Vipers' Nest: Tales from the Longview 5

Catching Up?

The TALES FROM THE LONGVIEW Series Overview

Inhabited by a crew of misfits fleeing nightmare pasts, with a cargo of Condemned slated to die at the hands of the highest bidders, and with a passenger roster made up exclu- sively of people not who they claim to be, The Longview serves the hidden agenda of an eccentric recluse bent on playing puppet master to all of Settled Space.

IN EPISODE 1: Born From Fire (originally Enter the Death Circus)

When love is crime, who will save the guilty?

After falling in love and fathering a child, a young crim- inal refuses to voluntarily throw himself into a lake of fire to gain his community's forgiveness. So he's sentenced to death and sold to the owner of a spaceship that buys criminals like him. But the ship and its crew are not quite what they appear to be.

IN EPISODE 2: The Selling of Suzee Delight

CATCHING UP?

When slavery is virtue, who will fight for vice?

When Suzee Delight, famous Cheegoth courtesan, murders the five most powerful Pact Worlds' Administrators during a private summit, the owner of The Longview Death Circus struggles against conspiracy to win the bidding for her execution. Meanwhile, Suzee’s powerless supporters race to save her, while the leaders of worlds pull strings to guarantee her death.

IN EPISODE 3: The Philosopher Gambit

When the mighty are monsters, what will monsters become?

An exiled philosopher buys a pretty girl a dress for her execution, by doing so becoming a hunted, wanted man with a death sentence on his own head and killers on his trail. The secretive owner of The Longview intervenes, putting his crew in harm's way to bring the condemned into his inner circle— but the hunters are close behind.

IN EPISODE 4: Gunslinger Moon

When freedom is silenced, who speaks for it?

Ex-PHTF slave WE-39R (This Criminal, from Episode 1), renamed Jex, is part of a team the Longview’s owner has tasked with finding the meaning behind Bashtyk Nokyd’s enigmatic final diagram. Drawing the most undesirable assignment, Jex and an unlikely ally fight their way to pieces of the truth.

IN THIS EPISODE: Vipers’ Nest

When betrayal comes home, where does home hide?

With no place to run and their complete and utter annihilation the enemy’s only objective, Bailey’s Irish Station’s citizens and the Longview’s crew stand together against the onslaught of enemies visible and hidden.

CONCLUDING IN EPISODE 6

With the lies revealed, what future remains?

With the location of the City of Furies revealed, Shay has to choose between the owner and Melie, and the path to freeing Settled Space and protecting everything that matters falls on those who never sought the task.

Chapter One

Melie

With Kagen back in the City of Furies, Melie had quietly been made captain of the Longview.

It felt like being made captain of an empty house.

The Longview — docked on the high gantry at Bailey’s Irish Space Station, still and silent — had been given asylum in Bailey’s Point. It could not move out of the system because of the bounties put on it by the Pact Worlds Alliance, and because of the many pirates and fortune seekers who would destroy it to earn even a fraction of the treasure offered.

So Melie was captain of a sitting target, new citizen of a space station that now carried bounties as well because it had dared to defy the PWA — the Pact Worlds Alliance — and had offered help to the Longview.

The work she had to do while the ship was docked was nothing like captain’s work.

But she had the captain’s rank, and someday, if they all survived, that might mean something.

At the moment, being captain simply meant that for the first time in her life, she’d moved out of crew quarters into the captain’s apartment.

These quarters contained more space than she’d ever had in her entire life — all for herself — with a real captain’s table for hosting honored guests, with amazing views, with a huge bed.

And with privacy.

The privacy was the thing she couldn’t quite get used to. It meant she and Shay could be together away from Shay’s quarter — which connected directly to the owner’s quarters.

Shay, stripped down to her shorts and tank, climbed into the bed beside Melie, and grumbled, Mado Keyr is impossible. He has absolutely no sense of anyone else’s personal time.

She was talking about the owner of the Longview, of course, who paid his people incredibly well — and in exchange required a tightly focused dedication that left little time for a private life.

In spite of which, she and Shay were managing to build a tiny private life… in her newly private quarters.

So we’ll just sleep, Melie said. Shay’d woken her coming in, and it was late. With the ship docked, they were both operating on owner’s hours, which were worse than when the ship had been running its circuit of PWA settlements.

They were both on call all the time.

Knowing he’d be demanding one or the other of them to go somewhere or do something at any time, they snuggled together, and Melie closed her eyes, her back warmed by Shay’s softness. Shay wrapped an arm around Melie, and Melie fell back to sleep almost instantly.

It wasn’t the owner who woke them both, however, but the alarm indicating that a call was coming through the isolated trace line Melie had programmed. She shot upright in the bed, shook Shay, and whispered Call coming through on the line we reserved for Bashtyk Nokyd’s killer.

Shay woke equally quickly and grabbed the communicator. Give me a go when you’re ready, she said.

Melie was wide awake, too, adrenaline coursing through her bloodstream, heart racing. This was what they’d been waiting for. She leapt to the console she’d set up in next to that massive captain’s bed, not bothering with shoes or shipsuit, wearing only her uniform gray undershirt and gray briefs. She hit the connect, hit the trace, and nodded.

She saw Shay’s com line go live. Heard Shay yawn. Heard her say, Owner’s office, Shay speaking. Sounding not only like she’d just woken up, but also like she was still mostly asleep.

Melie kept her head down, forced her breathing to slow, tracing the caller’s connection through the network she’d set up. If Shay could keep the caller talking, Melie would be able to pinpoint the location of the woman who had murdered the philosopher Nokyd.

The trace went through, then out of the ship.

It was strong. Tremendously strong. As if the ship transmitting it was within sighting distance.

In the background, Shay said, No. The owner is in his pressure chamber. He had a very difficult time today. I’m covering his transmissions.

Not a ship. The call was coming from the station.

Melie’s first identifier was Gantry Couple South Four Outfacing.

The power grid gave an affirmative, and she moved closer.

Her skin began to crawl. The threat was somewhere inside Bailey’s Irish Space Station.

Her tracepoint was working through ident challenges, and at each, she used a code — given to her by Wils Bailey, the owner of Bailey’s Irish Space Station — which identified the trace to the checkpoint as a power grid status query.

Blu-O power check, Terminus of East F/South Six. … affirmative.

Melie, Shay, and the rest of the crew had been given an introduction to the Blu-O protection system when they received their citizenship.

The Blu-O rings, manufactured right in Bailey’s Irish, surrounded all entrances to the space station, and all entryways and corridor crosspoints inside. They had sensors that identified a select set of human-designed body modifications in the bloodstreams of people passing through them, which released aerosolized vaccines to those toxins.

The aerosols had been developed in response to genetic body modders experimenting with modifications that turned them into predators for whom normal humans were prey.

The worst of these modifications was a mod called Legend. That mod had allowed normal human beings to becoming close approximations of fictional blood-drinking immortals. The fact that the mod creators for the original Legend made blood-drinking an involuntary reflex when the modder got too hungry, and made the mod self-replicating in attacked survivors, had caused a population explosion among Legends that nearly wiped out humanity.

AntiLegend, an aerosolized vaccine harmless to normal humans and lethal to anyone carrying the standard Legend mod, was a core ingredient in the Blu-O rings.

And while no one was certain who had been behind Legends’ near eradication, Settled Space was still rebuilding.

Bailey’s Irish had been untouched during the peak contamination by Legend modders, however, because it had installed Blu-O rings that spread the nanoviral antidote.

And still did, along with nanoviral antidotes to new threats that were being developed by the pathologically power-hungry.

Mado Keyr had been equally severe about making sure no dangerous modders came aboard the Longview. New crew (including crew unpacked from the Sleepers), and passengers of the Longview were inoculated against the same threats during the onboarding process, called repping by the crew. The inoculations were voluntary, but with the rule that if you didn’t rep, you didn’t ride.

The frozen Sleepers? Well, the Sleepers slept on.

"I don’t want to wake him for you, Shay said, managing to sound both sleepy and annoyed. His health is dangerously poor, and he needs another six hours in the compression chamber to fully cleanse and purify his blood."

Melie watch her tracker move closer.

East A/North Two, Blu-O power check. … affirmative.

I do understand that, Mada… What is your name?

East A/North Three, Blu-O power check. … affirmative.

Keffrim? Yes, Mada Keffrim, I do understand about emergencies. I simply don’t believe your situation qualifies as a greater emergency than the one that would be caused by pulling Mado Keyr out of his pressurization chamber prematurely.

East A/North Four. Blu-O power check. … affirmative.

"Of course I can explain. To get me to wake him, you have to demonstrate to me that your situation is a true emergency, can genuinely be solved by Mado Keyr, that Mado Keyr is the only person who can solve it, and that he will agree with you that it is as important to him as his interests, which from where I’m standing, are currently better served by making you wait the full six hours for his pressurization treatment to finish before allowing you to speak to him." Shay raised an eyebrow at Melie, questioning.

Melie mouthed the word Close.

Shay nodded and quickly suppressed a smile.

"Mada, that is exactly why he pays me, and insulting me will not move this process along any faster. A pause. Oh, if you can get him to fire me, please do. I want nothing more than to be told I must no longer work for him."

Melie grinned and kept her head down, working.

The trace was running through the corridors of Bailey’s, through each Blu-O-protected intersection, and confirmed the function of the O-ring as it passed through it.

When the Pact Worlds Alliance declared war on the Longview, and Bailey’s Irish offered everyone aboard citizenship, the space station had added weapons to every Blu-O ring.

The new weapon add-ons recognized citizens who were carrying registered weapons, recognized temporary visitors as long as they were unarmed, but turned armed or enhanced strangers into tiny piles of ash that were sucked into the filtration system — a fact discovered by an advance crew of heavily armed pirates who’d attempted to board the station pretending to be tourists.

But even before that, Bailey’s had somehow gotten wind of Legend from someone on the inside, and had received a duplicatable sample of an antiviral that protected those who inhaled it from Legend contagion. The station had installed aerosolizers into the Blu-O rings that protected each intersection in every corridor on Bailey’s Irish.

Because of that precaution, they had lost