“Another ship is veering toward us,” Yumi informed her.
“You’re supposed to tell me that before they hail us,” Alisa whispered. She looked at the readout long enough to determine that the second vessel was another modified freighter, then turned back to the comm. “We are having a party in our cargo hold shortly,” she said, “but I’m not sure you’re on the guest list. Care to identify yourself?”
“I’m Captain Asaro. I’m here to collect your taxes.”
Alisa rubbed her forehead. This moon was even more of a mess than she had anticipated. As much as she feared and disliked most of the Starseers she had met, she hoped Jelena was in their care if she was down there. She would need someone who could keep the aggressively opportunistic locals away.
“We’re already talking to a tax collector,” Alisa said.
“I see that. He’s not authorized. I am.”
“You’ll have to talk to him about that. I have a limited amount of taxes, and he was here first.”
Alisa closed the comm, doubting there was anyone orbiting this moon that she wanted to talk to. The Nomad was still on course for the southern hemisphere. She drummed her fingers on the console, then nudged the speed up. Accelerating into a body’s gravitational pull wasn’t typically recommended, but an idea started to form in her mind. Maybe she could come up with a way to avoid being boarded.
“Abelardus,” she called toward the corridor. She hated to ask for his help, but a little Starseer persuasion might move this encounter in the direction she wished.
The Nomad shuddered as an e-cannon blast slammed into the rear shields. The first ship must have figured out that she did not have boarding in mind.
You require my assistance? Abelardus asked smugly into her mind as he stepped into NavCom, his long thin braids dangling down the front of his black robe.
Haven’t we discussed the way you’re not going to talk into my head anymore?
Yes, and I adore our discussions, Alisa.
“Captain,” she growled, glaring over her shoulder at him.
Yumi gave her a curious look.
Alisa gestured to direct Abelardus toward the sensors. “Any chance you can convince those two captains that they’re mortal enemies and want to blow each other out of the stars?”
“It’s difficult to manipulate the minds of multiple people at once,” he said.
“If you can just convince one of those captains that they’re mortal enemies with the other, that should suffice. They sound like the kind of people who would shoot back if shot at.”
Another cannon blast slammed into the shields. Alisa snarled and took control of the helm. It was time for creative flying, whether there was anything to hide behind or not.
“They also sound like the kind of people who shoot at unarmed freighters,” Abelardus observed.
She would have snapped at him to at least try, but his eyes grew vacant as he stared toward the ceiling, and she realized he already was. Good. She braced herself to deal with the challenge of evading enemies while trying to find a safe landing spot down there. Neither swamps nor fungal stalks sounded like desirable things to come down on.
“Weapons fire is lighting up the sensors,” Yumi said.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Alisa said.
“They’re shooting at each other.”
“It’s working?”
“The newcomer fired a cannon at the one who hailed us—and fired at us,” Yumi said. “It only took seconds for that ship to shoot back. Now they’re both unloading everything they’ve got at each other.”
Alisa gaped at Abelardus. While this had been her plan, and she had hoped for this result, she hadn’t truly expected it to work, at least not so quickly.
He smirked at her. “There was some preexisting bad blood. It only took the lightest of nudges to convince the female captain that getting rid of the competition was a good idea. Especially when she thought she remembered a rumor that the Star Nomad was carrying a valuable cargo.”
“You didn’t put thoughts of a priceless Starseer artifact into her mind, did you?” Alisa couldn’t believe he would be that foolish, but who knew what went on inside that smug head?
“Naturally not. I tantalized her with thoughts of millions of tindarks worth of cyborg parts.”
“I don’t think Leonidas’s parts are worth that much.”
“No.” Abelardus sniffed. “They’re not. But I made her believe we have crates of cybernetic implants, state of the art. A valuable cargo. One worth fighting for.”
“It worked,” Yumi said. “Uhm, it may have worked too well.”
“What do you mean?” Alisa asked.
“The original tax-collecting ship has been incapacitated.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Abelardus said.
“Not when the other one is renewing its pursuit of us,” Yumi said.
Chapter 2
“We’re heading down now.” Alisa had not slowed the Nomad down while the other ships had been squabbling, and now she was glad. She had assumed that any fight that broke out would take several minutes to resolve. That woman’s modified freighter had to have some heavy weaponry, if it had destroyed that other ship so quickly. It would make short work of the Nomad too.
“Perhaps I dangled too appealing of a cargo in front of the captain’s eyes,” Abelardus said.
“I’d say so.”
Alisa watched their pursuer in the rear camera display as the contours of the continent came into view on the main screen. She could make out the infrequent domes rising up from the otherwise gray landscape. Hundreds of miles of swamps and fungal forests stretched between them, the flat wetlands devoid of mountains or canyons that Alisa might have flown through to shake a pursuer.
“Maybe you could amend your mental suggestion,” she told Abelardus. “Convince the captain that what she really heard about was a cargo hold full of rusted worthless cybernetic parts from centuries long past.”
“It’s much easier to convince someone of something they want to believe than of something they don’t want to believe,” Abelardus said.
“Does that mean you won’t try?”
“It means I already tried.”
A flare of yellow appeared on the rear camera as their pursuer launched a torpedo.
“Brace yourselves,” Alisa said.
That was going to hurt, even with the shields up.
She veered to the right, hoping to evade the attack, but the torpedo changed course to follow her. She wasn’t surprised. It slammed into their rear shields, exploding with a white flash that made Alisa wince as she was thrown forward against her harness. Abelardus might have gone headfirst into the view screen if he hadn’t caught himself on the back of a seat.
Alarm lights flashed, and the shield power dropped a terrifying fifty percent. It had already been down twenty. Another hit, and they wouldn’t have any shields left.
If the ship could last another minute, the Nomad would be skimming over the wetlands, where Alisa hoped, perhaps vainly, that she might find some cover. But she didn’t know if she had that minute.
Alisa thumped her palm onto the comm button.
“You’re going to have to pick up your expensive cybernetic parts by hand if my wreckage is scattered across a hundred miles down there,” she told the other captain, glancing back at the sensors, wishing that some police or military ship would appear to help them. But if anyone in the domes cared about squabbles between freighters, they weren’t coming out to show it.
“No problem,” the woman replied promptly. “I have mechanical minions that don’t mind such tasks.”
Chicken squawks drifted up from the cargo hold. Alisa wondered if their pursuer would be disappointed when all she found littered across the landscape was feathers.
The internal comm light came on. “Captain, what despicable and nefarious things are you doing to the ship?” Mica asked.
“I’m not the one doing them. We’ve picked up a tax collector.”
r />
“Is it hard to collect taxes from a ship that’s been utterly pulverized?”
“That’s what I was asking.”
“Just got this ship halfway fixed,” Mica grumbled, amid clanging sounds. “Taxes. Thought we overthrew the empire to get rid of taxes.”
More clangs sounded.
Alisa did not know if Mica was fixing something or simply taking out her irritation by banging on the hatch.
“Strap yourself in, Abelardus,” she said as the swamplands grew larger and more distinct ahead of them. “I don’t want you falling in my lap the next time we get hit.”
“You sure that wouldn’t excite you?” he asked, sliding into the co-pilot’s seat.
Alisa grimaced, regretting that she hadn’t told him to lock himself in his cabin instead. But they had reached land, and she was too busy flying to retort.
Tall gray stalks rose up from the moist ground, some towering forty or fifty feet. They did not have branches or leaves, instead reminding her of stalagmites. The water had a sickly grayish tint that matched everything else in the moon’s bleak wilderness. Not seeing any promising mountains or buttes to swoop around, she flew low over a lake.
“I’ll try to distract her gunner into—ah.” Abelardus frowned. “They’re launching another torpedo.”
Several of the fungal stalks rose up from the water, each between five and ten feet thick, and Alisa weaved in and out around them, hoping the torpedo might strike them instead of her freighter. She had no idea if they had the mass and density of trees, or if a torpedo would cut right through them without exploding. A faint shudder went through the Nomad as she brushed one with the edge of her shield.
“Brace yourselves,” she said again, watching the torpedo weave through the stalks after them.
It had irritating precision. She banked hard around a clump—or was that a copse?—of towering stalks, the Nomad’s belly almost skimming the murky water around them. The torpedo shot past, going too far before banking. It turned sharply. Too sharply. It clipped one of those fifty-foot stalks and exploded in a fiery blast that took out the entire copse.
As Alisa started to congratulate herself on surviving another thirty seconds, something huge leaped out of the water ahead of them. She shrieked as a hulking scaly figure slammed into the Nomad’s shields in front of the forward camera, momentarily blacking out the view. A thump sounded as the massive creature bounced off, flew to the side, and disappeared back into the water with a splash.
“Just to be clear,” Abelardus said, “were we bracing ourselves because of the torpedo or because of your flying?”
“What was that?” Alisa asked Yumi, ignoring him.
“One of the dinosaurs common to the southern continent,” Yumi said. She, too, sounded shaken, but she hadn’t shrieked. Alisa felt chagrined by her response. “They’re the local wildlife. Some scientists made them after the domes went up. I believe they’re something of a tourist attraction.”
“Do the tourists like it when they leap out of the water and try to plaster themselves to their hulls?” Alisa forced herself to take a breath when she realized her voice sounded squeaky.
“Your engines may have alarmed it.”
“You sure it wasn’t that torpedo exploding?” Alisa asked, then sobered and checked the sensors. Their foe was still out there and probably had more torpedoes.
“That also could have been the reason,” Yumi said agreeably. “I wish we could get out here. I believe I saw several interesting varieties of mushrooms growing in the shadows of some of those stalks. I would love to get a sample of the mycelial mat we flew over.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Alisa spotted the other ship flying over the shoreline ahead of them at the same time as the proximity alarm complained again. “Tell me something new,” she told it, and checked all of her cameras, certain another torpedo was on its way. “Yumi, how about finding me a place to land where that ship’s weapons can’t get us?”
“The swamps are reputedly full of quick-mud,” Yumi said. “Landing may not be safe.”
“Neither is flying.”
“They’re coming after us,” Abelardus reported. “Firing again.” He wasn’t looking at any displays, so presumably his fancy mental powers were telling him that.
Alisa swooped back into the fungal stalks rising from the lake, taking care to stay a few meters above the surface this time. She did not want to hit another so-called dinosaur, both because she didn’t want to kill random wildlife and because she was sure it would make a mess if it were sucked into one of her thruster housings.
The torpedo appeared on the sensors, a hot red blip chasing them. It swerved through the stalks, zooming closer. Despite Alisa’s best efforts to shake it, it refused to crash into an obstacle. She rose up, flying over the rounded tips of the stalks, and when it followed, she dove down, as if she intended to take the freighter for a swim. It zipped after her, closing fast. When it was only a few meters from her rear shields, and when the brackish water was close enough to taste, Alisa pulled the Nomad’s nose up.
Water sprayed as the shields skimmed the surface, but she managed to rise again before immersing the ship. The torpedo did not turn quickly enough, and it plummeted into the lake. She leveled out and zipped away, not certain if the water would do anything to thwart the projectile or its energy-seeking capabilities.
An explosion filled the rear camera. Some fungal stalks blew up, and others tottered and fell, their thick bodies floating atop the water like logs.
The comm light flashed.
“How many of my torpedoes can you avoid, fellow captain?” the woman crooned.
“I can avoid them all day,” Alisa said. “I flew a Striker in the war. You think I’m worried about your puny torpedoes?”
“Puny?”
Alisa muted the comm. “Maybe I shouldn’t have goaded her.”
“I’m attempting to influence the gunner,” Abelardus said, “but he’s terrified of his captain and cringes at the idea of disobeying her or willfully being inept.”
“She sounds like a lovely lady,” Alisa said, watching the freighter streak across the lake after them. She took the Nomad away from the water, hoping some other terrain feature would inspire her. She needed to force the other ship to crash, not simply crash its torpedoes. Who knew how many it carried? “Abelardus, how far are we from your Starseer buddies? Any chance they would help us if we flew close and they knew one of their delightful relatives was in trouble?”
“A delightful relative? Is that me or you?” He smirked at her.
“I’m no Starseer’s relative,” she said, though she knew what he was implying.
“Your father was. Have you looked him up yet?”
“Do you think this is a good time to discuss my family?” Alisa dove into a shallow valley, swerving to avoid even denser concentrations of the fungal stalks while groping for inspiration and waiting for the inevitable next torpedo.
“Why not? We discussed mycology mats, or whatever it was.”
“Mycelial mats,” Yumi said.
“That wasn’t a discussion. That was Yumi waxing passionate about fungi.” Alisa eyed a blanket of mist that floated over the lowlands of the valley. “Yumi, those dinosaurs? Do they have a habitat where they enjoy loitering in packs?”
“I believe some of the flying ones have pack tendencies. They favor marshlands.”
“Marshlands? Isn’t the whole moon marshlands?” Alisa ignored a flash from the comm after confirming it was their pursuer again and not some savior wanting to help them out.
“I’ve heard there are fens in the northern hemisphere,” Yumi said.
“Is that a joke?” Alisa glared back at her. Where was Leonidas to comment on inappropriate humor?
Yumi appeared tense rather than comedic, her lips pursed as she did some breathing exercises. Or maybe she was trying to keep from hyperventilating.
“There’s another valley in that direction,” Abelardus said, pointing. “Past that pond. Turn and
head into it there. I see what you have in mind, and I can help.”
Blazer fire streaked through the fungal stalks as their pursuer swooped left and right, trying to get a good shot at the Nomad. A few of the blasts made it through the forest, pattering against the rear shields. They weren’t as powerful as the torpedoes, but the shield power still inched downward. The other ship missed more often than hitting, fortunately. Fungal stalks pitched over or exploded in masses of cellulose. A ten-foot-wide one thumped down onto the enemy as it passed. Unfortunately, it bounced off the shields and did not do damage.
Alisa turned the Nomad toward Abelardus's pond, having little choice but to trust in his “help.”
She kept swooping about, trying to provide a difficult target, as she headed into a misty quagmire. Mud mingled with the murky water they flew over. She was glad they were not on foot.
“There.” Abelardus pointed toward a clump of fungal stalks.
As Alisa took the ship in that direction, more blazer fire bounced off their rear shields. A low-power alarm flashed on the console.
“I don’t see anything,” she told Abelardus.
“Just keep flying. Stay low. Trust me.” He flashed a grin at her.
She groaned. He hadn’t earned her trust yet.
“I believe she’s arming another torpedo,” Yumi said.
“Slow down,” Abelardus said. “Let her get closer.”
“Are you spaced?” Alisa glared at him.
“It’ll have to be close.”
“It would be nice if you explained yourself,” she growled, but he sounded confident, and she did not know what else to do. She slowed down, but she was careful to keep some of those stalks between her and the other ship, weaving in and out as unpredictably as she could.
“That’s right,” Abelardus crooned, watching the rear camera. “Come closer. You know we won’t be able to evade your torpedo if you get extra close before firing it.”
“Yumi, I think our Starseer has gone crazy,” Alisa said, her fingers twitching to summon more speed. This was ludicrous.
“It does happen,” Yumi said.