Zia barely said a word as we walked back to the airship. She ignored my purchases, dragged me into the module, slammed the door shut behind us and collapsed into the Captain’s chair.

  “Fucking fuckety, fuck, fuck. If you didn’t realise, that was a fucking Corporate Special Agent,” she almost yelled at me.

  “I know. Don’t worry, Special Agents are only as good as their intelligence sources and that one looked to be well out of his comfort zone. He's been given an almost impossible task and the support he has isn’t being particularly supportive. I can’t believe he offered me a job though,” I said, sitting down in the pilot's chair next to her.

  “He’s not just here for you. Whatever his support is, it was supportive enough to raid one of our allies' safe-houses in the Ice Plains.”

  “Really? I’m surprised at how discreet they’re being. Back in my day most Corps would just deploy a carrier in low orbit and throw assets at the problem until the problem got solved. Then, when they’d got what they wanted, they’d profusely apologise and promise never to do it again.”

  “This isn’t the fucking old days. Jeckon’s a Neutral planet and that neutrality is enforced by the Galactic Court. If the corps tried to come in with all guns blazing they'd have to go through a Court fleet and a Carrier full of ninja lawyers. They are being subtle and they almost got away with it.”

  “Okay, tell me about this raid on this safe-house. For a start, why does someone need a safe house on the Ice Plains in the first place?”

  “I haven’t been given all the intel, but given that the raid appeared to be purely to capture one person I guess it was to hide that person. The Free Enterprise’s crew knew exactly where they were going and who they were going after. They disabled the safe house comms and dropped straight through the ceiling of the safehouse before anyone there realised what was going on.”

  “How did you find out about this raid if their comms were disabled?” I asked.

  “Our allies have a physical line into Inkloo which is monitored by a sleeper agent. They thought it was important enough to blow their cover to pass on this information to us.”

  “Is their sleeper agent a hairdresser by any chance?” I asked grinning. Zia put an involuntary hand to her hair.

  “There was nothing wrong with my hair and they still charged me a fortune. I bet I won’t even be able to put it on expenses.”

  “It does suit you. Was there anything else? That Agent’s attitude seemed a bit… off. What did you say to him before I arrived?”

  “We were talking about why we were here… I managed to inject him with some sort of truth serum,” Zia wiggled a multi-coloured fingernail at me, “it should have made him more talkative. I don’t think it worked properly, even after the second time, it just turned him into a letch. I hate using drugs without knowing exactly what they do.”

  “It no doubt lowered his inhibitions. It’s a good thing you didn’t test it on me. Who knows what might have happened,” I joked. Zia looked at her fingernail and then looked at me speculatively.

  “Are there any other players we need to be aware of?” I asked quickly.

  “Every Government who thinks they have a vested interest in Galactic politics has some kind of intelligence presence on Jeckon. Some are more professional than others… But no, I have not been informed of any active agents here.”

  “So if there are any, they are probably quite good or they are sleeper units. Is the hostage still on board the Free Enterprise?”

  “Yes, and, as I’m the agent on the ground, they’ve told me to get her out,” Zia said, a note of panic returning to her voice.

  “So, what’s the plan? You know, as a representative of the Government, you could probably ask them politely to release her into your custody” Zia leaned forward in her chair and looked at me.

  “That is actually plan B,” she admitted.

  “So, what’s plan A?”

  “How do you fancy working for the Jeckon Government? she asked.

  “What do I get out of it?” I replied, not that I was going to refuse an opportunity to tweak a Corporation’s nose but the motions had to be gone through. Zia straightened up and checked something on her wrist-com.

  “We are prepared to offer you a Captaincy and a Command within the Jeckon Navy. Your salary will be backdated to when I rescued you and the post will come with ambassadorial status so you’ll have diplomatic immunity. Do you, Brandell Hawk accept this position?” she asked, suddenly all business.

  “Hmmm… that's not what I was expecting,” I replied as if I was expecting something more while internally resisting the temptation to jump around doing a victory dance. It had been a very long time since I’d actually been paid for doing what I did best.

  “They wanted to wait until we arrived at Kacke to offer you the position, but Jeckon needs you. Like, right now,” Zia shrugged, then got out of her chair motioning for me to stand. “Brandell Hawk, do you swear to uphold the values of the Great Know-All, to protect Jeckon and all its citizens?” she asked far more formally.

  “I do,” I replied wondering what the values of the Great Know-All were but was prepared to put up with a whole load of shit to be able to wave diplomatic immunity in the faces of the Corporations. And there was the promise of a command, hopefully, some sort of spaceship.

  “Then welcome to the Jeckon Navy,” Zia said, interrupting my thoughts by kissing me formally on both cheeks, which beat the salute and handshake I’d got last time I’d joined up.

  “Does this mean I’m now your boss?” I joked.

  “This is now officially a multi-agency operation and we are required to defer to each other in our relevant specialised areas of expertise in a mature and adult fashion, but yes, this is now your operation,” Zia said with a smile.

  ***

  Two days later Zia and I stood on one of the now unguarded ice bridges, dressed in our new shipsuits looking down on the rear stabiliser fins of the Free Enterprise. Inkloo’s lights had started their night cycle early and the storm rumbled its last hurrah overhead, drowning any noise we might make. Not that darkness and high ambient noise would normally make any difference to any half-decent surveillance system, but the Free Enterprise had suffered a string of mysterious technical faults over the last few days, culminating a few minutes ago, in a massive power outage that had hopefully taken out all the hard-wired security systems on the airship.

  Most of the crew were locked in the Flying Club drowning their sorrows, forbidden to wander about Inkloo unescorted due to the entire population of the Settlement turning against them. Not that the population had needed much of an excuse to turn against a Corporation, but finding out everything they’d bought from Sahara Galactic was stuffed full of surveillance devices had turned their dislike to violent hatred. I’d spent a fun couple of days fanning those flames, and in my spare time hacking into the airship’s systems.

  “Ready?” asked Zia, interrupting my thoughts. Her stance betrayed her nervousness. I nodded and we jumped twenty metres down onto the huge, horizontal, left-hand stabiliser fin, our fall arrested by some wonderfully silent, compact jetpacks Zia had acquired from some mysterious source. We found the small maintenance hatch on the fin with no trouble. It wasn’t even locked and we slipped into the airship’s envelope without a sound.

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  I looked around. The interior of the airship was dimly lit by emergency lighting that merely gave shape to the darkness. Fortunately, our vision was enhanced by night and heat vision goggles showing the few crew as bright blobs, most of whom were gathered in engineering with two guards in the hold and two people in two separate cabins, one of them lying down, the other sitting up. Every member of the crew was reassuringly accounted for so the one spare body had to be our target.

  The helium gasbags only took up the centre two-thirds of the airship leaving a surprising amount of space free here at the tail. This space was used to house the hold and, above that, a couple of landing pads for shuttlecraft, one of which we were on, the other was directly opposite and connected by a narrow catwalk with only a rope handrail to stop careless crew members from plummeting into the hold which I could now see was roofed with a hinged fabric cover.

  Our landing pad was occupied by a shuttle, a clone of the faithful ZB54 suborbital all-purpose offensive shuttle, produced in their tens of thousands and used wherever Corporations needed to protect their in-atmosphere assets, often from the people who claimed to be the owners of said assets. Its sleek lines showed it had been designed primarily for atmosphere and sub-orbital work. Not that it had gone anywhere for quite a while as it was covered in dust. On the pad around it was scattered a variety of tools, which meant they’d either been trying to get it working or, more likely, given the open panels and missing parts, they’d cannibalised it to get whatever had been on the other pad working.

  “I didn’t know they had a shuttle on board. Sub-orbital craft are banned from the outback,” Zia said in an outraged whisper as I picked up a universal wrench from one of the toolboxes.

  “And breaking into an airship is?” I asked as I started detaching one of the shuttle’s heavy lasers from its housing.

  “We are legitimate government employees investigating a kidnap, together with other potentially illegal activities. Like illegal surveillance. And we didn’t break in, the door was unlocked,” Zia hissed.

  “Please don't tell me this is legal, that takes half the fun out of it. And they’ll still shoot us if they find us. I’m also willing to bet they have two shuttles and the missing one is out there searching for the crash site.”

  “Oh. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown all that stuff out onto the glacier.”

  “It’s the pile of bodies we left there they’ll find first,” I said as the heavy laser came loose with a click and I slid it carefully out of its housing.

  “Well, we weren’t going to take them with us, were we? They smelt bad enough when they were alive… Errr… What are you planning to do with that?”

  “Liberate it to further the cause. We’ll pick it up on our way back,” I said, leaning the weapon up against the shuttle.

  “What cause?

  “What cause have you got?” I replied, grinning.

  “Well, you can fucking carry it. How do we get to the crew quarters from here?” I gestured to a narrow, unlit staircase descending into the bowels of the airship. Zia sighed.

  “Why is it always the dark, spooky staircase? Next, you’ll be suggesting we split up.”

  We descended the staircase. Together. This might have been a mistake, as, despite our best efforts, the flimsy staircase shook and wobbled alarmingly until we found a stable walkway and passed through a set of airlock doors that suggested the gondola was some sort of repurposed spacecraft. As we passed by the corridor to the engineering department we could hear a spirited argument. It sounded like the Special Agent’s lack of faith in his crew was well founded, as none of the crew were attributing the power failure to enemy action.

  We crept through the deserted crew quarters until we came to the door which housed the person lying down. I tried the handle, it turned and the door swung silently open. The smell of sweat and strong alcohol wafted out. On a narrow bunk in a narrow cabin, Special Agent Vilden Smath was sprawled in his underpants, snoring loudly. On the desk next to the bed were two empty bottles of the local rotgut, a pile of crumpled papers and a flickering screen.

  Before I could stop her, Zia crept into the cabin and in one swift movement unclipped his wrist com, she turned to leave, spotted something on the desk, paused, picked it up and bent over Vilden’s face for a second, then she ran out, her hand over her mouth. Just before I shut the door I saw what she’d done and I had to cover my mouth as well. We took a few seconds to move away from the cabin and compose ourselves.

  “That was very unprofessional,” I eventually managed to say.

  “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same,” Zia said turning off the stolen wrist-com and taking a few deep breaths to calm down.

  We crept towards the cabin housing the second body, which had a far more substantial door and was locked tight. Fortunately, the key had been left in the mechanical lock and the electronic locks had automatically disengaged when the power had gone down.

  I pushed the door open. A shock of recognition took my breath away as I saw the woman sitting on the cot. She looked me directly in the eye which was quite impressive considering it was almost pitch black.

  “You took your time,” she said, slurring her words slightly.

  “Vanessa. If I’d known it was you I wouldn’t have come,” I replied coldly as I watched her try to get up. She managed to make it to her feet on the second try.

  “That was a whole century ago. And I did it for us,” she slurred, taking a couple of steps towards me, stumbled and fell into my arms. “I’ve missed you,” she said, putting her arms around me.

  “Yeah, your aim always was crap,” I replied and heaved her onto my shoulder. She gave a startled squeak. She was painfully skinny, my shipsuit exoskeleton was barely needed and I could feel her bones poking into me.

  “Who’s your little friend?” Vanessa asked, noticing Zia for the first time.

  “Can you both keep quiet? We still need to get out of here.“ Zia hissed.

  “Ooo. I like her. All keen and professional.”

  “I know. Unlike some people. How drunk are you?”

  “Not drunk. They drugged me to knock me out but you know my metababolisisism doesn't work like a human’s so I’m stoned as fuck… I’m floating like a cloud… hehehe.” Vanessa said from halfway down my back.

  “Well, be high quietly and let us rescue you,” I said, manoeuvring Vanessa out of the cabin.

  “Fine. But you still owe me.” Vanessa murmured.

  “Shut. Up,” Zia hissed, as I made to reply, sounding uncharacteristically annoyed. To my surprise Vanessa shut up and started poking my bum, giggling quietly to herself. We snuck back through the airship making it back to the shuttle pads without incident. I pushed Vanessa through the maintenance hatch, keeping a tight hold on her in case she decided to wander off into thin air.

  “You’ve changed. In the old days you would have stolen this airship,” Vanessa slurred as I came through the hatch and picked her up again.

  “In the old days the Corps had stuff worth nicking,” I replied.

  “We’ve just spent two days disabling this fucking airship. We are NOT going to steal it,” Zia said firmly and jumped off the fin. I grabbed Vanessa tightly and followed Zia, falling towards our little orange airship.

  “Weeeeeeeeeeeee, hehehe.” Vanessa laughed as we fell. I activated the jetpack halfway down, slowing us but not as much as I would have liked. We hit our airship envelope with a muffled thud, making the entire airship shake. Before we could fall I grabbed one of the cables that attached the envelope to the module in one hand, keeping a firm grip on a giggling Vanessa with the other, before sliding down a rope to land on the container.

  I’d managed to unlock the access hatch before Zia floated gently down and landed next to me. She handed me the heavy laser I’d forgotten about, I picked Vanessa up and dumped her unceremoniously through the hatch. Zia looked at me in surprise then went to check on Vanessa. I followed her down and carefully hid the heavy laser behind some boxes then went to see what Zia had done with our rescuee.

  “She’s a Neko,” Zia said accusingly as I slammed the module door. I looked at her in surprise, my heart sinking. After all this time spent together, I hadn’t realised Zia was a speciesist.

  “Yes, I’m a cat ‘girl’, do you have a problem with that,” Vanessa growled from the pile of cushions and rugs that made up our living room as she tried to get up. With a shock I realised she wasn’t just skinny, she was skeletal.

  “Aren’t Nekos the Corporations' playthings, genetically programmed to be loyal to them? Why did we rescue her?” Zia demanded, sounding close to tears

  “We broke our programming centuries ago and we were only engineered to be loyal to one Corporation in the first place.” Vanessa slurred. Zia looked at me for support which I wasn’t about to give her, whatever Vanessa had done.

  “Do you have a big problem on Jeckon with Nekos betraying your secrets to the Corporations?" I asked Zia.

  “I’ve never seen a Neko before… And it's never been mentioned in any briefings, but in Crystal Springs everyone was saying that the Nekos are going to take over Jekon and terraform it so the Corps can come in…” Zia stopped when she saw the look of pure incredulity on my face.

  “Corporate propaganda strikes again. They want to keep us enslaved to them forever,” Vanessa said weakly, laid back on the cushions and went to sleep. Zia turned to me

  “What the fuck is going on. How do you know her?” Zia almost yelled at me.

  “That’s my wife… well probably my ex-wife by now,” I said, as if that would explain anything.

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