Chapter 55: Wanderer-7?!

"And then came the funeral," Ren whispered.

His voice dropped and went flat as a tombstone.

"A rainy Tuesday in September. Mother had been dead in that room for twelve hours before the morgue van came... I sat on the wooden porch in the rain, waiting for the front gate to open... The service started at two and the incense burned down at four."

His head tilted.

"Where were you, Nee-san?"

Aoi squeezed her good eye shut and her whole body shook as a ragged soundless wail tore through her chest.

"You missed the train," he said. "The weather bureau put out a typhoon advisory for Kanto and the bullet trains stopped running... A girl who mapped the gravity of other planets couldn’t check a weather forecast to get to her own mother’s cremation."

He let that hang.

"I carried her urn to the family plot by myself... Twenty-four years old, walking through the mud with Mother in a cardboard box under my arm."

He stood up slowly with his knees cracking.

He didn’t stomp or kick her again, Ren just smoothed the front of his tunic and looked down at her with a calm venomous detachment that went deeper than hate.

"My whole life," he said, and his voice carried to every corner of the bridge, "I lived in your shadow... Father bragged to the neighbors about his genius daughter who was going to build starships for the nation... Mother kept your graduation portrait on the altar, even while she was coughing blood into the towels I held for her. You were the golden child, the scholar and the elegant woman everybody bowed to."

His hand came to rest easily on the grip of his pistol, and his lips curled into a slow mocking half-smile.

"And look at you now... Tied to a pipe on a raider’s deck, covered in your own blood, waiting to be loaded into a shipping container."

He crouched one more time, close to her ear.

"You know what? When I hand you over at the rim, I’m going to make sure the manifest lists you for the pleasure quarters of some alien buyer... It fits you, Aoi... It really does... You always knew how to make men fall over themselves to protect you."

His breath was warm against her bloody cheek.

"You did it to that idiot kid in the corvette, didn’t you? Batted your eyelashes, gave him that gentle older-sister smile... and let him fly his ship into the dirt just to keep you warm."

Aoi’s heart shattered.

She felt something physical inside her chest snap and fall in, leaving nothing behind her ribs but an empty bleeding hole but she couldn’t argue.

Her brother carrying their mother’s ashes through the Kyoto rain rose up in front of her one good eye... and right beside it, Leo.

Standing alone at the mouth of the airlock with his dark eyes hollow, reaching out to take Ren’s hand because she’d begged him not to make her hate him.

’N-no...’

It clawed its way up through the fog of despair, sharp and jagged as broken glass.

’N-no... Leo...’

Her breath came in wheezing gasps against the deck.

...If they’d listened to him.

If she hadn’t screamed at him on the dais... If Elena hadn’t spat on his family... If they’d just trusted the quiet stubborn boy who’d flown them through the Rift, who’d held the ship steady between two crashing mountains while Chloe tore the crystal out of the stone, who’d cooked them warm bread with grease on his fingers...

Even if the Kite had turned hostile from the very start, even if this ninety-meter raider had opened fire with everything it had... they wouldn’t be here.

With Leo in the cradles, feeling the drift in the small of his back, the Wanderer-7 would have danced right through their firing arcs.

His turret would have drilled through this slate armor in three seconds flat and with Leo flying, they would have won.

They would have lived, but look at it now, she’d handed him to the wolf...

Ren turned his back on all of them like they were luggage already loaded and walked up the three steel steps of the dais with a relaxed lazy stride, settling into the heavy pilot’s chair and spinning it to face the forward consoles.

"Sit tight, ladies," he called over his shoulder. "We clear the gravity well in twenty minutes... After that it’s a nice smooth burn to the jump corridor."

Voss stayed by the weapons locker with his rifle across his broad chest with his dead eyes moving slowly down the bound row.

Dekker sat hunched at the secondary engineering station with his greasy fingers twitching as he punched in jump coordinates.

Chloe had started humming again.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!

A low chirp came from the long-range sensor board.

Voss’s heavy brow furrowed under his beard as he stepped over to the tactical plot and leaned over Dekker’s shoulder.

"Captain." His deep gravelly voice rumbled across the deck. "Sensor anomaly... Aft quadrant four."

Ren didn’t look up from his slate.

"Debris wake from the eel... Clear the buffer."

"It isn’t debris," Voss muttered.

Dekker tapped the screen with one trembling finger... and his wide oily grin hitched before twisting into a stiff awkward grimace.

"N-no..." His reedy voice jumped as the wireframe on his terminal resolved into an incoming velocity vector. "No... Captain... look at the mass profile."

Ren frowned and swung his chair around.

"What are you talking about?"

"Look at the MASS, Captain!"

"Enlarge the tactical feed."

Dekker slapped the main display relay with his palm.

HUMMM... SWOOSH!

The three-meter screen on the starboard wall swelled outward and threw the aft quadrant up in crisp stark wireframe right in front of the six bound women.

A ship was there.

...A sleek fifty-meter hull of pristine gunmetal Graventhal, its twin rail barrels centered on its spine, cutting through the void with terrifying liquid acceleration.

The Wanderer-7.

Its drives weren’t sputtering or choking or dying.

They were burning in two blinding pure turquoise plumes that stretched a hundred meters behind its stern, accelerating along Beta-9 at seven kilometers per second and eating the thirty-kilometer gap with aggressive momentum, tearing through the drift like an arrow loosed from a bow.

Aoi stopped breathing and next to her, the humming stopped dead in the middle of a note.

"That’s impossible," Ren breathed.

The relaxed posture evaporated in one violent beat.

He came up out of the chair and grabbed the rim of the console with his knuckles going white.

"The chip was seated! The logic bus was paralyzed! The scrubbers were dead! That ship should be a frozen iron brick drifting on a decay curve!"

"It... it overrode the logic bus, Captain!" Dekker shrieked, his fingers flying blind across the diagnostic terminal. "The telemetry lock broke the spoofing protocol... It’s running at a hundred and twelve percent fusion output! It’s coming straight for our aft quarter!"

Elena lifted her head with her swollen tear-stained eyes locked on the familiar beautiful silhouette of the gunmetal corvette slicing toward them through the stars.

’The ship...’ A wild dizzy spark of impossible hope caught fire in her chest. ’The ship is alive... but HOW? Who’s in the cradles?!’

At the end of the row, Chloe’s head came up.

Her bangs were stuck to her face with blood. Her skin was the color of paper but her eyes went to the screen, to that little gunmetal ship tearing across the dark... and the dying red behind them caught and flared becoming even brighter.

"Leo," she breathed.

"Chloe...?" Camila whispered beside her. "Chloe, sweetie, don’t—"

"He’s coming." Chloe’s cracked lips pulled back into a smile. "He’s coming... I can feel him."

She started to laugh, rocking a little against the pipe.

"He caught me," she whispered. "He always catches me. Hehe... he always, always catches me..."

Camila stared at her and for the first time since any of this started, she was afraid of somebody other than Ren.

Ren snatched the comm handset off the command stanchion and slammed the open broadcast switch down with his thumb.

CLICK!

"Attention, Wanderer-7!" he shouted into it, his voice booming across the open audio bus. "Identify yourself! We have your crew hostage! Disengage your drives and pull away immediately or we execute all six of them! Acknowledge and pull away...!"

Silence!

The speakers hissed with flat dead static.

Nothing came back out of the dark but the terrifying silent approach of twenty thousand tonnes of Graventhal iron, getting bigger on the screen with every heartbeat... and still no light in a single one of its windows.

Ren’s chest heaved.

He slammed the handset back into its cradle and spun around to face Voss and Dekker, running a shaking hand over his mouth with his eyes wide.

"Nobody could’ve survived that," he muttered. "Nobody survives hard vacuum without a suit! We kicked him into SPACE, for fuck’s sake! He went out that sleeve at five kilometers per second!"

"Captain, they’re inside five kilometers!" Dekker’s voice cracked into pure hysteria. "...They’re entering firing range!"

"WEAPONS!" Ren roared.

The charming brother was gone and what was left was the desperate fury of a trapped animal.

"Bring the main rail-cannons online! Arm the missile cells! Turn this bucket around and blow that scrap heap into DUST!"

CLANK... WHIRRR!

On the Kite’s dorsal shoulders, the twin heavy rail-cannons swung up, their fifty-millimeter barrels humming as the magnetic capacitors charged to full yield.

VMMMMMMMMMMM...

The whole bridge vibrated with it and the rope on Aoi’s wrists buzzed against her skin.

BOOM-BOOM!

The raider opened fire.

...Two massive slugs tore out of the barrels and lanced across four kilometers of void in a blinding flash of orange fire.

On the screen, the Wanderer-7 didn’t flinch.

It didn’t bank away in some wide clumsy evasive curve. The instant the muzzle flash bloomed, its starboard thrusters fired three micro-bursts...

PFFFT! PFFFT! PFFFT!

...and it snapped forty-five degrees along its spine and slipped right through the empty space between the two incoming slugs with barely two meters to spare.

Camila gasped out loud, even Voss took one step back from the screen.

"Again!" Ren screamed. "AGAIN!"

BOOM-BOOM! BOOM-BOOM!

A second salvo... A third... Six heavy slugs ripped through the vacuum and wove a deadly web across the intercept corridor however the Wanderer-7 danced.

It rolled.

It dove under a drifting iron asteroid and used the rock’s shadow to hide its line, then snapped up in a high-G reverse pitch that left the raider’s targeting computers screaming at empty space.

...It was impossible.

It was fluid and vicious and breathtakingly precise, a masterclass that broke every rule in every naval flight manual ever written.

"Missiles!" Ren was screaming now, spit flying off his lips. "Arm the cells! ALL of them!"

Dekker’s shaking fingers stabbed at the launch panel three times before he hit it.

WHOOSH-WHOOSH-WHOOSH-WHOOSH!

Six missiles burst out of the raider’s belly and curved back toward the little ship on long trails of white fire.

On the screen, the Wanderer-7 didn’t even slow down as its two pulse lasers flicked to life under its nose.

ZAP! ZAP! ZAP!

Three missiles burst into flowers of orange light before they’d covered half the distance.

The fourth it just rolled around, like a dancer stepping past a puddle, and the missile went sailing off into the dark hunting for something that wasn’t there anymore.

...The last two curved around for another pass however the Wanderer-7 dove straight at a tumbling boulder.

"It’s going to crash!" Dekker yelled. "It’s going to—"

It didn’t crash.

It skimmed the rock’s face with a meter to spare and flipped up and over the top of it... and both missiles chasing it didn’t.

BOOM! BOOM!

The boulder burst into gravel, and the corvette came out of the dust cloud on the other side without a single scratch.

Jin-Ah made a small broken sound.

’That’s the Rift,’ she thought, her eyes locked on the screen. ’That’s exactly what he did in the Rift...’

Aoi was crying again but it burned now.

She’d watched that flying for three years in a simulator hall... She’d stood behind his chair and taken notes on it and felt her heart speed up and told herself it was professional interest.

She’d know it anywhere, even with her eyes closed.

’Leo...’ she sobbed silently into the deck. ’It’s him. It’s him...’

’Nobody else in the universe flies like that.’