Chapter 114: When’s Lesson Three?

Leo took the companionway down to Deck One, and his boots made no sound on the rubber runners.

The corridor was dim and washed in the soft low amber of the ship’s rest cycle.

The living quarters were quiet, and the air still carried the faint warm smell of Camila’s bread and dried mint.

He walked past his own cabin, meaning to check the secondary life-support manifold at the end of the hall.

STEP!

A slender figure came out of the doorway of Cabin Three.

...It was Aoi.

She’d taken off her navy jacket and wore only a soft charcoal-grey cotton tunic cinched loosely at the waist, and her long black hair fell down her back in a thick glossy sheet.

She wasn’t wearing her glasses and without them, her dark eyes looked strikingly large in the amber light.

They stopped two paces apart as the hum of the scrubbers overhead sounded much too loud in the narrow corridor.

Leo slowed to a halt with his hands in the pockets of his black utility trousers and tilted his head at her.

"Aoi... Everything alright up in the cartography well?"

She didn’t answer right away.

She took half a step forward on bare silent feet, and her scent of dried tea washed over him.

As she closed the distance, her right hand lifted from her side as her slender warm fingers brushed the back of his calloused hand.

It was the lightest touch in the world, and it sent a sharp prickle of awareness straight up his forearm.

She didn’t pull away.

Her fingers lingered against his skin, and her thumb grazed lightly over the ridge of his knuckles before her hand closed around his wrist.

Her grip was fragile and trembling, and it stopped him completely. Leo turned toward her, and his eyes softened as he looked down into her face.

Her pale cheeks were dusted with a delicate burning crimson that spread all the way to the tips of her ears.

Her chest rose and fell with shallow nervous breaths under the charcoal cotton, and she looked up at him through her long lashes with a mix of raw trembling shyness and fierce stubborn resolve.

’I have to do it...’

She swallowed hard.

"Leo..." she breathed, and her fingers tightened on his wrist.

"Yeah, Aoi?" He answered softly, in the low warm voice that belonged only to the two of them.

She held his gaze.

Watching Vexa dance beside his ship through the asteroid stream, realizing that four short days were already slipping through her fingers like sand, remembering his warm thumb tracing her jaw in the quiet of her cabin, all of it had burned away the last of her hesitation...

She leaned in a little closer, and her lips trembled as she asked the question she’d been carrying since Driftmark.

"...when is lesson three?"

The words hung in the amber corridor like a dropped spark.

Leo’s breath caught in his throat.

He looked at her wide dark eyes, felt the quick fluttering pulse under the thin skin of her wrist and saw the open unguarded vulnerability shining on her burning face.

The woman who’d stood in front of lecture halls for years and made rooms full of restless students go silent with a single look was standing in front of him like a nervous girl asking for the moon.

A slow warm smile spread across his face.

"Oh..."

He turned his hand over in her grip and slid his fingers between hers, and his thumb stroked the soft back of her hand then he bent his head until his lips were close to the shell of her burning ear.

"Whenever you knock, Aoi."

Her breath hitched in a sharp little gasp.

The crimson on her face flared into a glow that made her whole body tremble. She looked at his mouth, felt the strength of his fingers laced through hers and gave one small dazed nod.

"I... I understand," she whispered, and her voice was thick.

She let go of his hand slowly with her fingers trailing over his knuckles until the very last millimeter, and stepped back into the doorway of Cabin Three.

She gave him a fragile beautiful smile that lit up the dim corridor like a sunrise.

PSSH!

The hatch slid shut.

Leo stood in the hallway for several long heartbeats, looking at the closed panel, feeling the warmth of her fingers still tingling on his skin, with a soft foolish grin spread all over his face then the ship screamed.

WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO!

The alarm exploded through the overhead speakers and tore the rest cycle apart as the amber light in the corridor snapped to a strobing crimson wash.

’What the fuck...?’

Leo’s grin vanished.

His whole body snapped into readiness in a fraction of a second, and he spun on his heel and sprinted for the companionway, taking the stairs three at a time.

Leo burst through the hatch onto the bridge and the dais was already alive.

Harper was strapping into the gunnery harness and slamming her headset over her messy hair.

Elena was waking the auxiliary capacitor banks with quick strikes of her switches, and Camila had already locked down the domestic life-support lines from the galley console.

Chloe was in her place at the bridge hatch with her sleeves pushed up, and when Leo went past her, she fell in at his heel without a word.

A second later, Aoi came through behind him with her hair loose and her glasses crooked on her nose and her face still flushed, and dropped into the cartography well.

Leo bounded onto the dais, threw himself into the throne and plunged his bare hands into the crystal cradles.

HUMMMMMMM!

"Jin-Ah, report!" His voice boomed over the siren. "What tripped the proximity grid?!"

Jin-Ah was standing rigid at station three.

She was gripping the edges of her console so hard that her knuckles looked like polished marble.

Her bob was perfectly still, but her face, usually a calm unreadable mask had gone completely bone-white.

Her eyes were fixed on the long-range telemetry.

"High-velocity contacts," she said, and her flat voice had a cold tremor in it that froze the air on the bridge. "Approaching from our rear vector at thirty-six kilometers per second. Distance forty thousand kilometers and closing fast..."

She tapped the screen and expanded the thermal and spectral analysis.

Across the tactical hololith, five big jagged signatures bloomed out of the dark behind their wake.

They weren’t haulers, and they weren’t mining dredgers... They were heavy armored raiders.

Four were eighty-meter strike corvettes, and at their center was a single one-hundred-and-twenty-meter frigate, and all five of them were cutting down the lane with their antimatter drives burning at full pursuit.

Painted across the dorsal spine of every one of them, sharp in the reconstruction on Jin-Ah’s slate, was a three-pointed emblem in pale bloodless white.

...The Pale Federation.

Jin-Ah slowly lifted her head and looked straight at Leo.

"Five ships with the federation markings and they’re on our exact vector." She swallowed. "Somebody sold our heading."

Leo saw a pair of yellow slit eyes over a raised stein, and his jaw went hard.

Behind the Wanderer-7, the black blossomed with five cold-blue exhaust cones, eating eight kilometers of the gap every second.

BZZZZZT-CLICK!

Vexa’s voice cut through the klaxons, and every last bit of the playful lilt was gone from it.

"Leo! Kill your cruise burn and bank ninety degrees into the transverse plane!" Her voice had dropped into a sharp icy panic. "I’ve got their transponders on my high-gain! Those aren’t militia... That’s the Iron Scythe Hunting Wing! Tier-2 strike corvettes on the flanks, and the center is a Tier-3 frontline frigate!"

Leo didn’t break his link with the cradles.

His fingers sank deeper into the smooth stone, and his eyes narrowed as he felt the propulsion conduits humming along his nerves.

"Your old friends?" he asked, steady as a drawn blade.

"No!" Vexa snapped, and they heard her teeth click together. "My wing was border drifters and light pickets! The Iron Scythe is the Federation’s enforcement wing... They don’t take salvage, and they don’t haggle over bounties! They’re butcher ships! They hunt defectors and Seeded targets, and they carry synchronized proton lances and heavy rail-arrays! If they bracket your stern, their first salvo will punch through your plates and turn your core inside out!"

Harper slammed her restraints shut with her knuckles white on the twin traverse controls.

"Thirty-six klicks a second! Cap, even with Torv’s coils wide open, they’ll overrun our exhaust in under four minutes! We can’t outrun them to the next jump corridor!"

"We aren’t running..." Leo said.

His voice was quiet and it settled over the bridge with the weight of a mountain.

Leo leaned forward in the throne with the sun-stone warm against his chest.

"Vexa," he said, in the low dangerous register that brooked no argument. "The Mirage can hit forty kilometers per second if you open your racing injectors... Drop your beacon, punch out through the transverse plane and run for Nexus-Prime. They’re here for my ship, not yours."

For half a heartbeat, the channel was dead silent then Vexa’s voice exploded through the speakers in a furious indignant screech that made the diaphragms pop.

"ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR BIPED MIND?!" she shrieked, and her voice was trembling with raw offended pride. "I’m Vexa Tarn! Champion of the Core Nebula! The Neon Phantom of Thyrra! You think I’m going to tuck my tail between my legs and run off to a customs spire and let five scrap-iron buckets shoot the only person who flies like my other half?! Don’t you DARE insult me, Leo! My tail stays right where your nose is!"

Through the starboard canopy, the Mirage didn’t peel away.

FLASH!

Its six thrusters flared with blinding lilac fire, and the interceptor whipped around on its vertical axis in a pivot that shouldn’t have been possible, until its needle prow pointed straight back into the teeth of the oncoming wing.

It slid across the Wanderer-7’s bow and hung there with its port wing twelve meters off Leo’s cockpit glass, matching his vector with breathtaking fluid arrogance.

"Formation locked!" Vexa declared, and her voice had gone rich and fierce and was shaking with battle-hungry joy then, smaller in a tone that was just for him.

"...Besides, you can’t leave me. You promised me a race."

A slow lethal grin curled the corners of Leo’s mouth.

"Stations," he said, and his voice filled every speaker on the ship. "We break their line."

The guide in the small of his back roared.

Between his shoulder blades, the compass flooded his marrow with a blazing river of liquid bronze, and across twelve meters of empty vacuum, the electric current in Vexa’s spine answered it in perfect resonance.

In the same microsecond, Leo felt the exact point in space where the frigate was locking its forward proton lance, and Vexa felt it too.

BOOM!

The two ships moved as one creature.

Leo killed his main thrust, slammed forty percent of the reactor reserve into the starboard attitude jets and hauled the corvette into an inverted seventy-degree climb, while the Mirage mirrored him from below and rolled onto its port flank.

Their flight paths crossed like two blades shearing through the same point in space.

SZZZZZZT! SZZZZZZT!

Two blinding emerald proton lances sliced through the exact spot where their hulls had been half a second before.

They struck nothing but empty dark, passing less than two meters under the Wanderer-7’s ventral plates as the corvette finished its roll.

"They’ve committed their forward batteries!" Aoi called from the pit, with her glasses jammed up her nose and her three silver rings spinning in blazing halos around her temples. "Range eight kilometers and closing! The frigate’s holding center, with two corvettes on the dorsal plane and two on the ventral! They’re opening their missile pods!"

"Not while I’ve got rounds in this drum!" Harper roared.

Her Kinetic Tuning hummed through the turret’s titanium linkages, and she could feel the balance of her new copper sleeves.

The twin-barrel turret swung thirty degrees to port and locked onto the upper corvette.

THUMP-THUMP!

Two eighteen-millimeter tungsten penetrators left the rails at twenty-four kilometers per second...

KRA-KOOOOOOM!

The first slug punched straight through the corvette’s forward shield, and its fluted vortex grooves drilled the plasma bloom into a cone that tore the sensor blister clean off.

The second went through the bridge viewport and turned the command deck into a boiling spray of shattered glass, shrapnel and venting air.

The eighty-meter raider pitched violently off its axis with its thrusters stuttering, and tumbled away into the dark, dead in space.

"One down!" Harper barked, and her freckled face split into a ferocious grin as she cleared the feed. "Twenty-one in the drum... Who’s next in line for the lathe?!"

"Leo," Jin-Ah said.

It cut through the cheering anyway.

On the hololith, the big crimson marker at the center of the Federation line had stopped maneuvering.

It had simply pointed its prow at them and opened its throttle wide, and the range was falling in great sickening leaps.

"The frigate isn’t shooting anymore," Jin-Ah said, very quietly. "It’s coming straight for us!"