Desperate Measures Chapter 10

Chapter Eight

July 12, 2230, Neo Southern California Metroplex, Private Hangar of the Argo

Erik set his flitter down in the hangar. He’d arrived in response to a cryptic message from Lanara.

Come right away. Don’t need your better-looking half.

They didn’t have a mission, and Alina had told them to stay on standby, so he’d spent the last few days with Jia, either on dates or training.

He doubted this was some secret attempt by Lanara to seduce him. That woman wasn’t turned on by anything that lacked a fusion reactor.

“What the hell?” Erik thought as he looked through the front windshield.

Large cargo bots floated through the air with crates underneath. There were crates and cargo containers filling half the hangar, and Lanara was pushing a hoverdolly topped with a pyramid of long, dark cylinders with pointed ends.

“Do you know what’s going on, Emma?” Erik asked aloud, confusion still painted across his face.

“Yes,” she replied. “I’ve had communication with her, but Engineer Quinn would prefer to tell you herself, I believe.”

Erik grunted in frustration and opened the door. Yes, any conversation involving the

Argo

was probably best held in the protected hangar, but she could have sent him a message with a couple of clever phrase replacements.

Lanara stopped pushing her dolly toward the open cargo bay and jogged over to Erik. “Blackwell, you came a lot sooner than I expected.”

“You said you wanted me to come right away,” he replied with a shrug. “I figured that meant right away.”

“Well, I figured that meant anytime in the next week, but now that you’re here, we can get this out of the way.” Lanara rubbed her hands together with an eager gleam in her eyes.

Erik looked up as a cargo drone passed overhead with a crate almost the size of his flitter underneath. “What is all this?”

Lanara jabbed a finger in his chest. “I’m trying to get you to stop bitching, both for your sanity and mine. The best way to do that is to solve it my way.”

He eyed her. No confusion had left his face, and perhaps a dab or two had been added. “I haven’t talked to you in days.” Erik gestured around the hangar. “You can’t need all this for my penjing containers.”

“Those? No?” Lanara waved that thought away. “I set that up days ago. You can transfer your stupid plants over here anytime you want. No, I’m talking about your other bitching.”

Erik scrubbed a hand down his face. “I’m so far off the map in this conversation that I’d need to travel for days before I got back to the part where it said ‘here be monsters.’”

Lanara mimed an explosion. “Because you’re a soldier, all you think about is blowing crap up. You keep whining for ‘more guns, more guns, more guns,’ and I keep telling you there’s only so much we can do because of the reactor.”

Erik nodded slowly, feeling more grounded. “Okay, and you’re going to add more guns?”

“Damn it, Blackwell.” Lanara shook her arms in front of him. “Don’t you

ever

listen? I can’t do much with guns because we don’t have the power for it. You don’t want a ship where the life support cuts out when you fire the weapons, do you?”

“No, that would include all levels of suck.” He thought for a moment. “But would the life support come back on in that scenario?”

Lanara’s withering glare made him want to laugh.

“The first step was to solve the power issue.” She flung her arm toward a large cargo container in the distance that could have held the MX 60. “And that meant we needed a reactor upgrade.”

“Now we’re talking.” Erik looked at the

Argo

. “But does Alina know about this? I’m guessing this isn’t something you can pound out in a couple of hours.”

“She knows I’ve requested supplies, and she’s approved the purchases, but she has cautioned me about taking the ship offline until we have a window of opportunity. Right now, I’m gathering the parts and preparing.” Lanara cast an eager look at the ship and licked her lips. “I’m good at what I do, Blackwell. If I prep this ahead of time, I can do it in stages, especially on a small ship like this. We’ll upgrade the reactor, and then I can immediately do the shield upgrades. It’ll take longer to stabilize the new power network, but once I do, we can start putting in more of the guns you’re so obsessed with.” Her eyes pinned him in place. “Assuming you still want them?”

Erik didn’t respond right away. He was too busy imagining the

Argo

with two or three times the firepower. The less they needed to rely on the jumpship, the safer they would be.

If the conspiracy got lucky and boarded the ship with enough Tin Men or

yaoguai

, they’d have the ultimate weapon. He wanted the jumpship to be the last resort.

“Why

wouldn’t

I want them?” Erik questioned.

“Because having more guns wouldn’t have done anything to help you last time,” Lanara replied with a shrug. “I don’t want to do a bunch of work just because you need a security blanket, Blackwell. If that’s what this is about, tell me now, so I don’t end up throwing you out an airlock later.”

Erik chuckled, amused at the image of the tiny woman trying to eject him from the ship. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to run into more human ships than Hunter vessels, and if we can’t have a fleet backing our asses up or a dedicated warship on call, the more we can cram onto this thing, the better.”

Lanara scratched her eyelid. “That makes sense. With your luck, we might run into Zitarks or Leems, and having more firepower would help.” She frowned. “But this is where things get complicated.”

“Complicated? Technically?”

“No.” Lanara shook her head. “I’m damned good, and this ship is on the smaller side, but I’m still one person. I can do this in stages like I said and get it done decently quickly, but I’m going to need help. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. If we’re going to fly around on that jumpship, I’m going to need more regular help. Raphael’s great, but he’s all about that jump drive, not so much the nitty-gritty of things like the grav emitters on the

Argo

. Emma’s terrific, but I need human hands I can boss around, too.” She clenched her teeth. “I asked Alina for more people, and she told me to talk to you about it because it’s your team. What crap is that? I’m the engineer. She wouldn’t ask my opinion if you wanted to hire a bunch of cannon fodder.”

“I don’t know,” Erik offered, the dream of extra guns fading. “Things are only going to get more dangerous from here on out. If these people are going to help, that’ll mean they’ll need to be on board with us when we’re on missions.”

“That’s kind of the point. I need help when crap’s blowing up all around me, too.”

Erik locked eyes with Lanara. “Cutter’s not the only person who might be dead by the time this is over.”

Lanara sneered. “You trying to scare me, Blackwell?” She took three steps to look up at him and squared her shoulders. Her tiny size might make her attempt to intimidate ridiculous, but Erik had to admit she had the aura of a grizzled lifer NCO.

“I’m saying not carrying a gun won’t save your life when the conspiracy’s shooting at us,” Erik offered quietly.

“Okay, Soldier Boy, I know you’re a bad-ass who has dropped onto every kind of world there is to blow people’s brains out, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know a thing or two about danger, and that’s before counting that I could have died too in that little Hunter incident.” Lanara’s nostrils flared. “I’ve been in a cramped little engine room when half the ship’s been blown apart so badly that I’m lucky I’m in a pressure suit and the grav emitters are fried. Bodies floating around me, their blood making those stupid little spheres, and me sitting there trying to get the backup power cells online, so the other guys don’t end finishing me off. At that point, guns don’t mean crap.” She pointed to her chest. “In that situation, engineers mean everything.”

Erik nodded. “If you’ve been through that, why are you blowing the danger off?”

“Because…” She deflated a touch. “Because I actually believe in your stupid mission, Blackwell.” Lanara relaxed her shoulders. “And as great as I am, I know my limits. Alina’s like you. She thinks she’s doing everybody a favor by limiting exposure and keeping all this secret. I know some of that is ghost crap, but I’ve accepted a truth that seems to have escaped our fancy ghost boss and your oh-so-experienced ass.”

“What truth is that?” Erik asked, his voice a soft rumble.

“We’re at war, Blackwell,” Lanara answered. “You both talk like it, but you don’t always act like it.

Erik grunted, unsure of what to say. This was more a mission of revenge-filled annihilation.

“I’ll admit I didn’t take this seriously at first,” Lanara continued. “Put me in a ship, give me my tools, and I can be happy. Alina pays well, and you were giving me challenges. That’s all I cared about.”

He reached up, scratching his nose. “But you take it seriously now?”

Lanara nodded. “If we hadn’t been out there to stop that Hunter ship, who would have died along the way? Those bastards might have parked above Earth and broadcast a suicide signal and killed half our species.” She tightened her hands into fists so hard, her nails dug into her palms. He worried droplets of blood would leak out. “It’d be one thing if those Hunter bastards had shown up themselves, but the conspiracy woke them up. The conspiracy could have cost billions of lives because of whatever twisted plan they have. And that’s before you think about all their weird-ass

yaoguai

, mutants, Tin Men, and half-alien hybrids. There is absolutely nothing they won’t do.”

“I’m going to wipe them out,” Erik growled. “You think I don’t take this seriously?”

“I think you’re letting Alina program you to be a good little ghost,” Lanara replied. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if we can’t keep secrets if it means those other guys get an advantage. We have to stop them. We have to burn them to ashes, and that means risking other people’s lives: mine, Jia’s, Raphael’s, and everybody else’s who is part of this. Nobody’s going to be hired for your team and think it’s a safe job, so screw not hiring people because they might get killed.”

Erik ran his hand through his hair. “I’ll talk to Alina about getting people, but whatever you can do quickly might help.”

“Good.” Lanara nodded slowly, the fire dimming in her eyes. “Got any suggestions about what you’d want that doesn’t take a reactor overhaul?”

“Missiles and torpedoes don’t require as much power,” Erik noted. “Deployable launchers that we can hide. We can punch above our weight without needing as much reactor power.”

Lanara’s face brightened. “That’s…actually a good idea. I’ll concentrate on setting some up, but there’s only so much I can do while we’re on standby.”

“I’ll talk to Alina.” Erik turned back toward his flitter. “We’ll win the war, Lanara. We already are.”

“I know we’ll win.”

He looked over his shoulder as he walked. “Why is that?”

Lanara looked at the

Argo

’s cockpit, pain in her eyes. “Because we have to.”