to figure out how much Ramsay knew and just how he was going to get out of this.

  Ramsay threw something down on the ground, something silver with black threads hanging from long, spider-like legs that looked like a meaiai all curled up in death. Tom stopped breathing.

  “Fuck. You do recognize it.” Ramsay slapped his palm against the blast wall. “God damn it, I never—” With that, Ramsay stopped, his face twisted with fury.

  “They wanted to see what she was up to and that didn’t seem like such a bad idea,” Tom defended himself. “Seemed like someone should keep an eye on her.”

  “And you appointed yourself the one to make that decision? In six years, I’ve never seen you get this flat-out stupid. Suicidal? Yeah, some days it did seem like it, but this…” Ramsay pressed his lips tightly together and Tom could feel panic crawling through his guts. Fuck. He’d never meant for Ramsay to get this upset.

  “I didn’t—”

  Ramsay cut him off before he could say more. “Conspiracy against Corps personnel, conspiring with the intent to commit murder, possession of illegal weapons, attempted murder. Damn it, Tom. Could you have fucked this up any more if you tried?”

  “Attempted murder?” Tom shook his head. “I ain’t been trying to kill her. Now if she gave me an excuse, I wouldn’t mind putting a bullet—”

  “Stop. You dumb fuck. You say shit like that and then you put that on her…you’re going in for attempted murder, Tom, and I can’t figure out why you would turn on crew.” Tom’s guts curled up and died in the face of that pure anger.

  “I wasn’t going to let her wear it on board,” Tom said. That would have been just stupid because someone would have seen it on her back and that would have been the end of that. “I’ve got an electronic safe for the thing when we were flying and we could keep an eye on her without that little man getting himself involved.”

  Leaning against the blast wall, Ramsay hung his head and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes as if he were trying to press something right out of his brain. “Look at the tech, Tom. You’re rated in weaponry, so you look at the tech.”

  Tom frowned, but he reached out with his free hand and pulled the disk closer. The bottom was open now since the disk was ripped out of the cloth instead of getting deactivated so that the little legs tucked back inside. Turning it so that he could see inside, Tom frowned.

  “Can’t actually see much without magnification,” he admitted, but an uncomfortable feeling was crawling up his legs as if he were sitting in ice water.

  “You see anything missing?” Ramsay asked, his voice deadly quiet.

  “Ain’t got no transmitter that I can see.”

  “Not one large enough to transmit voice,” Ramsay agreed. “But there’s a transmitter in there. One so small that you can’t even see it unless you’re looking right at the circuitry nanowired into the casing under the attachment legs.”

  Tom’s fingers went numb. “It’s just a bug…a way to listen in on what she’s doing when she wanders off.” Tom said it, but he wasn’t sure he even believed that any more. Nanotech. Shit.

  Ramsay gave a rough and dark laugh. “You are all kinds of stupid, aren’t you? Someone shows you a pretty picture and you…” Ramsay threw up an arm and Tom knew the man was done with him. Just done. Tom looked down at the ground, not even sure what to say. Six years he’d followed Ramsay and he could feel something important crumble under him as Ramsay looked at him with hate. “You know weapons, Tom. You fucking know them, so why would someone gut a listening bug and retrofit it with nanowiring?”

  Tom didn’t want to answer because he could think of all sorts of applications for tech like that. He’d never seen a bug with nanowiring because that sort of technology was too damn expensive to waste it on something you planned to use once, but if someone had limitless money, Tom could think of several ways to use nanowiring. It could be used as a quantum disruptor to throw a ship off her quantum string. It could be a beacon, transmitting a signal that mimicked solar noise to help someone track the ship. It could…hell, it could be pretty much anything.

  “And here you are saying how you’d like to kill Da’shay.” Ramsay shook his head and ran his fingers through white hair that hung to his shoulders.

  “But I couldn’t manage nanowiring. Not even Becca could do that and she’s a whole lot smarter than me,” Tom protested.

  “You think your defense attorney can really build a defense out of you being too stupid to pull off what has to be the world’s stupidest assassination attempt?” Ramsay was shaking his head now and backing away. Tom struggled against the cuff, desperate to follow and explain how this all got so out of hand. “The best that proves is that you had friends in this. You helped someone target this crew, and depending on what that thing does, you just about helped someone murder all of us.” Ramsay’s voice dropped to a whisper barely audible over the Kratos’ engines. “Fuck you, Tom. Fuck you and your traitor friends.”

  “Captain…”

  “I ain’t your captain, Tom, not anymore.”

  Tom leaned back against the blast wall, pretty sure he would fall down if someone took it away from him. “I didn’t mean—”

  “The worst part is, I want to think you didn’t. Hell. You do find trouble, Tom Frieden. Every damn planet we land on, you find trouble. I’ve always respected you because you never actually went looking for it and you always gave more trouble than you took. But this—” His tone was full of contempt.

  Tom struggled for something to say, something that would clear him, but he couldn’t come up with one damn thing. Ramsay wouldn’t lie—not about the nanotech and not about how much shit Tom was in.

  “I figure you have two choices,” Ramsay said. He had a real calm tone that made Tom worry. “I can call the Corps and hand the evidence over. Make no mistake—you’ll never see daylight again. That’s the last look at blue sky you’ll ever have.” Ramsay poked his thumb at the sky visible just past the Kratos. “Your other choice is to stand right there.”

  It took Tom several seconds to realize what Ramsay was saying. The Kratos was rumbling, but even looking down the butt end of her thrusters, it hadn’t occurred to Tom that he was in grave danger of being very dead. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was so dry that the sides of his throat seemed to stick together and sting.

  “You’d do that?” Tom tried pulling on the chain quiet-like, but he was trapped and now he was looking death right in the face. Tom didn’t think he’d ever been so scared—not when he was five years old and watching his father die, not when he was not much older than that and watching his stepfather come toward him with a stick in hand, not even when he’d stared down the barrel of more than one gun in the line of duty. Ramsay. It was Ramsay who was finally teaching him about cold-white terror.

  “Your choice, Tom.” Ramsay held up his own handheld. “I’m calling the Corps on this, but I can either call them right now and tell them to come get your traitorous ass or I can call them from orbit after we find your suicide note and say that you chose a particularly effective form of suicide.” Ramsay pulled out a magnetic controller and dropped it on the ground. “Seems like Tom Frieden was afraid he might back out at the last second, but he knew how to kill a man. It seems like that extended to doing a pretty good job on himself when he was cornered, because he chained himself to the wall.”

  Tom stared at the controller.

  “So, when do I call them, Tom? Now or after we blast off?”
r />   Tom stared at Ramsay, his mind blank. This wasn’t the sort of question he had an answer for.

  “Tom, I need an answer. I’m trying to give you a choice here because we’ve been together for six years and it about kills me to think of you in a cage.” Ramsay stopped, his whole face twisting into an ugly version of itself before he cleared his throat and kept going. “But I need to hear from you. What do you want me to do, Tom?”

  Tom wrapped his fist around the chain that trapped him. Ramsay thought it was better for him to die right here. Tom couldn’t seem to find any answer at all in his own brain. His thoughts kept circling like a rabid animal, but Ramsay thought he should just sit here while the Kratos blasted him with hot gasses strong enough to strip the flesh from bone. All these years that he’d lived adding up to nothing more than charred bones and ash—that’s what Ramsay was telling him to choose.

  Slowly, Tom sagged, his whole body weak.

  “Tom, do you want me to make the call later?” Ramsay’s voice had gone cold with frustration. Tom’s inability to die quickly was ruining their schedule more than likely. Tom nodded mutely. He kept his eyes focused on the thrusters even though a big part of him didn’t want to see death coming at him head on. It’d be quick, that was sure. Tom wondered if he’d see anything at all. With the decision made, Tom felt stripped of all emotion.

  “Captain,” Tom called out. He remembered too late that Ramsay had told him not to call him that. He supposed it didn’t matter anymore. Ramsay stood off to the side of the ship and looked back at Tom with the sort of pity that Tom hated coming from most men. He figured right now he’d earned a little pity, even if he couldn’t get any forgiveness. “You be the one to launch the ship. You don’t let Becca anywhere near that.”

  Ramsay stared at him for a time before answering. “I take care of crew.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Hell, you’re crew too, Tom. If you weren’t, I would have called Command the second Da’shay showed me the pretty little gift you’d given her. That nanotech is so illegal I thought I was going to have to arrest myself for seeing it.”