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  “You up for a little fun?” McKibbon asked when he stepped into the room that Zulu’s soldiers used as a commissary. It is mostly just small appliances, counter space, and a couple of tables with chairs. Martin had been heating up a cup of something.

  “Depends on the kind of fun you have in mind.”

  McKibbon smiled. “Soldier fun, idiot. We’ve got a request from the Zulu high brass to go check out a distress signal from a ship a little ways out. I’ve been asked to grab a couple guys and go see what we can figure out.”

  Martin pulled a forkful of noodles from his styrofoam cup and shoved them into his mouth. “Trying to keep the girlfriend happy?”

  McKibbon didn’t respond. Martin swallowed.

  “Yeah, I’m up for it. Give me something different to do. I don’t think I could run another set of drills again.”

  Grace was sitting in the training room when McKibbon passed. A video of the battle from the Fight Over Texas from the End of States wars played on the screen in front of her. Her head was down. She was drawing formations and tracking fighter movements. Pausing the video. Rewinding the video. McKibbon watched for a moment then interrupted Grace’s study.

  “Let the video run,” he said and stepped toward the screen. He watched a moment then followed one of the fighters with a finger.

  “Know who that is?” he asked.

  “Uh, no sir.” Grace’s response was staccato, official. She’d yet to relax into Zulu and accept the lack of formality that was needed to make a small team like Zulu’s run well. There weren’t enough jobs to create too formal of a command chain.

  “Martin.”

  “Our Martin?” Grace’s face crinkled with confusion. Fighters in famous battles didn’t come out to places like Zulu. They fought in bigger and bigger battles until their luck ran out. Then their images were put on posters, and stories of their bravery were used to recruit people like Grace into the corp.

  “Yep. Our Martin. Want a chance to pick his brain?”

  “Sir?”

  “I need some help. There’s a ship a bit of a way from here. It’s sent a distress signal, and I’m putting together a small team to go check it out. Right now it’s me and Martin. We need a third. You come along and you can ask him all the questions you can think of.”

  Grace fought a smile. “I’m honored you thought of me, sir. It’d be a privilege to go out with you and Martin.”

  Grace realized what she said. “Not ‘go out with you’ go out with you …”

  “It’s fine, Grace. Go get geared up. I don’t think we are going to run into trouble, but bring a sidearm just in case.”

  And that was all Grace brought, the standard issue piece given to her first day of intake. Martin brought more. He had a standard-issue blaster holstered to his side. Some kind of rifle that McKibbon didn’t recognize was strapped to his thigh. Across his back he wore a bolt gun.

  “Overkill, super soldier?” McKibbon asked.

  “Prepared.”

  “I told you what we were doing, right? Just going to check on …”

  “Want to guess the number of times I was told ‘Easy mission. Out and back.’ and it turned into the opposite? You’ll excuse me if I feel like maybe more is better.”

  “Suit yourself,” McKibbon said. “You’re the one who has to lug it all around.”

  Martin and Grace followed McKibbon into the cargo hold and stored their gear. That was a little more than an hour ago. Grace started in with the questions almost immediately, and they hadn’t stopped since. McKibbon turns from his controls and watches Grace asking specific things about formations and maneuvers. She’s brought her notebook and is walking Martin through the hows and whys of certain turns and firing positions. Why had he taken that shot? Why did he only use an evasive move there?

  To McKibbon’s surprise, Martin is just as involved in the conversation. He makes fighters out of both hands and excitedly flies them in front of Grace, showing her how diving left here actually gave him advantage over the fighter chasing him.

  McKibbon leaves the two pilots to their conversation and walks back to the cargo hold. He opens the storage bin holding his gear and pulls out a small canvas pouch. He rolls the top down, and the smell of fresh tobacco hits him in the face. Getting tobacco all the way to Zulu isn’t cheap or easy. But it does remind him of home, the back room at his grandfather’s house in the mountains. Big leaves drying in the cool air, all harvested from the plants that grew wild out back. He’d come in the summer and watch as grandfather ground the leaves down so that they could be rolled into cigarettes or, as grandfather preferred, put into the bowl of a pipe.

  McKibbon rolls a cigarette then goes back to his storage bin for a match. He grabs his datapad. He lights the cigarette and taps the screen of the datapad and opens the messenger app. He sends a quick note to Grey then signs off. Never know when teacher and student might take a break.

  “Launch was smooth. Still a few hours out. Will contact the main comm when closer. XO mck”

  +++++

  The messenger app on Grey’s datapad flashes a new message. She and Keith sit in front of the big screen in the control room. They’ve been waiting for more than an hour to hear something.

  “Take a break,” Grey says to Keith.

  “For how long?”

  “Looks like a couple of hours.” Grey is still looking at her datapad.

  “You have some map on there that I don’t have access to?”

  “No,” Grey says. “It’s a message.”

  “On your reader? Really? From who?”

  “McKibbon.” Grey pauses, realizing what she’s said and to whom.

  “On there? You know that regulations don’t allow you to communicate with the military staff here except through official and open channels.”

  “I’m aware, Keith. Of all the regulations. I was required to learn them before I took the job. Now take a break. Meet me back here in a couple hours. Meanwhile, grab some food. Or some sleep. Just get out of here for a bit.”

  Keith doesn’t move. “I’m OK.” He punches a couple of the keys in front of him and pulls up a screen that Grey has never seen before.

  Keith keeps typing.

  Grey clears her throat. Keith stops typing and stands.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he says.

  +++++

  Lebbe is back in his quarters. He rifles through a drawer in the kitchenette looking for a flashlight. He knows that he brought one with him to Zulu. Get caught on one too many ships with shaky-at-best power sources and you learn to come prepared. Lebbe scoops everything out of the drawer with both hands and lets it all fall onto the counter. The flashlight lands with a metal thunk. He scoops it from the mess and flips the switch on the top. Nothing.

  He bangs the butt end against his hand and tries the switch again. A spot of light pops against the wall across from him. He turns the light off and drops it into a bag he carries over his shoulder.

  Next, Lebbe rummages through the shelf at the top of his bedroom closet. He’s looking for a small bag he packed before leaving for Zulu. He's made no effort to make his quarters home. The deep green blanket that was folded and laid across the bed when he arrived is pulled up to cover the mattress and tucked tight under its sides. The clothes, all five shirts and five pairs of pants, hang neatly spaced on the rod in the closet. The story is the same in the living room. There are no pictures on the walls. There are no books stacked on the coffee table, only the remote that controls the screen on the wall opposite the couch.

  Lebbe pulls the bag—small and gray—from the shelf in the closet and tosses it on the bed. He then feels around for a small cardboard box and pulls it from the shelf too. Ammunition. He goes over to the bed and opens the bag. He drops the ammo in then reaches in and feels the cold metal of the gun’s barrel.

  He hadn’t planned to bring a weapon with him. Nobody shoots a gun like this in space, right? Not even if it was safe, like everyone said. He wasn’t going to a place where he nee
ded to be armed. Zulu was a transfer station. It was a galactic bus depot where people changed vehicles or stopped to switch drivers. Nothing happened here. That was the selling point.

  Still, Lebbe had seen enough situations that were supposed to be safe or jobs that were supposed to be simple turn out to be neither of those things. Better safe than sorry, he told himself when he walked into the pawn shop on his way to the airfield where he’d begin his trip to Zulu. He’d bought the piece from a greasy haired guy with a thin-whiskered mustache. He had no idea what he was selling, and Lebbe got the piece for cheap.

  “Needs ammo,” Lebbe said as he held the gun out in front of him, aiming it at a pile of stuffed animals across the shop. He mentally pulled the trigger and, in his mind, watched each of the little dogs and bunnies and bears disappear into a cloud of stuffing and shredded fabric.

  The guy behind the counter pulled three boxes of ammunition from underneath and set it out in front of Lebbe.

  “Take whatever works.” He pulled a toothpick from his mouth and continued. “It’s on the house.”

  Lebbe plucked a half-full box of bullets from the counter and dropped them into his bag then put the gun on top.

  Lebbe hadn’t touched the gun since. Hadn’t even seen it until today. It made the trip to Zulu inside of Lebbe’s luggage and then the bag was absently tossed onto the closet shelf when he arrived. But today he feels the cold of the metal again, the weight of it in his hand. The slight pull on his shoulder when he holds it at his side. The tingle of the trigger on his finger. He looks the gun over, probably more closely than the day he’d bought it. He drops it back into the bag then cinches the top closed.

  He knows the gun isn’t necessary for his little “walk the floor” excursion. He isn’t going to find anything other than the satisfaction of sticking it to Grey. But if he’s going to do this, he wants to do it the right way, and having a gun on him will slow him down, let him walk with a little more attentive confidence.

  Lebbe gives the bedroom a once over. He heads to the living room and does the same thing before heading out the door and pulling it shut tight behind him. There, he thinks. One room done.

  +++++

  Grey has spent the last few hours with her head in her tablet. She never left the control room, and now, as the clock pushes toward 9 p.m., she’s alone. She sits the datapad down and walks to the rail that runs along the edge of the floor in front to the large view screen.

  She looks at the blip indicating the damaged ship. She looks at the blip indicating McKibbon and his crew. She starts to imagine other blips on the screen, moving faster. Moving with purpose. Aggressively. She gives an imaginary order and more blips appear, quickly overtaking the others. But those are only a first wave, and soon, in her mind’s eye, the screen fills with aggressors looking to take Zulu down. Grey orders more defenses with a dramatic wave of a hand. She swipes her other arm in a large arc, ordering a group of ships she’s already called out to try a flanking maneuver. She’s a conductor on a podium orchestrating the protection of her station and all the people on it, calling for the rat-a-tat of guns here or the roaring bass of a big ship’s engine there.

  The chirp of her datapad cuts through all of the imaginary noise. It’s a message from McKibbon.

  “Close. Getting a good look at our floater now.”

  Grey activates the earpiece in her ear and calls for Keith.

  “They getting close?” he asks.

  “Just got a message from them. Come back.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  A couple of moments later the doors open and Keith comes through carrying a cup from the Quickstop. He sits it on the edge of his desk then takes a seat. He punches keys.

  “McKibbon says they are getting a good look at our ship. Can you pull up communications with him?”

  “Working on it now.” Keith continues to push buttons and watch his screen.

  A speaker crackles and then a quick hello from someone on the other end, a woman.

  “This is Private Rachel Grace. Is this Zulu?”

  “You’ve got Zulu, private,” Grey says.

  “We are approaching the ship, ma’am.”

  “And what are you seeing?”

  “Definitely pirates.” It was McKibbon. “Can you pull up our external cameras there?”

  A moment later the view of what McKibbon and his team are seeing from the hauler is up on the main screen in the control room.

  “We’ve got you,” Keith says.

  “You can see, it’s just a clearer view of what we saw earlier,” McKibbon says. “We aren’t close enough to run any kind of remote scans yet, but whatever or whoever punched the hole in the side of that ship did it clean. Nice big opening. Smoothed edges. Easy to get in and then get out whatever that ship might’ve been hauling.”

  “What’s your plan, commander? Once you’re close enough to do something.”

  “We’ll run our scans, get a handle on what we’re dealing with. Then we’ll send Martin and Grace in to do a visual confirmation on what the scans are telling us. After that we’ll tether up the ship and drag it back to Zulu for demo and disposal.”

  “Sounds good. You guys do what you need to. We’ll keep this comms line open so we can watch and listen.”

  +++++

  McKibbon pushes himself back from the controls and turns to Martin and Grace.

  “Get geared up, you two. Once we get close enough to the ship, you’ll board and check everything out. Make sure what our scanners are telling us is actually true. Should be easy.”

  Martin disappears into the cargo hold. Grace salutes then turns on her heals and follows.

  McKibbon is alone in the cockpit. He looks out at the ship in front of him, floating with no one on the stick to tell it where to go. Free to drift wherever the slightest bump or jostle will take it. He knows people on Zulu who would give anything for that kind of life.

  For now, McKibbon enjoys being back behind the controls, even if it is just a flight out and back. It feels good getting back to the thing you first loved. His position on Zulu is nice, and he’s worked hard to get there. First, flying Zig Zags off of a combat ship in the far reaches of the galaxy opposite Zulu to support diplomatic ships that would come out to visit soldiers and the civilians who called deep space home. He hadn’t fought anyone in those first missions out of the academy, but he had turned a fair share of asteroids to dust.

  He only has a single tick mark on his list of enemies downed, an alien ship brought down during a skirmish that required all hands. He and the rest of his unit joined the fight just before the aliens bugged out, but it was long enough for McKibbon to swing his Zig Zag into an offensive position behind an alien craft that was tailing a larger United Countries fighter.

  McKibbon squeezed off two shots. One missed wide. The other caught the turning alien in the exhaust port. The ship disintegrated in front of McKibbon. The rest of the aliens turned tail, and victory yelps filled the comms of all pilots.

  It had been a lucky shot. It was enough, though, with his grades in the academy to get him fast-tracked for leadership. Leadership meant more time behind a desk and less time behind the stick, so getting his hands on the controls again was nice.

  As McKibbon’s hauler moves closer to the drifting ship, he starts the scans. One an advanced heat scan, looking for hot spots, like cooling engines or charging blast cannons. Another a bio scan, looking for bodies, alive or dead.

  Martin comes back into the cockpit wearing a bulky armored suit. The weapons he’s brought with him are strapped to him and slung across his back. His helmet, in a gloved hand, hangs loose by his side. Martin is not a small guy, but in an armored ExoSuit he’s gigantic. His chest plate makes him at least four feet wide. He swings his helmet above his head, throwing his arm in a wide circle. He grunts to get it to complete its revolution then switches the helmet to his other hand and repeats the motion.

  Martin’s Exo carries the scars of battle. Custom made from carbon fiber brewed
up in some lab by scientists specialized in armor, guns, and bombs, the suits are light but strong. Not impenetrable, but close enough.

  Grace joins them a moment later, and her suit is pristine—soldier’s sidearm holstered to the side. Even still, tiny Grace is intimidating armored up. McKibbon suddenly feels small.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “We’ll get a little closer, and I’ll slide us in sideways, parallel with the ship. Our cargo hold will open and you two should be able step off of us and onto them. I’ll hang here while you guys do a quick check internally. We’ll tether this thing up and tow it back once you are done.”