Fool's Gambit (Confederation Reborn Book 5) Read online

  The bridge's doors slid open and Vorsin fired several quick shots, his weapon groaning as it charged with energy, then sending bursts of electrical flame at the entrance. The Rothians shot back, filling the bridge with the deafening roar of gunfire and rounds hammering the metal plate and making it ring.

  Vorsin wilted slightly under the onslaught. The metal plate glowed hot from the Rothian's weapons, but even as Vorsin buckled slightly he was reaching for his heavy artillery rifle. Rothian fire punched through the thick metal plate, and Vorsin roared as a round sliced across his shoulder. He kicked the plate with one massive thrust, sending it at the entrance, then he swung the barrel of his weapon up and fired.

  The gun released a chain of rounds at everything in its path. It shredded the metal plate and blew holes in the bridge doors, knocking them from their frames. By the time he stopped firing, Knox could barely see from all of the smoke, and he covered his mouth with his hand to keep from inhaling it.

  He heard Vorsin's heavy footfalls as he retreated to his defensive position, behind them, and ducked down. "I counted seven bodies out there," Vorsin said, as he lifted his fusion rifle. "More are coming. Prepare to defend yourselves."

  Dolon propped his assault rifle over the lip of the desk, and Knox peered around the side, his sub-machine gun in his hands. The scraping and scuffling sounds intensified, then stopped. Knox heard muffled voices, then he saw a small object fly into the room in a low arc and bounce off one of the consoles with a metallic chime.

  All three of them dropped to the ground and covered up, trying to get behind cover as the grenade exploded.

  The shockwave slammed Knox like a fist, but the sturdy desk shielded him from the blast and apart from a deafening ringing in his ears he could feel no pain. When Knox looked up, Dolon had already returned to his firing position, and as he leant past the side of the desk to cover the door he saw that Vorsin was hauling his gun up and onto the metal plate in readiness.

  A handful of Rothians charged through the door, bursting through and spreading out immediately, hunting for them. All three of them opened fire, gunning down the intruders within seconds.

  Knox fired off a burst of shots that sent one of them spinning to the floor, and above the ringing in his ears he could just make out the rattle of Dolon's assault rifle, and from the other side of the bridge, the electronic whine of Vorsin's fusion rifle.

  The remaining Rothians scrambled back to safety inside the passageway, taking cover behind the ruined door frame and firing blindly. Knox dropped to the floor just as a barrage of rounds sprayed across his desk. "There!" someone shouted, and chunks of plastic were blasted into fragments over his head, raining down on him in thick splinters.

  Dolon and Vorsin were up over their barricades, firing at the doorway, but the angle was too tight for the shots to penetrate. The sound of Dolon's rifle running dry, an audible clicking noise, echoed throughout the bridge.

  There was the sound of light laughter from the doorway, and Rothian voices said, "Out of ammo? What a shame. We've got plenty."

  Knox dug into his pocket for more ammunition, and realized he was out. There were five rounds left in his gun. He turned to look back at the others, only to see Vorsin toss aside his fusion rifle and leap down into the narrow corridor. For a massive creature, he moved quickly, darting between the barricades and picking up speed like an old-world locomotive, aimed directly at the door. By the time he reached it, he'd drawn both blades from his belt, their black metal lengths flashing in the bridge's emergency lights.

  Knox heard a tremendous crash as Vorsin threw himself through the door. He winced at the sound of the first metal barricade breaking apart at the Yuruk's impact, and at the small arms fire that lit up the dark entrance.

  There were screams, and Vorsin's throaty roar, like a wild, enraged animal, until finally, the gunfire grew distant, and stopped.

  Knox crept out from behind the desk and made his way towards the entrance, gun in hand, but as he reached the corridor, he did not see Vorsin. He ducked into the passageway and stepped over the gutted bodies of two dead Rothians. There were clumps of shredded netting scattered on the floor around the bodies, but as Knox bent down to investigate, he heard shouting erupt from down the hall. Another short crackle of gunfire, followed by wretched screaming that ended as suddenly as it started.

  Knox crouched low, keeping his gun aimed down the corridor, trying to make out shapes in the darkness. It was silent as he moved, inching forward, telling himself he had five good rounds left, ready to fire at the first thing that moved. And if he hit Vorsin, accidentally? Well, that was just the cost of doing business, he decided. He doubted he would regret it.

  As he passed the last barricade, he found a ruined blaster on the floor, the amber 'reload' indicator flashing beside the stock. There were swaths of blood smeared across the floor and walls. Puddled in the blood was more netting, its webbing sliced cleanly in half at multiple places.

  Knox followed the blood trail through the ship to the starboard airlock, where it curved through and led to the Rothian vessel docked alongside them. The Rothians had used an in-space tunnel device to breach the Fool's Gambit airlock, and simply walked onto the ship. He crept through the tunnel and edged along a series of dark, alien corridors until, at the end of the bloody trail, he found Vorsin.

  The Yuruk had his back to Knox, and he stood just inside what looked like the bridge of the Rothian vessel. He held his blades in either hand, and blood seeped from his arm and his side. There was a jagged wound running through the back of his thigh. Beyond him, inside the bridge, Knox could just make out the legs of two prone bodies. The floor was slick with dark blood.

  "They're all dead," said Vorsin, wiping the blades on the legs of his fatigues. They left black smears on his thighs.

  "You're injured," said Knox.

  Vorsin looked down at his leg and nodded, "Their captain fought well." Vorsin said, with grim admiration, as he pointed to the broken body lying next to the command chair. "Right up until I snapped his neck."

  Knox looked closer at the wound and saw that black nylon threads were buried in the Yuruk's flesh. Pieces of netting were stuck to his pants and dangled from the blades in his hands. "What were they trying to do?" he said. "Take you prisoner? They must have wanted to torture the codes for the cargo out of you."

  "Rothians are slavers," Vorsin said. "Likely, they were simply trying to capture us and sell us to the labor camps." With that, he turned and limped back toward the tunnel that would take him back to the Fool's Gambit.

  "Let me give you a hand," Knox said.

  He moved to take up the Yuruk's arm, but Vorsin yanked away and shoved Knox back so hard he cracked his head on the wall. "I don't need your help, human," he snarled.

  Knox felt the back of his head, checking for blood. There was none, but he could feel a small lump forming on his skull. No, he thought, as he watched Vorsin enter the tunnel, I would not have regretted it if you'd been killed.

  When he returned, he found Dolon still crouched behind the desk, holding his empty rifle. The Gorohai looked at Knox with wide eyes, the strain showing in his face. "Is he with you?" Dolon whispered.

  "No," Knox said, looking back at the doorway to make sure they were alone. "He got injured."

  "H-he came in here. Dragging one of the dead bodies, showing me what he'd done to it. He told me that if I ever disobeyed him again, I'd be next."

  "How did you disobey him?" Knox said.

  "I have no idea!" Dolon said. "Anyway, I don't take orders from him. This is my ship. I'm the captain."

  Knox took a deep breath and said, "He's just worked up from the Rothians. Give him time to cool down."

  "It's that damn cargo," Dolon said. "It almost got us killed."

  Knox leaned against the navigational computer and said, "No. You navigating past the edge of Fed space is what could have got us killed. I know these parts. We're a long way from any kind of law."

  "The only trouble we'll get in
to will be because of that cargo. Axalis was worried, I could tell. Now, so am I."

  "Good. You be worried, because it will keep you awake. Me? I'm going to take a nap. We'll all talk about this later."

  "Listen to me, Knox! I've been running illicit goods all over these systems for the best part of twenty years. I know when I'm being set up. This won't be the last one," he said, "There'll be others before we deliver whatever's in that cursed box."

  "They were Rothians," Knox said. "Vorsin thinks they were just trying to pick us up as slaves and it had nothing to do with the cargo. Tell you the truth, I think he's right. We got unlucky, and we're far enough out here in the middle of nowhere that they tried picking us off."

  "No. It's too much of a coincidence. Twenty years and I've never had a sniff of trouble. Not once. And now, as soon as we're carrying this thing, we get hit? I'm sorry, I don't buy the coincidence story. I need to know what it is, otherwise we're going to get hit again." Dolon got up from the floor and started for the entrance.

  Knox stopped him, grabbing him by the arm. "Listen to me. Leave Vorsin alone right now. In fact, after what I just saw, I don't think it's a good idea for either one of us to be alone with him."

  "So my choice is find out what we're carrying and get killed by him, or keep quiet and get killed by whoever else we run into. Great."

  Knox looked around the bridge at the blinking lights and scar marks etched in the walls and consoles. "Is this ship even still operational?"

  Dolon sighed and headed back for his command chair, "I'll run a series of diagnostics and find out. Might as well start working out what repairs we need to make."

  "That's the spirit," Knox said. "You do that, I'll start cleaning up."

  "I thought you were going to lie down?"

  Knox stopped at the entrance, seeing the carnage laid out before him, and said, "There's too many dead bodies around here for that."

  Knox dragged the corpses one by one out to the airlock, piling them up on the platform, then jettisoning them out into space. He watched the bodies tumble serenely away into the void. They'd be incinerated by comets, or dragged along endlessly by asteroids, and eventually be drawn into the grateful orbit of some distant, lonely sun.

  Once the corpses were removed, he worked on dragging the scrap metal from the corridor into whichever empty cabins were closest, heaping it into piles. If they ever needed to barricade the bridge again, at least they wouldn't have to look far to find the right materials for the job. When he returned to the bridge he was sweating and smudged with grime.

  Dolon stood up from the console and handed him a portable display, saying, "The bad news is, our ship is nearly crippled. The good news is, most of what we need to repair it can be found on the Rothian ship. Here's a list of what we need."

  Knox swiped his hand over the portable display and scanned its contents. "I don't know what half of this stuff even looks like, let alone where it is."

  Dolon peered into the sensor display, typing various commands into the overlay to show Knox where to look on the Rothian vessel. His large, dark eyes were etched with worry.

  "Are you all right?" asked Knox.

  "Don't worry about me," he said. "Look, I've loaded in a plan of the ship and marked where the parts should be. There's a few tight squeezes, but nothing you won't be able to reach. You'll be able to call up images if you need them. Everything's basically modular, so just pull it out in one piece and we'll be fine. All right?"

  Knox nodded and said, "You want to come with me? We can put the ship on autopilot."

  "The autocontrols are destroyed. We need those parts, and we need them fast."

  "All right," Knox said. "I'll get them."

  As he headed for the entrance with the display, Dolon called out to him, "You know what I think? I think the only two pieces of information we really need are the location and the name of the contact. If we lost Vorsin, we could still make the deal, and only have to split the money two ways."

  Knox nodded slightly, but left the bridge without saying another word.

  The Rothian ship was not much larger than the Fool's Gambit, but its interior comprised a warren of passages that winded around on themselves, presumably to limit line of sight for defensive purposes. It was like navigating a series of figure-eight's, and at every turn, Knox paused and listened for any slavers that might have escaped Vorsin's slaughter.

  The portable display provided an accurate representation of the ship and effective imagery of the required parts, and though it took him longer than he liked, he was able to locate and extract the series of needed modules and cylinders using the instructions. He slung the parts into his rucksack as he went, taking no longer than an hour to collect them all.

  He turned, and turned again, and realized he was lost. As he pulled up the map of the ship, he found himself going below decks, trying to find a hatch that would take him back to the bridge. The route took him over grilled drain panels on the floor that were built at an angle, with slime and debris sliding down them, into a chute at the center of the room.

  Knox recoiled at the foul stench coming from the floor, thrusting his face into the crook of his arm to keep from breathing it in. He heard noises ahead of him, things moving in the dark, and as he continued down the corridor, eyes stinging from the noxious fumes, he saw something reaching for him out of the wall.

  He leapt aside as the hand swept at him, desperately trying to grab a hold of his shirt. Knox had his gun raised and was squeezing on the trigger, when he realized the hand was extended through thick iron bars built into the wall. He saw it was one of a long series of cells that extended the length of the corridor, no bigger than storage chests, and inside each one, three figures. Males, females, children, but in the dark he could not tell what species any of them were.

  It didn't matter.

  Each of them wore bulky electronic collars around their necks with stun sensors that blinked red, revealing the manacles at their wrists and ankles that chained them to one another. In a few of the cells, one of the occupants was dead, collapsed on the floor, but the others were still chained to the body.

  "Help us," one of them croaked. "You're from Confederation? You have to help us."

  Knox halted. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. "I'm only here to get supplies for our ship," he said stiffly. He didn't say that freeing slaves wasn't part of the agreement. He didn't say that Axalis didn't seem like the kind of person who'd pay out a hundred thousand to someone who'd bring a dozen castaways onto the same ship as her precious secret cargo.

  "Please," another begged. "Please, sir. You must. We need you."

  Knox quit the corridor and turned away, racing back the way he'd just come, desperate to escape. "Confederation!" someone cried out behind him. "We need you!"

  He was still running by the time he reached the bridge of the Fool's Gambit. "I got your damned parts," he called as he came through the entrance. "But you're going to want to hear what else I found on that ship. Must be fifty slaves trapped on there. We're going to need to work out how we ˗ "

  His voice tailed away as he entered the bridge and realized that the Gorohai was absent. "Dolon?" he said. "Where the hell are you?"

  He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. "You're the pilot now," Vorsin said behind him, his voice low and humorless.

  Knox turned around slowly to see the Yuruk standing in the entrance. His chest and legs were covered in fresh blood. "Where's Dolon?" Knox whispered. "What did you do to him, you psychopath?"

  "It was not my choice."

  Knox wrenched his pistol free and leveled it at Vorsin's chest. Behind his mask, the Yuruk's eyes flared like dying suns. "You had better be prepared to pull that trigger, little human," he said.

  Knox's knuckles whitened. The barrel of the pistol quivered. Dolon's blood was dripping on the floor from Vorsin's clothes. "What the hell happened to Dolon?"

  "Either shoot me and be done with it, or lower the weapon and we'll talk."

&nbs
p; "Answer me, damn you!"

  The Yuruk took a breath, held it and then let it out evenly. "All right," Vorsin said quietly. "He was angry. He still thought that it was the cargo that had drawn the slavers to us. I tried to reason with him. He wouldn't listen. He insisted that I tell him what it was, and when I refused he tried to open it himself. I could not allow that."

  "Why? Why couldn't you have just taught him a lesson or something? Why did you have to kill him?"

  Vorsin paused, then inclined his head towards Knox's pistol. "You and I can still make something of this mission if no one else does anything stupid. You do not look like a stupid man, Knox. What is more important to you? Your friend Dolon, or the money that we were promised?"

  Almost without realizing it Knox took a step back and allowed his arm to sag to his side, though he did not return the pistol to its holster. Behind his mask Vorsin gave a kind of hoarse wheeze that was not quite a laugh and not quite a cough, then he calmly lowered his hands and said, "I will dispose of the Gorohai. You can start working on the repairs."

  "You're not disposing of anything," Knox said. "We're going to take him with us and send his remains back to his people."

  Vorsin laughed coldly and said, "It is no wonder your little Confederation failed. Look at how weak and sentimental you humans are. Get to work. I want us operational as soon as possible, or you will be following your friend through the airlock."

  Knox stood there, impotently watching the Yuruk walk away. The oversized bastard was going to toss Dolon's body into space and think nothing of it. Dolon had been the closest thing to a friend Knox had in months, and now, he was about to get dumped from the ship like Rothian trash. "Hell no," Knox muttered to himself.