Four Lieutenant Garys

Cal found a maintenance terminal and jacked into the Yushi’s surveillance system. The ship’s security was competent but not inspired—military-grade locks with a commercial firmware that hadn’t been updated in months. She cracked it, pulled up the internal camera feeds, and felt her stomach drop.

Lieutenant Gary was on the bridge. That was the good news.

The bad news was that there were four of him.

Four identical men occupied the Yushi’s bridge, all wearing the same face, the same build, the same bland expression of someone trying very hard to look like they were in charge. Decoys—cloned, cosmetically altered, or simply very well cast. It didn’t matter. Somewhere among those four matching faces was a data port with a fortune in insured information, and Cal had to figure out which one before—

An alarm sounded. They’d detected the intrusion. Her hack had tripped something on the way in, a delayed alert she hadn’t caught.

Cal swore and started moving.

Jakob, meanwhile, had crossed the gap from his damaged exosuit to the Yushi’s secondary airlock, following Cal’s path inside. That gave them two on the ship. But they had a new problem: through the Yushi’s portside cameras, Cal could see the pirate vessel powering up and turning toward them. The fight among the exosuits had drawn attention.

On the Night Heron, Io saw it too.

She turned to Benny, who was sprawled in the copilot’s seat playing a game on his handheld. “Drop the controller,” she said. “Strap in. We’re going in hot.”

Benny, to his credit, did not argue. He was twelve years old and had lived his entire life on ships. He knew what that tone meant.

Io brought the Night Heron’s engines to full burn and catapulted out from behind the asteroid. The old ship surged forward, and whatever phantom haunted her corridors must have approved, because the engines sang clean and true.

The pirate ship was turning toward the Yushi when the Night Heron came howling out of the asteroid field. Io opened up with the point-defense cannons—weapons designed to shred incoming missiles, now repurposed to shred the pirate’s hull plating in a long, raking burst. Sparks and debris sprayed into the void. The pirate ship rocked, staggered, began to turn.

Io was already banking for another pass. She came around hard, lined up the shot, fired again—and hit. But this time she’d misjudged the enemy’s trajectory. As she pulled out of the attack run, she found herself staring directly into the barrel of the pirate’s main cannon.

For a frozen heartbeat, the gun filled her entire viewport. Then instinct took over—or training, or desperation, or whatever it is that makes a sixteen-year-old pilot better than she has any right to be. She slammed the throttle forward and wrenched the Night Heron sideways. The ship screamed. Benny’s knuckles went white on his armrests.

The cannon fired. It missed the Night Heron by a margin that Io would later refuse to quantify. But the pirate ship, swinging to track her, swept its own drive plume across the space where its three exosuited crewmates were drifting. The ones Jakob had disabled.

There was a brief, terrible flash.

The pirate ship stopped firing. It stopped turning. It hung in space for a long moment, and then, slowly, it moved—not toward the Yushi or the Night Heron, but toward the expanding cloud of debris that had been its crew. Whatever fight they’d had in them was gone.

Inside the Yushi, Cal was in trouble.

She’d been trying to set up an ambush using the secondary airlock—a clever plan involving the door controls that would have funneled the four Garys into a kill zone. It did not go as planned. A miskeyed command sent the wrong door cycling, and suddenly Cal was the one in the airlock, the outer door beginning to open behind her, the void pulling at her already-damaged suit.

Jakob lunged for the control panel. He was no hacker nor technician, not even a man of delicate skills. He was a man who solved problems with his hands, and his hands found the emergency override and wrenched it. Sparks erupted from the panel, arcing across his fingers and up his forearms. The outer door groaned, shuddered, and slammed shut.

Cal collapsed against the inner wall, breathing hard. Jakob shook his burned hands, flexing the fingers, making sure they still worked. They did. They hurt enormously, but they worked.

“Thanks,” Cal said.

“Yep,” Jakob said.

They kicked open the inner door and waited for Lieutenant Gary and his doubles to arrive.

The four men came down the corridor without caution, and Jakob and Cal attacked head on. The fight that followed was short, brutal, and deeply unglamorous. Jakob used his heavy revolver as a club—ammunition being expensive and hulls being thin—while Cal waded in with her armored fists. The decoys fought with the desperate energy of men who knew they were outmatched. One of them caught Jakob with a taser, sending a vicious jolt through his already-burned hands that nearly put him down. He responded by putting the taser’s owner through a console.

When it was over, four men lay on the deck in various states of consciousness. Cal knelt beside each one, checking arms until she found what she was looking for: the data port, a small medical-grade implant embedded in the forearm of the second man from the left. The real Lieutenant Gary. He was dazed but alive, and more importantly, his data port was intact.

They sealed the three decoys in environmental suits, marched them to the airlock, and pushed them out toward the pirate ship. It seemed fair. The pirates could sort out their own people.

The Yushi and the Night Heron set course for Glimmer together, the battered scout ship limping along under Cal’s inexpert guidance while Io kept the Night Heron close alongside. The journey was uneventful, which was the best thing any of them could say about a journey. Jakob sat in the medbay, applying burn cream to his hands and occasionally swearing in a low, philosophical tone. Cal monitored her suit’s atmosphere readings and tried not to think about how close she’d come to breathing vacuum. Benny, satisfied that the excitement was over, retrieved his game controller from where it had wedged itself under a conduit during Io’s combat maneuvers.

Somewhere in the corridors of the Night Heron, the phantom music played on—a faint, wandering melody that none of them could quite identify. It sounded, if you listened closely, almost pleased.

Lazarus was waiting for them in the Glimmer docks, a fresh cigarillo smoldering between his fingers. The insurance agent stood beside him, clutching his data pad, his expression hovering between relief and disbelief—the look of a man whose actuarial tables had, against all probability, come out in his favor.

“Not bad, Kid,” Lazarus said, and Io tried very hard not to grin.

She failed.