The ship doesn’t respond. The alarm starts to sound again.

  “The other ship is showing an offensive posture.”

  Finally, a blip appears on one of the monitors Nixon can see.

  “Offensive posture? What’s that mean?”

  The alarm wails. There’s a steady indicator light in the middle of the screen that Nixon is watching. It’s the position of his ship. The blip he’d first seen a moment ago is closing the gap between them, and it’s not appearing to do anything to vary its course.

  “Many factors go toward determining an offensive posture.”

  “Secret math.”

  “If you want to call it that, sir.”

  Nixon watches the small indicator light get a little closer, and then, a moment later, closer still. He begins to say something when the ship dives, and Nixon’s stomach winds up in his chest.

  Another alarm sounds, this one high and shrill. It’s screaming louder than all the others.

  Nixon grabs the arms of the seat on the captain’s chair to steady himself as the ship twists and turns in every direction. Out the front of the ship he sees two blasts shoot by, there a moment and gone the next.

  The ship doesn’t stop, but the loudest of the alarms does. It’s only for a moment, and the ship starts winging through space again. Nixon does everything he can to keep himself steady in the chair. Two more blasts cross in front of the ship, and the ship suddenly goes straight up. It banks hard left and then there, in front of Nixon, is the ship that had been chasing them.

  He hears the mechanical drop of something emerging from the ship and then, a second later, the roaring blast of guns firing. It’s three shots, and the last two smash the back of the little speeder. It disappears into a shower of fire and debris, and EHL navigates this sudden field of a million little pieces that could take it down.

  It all lasts just a few minutes, from that first proximity alarm to those last screaming warnings that Nixon can only assume means there is incoming fire. His heart is racing, and his breathing is fast.

  “Are you OK, sir?” the ship asks.

  Nixon nods.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. I’m just…”

  “I’m sorry. That was unexpected.”

  Nixon tries to stand, but his stomach is still out of place, and his knees tell him that maybe it’s better to stay seated.

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Undetermined.”

  “What could you determine?”

  “I don’t understand the question, sir.”

  Nixon pauses to think how he can rephrase.

  “You kind of shot that thing pretty quickly, but what were you able to ascertain? Once it was close enough, were you able to pull any data from the ship’s manifest? Was it registered to anyone or carrying any kind of flight plan?”

  “None of that. But, we aren’t either. I was never given an official manifest, crew record, or flight plan.”

  Nixon nods. “OK. Good to know.”

  He drops from the captain’s chair and walks a small circle around the tight room. He stops at the navigator’s chair and rests a hand on the left-side arm.

  “So it was a ghost. Did it get close enough for us to capture any images?”

  A moment passes without any kind of response from the ship. Nixon is about to repeat his question when three images pop up onto the screens on the front of the dash.

  “This was the best I could do. They are captures from the video that’s constantly being recorded by the outside cameras.”

  The images are mostly smears of color on a black background. Like someone has tried to wipe paint off glass. There’s a swipe of white crossing from corner to corner in one, red accents dotting across the middle. Another is mostly grey with a streak of blue cutting across one corner.

  Nixon dismisses both of those images and pulls up the third. He sticks with this one. It’s not exactly like the others. This one isn’t clear; the ship was moving too fast for that. But it’s better.

  It was taken as the craft dropped in front of Nixon and EHL, just moments before the ship would become nothing more than grit and debris.

  There’s more here than just color. This ship was shaped like a lopsided pyramid. Its nose came to a point. Engines across the back, set in a triangular shape. The bigger engines sat at the points of the triangular and engines of varying sizes filled in the middle, all in patterns of threes. The body of the ship looks to have been grey and blue. White was on the underside.

  Nixon leans in to the screen and tries to force the picture into focus. He still can’t make out specifics. He squints harder and focuses on the section of the image that created the blue streaks in the previous picture.

  He leans back and points at the image. “Here,” he says. “What’s this?”

  It’s a small, broken-up section of blue. “Is it writing?” he asks. “Call numbers? Some kind of indicator?”

  “One moment.”

  Nixon has something. He’s sure of it. But this moment feels like two eternities. He stares at the screen and tries to will the image clearer. Tries to mentally force the pixels smaller and smaller and the image to become clearer and clearer until … wait. There. It is clear now.

  “I ran it through our enhancer systems, and this is what came back.”

  “Oh.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “Not in what you were able to do. Looks great. Thanks.”

  Nixon turns his attention to the small jags and slashes of blue. These were definitely markings of some kind, but it wasn’t any alphabet he recognized.

  “Help me out again,” he calls out and points back to the screen. “Help me determine what alphabet this is on the side.” He points very specifically to the blue markings.

  “Yes, sir. Another moment.”

  Nixon waits and looks harder at the image. He hadn’t noticed when the image wasn’t clear, but they caught the pilot, or at least part of him. Nixon gestures to enlarge the image and focuses on the cockpit. That little ship was a one-seater and the cockpit was one of those closed-in numbers that Nixon was sure would give him a heart attack.

  There, though, in that tiny cockpit sitting in that tiny ship is someone with dark hair. Tight curls and messy. Nixon sees the back of the head, and there’s a spot where the big mane is thinning, and he wonders if it was kept extra long as someway to make up for the fact that soon most of it would be gone.

  He can also see the pilot’s right cheek. It’s stubbled with salt and pepper growth, a few days at least. Maybe more, depending. Nixon instinctively reaches up and runs his hand across his own sandpaper face then pulls his fingers through his own tangle of hair.

  This pilot was human. There’s no doubt about it.

  “Sir, that is the Cheshorian alphabet.”

  Cheshorian means nothing to Nixon.

  “Show me a Cheshorian,” he demands. He’s never seen one, never even heard of them until now. The galaxy is a big place, and unless you have a lot of credits you don’t get to see much of it. Nixon barely had enough credits to get himself to Exte. He for sure didn’t have the credits it took to see any more than that.

  After a moment, the ship throws up the image of a Cheshorian onto the screen in front of Nixon. Orange skin. Pronounced lips. Heavy lidded eyes. Bumpy skin, like just underneath were a thousand pebbles.

  Whoever was behind the controls of that ship wasn’t a Cheshorian. He knew a human when he saw one. But if he wasn’t Cheshiorian, then how did he get behind the controls of a Cheshorian ship? And what did it mean that this pilot or the Cheshorians who hired him seemingly wanted to see Nixon dead?

  “Show me Chesh or Cheshoria or wherever it is that ship was from.” Nixon tells the ship.

  “It’s Chesh, sir. And you can find it …”

  The ship never puts up the image. Sounding alarms will interrupt any processes deemed non-essential, and another proximity alarm blares.

  05

  Nixon looks at all of the screens, but he doesn’t see it. There’s no threat indicated anywhere.

  “Are you kidding me?” he asks no one.

  “My systems detected something, sir, moving at …”

  At that moment something blurs past the front of the ship.

  “Where did that come from? And why am I not seeing it hitting any of these screens?”

  The ship doesn’t respond. Nixon waits. The alarm whoops.

  There’s another roar and another blur in front of the ship.

  “Is he circling us?”

  Silence.

  “Hello? Status please!”

  Nixon grips the arms of the captain’s chair until his knuckles go white. He studies the screens in front of him, still looking for any indication of what keeps passing in front of them. The ship never responds, not audibly.

  Nixon leans forward and reaches for one of the buttons on the dash in front of him and is pushed back into his seat as the ship leaps forward, a full fire in its engines. There’s a pressure in Nixon’s chest that’s pinning him to his seat. He tries to speak, but can’t. The gravity that this newfound velocity is creating makes it nearly impossible to speak. He can do nothing but wait for the ship to pull them out of this sudden rush. But it doesn’t. It pushes harder. Faster. Nixon feels light headed, the blood slowly pooling in his feet.

  The light around his eyes begins to tunnel. His brain should be prompting him with warnings. It should be feeding him ideas on how to get himself out of this, but it doesn’t.

  The proximity alarm never stops. It keeps sounding its staccato rhythm. And now it’s joined by another alarm, a familiar one. One that Nixon heard earlier. He knows it. Doesn’t he?

  So hard to remember right now. So hard to think.

  The pressure on his chest pushes harder. It forces him deeper into his seat, so far down that the gel cushions are starting to encircle his legs. They are starting to creep over his shoulders. His palms press harder into the moulded plastic arms, and his head finally gives up. The dark edges of his vision take over. It’s all black now, and he’s gone.

  Nixon never feels the evasive maneuvers the ship makes. He never hears the warning alarms that indicate target lock or feels the impact as one of the blasts from the two ships that have found them skids across the length of EHL.

  He never sees EHL get the other two ships turned around. Never sees one of them explode when a shot from the other slides past EHL and hits the other ship right in center mass. And he never sees the second of the two ships bug out when EHL achieves weapons lock.

  He comes to when the alarms are quiet and EHL is flying normal again, like the last hours haven’t been filled with dogfights and deliberate attacks.

  Nixon blinks his eyes twice, then twice again and pushes himself to a more upright position. He wipes a small bit of drool from the corner of his mouth. He’s awake, but he’s not back. His head feels like a fog.

  “I, uh…”

  He looks around the main cabin.

  “I, uh …” he says again.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the ship says.

  “Sorry?”

  “For the speed, sir. That’s why you passed out.”

  Nixon opens his eyes wide and stretches his arms out in front of him, trying to force his head back to normal, blowing out the fog.

  “It’s OK,” Nixon says. “You did what you had to do. But what happened?”

  “Proximity alarm.”

  “I remember.”

  “Then a weapons alarm.”

  Nixon stands. He bends deep at the waist then stands back straight. He shakes one leg then the other.

  The ship continues: “Two crafts. One eliminated. The second took itself out of the fight.”

  “Bugged out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Nixon nods then mutters a distracted “OK. OK.”

  The cloud inside his head has lifted, and now his mind is working. They're moving slowly, but he can feel the wheels turning, the grit falling from the cogs.

  He starts piecing this puzzle together, not that it's that complicated to solve.

  Laana told him most of it. Roland proved it. There's a bounty out for him. People are willing to pay for him to be brought in. But who? The Uzeks are a good bet. Makes sense. Their leader is dead, and Nixon is the reason. But the Uzeks are also cheap. They aren't going to pay for him to be brought to them. They're going to do it themselves. Unless they just want him back so bad... . So, is that who this is? Maybe.

  But …

  Nixon thinks back to Exte and that final chase off the planet that led him to this ship and a rocket ride out into deep space. Those weren’t Uzeks pursuing him then. Those weren’t Uzeks with the big blasters. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Those were humans. And it was humans who took out Shaine. So, is that who this is? Yeah, maybe them too.

  Then his mind goes back to the bounty. Yes, it could be the Uzeks. And, yes, it could be whoever those humans were on Exte. As for setting up a reward, that’s who’d behind this. But those coming after him could be anything or anyone willing to turn him over to whoever is bankrolling the operation. It’s good work if you have a ship and the ability to chase someone across the galaxy.

  It’s work Nixon would have done if he’d had a ship. It’s actually something he considered talking to Shaine about more than once. He’d present it as a partnership, one where all the risk was on Nixon. Nixon would be the hunter, the one flying around and chasing down whoever it was that needed catching. Shaine would front the money for the ship and get a cut of each bounty. He could stay home with Mira and the girls and watch the money come in. But even in imagined conversations, things never seemed to work out like Nixon would have hoped.

  “You say all the risk is on you,” Shaine would say after hearing Nixon’s proposal.

  “Well, I’m out there trying to find these folks. I’m the one out there risking injury. Risking worse.”

  “Yeah, but you’re out there in a ship that I bought.”

  “And for that you’re getting a cut of the bounty.”

  “The smaller cut.”

  Nixon would look at him confused because they’d already established that he was at the highest risk, but he’d say it again to reiterate the point.

  “It’s different risk, but it’s not less risk,” Shaine would counter.

  And it’s in the middle of that sentence when Shaine’s voice shifts to Mira’s, because Nixon knows this isn’t Shaine’s argument. The Shaine before Mira would have loved this idea. The Shaine before Mira would have been sitting next to Nixon as part of some bounty hunting team.

  But there was a MIra, and she’d convinced Shaine that he needed to do respectable work. Steady work that would support her and the girls. And Nixon knew she wasn’t wrong.

  If there wasn’t a Mira, though, and Nixon was out flying around in Shaine’s ship, what kind of bounty would a guy like him command? It was time to find out.

  06

  Nixon pulls up a keyboard and starts entering codes that will give him a directory to outside systems.

  All around him the ship is rattling. He hears the soft ting of metal hitting metal. He hears plastic scraping against plastic. He can look up and see the interior of the ship shimmy as it flies him farther out into space, each of the large panels that were seamlessly connected before don’t look as seamless now. The ship pushed itself too hard. It flew too fast and went past the edge of what it could take. Second time it had done that. All that work that Nixon put in back on Umel to get the ship flying again is rattled apart now.

  The ship’s condition sits in the back of his mind as he requests access to exterior systems. The screen in front of him blinks off for just a flash then reappears. It’s blank now except for a blinking cursor in the upper left. He begins typing commands and a text menu soon fills his screen.

  It’s a series of choices that will send him off to different locations on a public message board. It’s a place where Nixon had spent hours a night back on Exte. He’d lay in that cramped one-room hovel, his back nearly flattening the thin mat he called a bed.

  His reader would be held above him—Not too far. His eyes weren’t what they used to be—and he’d scroll through post after post. Looking at the jobs that people needed filled. But the threads he spent most of his time with weren’t that at all. They were people detailing operations that had, more than likely, gone poorly. The people creating these posts took what was supposed to be an easy job, but it turned out not to be. Or maybe they’d so righteously screwed that job up they couldn’t find their way out and now needed help.

 

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