The Endless Sky Read online

  They gathered around him and looked at the table. Two pieces of metal sat on the table, heavy and thick enough, Bee judged, to be pieces of a small ship’s hull. “Where’d you cut those from?” she asked.

  “No, look at the edges,” Mills said, pointing. Sure enough, the two pieces had ragged edges, looking torn, or pulled, apart from the whole.

  “I found these ages ago, right before I, uhhh,” Mud shrugged, glancing at Mills, “snuck onto the Dozier that time.” Mills certainly remembered that. The others had heard the story, both from Mud and from his dad. “At the time I didn’t know what it was, I guess I still don’t, but I found a ship broken apart at points, and the hull—well, here, see for yourselves. Mills, is this what you meant about Bushfield’s ship?”

  Mills studied the pieces of hull. “This is the same stress and tear patterning, yeah. So what does that mean?”

  “It means someone else thought of Bee’s idea to go around a communication breakdown before, with the same result,” Olivet said.

  “So this happened before? The same thing?” Steelbox asked.

  “Seems like it,” Mills said, not liking that one bit. “All right, this is definitely yours. With backup for a change.”

  “Backup?” Mud asked. Backup meant a close eye on them, something he wasn’t too fond of, mostly because it meant they had to play by the rules more than they liked.

  “There’s some other data. We’ll have a full brief in a few hours once your backup arrives,” Mills said, walking away from the table. “For now—good job.”

  Mills grabbed the cargo, tucking it under one arm, and started out of the room. He closed the door behind him and the team turned to Mud. “Yeah, about that good job, wait till we tell you what we were lugging,” Steelbox said. “Just wait to yell until we finish.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE INSERTION TEAM WANDERED away from the room, needing a break of even a few scant hours before they found themselves facing the next problem. Mud, still fuming from what Steelbox had explained, stalked off to his quarters on the Ratzinger, Bee trailing behind him, unfortunately going the same way.

  The others went to the Mess to grab food, leaving their Captain and his Second to fume. Bee let Mud rant softly under his breath, issuing the occasional mutter of agreement, for most of a hallway. At a junction, people crisscrossing this way and that, to and from various duties, Bee noticed a familiar shape and slid off without a word.

  Mud kept talking to her for about thirty feet before he noticed her absence. Shaking his head, annoyed more with himself than anyone else, he turned to see where she’d escaped to. Not that he blamed her. She didn’t need him venting any more than he’d need to hear it from himself. Still, bad form.

  He caught Bee, fairly skipping back toward him, hand in hand with someone decidedly not skipping but no less pleased to be there.

  “Bushfield,” Mud said, watching the couple come down the hallway. Bee stopped her half-skip to walk normally, trying to feign looking embarrassed. She wasn’t, Mud knew.

  “Hey Mud,” Bee said, smiling, “look, it’s Sarah!”

  “Yah, just said hi to her. You were there. It was three seconds ago.”

  “I’m allowed to be excited,” Bee said.

  “She is,” Bushfield said, shaking Mud’s hand. “Mud. Heard you had some trouble of your own?”

  “Ditto,” Mud said, shrugging, “and isn’t that just odd. Think they’ll send us out together this time?”

  “Backup, reporting for duty,” Bushfield said. She leaned down to quickly kiss Bee, then stood military straight again, grinning.

  “You could just join the team,” Mud said.

  “Mud, you know I think of you—hell, your family—as my own, but I never want to work for you,” Bushfield said, the words coming out like an incantation. A conversation they’d repeated many times, that neither of them grew tired of.

  “But we’d get to travel together and see each other more,” Bee said.

  “And you’d get sick of me, and I wouldn’t be your pilot, and...and...and,” Bushfield said. “When all that changes, then maybe. But for now? Backup. As requested.”

  “No offense, but not requested. We were told.”

  “I didn’t ask to ride shotgun myself, Madison,” Bushfield said, needling him, “but orders are orders.”

  “Mostly.”

  “Mostly,” she agreed, with a smile. “Briefing in two hours, right?”

  “Something like that,” Bee said, checking the time readout on the cuff of her thinsuit.

  “Mud, we’ll see you in Ops in about two hours then. Go get a nap, or a drink.” And with that, Bushfield and Bee wandered off to catch up as best they could in the small time they had.

  Stepping around strangers in the hallway, Mud wandered aimlessly, unsure what he needed. Food and sleep both sounded good, but neither sat right in his gut. He stopped, having wandered down to navigation, and activated his team’s communicator. “Olivet, meet me, your quarters, in ten,” he said. Without waiting for a reply, Mud started back in the direction of the crew’s suite of rooms, spread along a hallway near the hangars. Not the best location, but good for a quick rollout and launch, which was what they’d asked for.

  “Copy,” came Olivet’s delayed response a few minutes later. Mud kept walking, stopping by Medical for some painkillers for his leg. He refused to let them get a look, needing to keep moving. The pressure bandage job would hold a bit longer.

  The crew around him subtly changed as he moved down levels and aft on the large ship. Management types vanished and more and more flight deck crew could be spotted. Mud felt no difference between the two types, mentally, but he admitted the former were far worse at getting out of your way in a tight corridor. Mud felt like a snob even noticing the issue. He shook it off, finding the corridor where his crew lived when not on missions.

  He knocked on Olivet’s door and waited. Then he knocked again. “Mud, relax,” Olivet said behind him. “You beat me here. I decided to grab us both some pie. Whatever it is, pie will help.”

  “Is that one of your big future feelings?” Mud asked lightly, following Olivet into the room.

  “If you’d like.”

  They sat in the small, sparse room. Olivet leaned back in his desk chair and Mud perched on the edge of his dresser. Olivet hadn’t decorated to any serious degree. A small clutch of empty jars sat in one corner. Mud eyed them, thinking. Olivet noticed and raised an eyebrow. “You need the mists?”

  “How’s your stock?”

  “I am waiting for another shipment from Bercuser,” Olivet said. They both knew what that meant. Shipments from the planet could take months, because, inexplicably, the planet changed which of the two possible stars it orbited on a random-seeming basis. No one knew why, but you couldn’t count on Bercuser being in the same star system you’d thought it was in when you headed there. Considered off-limits to everyone until recently, there were still, obviously, major problems with trade.

  “So you’re out?” Mud asked. The idea kept tickling the back of his brain, and he didn’t want to let go just yet.

  “Not quite,” Olivet said, thinking out loud, “but my stock is low and I would not be able to incur many visions. They would be sporadic, and weak at best, I fear.”

  “No, that’s fine. Something is better than nothing. Make sure you bring what you can on the Arrow, all right?” Mud sat still, letting his mind work on the problem.

  “Of course, but can I ask?”

  “Why I’m suddenly all about your prophecy, if I generally want you to just deal in hard science instead?” Mud asked in return, smiling at his science officer.

  “Yes, pretty much,” Olivet agreed.

  “I have a feeling,” Mud said.

  “You? Listening to your gut, to some strange sense of—”

  “Oh, all right, I listen to my gut all the time. I just don’t huff paint to do it,” Mud said, smiling. Olivet felt his visions were true, and that his success rate was extremely high
. Which remained something that Mud fought back on, pointing out that they were often vague enough to be able to claim success or failure depending on how you looked at it. They disagreed on which way to look at it, and yet had turned it into a friendly distrust and not a team-breaking one.

  “I’ll make sure I have what stores I can gather loaded on the ship, Captain,” Olivet said, not rising to Mud’s dig.

  Mud stood, nodding at Olivet. “Thanks. I’ll see you in Ops in a while.”

  “If I may,” Olivet said quickly before Mud could leave, “beyond your gut, what’s setting you off?”

  “That’s the thing,” Mud said, stepping out of the small room, “I’m not even sure. Anyway, briefing in a bit.”

  “You didn’t even have any pie.”

  “Thanks, I’m good.” Mud closed the door behind him and started back down the hallway. He headed to Medical, to see to his leg, figuring he might as well get it dealt with by professionals while he had some time to do so.

  While Mud wandered, Olivet ate pie, and Bee and Bushfield spent quality time together, Steelbox studied charts. When Mud had officially formed a new Insertion Team he’d asked Steelbox to be a part of it, knowing what the man had done for his father. A fighter, Steelbox didn’t let anything stop him if at all possible. He could push harder than any of them, just about, to keep going.

  The thing of it was, he had no practical skills the team needed. They didn’t need a bruiser, and so after a lot of thought, and beers, he’d decided to become a navigator. It was a job he’d done before, rawly and untrained, and he enjoyed it enough—he set his mind to the task.

  He studied. He spent downtime—nights off-shift on the Arrow, whatever time he could spare and still end up alert and ready for missions—working on his new calling. So he sat, in a small corner of the primary mess hall, and pored over star charts. Bercuser remained his favorite side project. He’d map out both systems that the planet lived in, overlap them, anything to try to make sense out of the behavior of the strangest world known.

  Not that he got anywhere. People studied those systems, wrote dissertations, built entire careers on them, and had for decades. The point, to Steelbox, wasn’t to discover and solve the problem, necessarily, but to rediscover on his own everything that humanity knew. To reverse-engineer the data, and reprove it. To become good enough to have earned those degrees himself.

  This time, he thought he saw something. He looked at the maps, them laid them over each other. Scrounging for a pencil, he marked both maps up and started doing calculations, roughly, in the margins. Even as he worked, he decided someone else must have either noticed what he saw or already dismissed it. Regardless, he did the work and noted the data carefully. Olivet might know about this, he considered—but then, most Bercusans didn’t study their planet, instead choosing to accept its behavior and the fogs along its surface: simply a thing that was and always would be.

  He’d started to sum up his thoughts, writing longhand on the back of one of the maps, when his suit’s clock alarm went off, reminding him of the briefing. If he left now, he thought, he could just manage to arrive only a minute or two late. Sighing at himself, he quickly folded up his maps, being one of those strange people who could actually refold a map properly on the first try, and hurried out of the room.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE INSERTION TEAM’S OPS room felt fairly full by the time Steelbox got there. Besides his team, Mills, and Bushfield, one of Bushfield’s squad took up a seat and a bunch of secure boxes hemmed in the chairs, seeming to sprout uncontrollably from somewhere else. They intruded on the small space, making people draw their chairs closer together, huddling into a semi-circle aimed directly at the video wall and whiteboard where Mills stood.

  Bee turned to look at Steelbox as he entered, the last one in the room, and just shook her head at him. Not in anger; more along a sisterly annoyance. He shrugged in reply and found a seat.

  “...So once you’re on mission, you can deploy the scanning equipment,” Mills was saying, “which will hopefully let us track what’s going on. Hopefully it will be a waste of time.” Everyone chuckled politely, mostly because growling was rude.

  “Can’t you deploy this stuff,” Mud waved at one row of boxes, “some easier way? By easier, just to be clear, I mean ‘using anything but us.’” No one dared chuckle at that, because they would have meant it, and Mills could tell the difference.

  “It’ll need to go along your flight path, regardless, so you get to do it. Look,” Mills said, trying to not sigh. “We need this stuff. You don’t have the only payload, trust me, but we need to be able to at least make a stab at tracking an origin point for these comm blackouts.”

  “But you’re sending us to deal with the primary suspect,” Mud said. He leaned back in his chair but kept his legs curled back, under the chair, to avoid disturbing anyone else or taking up extra space. He could’ve gotten away with it, and he knew it, and that only added to his reluctance to actually do it.

  “Yes,” Mills agreed, “but the primary suspect in this case is fairly thin. Now, I admit, we want these guys brought in anyway, so lucky us. But we can’t put more than a best guess on them for this in particular. So we double down. You saying I shouldn’t?”

  “No, sir,” Bushfield said, “he’s saying he’s lazy.”

  “That’s the one,” Mud said. The laughter came from everyone, including Mills, this time. “So fine,” he continued, “we set up your equipment. What’s the actual mission?”

  “You need to take out the Brand Syndicate. Family run, we’d like Sybil and Tiago Brand back here, optimally. They’re in the city of Kenzo, planet is McDallison.” Mills called images up on the screen next to him. Pictures of an Earth-like planet, followed by slowly zoomed-in shots all the way down to the city level. Tiny facts, added by helpful people who didn’t realize the data would be too small to read when run on a screen like that, sat in small boxes along the edges of each image.

  “McDallison,” Bushfield said. “Isn’t that pretty farspun, sir?”

  “I couldn’t make them live closer, Bushfield. You’ll carry extra fuel and leave some along the flight path back, with two of the sensor packages. The Arrow should be fine for it, both ways.”

  Bee nodded, “If I remember where McDallison is, we should have fuel to spare.”

  “We will,” said Steelbox. “McDallison is farspun all right, but only a few days out from where we just were. Timewise. Directionally, whole other ballpark.”

  “So we know where, but why them? And what,” Mud asked, “will we be facing that you want us to have backup for? No offense, Bushfield.”

  “None taken. Not a single one of us wants an unnecessary field trip.”

  “The Brands have been on our radar for years. They run their local city and have fingers in most of the crime spread throughout at least one continent on McDallison. But they export, which is where we get involved. They focus on aerial and orbital defense, illegal gun mods, and communications jamming. They minor in Beta-wave disruption and recreational drugs. They’ve made some advances in comm jammers that are damned strange, so we think there’s a good chance they’re our goal. Also, three of the jamming waves have been from their degree of the sky, more than anywhere else. It points right down their throat, frankly.”

  “Wait,” Steelbox said, “they minor in drugs? And they still have a big reach? We might not have to move on them—they’re apparently bad at business.”

  “Sorry, that list was for off-world. Around home they balance it all about how you’d think they would. No, they’re good at what they do—very good. And dangerous.”

  “Let me guess,” Bushfield said, “that whole aerial and orbital bit there, that’s why you’re calling me and Beef up.”

  “Your callsign is Beef?” Bee asked Bushfield’s squad member.

  “Yours is Bee?” he asked in return.

  “No, my name is Bee,” she said.

  “Oh, my name is Ted. But yeah, Beef. I think I was pas
sed out when they handed out call signs, or something.”

  “It’s because you wouldn’t stop talking about types of cows that one day,” Bushfield said, punching him in the shoulder. “Hours of ancient types of cows on Earth.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’d do it,” Beef said, happily agreeing.

  “Guys, up here,” Mills said, trying to recover the room. “To your point, yes, Bushfield, that’s exactly why you and Oblick were called in for backup. The Brands will have something, at least one something, and we have no way to know what it is—only that it’ll be ugly and deadly. You hold the door open for the Arrow, retreat, then reenter the field to open the door on exit.”

  “No planetary run?”

  “Not unless unavoidable,” Mills said. “You leave tomorrow morning. Take the rest of today, get ships and gear in order, do your prep. I’ll run Ops from here, assuming I can and they don’t jam us. If they jam us, Mud, you’re in charge on ground, Bushfield in orbital combat.”

  “Thank you,” Olivet said, “for getting that straight now.”

  “Are you trying to say something?” Mud and Bushfield asked him, almost simultaneously.

  “I think you just explained it for us,” Olivet said.

  “All right, get out of here,” Mills said, “before this turns into what it usually does.”

  “That was kind of quick,” Mud said, even as he stood.

  “It’s a simple mission. Go get these folk. Don’t die,” Mills said. “Fix the problem.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE NEXT MORNING THEY prepared for launch. Mud and Bee went over the GravPacks that the Insertion Team both loved and hated. They were too useful not to wear, and use, during missions. But they’d also gone out of fashion decades ago. Mud’s parents, and the original Insertion Team, were the last people to use them on a regular basis. Trained on them as a normal part of growing up, Mud remained the most comfortable with them, and even he preferred to not use them when he could.