Foolish to think it would.
That brief glare told Naero all she needed to know.
She was really in for it now.
Nothing she could do but take her lumps.
Naero got a few blows in
before she went down.
That didn’t matter.
Aunt Sleak overwhelmed her defenses and threw her to the ground. Hard.
Suddenly it was a bit like fighting Baeven. She knew
her aunt had been holding back in the past, but she had no idea how much.
Naero rolled to her feet, buffeted by low kicks as she crouched.
Their precision and speed pummeled her, and knocked her back into the wall.
Training with Baeven turned out to be good for something. At least he taught her how to take a beat down
“What in the hell were you thinking?” Aunt Sleak finally screamed at her. “I don’t care how good-looking he is. He’s a Matayan. One of their princes. This is not going to happen. The two of you will never be left alone again.”
After getting beat up, Naero’s own temper flared. She spread her arms wide in denial.
“So he’s a Matayan. So what? What’s the big deal? You sound as bigoted as they are. He’s not all that bad. Did you ever think that with all this talk of new alliances, he might be able to help our side and his own people at the same time? They’ve got their backs against the wall. They’re desperate.”
“
His people kill our people, Naero–every chance they get. They killed your parents and everyone with them. And we’ve killed plenty of Matayans in retaliation. We are enemies. Blood enemies.”
“And when will that change? Never? We have a platinum opportunity to reverse that. Can’t anyone see that? His people need help.”
“They won’t find any from us. This isn’t about diplomacy, and you know it.”
Naero tried to rise
. Aunt Sleak rammed her back onto the mat with a heavy foot.
“You want to learn about sex, s
pacechild? Well that’s just great. Pick one of the crew. Take that lander boy for a spin. Go hire someone at one of our stops to throck your world. Knock yourself out. But stay away from that Matayan bastard. Before you screw the sons of your family’s slayers...I’ll kill you myself. You got that?”
Naero glared back. “
Got it.”
“
Good.”
A big, athletic Intel self-defense instructor stepped in, ready to spar.
Aunt Sleak let Naero up and motioned to the Intel instructor. “Continue this session. Push her hard.”
She didn’t even look back, adding, “
You’ve really disappointed me, Naero. I thought you were smarter than this.”
Naero took her stanc
e, her bleeding lips tight.
As f
ar as she was concerned, that instructor was in serious trouble.
34
“
Take your stations, then.” Aunt Sleak turned and met Naero’s eye the next morning as their Intel training continued
Naero smiled back.
After laying low to drive Triax insane, very soon they would make good their escape from Corps Space under the cover of their new merchant freighter.
For
intents and purposes,
The Rio Lobo
was just a standard, 400 ton freighter out of Arnett Corps Space. The escape team transferred all of their basic gear to their new quarters, and continued to work and train on their new home, hidden in one of
The Alamo’s
huge cargo bays.
They left behind anything that might give them away.
Each member of the escape crew also swallowed a temporary Intel programmable implant that remained inside them, identifying them as genetically standard humans to all Corps scans and sensor checks, even at the genetic level.
No one would be able to tell they were Spacers; their covers,
solid. And the IDs could still be changed if needed.
Their itinerary would take them several
days to eventually reach Hadar-1, close to a far corner of Triaxian and Joshua Tech Space. Close to, but not yet within, the worlds of the mining revolts.
The only restrictions Intel placed
on them insisted that Tarim and Ellis could not leave the ship at any destination unless accompanied by an Intel handler.
Naero and Jan also had to
remain under heavy guard at all times, but everyone would more or less do their jobs and function as normal crew to avoid suspicion. The Intel agent who helped train them, Irith, was assigned to them both as a body guard.
Naero liked Irith, even though the quiet agent was
almost thirty, and very tall. But she had black hair and violet eyes like Naero, and they pretended to be sisters as part of their cover.
She never had a real sister before.
Today, Irith and Aunt Sleak ran the backup checks on their jump drive.
Naero
finally got relieved from her post at the navigation console and slipped away.
The Intel Chief Klyne gave them their final instructions.
“The escape plan is simple and straightforward. Play your roles. Remember your parts. Stick to the plan. We’ve been running this ship for three years now along the same route. Its various trade stops are firmly established with the authorities and accepted as routine. There’s some room for deviation, but not much.
“We do this right, and we make it safely into Joshua Tech Space easy
. That’s the plan. Any last-minute questions?”
Naero
tried not to nod off. Intel was nothing if not thorough in their rigorous training. On top of her aunt’s tender love.
After running through the plan multiple times from almost every angle for days on end, Naero
had few questions.
They launched that evening.
By all reports on
INS
, Triax and the other nearby Corps had gone berserk looking for terrorists, rebels, anarchists, alien infiltrators, renegade psyons–anything to justify the additional strong-arm police-state tactics they unleashed on their systems.
The fact that Naero and Jan vanished off everybody’s scans by hiding out in
The Alamo
had many convinced that they had already made good their escape, with the help of
The Shadow Fleets
.
A equally dumpy, old
Triaxian cruiser boarded
The Rio Lobo
upon their scheduled approach to Hadar-1.
The first test of their new cover.
The Corps Marines knew Klyne under another alias, but checked and scanned everything and everyone according to SOP.
Luckily, the Intel people
did their homework well. Their cover held up airtight.
“
You’re clear, Dutch,” the Triaxian Marine lieutenant told Klyne. “Everything checks out, just like your manifest says. You got those creds you owe me on the fights?”
“Next time,”
Klyne said with an easy laugh. “I’m a little short now, but you know I’m good for it. We can go about our business?”
“Yeah, s
tick to your route. Watch out for mining ships, though. Don’t trade with them, don’t dock with them. Even if they’re in distress. Triax gives you permission to let them cook off if you have to.”
“What’s going on?”
Klyne asked.
“
Check the local system news monitors. Miner revolts are spreading across several systems in this direction. Nothing we can’t handle, though. They’ve got a powerful psyon helping them, but we’ll either blast or starve them all out in the end. That’s how we usually get it done.”
“
I see,” Klyne said. “How dreadful.”
Naero resisted the urge to glance at Jan, expecting to find him drooling over potential
high-risk profits.
Naero looked for Tarim, overwhelming compassion
for the miners and their families washing over her. She couldn’t spot him.
The Triaxian duty officer rambled on. “
To be safe at the starports, stay out of the local areas and any place frequented by miners. They’re desperate for weapons and ships. No one’s safe. Wear psycaps if you have them or can buy them. If you see anything suspicious, anyone tries to mind control you, contact the authorities and let us check it out. We have psy-detection units and routine patrols throughout this entire region.”
“
Will do.”
Luckily
, all of their weapons and other nefarious gear were temporally displaced so as not to show up under any normal scans. The temporal pockets were just one of a number of high-tek advantages that Spacer Intel had over the Corps. The only problem with the pockets was that you could not hide anything alive in them. It even killed plants and single-celled organisms.
Tests had been made, unsuccessfully, with
live animals. The data collectors on the test subjects survived, recording an excruciating death as the space-time dimensional anomaly broke them down and tore them apart.
Maintaining a
technological edge over the Corps would continue to spell the difference between life and death for her people.
The
Kexxian Data Matrix could not be allowed to fall into the hands of their enemies.
Naero glanced
at the deathband on her wrist.
Could she really use it to blow herself up if need be?
Haisha
.
She shuddered
, sensing a flurry of muted objections from Om. She’d told him to remain silent during the boarding. Just in case.
The Corps boarding party returned to their warship.
The Rio Lobo
continued on its way.
“Get it in gear; to
your stations,” Klyne called out. “Proceed to Hadar-1. Request landing instructions.”
Naero
scanned Hadar-1. Fifty-percent land mass. A white, red, green, and blue world, mineral rich. A slight cloud cover obscured the south pole due to vulcanism.
Lots of mining interests.
No signs that the revolts had openly exploded there yet.
Kly
ne piloted. Aunt Sleak co-piloted. They took the ship in.
Naero manned her sensor array station. Nothing but the nav
al patrol ship receding, a few traders around the planet, and a couple of old satellite networks.
“
We have some limited contacts with the rebel miners,” Klyne told Aunt Sleak. “If things go badly, they might be able to help us in a pinch. Yet their backs are against the wall. They’re very wary, but desperate for allies.”
Aunt Sleak nodded
. “Let’s follow up on that quietly if we can. We need all the intel we can get.”
The Rio Lobo
settled down into the starport docking bay.
What a clunker. Sturdy. Reliable. But still a clunker by any stretch of the imagination.
And Naero couldn’t ever afford a clunker like it.
The auto-landing sequence brought all drives to a full stop.
Naero sprang out of her gelchair before anyone else.
Back in her cramped quarters,
she reviewed a holo of the planet in her room for any curious details. Hadar-1. A near-earthlike, terraformed to be somewhat more pleasant–if that was even the correct term. Even with huge continents and barely fifty-percent oceans, most of the northern and southern hemispheres lay locked in the grip of ice age glaciers.
In the habitable zone around the equator, it got up to only
fifteen degrees Celsius in the summer. Twenty or more might be considered hot. Normally five or ten degrees in the morning or at night.
Fun.
The Hadar system did possess a wide variety of rich mineral deposits, hence Triax’s primary interest.
It remained
a relatively young system, and together with its equally rich asteroid belts, it had yet to be strip-mined out. Even with modern equipment, Corps miners went there by the multitudes on freeze ships to slave for Triax and scratch out a meager existence for themselves and their families.
They h
ad little choice in the matter.
Production demands, profit
-sharing restrictions, and safety code violations eventually led to a grinding process of misery and death.
Surprise.
As long as the Corps overclass thrived, their military remained dominant, and the struggling middle class were kept more or less happy and distracted, the other sixty percent of Corp society could simply go straight to hell and wallow there in abject misery.
Triax
. The worst and the oldest of the Corps, had no reason to improve things. Their systems produced an abundant supply of desperate, expendable workers.
To
Naero, the miners looked royally sodomized.
By local time it
reached morning where they were headed, the sky still dark.