Vitalis Omnibus (9 page)

“That LF
grenade went off next to me. Shrapnel tore into my hip pretty good.”

Kira nodded,
and then began to turn away from him. She saw that Eric’s face was guarded. He met her eyes briefly, and then looked away before she could offer him a smile.

“Hey, that’s an impressive piece of hardware you got there. Newer than what I’m used to. Then again, I never cared much for sniping. You got clearance for that thing?”

Clearance? She glanced down at it, clueless as to how to answer him. “Does it matter?” she asked, remembering his own boasting about the military grade plasma rifles he’d acquired.

Tarn grunted. “Only if somebody with bigger guns and a search order comes asking.”

An image of herself filling out forms at an office and then transferring money from three separate accounts to a fourth account played through her head. “Yes, I have a security clearance for it.”

He nodded and looked away from her. Kira frowned
. He hadn’t been nodding to her; it had been for the Captain. She turned to face him. “This going to be a problem?”

“Problem? Maybe you hit your head but you just saved our butts. Near as we can tell
, the pirates turned tail and ran away. Eric even went out on the hull to see about some repairs. No sign of ’em,” Sharp said. “You can sail with me anytime, navigator or security.”

“Hey!” Tarn protested.

“Shut your hole; you’re old and not much to look at. Kira here is younger, faster, and a lot nicer to look at!”

Tarn chuckled. “Got me there.”

Kira looked back and forth between them. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about how I did all that?”

“
Ain’t a one of us that doesn’t have secrets. A dark past, a mistake or a string of ’em. We wouldn’t be where we was without them. Long as they don’t threaten my ship or my crew, you’re entitled to them. One thing though: is it Kira or is it Emily?” Eric made a strangled sound at Sharp’s words, drawing glances from Kira and the Captain.

“It’s Kira. Emily is— was a…well, I don’t know what she was. A survival mechanism
, I suppose. She’s gone now, and I have to pick up the pieces and move on with my life.” Kira paused to stare purposefully at Eric. “If my life will let me, that is.”

Eric met her gaze and after a long couple of seconds
, he gave her an abbreviated nod. The butterflies in her stomach settled down, but it took a few additional moments for her to tame the grin that came to her face. She turned back to the Captain. “I don’t even know all the skills I have, nor what’s so special about me. It’s going to take a lot of time to figure out.”

She paused, thinking about where to begin or what to say. She looked at all of them and noticed for the first time the absence of Kevin. “Hey, where’s Kevin?”

Jeff stiffened and looked away. “He didn’t make it,” Eric said softly.

“Pirates picked him off the hull on their way in,” Tarn said in his usual gruff voice. “Jeff was hiding on the other side
; they never saw him.”

“Oh. Um, I’m sorry,” Kira said. She was sorry, but in spite of having spent months on the same ship with the man she had never really gotten to know him. That and her natural compassion and empathy seemed diminished for some reason. She frowned, wondering if Emily was responsible for that dehumanizing trait. Not for the first time she wondered just what Emily had done while she was blacked out. “Okay, let’s move on. What’s next? How’s the
Mule
doing?”

“Engines are good but the pushers are shot up,” Eric answered. “I can probably get some minimal thrust out of one of them. They took another shot at us after they left. A parting gift.”

“We were just discussing that very thing,” Sharp added. “Unless you’ve got any more revelations for us?”

Kira shook her head,
and then moved over to sit down at the navigator’s station. She noted that the seat had been adjusted to give her knees more clearance. She smiled and blinked away the sudden moisture that came to her eyes. Even uncertain of their future, Eric had still been thoughtful enough to help her. She pushed the thought aside; there’d be time to thank him properly, and messily, later. She checked her rifle over, noting it still possessed three rounds in the clip. She wondered if the case it had been packed in had any more.

She turned and saw them all still watching her. She stuck her tongue out at them and put the MAR-7 down,
and then pressed her data port against that of the nav station. Moments later she was reading data on her display and mentally injecting commands back into it faster than she could ever remember doing. New commands came to mind as well, slipping in with the old ones and allowing her to bypass just the navigational systems she normally accessed and giving her free rein of the ship’s computer. She smirked, wondering how upset Sharp would be if she routed the output of the display to the main terminal instead of just her own private one.

As she sorted through the different sections she now had available
, she stumbled across the cargo load. She surveyed it, feeling something nagging at the back of her head. “Hey,” she said, drawing the attention of the others while she continued to survey it, “when we lost our sensors, what happened?”

“Energy blast, probably a charged particle beam. Too far for plasma or a laser,” Tarn answered.

She glanced at him, nibbling on her lip. “You said something at the time. Something about our sensors being useless even before.”

Tarn shrugged. “Yeah, they is— was.”

Kira scowled at him. “What did you say?”

“That they’re junk.”

“Don’t make me slap you!” Kira growled. “I don’t mean just now; I mean when it happened.”

Tarn shrugged. “That was weeks ago!”

Kira closed her eyes and thought back. She’d found the enemy ship but it was at extreme range still. Sharp was worried what kind of weapons the pirates had… She gasped. Suddenly it flashed into her head as clear as if she had just heard it. “This is a transport! No sensors worth a damn on here. Mining rig’s got better eyesight than this thing does.” She even did a poor job of imitating Tarn’s gruff and surly voice.

“Yeah, sounds right,” Tarn agreed.

“It is right; it’s exactly right!” Kira said, turning back to study the inventory list again. “Captain, we can float blind forever or you can break into our cargo and rig up some eyes for us out of the mining gear we’ve got. There’s some small scout craft we’re carrying that have them on them. Perhaps even hook them up in an array for greater detail.”

She looked up at the open
-mouthed faces of the rest of the crew. “That’s brilliant!” Eric said in awe. Sharp slapped his chair and laughed, and then he hopped up and went over to Kira’s station, giving her a resounding smack right on her lips. She let out a surprised yelp and pushed him back but he just gave her a wink. “Captain’s prerogative. Don’t worry, I won’t tell Eric.”

“What?” Tarn blurted out.

“Tarn, suit up; you and Eric got some work to do. Jeff, start clearing off the old sensors.” Sharp gave Kira another thumbs-up. “We may be limping and we may not have much hope, but by the stars out there, we’re going to know where we are!”

Chapter 11

Close to thirty hours later
, Eric’s disembodied voice came across the ship’s speakers. “We’ve made the last connections. Some calibration may be necessary since we’re running in tandem, but we’ll deal with that when it’s needed. Energizing the array in three…two….one…”

Kira slipped in streams of commands into her station. Text scrolled across her screen,
and then blinked out for half a second. When it returned it was sectioned off into windows, one containing her text stream while two others had graphical displays. Kira hissed triumphantly, and then continued to instruct the computer to bring the new sensor arrays on line. Within moments the main display came back to life, rendering a simulated image rather than the direct optical feed of the space outside of the
Rented Mule
.

Captain Sharp threw his fist in the air and let loose a w
hoop. “Keep your hands to yourself!” Eric warned over the speakers. Sharp and Kira both laughed, remembering the last time Kira did something Sharp was pleased with.

“All right, so where are we?”
the Captain asked.

Kira focused on her display as she worked the controls and tried to zero in on their location. She frowned, not making sense of what her system told her. “I’m not sure. We’re
travelling just under half the speed of light.”

“What!”

“Yes, sir, point four five of C,” Kira confirmed. “A lot of this doesn’t make sense. I can’t even figure out our course or where we came from. Something must have happened during the fi—”

“What’s wrong?” Sharp demanded as Kira fell silent.

She held up a finger on her free hand, which only served Sharp to hop out of his chair and come and lean over her shoulder. She glanced up at him, conveying her annoyance with her pinched eyebrows. “The
Mule
doesn’t have any inertial compensators.”

Sharp snorted. “It’s a damned old transport
. We’re lucky it’s got engines!”

“Yeah, well without those and with inertial suppression on the inside of the ship, we’ve got no idea when our course is altered without active sensors. The first battle, with all of those impacts from the raider, must have skewed our heading — probably our pitch as well if not the other axis.”

“So what? We’re lost in space?”

Kira sighed. “No— well, yes, but only until I have time to figure things out. We’re going faster than we thought. We didn’t expect to hit anything over .15 C. I bet nobody bothered checking either, because of that, but now that I’m looking at it… yes, see, our fuel reserves for the pushers are at ten percent. We were supposed to make the run to the mining station and back and still have forty percent left!”

Sharp swore and turned to stomp back to his seat.

“Captain,” Eric said over the speakers, “it doesn’t really matter how much fuel we have for the pushers. We’ve only got one that I can squeak anything out of and it would take close to sixty years to slow down, turn around, or do anything else.”

“What happened?” Sharp spouted. “Why the extra speed? Why the extra fuel?”

“Does it matter?”

Kira turned to look at Tarn. He held up his hands, showing that her glare was similar to the Captain’s. “Hey, don’t be looking at me like that. It don’t matter what happened — it happened. Now we got to figure out what we’re going to do about it. More time we waste not doing that, the more fucked we are.”

Kira felt her eyes narrow as she eyed him suspiciously. He was right, but why draw attention away from figuring out what happened if not to hide something? She turned back to her station, suddenly taken with an idea prompted by Tarn’s suggestion.

“Got it!” Kira cried out a minute later. “I couldn’t pinpoint us because I wasn’t using the right dimensions!”

“Dimensions? We hit a natural jump station or a wormhole or something?” Sharp asked bitterly.

Kira shook her head. “No, sorry, I meant x, y, z, and time. I hadn’t factored in that we might not be in the time we think we should be.”

“I’m waiting for this to make sense and I have to say, I’m not in the mood for being played with.”

“Yes, Captain, no games, sir. When the sensors were hit, it sent all sorts of feedback into our system that messed with the ship’s core computers. Our four-week sleep was closer to twelve months.”

Sharp groaned and slumped in his chair after a long moment of staring at Kira with an open mouth. Tarn was quicker to react, blurting out, “Them pirates followed us for a year?”

Kira shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe. I think they were probably somebody else though.”

“Who would be this far out?” Sharp perked up.

“No idea, sir, but more importantly we missed the asteroid belt by about eleven months. It’s damn near a light year away from us, but we didn’t just shoot past it; we also were pitched up about five degrees. Although the recent fight skewed us some more.”

“So where are we headed?”

“Out there…sir,” Kira said. “Deep space. Deeper; we’re already outside the Rim.”

The silence on the bridge was agonizing until, after a pregnant pause, Captain Sharp exhaled softly. “How are our maneuvering reserves?”

Kira called up another display on the main screen. “Seventy percent, sir.” She turned to look at him, not sure what else she could or should do. He nodded as he looked at it, and then stood up slowly. “Do we have broadcast ability?”

“Yes
, Captain,” Eric said over the speakers. Kira noted his voice sounded subdued, and then again she supposed not a one of them sounded the best. Their situation had passed desperate a while ago; now even bleak was an optimistic description. “Radio signal or direct transmission.”

“I’ll be in my room,” Sharp announced abruptly. He paused, looking at both Kira and Tarn alternately. “If either of you have anything you want to say to anyone left behind, I suggest you figure
it out now.”