Empire's Legacy

Chapter 22: Rich Kids

The shaft was cramped and smelled like sweat and old grease. Amy could think of worse places she'd been, but most of them hadn't been voluntary. Her hands and knees were streaked with grime and ached from crawling along the tunnel.

The secure comm bug in her ear crackled. Her head hit the top of the shaft in surprise; wincing, she tapped her ear. "What?"

"Peleteth Docking Control wants to know when we're planning on leaving. They regret to inform us that we may be carrying a government official but that that unfortunately doesn't give us the right to outstay our docking permissions. Where are you, ma'am?"

She squinted down the tunnel and then looked down at the map hastily copied into her notebook from the much more detailed plans Cam's young sailor had pulled up for her. "Almost there. Stall them."

"Excuse me?"

She inched forward, glancing from the map to the shaft and back again. "Stall them. Cite them for something."

"Ma'am, if I stall them much longer, that shaft may begin to retract whether we detach from this side or not."

"Two minutes," she said, reaching the hatch in the side of the shaft. Tucking her notebook into a pocket of her jumpsuit, she opened the hatch a few inches, peered out, and then flipped it all the way back. Carefully, she drew her legs up and then slid until she was sitting at the edge of the opening. She leaned over, made a face, and began to roll onto her stomach. The shaft lurched, sending her sliding, and she scrabbled for a handhold, swearing under her breath.

The comm bug buzzed again. "They've begun to retract, ma'am."

"I noticed." The edge of the chute dug painfully into her stomach; her legs dangled conspicuously into the tunnel below. Biting down hard on her lip, she wiggled backwards until she was hanging from the chute by her elbows, then from her fingertips, and finally dropped. She landed hard in the maintenance tunnels, rolling her ankle and dropping to one knee.

"Shit," she muttered as she pushed herself to her feet. Blood oozed through the knee of her jumpsuit.

"You okay, ma'am?"

"Yep. Thanks for the help. My regards to Cam."

"Good luck, ma'am."

Amy pulled the comm from her ear and dropped it to the ground, crushing it beneath her boot heel, and then stripped off her jumpsuit to examine the damage. There was a noticeable tear in the knee of her trousers; the fabric was dark, so the bloodstain would pass unnoticed, but she would have to do something about the rip. And the blood. The tunnels remained deserted, so she quickly tugged off her boots and the trousers, bandaged her knee, and redressed herself before rummaging through her bag in search of inspiration.

"Ah," she said at last, pulling out a silk scarf. A slight smile crossed her face as she remembered the last time she'd used it, but quickly faded again as she focused on the task at hand. When she'd last been on C-Prime, some of the politicians' kids had been wearing scarves tied above their elbows. It had looked utterly ridiculous, but then, she was disguising herself as herself, and rich kids were known for their eccentric fashion sense. And their stupidity. And if someone like Janelle Nicholson could wear a fuchsia scarf above her elbow, then surely Annieka Brenner could wear a turquoise scarf over her knee.

The scarf fluttered against her calf as she walked, making her jumpy, but it hid the shredded part of her trousers as well as the blood-spotted bandage. And it made her look more ridiculous, and on balance Amy reckoned that anything that made Annieka Brenner seem less of a threat was probably a plus.

She left the jumpsuit in the tunnels, balled up behind a tangle of pipes, and found an exit point onto Level One. Slipping into the crowd, she wove her way across the deck to Kettering's Sfera 21. No one looked at her twice. When she reached his dock, she didn't look around, but went straight up to the access pad as though she belonged and pretended to enter the code. Kettering hadn't entered his code upon departure, of course, and so the hatch opened as soon as she asked.

Once through the access port, she entered a new code and locked the hatch. The Sfera was small for a pleasure cruiser, but the cockpit was spacious compared to some of the earlier models. She remembered the first Sfera she'd ever been in, a Sfera 04; that had been a cramped ship. It had also been twenty years earlier.

She settled into the pilot's seat and checked the instruments. Instinct screamed at her to contact Docking Control and request permission to depart, but of course that would be ridiculous. The point was that she was stealing a ship, after all.

Then again...

Checking one more time that she was ready to blaze for the Sophia's coordinates, Amy flipped a switch and knocked out a series of commands; the Sfera rocked and then tipped forward, breaking free of the docking clamps almost immediately. She grinned. It had been years since she'd pulled that manoeuver. Through the windscreen she saw yellow lights begin to flash on the spaceport. Good. She'd set off the alarms.

She flicked a knob and opened a pipe to Docking Control. "See you later, babes," she said with a laugh, and then gunned the engines. The Sfera shot away from Peleteth, looped a slow-moving cargo vessel, and swooped off in the direction of the quarantine line.

The Sophia idled near the quarantine line, a deep-space anchor holding her in place. A Commissioner scout ship had come almost within spitting distance earlier, but had shown no sign of detecting the salvage vessel. The interior of the ship hummed, making the deckplates buzz beneath one's boots and sending a faintly uncomfortable sensation through the one's bones and teeth. The humming had started up as soon as Taz had activated the signal deflector and had only grown in intensity the longer it had been operational. All non-essential systems were powered down, which made the humming that much more noticeable.

Most of the crew was gathered in the bowels of the ship, cradled between the engines; the usual purr of the Sophia's double engines canceled out much of the signal deflector's buzz. Taz lay on his back, wrist-deep in a tangle of wiring, as Grey, Ramina, and Benji studied their tokens.

"Dinner next Tuesday," Benji said at last, tossing in a slip of paper. "And cleaning out the aft manifolds."

"That's not a raise," Grey objected.

"Have you seen the build-up in the aft manifolds?"

Ramina shook her head and tapped her tokens together before setting them face down in a neat pile. "I have no intention of cleaning out manifolds of any sort, thank you." She nudged Taz's boot. "Yours, Dekker."

Taz craned his head. "See your cleaning of the manifolds, Benji, and raise you a full scrub-down of the engines—inside and out."

Grey tossed down his tokens. "What the hell do you have, Taz?"

The question went unanswered, as the comm crackled loudly and Kate said,

"Captain, I've just picked up a ship on the edge of scanners. She's small but closing quickly."

"Jones?"

"She's too far out, Captain. I'm not sure what else such a small ship would be doing out this far by itself, but the readings I'm getting are jumbled. I can't tell what kind of bird it is."

"I'm headed up."

Kate turned as he came up through the deck. "She looks like a Sfera, but she's still too far out for me to see what model."

Grey braced his hand on the back of her chair and leaned over her shoulder to look at the readings coming through on the panel. "Sferas are top of the line, high-speed pleasure cruisers, aren't they?"

"New one out just about every year," she said. "I desperately wanted one when I was 17. They're hard to beat for speed, although I think the Obvera's got them beat for style." She saw Grey's raised eyebrows and blushed. "You know me, Cap. Flight-mad since I was a kid. I used to get all the latest on new ship models. Although admittedly I'm a bit out of date," she said, frowning at the data coming in. "I don't recognize this model. They've redesigned the engines and streamlined—" She cleared her throat. "Sorry."

"But is it Jones?"

She flicked on the vidscreen as the Sfera came into visual range. "Guess we'll know as soon as she hits the sensor net."