LAST LICKS

  STARSHIP FOR SALE

  BOOK 10

  M.R. FORBES

  Published by Quirky Algorithms

  Seattle, Washington

  This novel is a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2023 by Quirky Algorithms

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration by Tom Edwards

  Edited by Merrylee Lanehart

  CHAPTER 1

  “Three days,” I said to Matt as I stepped through the transit portal and back onto the arid surface of the planet Jaito. The portal closed behind me as I stopped playing Stairway to Heaven, my tap into the chaos energy that filled the void between time and space fading with the final notes.

  “Three days, what?” he replied, confused by the simple statement.

  “I told Keep we would be back on Atlas in three days. There’s a war to win, you know.”

  “Why?”

  The question surprised me. “What do you mean, why? Did you already forget how Blorb is using the sigilships to attack the Spiral? Or were you replaced by an Aleal in the literal two minutes I was gone?”

  He smiled. “I mean, why do we need to go back to Atlas? You have the collator if you need to talk to Keep. And Head Case is a sigilship now. We can deal with Blorb ourselves.”

  “Doubtful,” I replied. “We need support if we’re going to confront Dominator, especially if we’re dealing with another fleet like the one at Jaito. We need the Royal Guard as much as the Royal Guard needs us.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “But I appreciate your faith in me.”

  He draped his arm over my shoulder. “So, what do we do next? Three days isn’t a lot of time, and Head Case might be spaceworthy, but she’s got all kinds of damage.”

  “Fortunately, we have three engineers to work on fixing the worst of it,” I replied.

  Quasar, Shaq, Justus, and Dryka waited for us closer to Head Case, parked a distance away. The Sanguine gunship stood beside my ship, looking much worse for wear than Head Case. After Justus and Dryka had saved my bacon from the incoming enemy corvette, the gunship had taken critical damage to its life support system, forcing her to make an emergency landing here on Jaito. Kat’s Litter had been billeted in the stern, and O’Neill and Stearns were killed by shrapnel that pierced that section of the ship’s hull. Of the original unit, only Ki and Narayan remained.

  The two Littermates were currently working with the rest of my crew to salvage anything we could of value from the gunship, with the hopes of obtaining enough parts to help put Head Case back together again. From here, the scorched and pockmarked ship did sort of resemble Humpty Dumpty.

  “Three days, that’s all we’ve got,” Matt said as we approached the smaller group, relaying what I had said to him. Once we were close enough, Shaq hopped from Quasar’s shoulder back to mine.

  “That’s not a lot of time,” Dryka replied. Her eyes turned to me. “Are you sure you aren’t stretching yourself too thin?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But what other choice do I have? What other choice do any of us have?”

  “None, I suppose. How’d it go with Avi?” she asked.

  “Pretty much how you expected,” I replied. “Publicly, he’s not thrilled. Privately, I think he understands how important my crew is to me.” I turned my attention to Quasar. “Does Gia have anything on Grizz’s family yet?”

  “We’re really going to waste time trying to rescue one man’s wife and children?” Justus asked.

  My sidelong glare caused him to flinch. “Do I even need to dignify that question with a response?” I growled at him.

  “Ben,” Quasar said, her tone suggesting she was about to come to Justus’ defense.

  “Grizz is a member of my crew,” I said, pointedly looking at her instead of Justus. “Our crew. And his family is in danger because of me. He sabotaged the scaler and we all nearly died because he didn’t trust me to help him. How can we take care of the rest of the Spiral if we can’t or won’t take care of our own?”

  “What about David?” Matt asked. “He’s ours too, isn’t he?”

  “You’re damn right he is. I don’t care what Keep thinks we should do. We’re going to get him back, too.”

  “So, two rescues in three days. Are you sure you shouldn’t have said five days?”

  The question drained all the anger from me. I looked at Matt and laughed. “Yeah, I probably should have said five. But a promise is a promise. It’s up to us to live up to it, ambitious or not.”

  “It’s mostly up to you,” he pointed out. “We’re just along for the ride.”

  “Yeah, right. If you think I can do any of this without all of you, you’re crazier than Emerald.” I turned back to Quasar. “So, does Gia have anything?”

  “I provided her with Grizz’s hypernet account identifier and credentials. She pulled the stored versions of the messages he received and backtraced their IDs. Burner accounts, of course, but she traced the originating device serial numbers to an outpost on Kenwick and then branched out from every slab signal picked up in the area over the three months the devices were stocked there. Thankfully, Kenwick isn’t a big place.” She paused to pick up more of Gia’s conversation from the neural link in her head. “Twenty-thousand potential hits. She traced them all backward, narrowing the search down to planets in Sedaya’s Duchy. You’ll never guess where one of the prospective account creators lived and worked.”

  “Kirillia. Sanguine Studios,” I guessed.

  “Bingo bango boingo, give the kid a prize,” Quasar said in her best Keep imitation. “Want to guess who?”

  “Orange Asscrab?”

  “Who?” Quasar asked, confused.

  “Jason Yen?”

  “You’re good at this.” She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Okay, I’ve got another challenge for you. There was someone else on Kenwick around the time Jason created the burner account.”

  I shook my head. “I know who I want to say, but that’s impossible. The last time I saw him, he was doing donuts through space.”

  “Apparently, being blind wasn’t enough to keep Colonel Coil from becoming involved in this mess. My best guess is he managed to phone home and got directions to where the controls were, at least well enough to get him to Kenwick. Yen meets him there with an offer he can’t refuse, and the next thing you know, they’re scooping up Grizz’s wife and children and making threats.”

  “Because Yen knew about his family and where he lives,” I said. “Shit. I bet Coil convinced him to pick up some mercenaries on the way, too.”

  “Or his old unit,” Justus said. “When things went south, he took the fall, but they weren’t exactly Galaxy Scouts either.”

  “Zar, any idea where they are now?”

  “Gia’s still trying to trace all the traffic from Caprum over the last few weeks. The Sanguine ship wasn’t there. At least not officially. They used a different ship to abduct Grizz’s family.”

  “How will she ever figure out which ship?” Matt asked. “That’s needle-in-a-haystack stuff.”

  “For one thing, she’s a supercomputer. She might not be able to narrow the possibilities to one, but she can thin them out quite a bit.”

  “We only have three days,” I reminded her.

  “You should have said five,” Matt razzed.

  “She’ll do her best,” Quasar said. “She just needs more time.”

  “We can make our play for David first if needed,” I said, before turning and pointing toward Meg and the others. “We should help with salvaging parts. The more hands tearing stuff down, the faster we can transfer it all to Head Case and get moving.”

  “You should go rest,” Justus said. “You need to stay in top shape for what you plan to do.”

  “I’m fine,” I replied, starting toward the Sanguine gunship, only to pause as a wave of all-too-familiar dizziness swept over me. It was the first time since Omega Station that I’d felt the effects of my cancer. I lowered my head, fighting back against the anger, fear, and frustration that came from knowing that my newfound ability to harness chaos energy hadn’t come cheap.

  “Ben, are you okay?” Matt asked, noticing my hesitation.

  I glanced over at him as Shaq nuzzled my neck, attuned to my emotional state. “Yeah,” I replied flatly. “I’m fine.”

  Matt opened his mouth, probably to tell me what a terrible liar I am and that I should go to sick bay with Justus. He decided to remain silent. He didn’t need to say anything. A quick glance at the others proved how firmly my heart clung to my sleeve. They all knew I wasn’t okay. They all knew why. There was no sense in making a big deal out of it, because there was nothing they could do to help. Only one thing could help, and it was etched into my chest with a line through part of it, rendering it currently non-functional. I couldn’t fix it without losing the construct. And I couldn’t lose the construct if we wanted any chance at defeating Blorb.

  None of us had any choice but to grin and bear it.

  I resumed walking. If I had learned anything over the prior months, it was how to fight through hell.

  CHAPTER 2

  I didn’t stay with the rest of the crew the entire time they stripped the Sanguine gunship. While I wasn’t overly tired after transiting to and from Atlas, a second round of dizziness convinced me I needed a break before we were ready to roll. I considered stopping by si
ck bay and letting the autodoc give me a clearer indication of my health, ultimately deciding there was no point. I already knew the stages my body would go through as it descended toward death. I had come full-circle from Omega Station. Like before, I just had to survive long enough to finish the job.

  Unlike before, I had a greater sense of peace regarding the end of my life. My greatest fear wasn’t missing out on whatever might have been once I was gone. What scared me the most was that I would fail to stop Blorb before he killed millions more. I didn’t consider myself a hero, and I didn’t want to be a savior. I had this power through chaos and sigiltech that I’d taken advantage of, but I didn’t need it to feel happy or whole. I would have traded the construct for the restore sigil without a second thought if the consequences weren’t so dire. I was willing to sacrifice myself to save as many lives as possible. No hesitation. No questions asked. No shits given.

  Maybe that made me a hero after all. It wasn’t for me to say. I was only being the man Mom had raised me to be. Living up to our shared ideals and beliefs while forging my own way. I was ready for whatever happened next. I was ready to die fighting for the people who couldn’t fight for themselves.

  And damn it all, I was going to win.

  My eyes snapped open, and I bolted upright in bed. A refreshed sense of purpose flooded through every vein of my body as though I could convert chaos energy into pure resolve. I reached for my slab on the table beside me, disturbing Shaq in the process. Asleep on the other pillow, his eyes flipped open, immediately as awake and alert as me.

  “Is it time?” he buzzed.

  Three hours had passed since I had excused myself from the group. Six hours since my transit to Atlas. We only had three days. We couldn’t afford to delay any longer.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “It’s time.” I tapped on my comm badge. “Meg, what’s your status?”

  “Captain,” she answered. “We finished pulling all the wiring and electronics we could salvage. We stripped out the cannons too, though we’ll need to find ammo somewhere if we want to use them. We were about to start cutting off the undamaged armor plating. We don’t have enough operational shield nodes to go around, but there’s enough salvageable metal to reinforce the ear over the remaining ion cannon. But honestly, Cap, it would do us a world of good to stop off somewhere for repairs.”

  “I know it would, but Blorb isn’t waiting for us to give Head Case all the attention she needs. We can’t afford to wait, either. Forget the plating. It’s time to go.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  I tapped the comm badge again to disconnect and hopped out of bed. Digging through my closet, I pulled out my newest Captain’s uniform. After everything that had happened with Rickard, I’d decided to swap out the blue jacket and pants for dark red and the lighter material for something more defensively robust.

  I kept my t-shirt on, layering a stretchy black shirt with a Nehru collar over it and the jacket over that, buttoning the double breast. I swapped my sweats for pants before reaching back into the closet to grab a new pair of dark, steel-tipped magboots. The thick-soled boots came up over the pants to the top of my calves. I’d wanted to add a pouch for Shaq somewhere in the ensemble, but I’d yet to find a suitable spot that wouldn’t be uncomfortable for him for long periods of time or bulge out in a comical way. For now, tt wasn’t an important consideration.

  The uniform wasn’t only stylish and functional, it was a statement piece that said, don’t mess with me. At least, that’s what I was going for. In any case, Shaq settled on my shoulder, the thicker material absorbing his claws as he climbed to his perch.

  My guitar leaned against the bulkhead next to the door. I scooped it up on my way out, heading down the hallway to the stairs. Expecting everyone to still be finishing up outside, I was surprised to find Matt sitting in the lounge, obviously lost in thought. Elbows braced on his thighs, he stared down at his folded hands, one thumb rubbing over the other as if soothing some kind of pain.

  “Hey, man,” I said as he turned on the couch to look at me.

  “Hey, Mister Deadpool,” he replied, looking up and grinning at me. “Nice threads. You could use a sawed off shotgun strapped to your hip though and maybe a Katana swinging from your belt.”

  “Funny,” I replied with a half-smirk. “I hope we won’t need guns or swords where we’re going next. What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you, actually.”

  “Checking up on me? I feel fine.”

  “One: bullshit. Two: no, I’m not here to check up on you. I have something for you.”

  That surprised me. “Really? When did you have time to get me something?”

  “You mean to make you something. We started designing it a few days ago. I ran it through Asshole while you were sleeping.”

  “Don’t ever say that again,” I quipped. “You were supposed to help Meg and the others with the gunship.”

  Matt laughed. “You know what they say about too many cooks. Besides, the rest of the crew wanted you to have it, too.” He bent over, picking up a long, rectangular metal box from the floor. It wasn’t wrapped in paper, its shape giving me no idea what could be inside. “They all wanted to be here to see you open it, but you woke up before they finished up outside.”

  I stared at the box, eager to see its contents. If the crew wanted to watch me open it, I’d give them that. “I was already headed down to the hangar. Come with me, and bring it with you.”

  He picked up the box, and we rode the elevator down to the hangar, exiting onto the upper level. I walked over to the railing to look down, finding that all our bounty had already been sorted into piles, some things on wheeled carts. The functional electronic components like the comm system and nav computer were on one cart and, extra wiring on another, with random parts I couldn’t identify in two more stacks.

  Grizz stood in the midst of the junk picking through the pieces and considering them before returning them to where he’d found them or tossing them into an empty oil drum I assumed was the trash. Motion at the hangar door caught my eye, and I glanced up to see Meg leading the others inside, each pushing a last cartload of potential salvage. Emerald was the first to notice me, and she waved emphatically before blowing me a kiss.

  I waved back before trailing Matt down the steps to the main hangar deck. We stopped near the back to let the others gather around us. Grizz was the first to reach us. Still busy making repairs to the scaler, he hadn’t been in the hangar when I’d first returned. He looked up at me with sad, Puss-in-boots eyes.

  “Are we going to help my family now, Captain Ben?” he asked. “I’m real worried about them.”

  “We’re going to help them,” I replied. “But Gia hasn’t finished tracking them down yet. She’s close, though.”

  He nodded, stepping back. “I know you’re doing the best you can, Captain Ben. I appreciate you trying to help. It truly means a lot to me.”

  “I care, Grizz,” I said, smiling in sympathy at the man as I clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Heya, Grizz!” Emerald skipped excitedly over to the old man, draping her arm around his broad shoulders. “How’s my favorite attempted-murderer grandpa?”

  A skeptical spasm crossed his face. “You aren’t mad at me anymore for shooting you?”.

  Emerald’s free hand moved to her injury, bandaged beneath her clothes. “Did you shoot me?” she replied. “I’d honestly forgotten.”

  Grizz smiled. “You’re fibbing.”

  “I don’t fib,” Emerald countered. “Lie, falsify, deceive, fabricate, and perjure, yes. Fib, no.” She looked up at me. “ Are you going to open your—?”

  “Emerald!” Matt snapped, his voice loud enough to drown out whatever it was she said.

  “Oops,” she sheepishly whispered. “Sorry. You didn’t hear that, did you, Chief?”

  “No,” I replied. “Matt saved you.”

  “My hero,” she said in a high-pitched voice, batting her eyelashes at Matt. He predictably rolled his eyes.

  The others offered greetings as they gathered around Matt and me. They were all sweaty and a little grimy, with sand, lubricant, and ash sticking to them. Even Ixy had a few grimy dark spots on her abdomen where she had brushed up against something filthy.