Chapter 111: Vexa Is Our Only Hope

The air on the docking gantry smelled of sulfur and machine oil, but at the foot of the ramp, Vexa smelled quite nice.

’Is she using some sort of alien perfume...? I want that.’ Leo thought.

He came three steps down the ramp and folded his arms, and his eyes were level with hers.

Behind him the corridor was quiet, but he didn’t need the guide in his back to know that six pairs of ears were pressed to the inner bulkhead.

"Explain," he said. "The broker said an unregistered hull gets shot the moment it crosses their outer grid... Having fifteen thousand Zuni for the landing fee doesn’t mean much if their batteries turn us to vapor before customs opens a channel."

’I do know we need IDs to enter.’ Leo thought. ’But I think we can register that before we enter the planet, can’t we...?’

Unfortunately, there was no way to make one on Driftmark...

Vexa’s tail swayed in a slow confident rhythm behind her calves, tapping the metal grating every third beat.

"That’s because your broker was talking about vagrant trash," she said, resting her white knuckles on her hips with her chin up and a dazzling, effortless arrogance. "Nexus-Prime isn’t some backwater rock with three rusty gunboats and an old biped with a stamp... It’s the hub of five merchant houses! They’ve got twelve Tier-4 platforms over the equator, and their targeting systems don’t hail unaligned ships. They paint your drive core with proton lances from forty thousand kilometers out and turn you into expanding gas before you can even send a landing request... If you fly that gunboat in alone, you’re scrap before your boots touch air."

She stepped a little closer, and the tip of her pink nose wrinkled with excitement as she pointed at her own chest.

"Unless you’re flying under an escort beacon... I’m not just a citizen of Nexus-Prime, Leo. I’m a Tier-S High-Velocity Flight Champion, and my credentials come with unrestricted corridor clearance so when the Mirage sends its personal transponder code, the grid opens a clear lane straight down to the Central Customs Spire, and anything flying in tight formation behind me gets logged as my authorized escort... They’ll hold their fire, check your arrival under my name and let you walk right up to the customs desk to pay your tariff and register your IDs like civilized people."

She spread her hands. "Without me, you’re target practice but with me, you walk through the front door."

Leo held her violet gaze for three long silent seconds, listening to the guide in his back.

’Is she lying...? Is there any danger?’

The guide hummed with the smooth warm feeling it gave him when the space ahead was clear.

"Wait here..." he said.

He turned, walked back up the ramp and slapped the cycling pad.

PSSH-LOCK!

The airlock sealed with a heavy thud and cut Vexa off on the gantry... The command dais was now a storm of quiet simmering friction.

Harper was practically pacing a trench into the floor beside the gunnery station with her knuckles stained black with grease and her jaw locked.

The moment the hatch shut, she spun around with her eyes blazing.

"No," she snarled, and took two stomping strides toward the throne with her finger jabbing at the airlock. "No damn way, Leo! Are you seriously listening to that cat-girl?! A while ago she was sitting in the dark watching three pirate gunboats try to chew our thrusters off... She admitted it! She commanded the wing that tried to kill us, and now she’s on our ramp batting her eyelashes and offering to be our tour guide through a planetary defense grid?! What if she leads us straight into a kill-box, drops out of formation and lets their cannons blow our engines out while she laughs all the way home?!"

"Her position is undeniably suspicious," Elena said, stepping down from the engineering console with cold precision.

Her uniform was immaculate and her honey-blonde hair was pinned up again, but her eyes were narrowed into blades and her arms were folded tight.

"Relying on an unverified alien corsair to guide us through an automated defense perimeter is an unforgivable breach of operational security, Captain... She claims to be a celebrity of the highest tier, and yet her association with the Pale Federation shows an appalling lack of ethical consistency. She chased us for fun... She nearly destroyed her own ship doing it and now she clings to our hull like an opportunistic barnacle."

Her voice dropped and turned venomous.

"Letting her choose our flight path hands our safety to a woman whose chief qualifications seem to be an offensive amount of hair and no dignity whatsoever."

"We need to look at this objectively," Jin-Ah said, and her voice cut through the rising argument like a scalpel.

She was still seated at station three with two data panes floating in front of her, cross-referencing the station’s public manifests against Scribe-Nine’s packet.

"Personal distrust aside, her description of Nexus-Prime’s orbital defenses is accurate," She reported calmly. "The twelve platforms enforce a zero-tolerance policy against unregistered vessels... According to their port authority’s own public records, unregistered hulls approaching the customs spire without a certified escort or a consular visa have a ninety-one point four percent rate of interdiction and destruction and her registry confirms her identity. Vexa Tarn is a citizen of the highest tier... An escort beacon bypasses their automated firing solution and takes us directly to the registry desk."

Aoi adjusted her glasses with one finger, her dark eyes solemn and watchful by the cartography table.

Her rings were dormant, but she carried the quiet weight of a lecturer about to correct a dangerous assumption.

"The logic may be sound, Jin-Ah, but caution has to govern how we carry it out," she said. "A ship flying in tight formation with a high-speed interceptor is bound to that interceptor’s vector. If she banks without warning inside a platform’s firing envelope, our reaction time will be limited by our mass... There’s no room for error in that kind of sky, Leo. If we accept her escort, we must keep control of our own drive."

Camila stepped forward from the galley rail and smoothed her leather apron with nervous hands.

Her eyes were soft and troubled by the tension between Harper and Elena, but when she spoke, her voice carried that gentle certainty she had sometimes, the same kind that saw past the noise of war.

"She didn’t know about the slaves, Leo," she said softly. "I was watching her face on the rock when you told her what the Federation really does... Her tail stopped completely, and her skin went pale as milk. She looked sick, Leo... Cruel people don’t look like that when they hear about cruelty. She’s reckless and she talks without thinking, but I don’t think there’s any rot in her."

Behind the throne, Chloe sat cross-legged on the mezzanine step with her black sweater pulled down over her knees and her bangs low over her eyes.

Her green eyes were fixed on the closed airlock door at exactly the height where Vexa’s throat had been.

She didn’t care about defense grids or fifteen thousand Zuni or racing trophies.

Her small pale fingers were slowly flexing against the wool of her sleeves, and she was thinking that if the pink girl ever made one sudden move toward Leo’s neck, she would go straight through the glass of that pretty purple cockpit and rip out her windpipe before her tail could hit the deck then she blinked, and added fairly to herself.

’...But she did save Aoi.’

The bridge went tense and silent, and six faces turned toward the young man standing in the middle of the command deck.

Leo stood quietly for several heartbeats with the sun-stone pulsing faint and warm under his shirt.

He didn’t defend Vexa, and he didn’t dismiss the real anger burning in Harper’s chest.

"We take the escort," he said.

Harper’s mouth opened, and he held up one calloused hand and stopped her before a word came out.

"Listen to me." His eyes moved across each of them in turn. "We have twenty-one thousand two hundred Zuni in our safe... Fifteen of that is set aside for the landing fee, and the coils are bolted to our engine block but a ship floating in pieces outside an orbital grid can’t spend money and it can’t register IDs... If her beacon gets us through those guns without dodging proton lances, we use it. We use every advantage the void gives us to reach that surface alive."

He lowered his hand, and his jaw set.

"But my rule holds, and it’s final... Vexa flies her own ship and we fly ours. She doesn’t come aboard, she doesn’t cross our airlock, touch our consoles or sleep on our bunks... We fly in formation, we watch her telemetry every second of the trip, and if she so much as twitches toward a vector I didn’t approve, Harper puts a slug through her tailpipe before she can clear our bow... That’s the order so stations."

He turned to Harper last, and his voice gentled without losing any of its weight.

"And you’re right to be angry. I haven’t forgotten what she did... If she ever gives me a reason, I’ll be the first one to cut her loose but today she’s the fastest way to a safe sky, and I want every one of you standing on solid ground under it."

Harper let out a long ragged breath through her nose, and her shoulders came down a centimeter.

She looked at his face, at the stubborn protectiveness behind his eyes, and gave a stiff reluctant nod.

"Understood, Cap," she muttered, turning back to her console with a fierce frown. "I’ll keep the turret on her shadow the whole damn way..."

"Auxiliary capacitors are primed," Elena said, dipping her head in composed agreement, though the cold gleam in her eyes promised the Mirage would stay painted by targeting lasers for every kilometer of the journey. "I’ll align our forward shields to her exhaust path."

"Laying in the departure sequence," Aoi reported, her fingers moving smoothly across the astrogation controls as her professional calm settled back over her. "All umbilicals are clear."

Leo cycled the airlock one more time and walked halfway down the ramp.

Vexa was exactly where he’d left her.

She hadn’t wandered off to look at the other ships or gone back to her cockpit.

She was standing at the bottom of the ramp with her hands clasped behind her back and her tail curled tight around one ankle, rocking very slightly on her heels, and the moment the hatch opened, her ears went straight up.

"Well?" she asked, and tried very hard to sound casual about it.

"You fly your ship, we fly ours," Leo said. "You don’t come aboard... You stay where my gunner can see you the whole way, and if you bank without telling us, she shoots first and apologizes never."

Vexa’s whole face lit up like a launch beacon.

"Deal! Deal, deal, deal!" She bounced twice on her toes, and her tail came uncurled and began whipping back and forth so hard it rang off the gantry rail. "I won’t even breathe near your hull! I’ll be the best escort in the history of escorts! Your gunner can paint me all she wants!"

She was already backing away toward Berth Forty-Five while still talking.

"Four days, Leo! Four days and you’ll see the purple sky! Don’t fall behind! Actually, you can’t fall behind, I’ll slow down but not too much! I don’t do slow very well!"

She turned and sprinted for her ladder, and Leo stood on his own ramp for a second longer, shaking his head as he smiled.

’She’s very sweet... I don’t know what to think.’

Up in the gunnery seat, Harper watched the whole thing through the external feed and said nothing at all.

Leo walked to the throne, settled into the leather and sank his bare hands deep into the crystal cradles.

The link surged warm through his palms and locked his mind into the hull.

"Vela, signal Berth Forty-Five... Tell our escort to spin up."

CLANK-HISS!

The arrestor pads of Berth Forty-Four let go of the ventral hardpoints, and the mooring arms retracted into the gantry with a deep echoing shudder.

WHOOOOM!

The twin ion thrusters flared clean turquoise, and the corvette backed smoothly out of the bay and rotated ninety degrees on its axis as it cleared the habitat ring.

Twenty meters off their starboard flank, the Mirage slid out of Berth Forty-Five like an iridescent viper leaving its nest, folding its landing skis up into its hull and coughing twin plumes of lilac plasma across the dark basalt of the asteroid.

Through the canopy, the open black of deep space stretched out ahead... clean and free of Driftmark’s smoke.

The station’s defense batteries fell away behind them, and their three-hundred-kilometer perimeter dissolved into the void.

"We’ve cleared the exclusion zone," Aoi announced, her rings spinning bright around her temples as she lined their bow up with the distant corridor. "Vector’s aligned and the lanes ahead are clear."

"Elena," Leo said as he narrowed his eyes. "Bring the new coils online..."

He was quite hungry to see the results.

"Pulse induction coils are engaging..." Elena’s fingers moved across the propulsion switches in a crisp rhythm. "Routing forty percent of the core’s auxiliary output through the compression rings... Fields are now stable and temperature is nominal."

She looked up.

"...Captain, the drive is yours."