Luckily it was little more than a glance, and Kail turned back to issue an order he couldn’t hear to one of the dynes. Dashiel crossed the remaining distance and ducked beneath the ship’s hull.
As expected, the cover extended over the laser’s opening to form a snug seal. He removed the multitool Nika had given him from his pouch and activated its nanoblade, which he placed flush against the seal and worked back and forth until the seal broke.
The cover didn’t pop open, but after a bit of effort he was able to force it open. He retrieved the tracker and maneuvered it a few centimeters inside the laser’s housing, then pressed it firmly against the metal for several seconds.
He closed the cover back over the laser. The seal no longer formed, however, and when he let go the cover hung half-open.
He studied the multitool settings for something that could help…then smiled. It seemed Nika’s little ‘get-out-of-shit’ tool, as she’d called it, sported a tiny blowtorch as well. He’d put this one to better and less costly use than the last one.
The flame flickered to life, all three centimeters of it. He held the cover closed with one hand and the multitool with the other, slowly melting the cover and housing until they became one.
If Kail decided to use the laser at some point during her travels, the tracker wouldn’t be the only casualty. He simply had to hope she didn’t have an occasion to do so before she got where she, and hopefully the cargo ship, was going.
Satisfied he’d done all he could, Dashiel backed out from beneath the hull on the side opposite the outpost—
—Kail and her dynes were thirty meters away and approaching fast.
He used the cover of the hull to scramble another dozen meters away, albeit in the opposite direction from the Wayfarer, but halted when they rounded the nose. He stood still as stone while the dynes boarded the ship and Kail paused to look back at the outpost a final time before doing the same.
He felt the vibration in his bones when the engines engaged and the ship rose high in the air. Then he turned to go—
—a boom shook the ground beneath his feet as explosions cascaded across the outpost. He stumbled forward, caught himself with a hand on the ice and, all concerns about stealth forgotten, took off running for their ship.
Plumes of ice shocked into instant evaporation blasted into the sky like geysers. Hairline cracks splintered out from the outpost and across the frozen surface.
He ran faster.
A crack outpaced him ahead, and the ground split apart in front of him. He launched himself forward, across the widening crevasse, and landed in a crumpled heap on the other side.
Get up!
He followed his own command and forced himself to his feet, then forced them to move. The Wayfarer was so well cloaked he couldn’t make it out in the now turbulent scene, but its own tracker told him it was a short twenty meters away.
It revealed itself barely a meter before he ran smack into it. He slid across the ice until he banged into the hull, shoved off of it and rushed up the ramp.
As he did, a second round of cracks raced outward from the crumbling outpost, one of them headed straight for the Wayfarer. He fell into the left-side cockpit chair—the ground beneath the hull lurched, sending the nose leering downward at a dangerous angle.
Ramp up. Engines active. Hatch closed. Hurry!
The Wayfarer rose as the ground fell away beneath it. An icy mist billowed into the air, obscuring everything outside. He kept ascending.
The mist was captured by the wind and carried away to reveal a sunken crater where moments ago the outpost, and their landing spot, had resided. Chunks of ice shifted, settled and in several cases rose again until a new equilibrium asserted itself. Silence fell.
Dashiel sank down in the chair, utterly exhausted. Everything hurt, from his toes to the tiny muscles where his cheeks met his ears, but mostly all the places in between. A variety of warnings in his virtual vision told him he’d need to visit the repair bench soon. But it was all worth it if the tracker led him to Nika.
He leaned forward and tuned the frame on the HUD to display the signal from the tracker he’d placed on Kail’s ship.
A tiny dot appeared. Beneath it, galactic coordinates scrolled.
His chin fell to his chest as the adrenaline his OS had overloaded his body with dissipated. Dread surged to replace it as he thought about Nika, alone and trapped inside the cargo ship.
But he refused to let the dread win. This time, he hadn’t let her stride off into danger while we waited at home, impotently hoping she’d be safe. This time, he’d acted. He’d done what was in his power to do.
And now, he’d chase her across the stars after all.
26
* * *
MIRAI
THEY MET ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Mirai One, amid tracts of automated farm labs. This far away from the bustle of the city, the NOIR lookouts stationed along a perimeter eighty meters out would see a hunter or AEV squad coming well in advance, giving his people enough time to scatter into the darkness. It wasn’t a perfect location, but Joaquim felt confident they controlled the field of play as much as was feasible, and to a far greater extent than Justice did.
Perrin, Ryan and Ava accompanied him to the meeting. Perrin because she’d never have agreed to stay behind, Ryan because he knew more about the virutox than anyone in NOIR, and Ava so she could stand back ten meters with multiple weapons trained on their guests and itchy trigger fingers.
The Justice contingent didn’t appear to include an armed escort as they arrived, but it wasn’t as if they’d never heard of a kamero filter, so Joaquim wasn’t so foolish as to trust his eyes.
Whether he was foolish to agree to this meeting in the first place remained to be seen. Perrin had been…persuasive. When faced with the wretched, pathetic pile of mush on the floor that he’d been reduced to by the time he’d finished his sad tale, she had countered with sympathy and a gentle and true understanding.
Yet she had also remained unyielding in her conviction that they must take this chance. She’d kicked him in the head, if softly and metaphorically, and told him to get his psyche straight and back on mission. And since, as difficult as it was to believe, he did recognize his own biases in action, he’d chosen to do so.
Reluctantly.
He motioned to the others, and they stepped out of the shadows to meet their counterparts.
An unassuming-looking blond man took the lead. “I’m Advisor Adlai Weiss. Spencer Nimoet, I believe you know. This is Erik Rhom, our best forensic analyst and the person who developed the vaccine. He’s here should you have any questions about its design or functionality.”
Perrin made a little waving motion. “Hi, Spencer.”
“Hi, Pe—hello. It’s good to see you.”
If Spencer outed their identities to his boss, they would have words. Joaquim offered the Advisor a smile that probably wasn’t very friendly. “I’m not telling you my name, and neither is anyone else. You’re welcome to waste your time scanning us, but you won’t learn anything.”
“I assumed as much. I’m not here to take you in. The truth is, right now NOIR is doing Justice’s job better than Justice is, so it’s to my advantage for you to keep doing it. This doesn’t mean NOIR is off the hook for its past or future crimes, but at present we all have more important concerns. I believe everyone here believes they are acting in the best interests of the people. For the next several days, let’s do so together.”
Perrin nodded enthusiastically. “We want the same thing.”
Joaquim shot her a warning glare, then returned his focus to Weiss. “Nice words. We’ll see if there’s any truth behind them. Give us the vaccine. We’ll tear it apart and subject it to tests you’ve never conceived of. If it’s legitimate, we’ll distribute it our way, using our own people and methods.”
Weiss frowned. “That doesn’t sound like much of a partnership.”
“We never agreed to a partnership. But if this really is a vaccine
, and if you really want it to get to the people most in need of it, then you won’t care how we make it happen.”
“I can see why Nika left you in charge.”
Joaquim bristled at the mention of Nika’s name, at the insinuation that this man somehow knew her in any genuine way, but the mission required him to not pick that fight. He motioned beside him to Perrin. “Her, too. She’s the friendly half of the operation.”
Weiss laughed unevenly. “Glad to hear you have one. All right, I accept your terms. We’ll be distributing the vaccine ourselves as well, in whatever ways we’re able to do so. I hope you decide to pitch in sooner rather than later. Every minute you burn second-guessing our intentions risks more innocent lives.”
“Don’t lecture us about risking innocent lives. Justice destroys—”
Perrin laid a hand on his arm. “This isn’t the time.”
He forced himself to take a deep breath, then carefully blow it out. “It isn’t. Okay, enough talking. Hand it over, and we’ll be on our way.”
They took a circuitous route for their return to The Chalet. Honestly, Justice would be idiots not to send someone to shadow them, if only for future reference, but Joaquim didn’t intend to allow them to succeed at it. Once they were in the heart of the city, they split up. The people on perimeter watch wandered around for a while before splitting up themselves and taking Doors #2 and #3. Ava took the long way around to #4, Ryan #1, and he and Perrin planned to use #5.
They turned left at the next intersection, and the lights of Hataori Harbor greeted them.
Perrin abruptly grabbed his hand. “I know we have to get the vaccine—”
“Alleged vaccine.”
“—alleged vaccine back home for testing, but can we take two seconds to stop at Maxine’s for some lemonade?”
“You can get a lemonade. I can get a—”
—a sharp sting at his neck cut him off. It burned like a wasp sting, but the insects weren’t common around Mirai One…
…vertigo washed over him, and his head suddenly felt thick and heavy. His hand moved to his neck, and he pricked his fingertip on something, like a tiny needle….
Perrin pivoted back to him, a question on her lips. As his legs buckled, he focused all his waning lucidity on getting a single word out before everything went black.
“Run.”
27
* * *
MIRAI
A DRIVING BEAT ASSAULTED Perrin’s ears. Colors and lights danced across her vision in jarring fits and starts. Her mind drowned beneath the sensory overload, and she lurched forward in search of air and silence but instead bumped into something solid.
“Hey, want to dance?”
She looked up in confusion. ‘Something solid’ was a tall, willowy woman with curly fuchsia hair wearing a translucent slip of a dress.
She mumbled out an apology and stumbled away, but everywhere she turned, there were more bodies. They twisted and writhed in time to a cadence she couldn’t decipher.
Where the hells was she? How had she gotten here?
A club. This was a club. She didn’t venture a guess as to which one. Before she was here, she’d been walking with Joaquim—
Run.
She must have done so. Deeply embedded fight-or-flight routines had taken his suggestion under advisement and chosen flight. They’d carried her away from danger she’d been unable to see by flooding her pathways with adrenaline and drowning out conflicting desires like not running and instead staying to help Joaquim.
She spotted a gap in the crowd and rushed through it until she hit a wall that wasn’t a person. Then she pinged him.
Jo? Are you okay?
The seconds ticked by in time to the music’s unremitting rhythm while she waited on a reply she knew wasn’t coming.
Guilt rose up to smother her, clouding her vision and choking off her air. Had she even checked behind her to see what happened to him? Was he taken? By Justice? Had the meeting been an elaborate double-cross after all?
If so, it meant she was responsible for whatever befell him. She’d batted her eyelashes and used her ‘sweet’ voice when he was at his most exposed to woo him into agreeing to the meeting.
She touched her pocket, felt the bulge of the weave containing the supposed vaccine. If it was in reality a trojan horse, she had to make certain it never saw the light of day; if it was truly a vaccine, she had to guard it with her life and do everything in her power to make certain it reached the masses.
And if she was going to save Joaquim, she first had to find out which one it was.
Which meant she had to get back to The Chalet cleanly. Once there, she had to tell everyone that Joaquim was lost. Taken. And she’d let it happen.
“Whoever took him, you couldn’t have stopped them on your own.”
“We should have all stuck together, dammit. I would have stopped them.”
Ryan glared at Ava, then returned his attention to Perrin and rested his hands on her shoulders. “They would have taken you, too, and with you, the vaccine.”
She tried to keep the worst of the despair off her face. She had to be a leader, now more than ever. But she was also dreadful at hiding her emotions. Everyone who knew her said so.
“If it is a vaccine.” She removed one of Ryan’s hands from her shoulder and placed the weave in it, then curled his fingers around it. “Isolate it from everything and everyone. Put it in a sandbox inside a sandbox inside a locked cage. Then find out what it is.”
“I will. I promise. While I’m working on it…” he lowered his voice “…are you planning to contact Nika and tell her what happened?”
The despair threatened to overwhelm her right and proper. But she smiled anyway, though she doubted it was convincing. “No. If I tell her, she’ll rush back here and mount a rescue operation, despite the fact that we don’t know who took him or where he is now. In doing so, she’ll be abandoning a mission to save tens of thousands of lives, and Joaquim wouldn’t want her to prioritize him over so many others.”
“No, he wouldn’t. But when she does find out, she is going to be livid that you didn’t tell her.”
“I realize she will be. But it’s my decision to make, and I’m making it. I’ll pay the price when the time comes.” Even if it meant losing Nika’s trust, and thus her friendship.
Nika had taught her more than she’d ever realized about being a leader, but only now did Perrin begin to understand the true weight of the burden that came with it.
28
* * *
UNIDENTIFIED SPACE STATION
Asterion Dominion Space
NIKA JERKED AWAKE.
Darkness greeted her—the darkness of a closed cabinet door.
She rotated her shoulders in circles and stretched her arms close across her body, which was the best she could manage in the cramped storage cabinet. Her OS had kept her on her feet while she slept, and the result was a decidedly suboptimal form of rest.
What had woken her? She sipped on the dwindling supply of water her climate suit provided her and switched her visual sensors to the x-ray band.
Ηq (visual) | scan.xray(280°:70°)
Outside the cabinet, two dynes had begun detaching stasis pods from their berths and escorting them off the ship, which meant they were docked somewhere. Her vision extended out beyond the hull to reveal the outlines of…she couldn’t tell what. Storage racks, perhaps. Machines, equipment.
She queried her tracker, but it gave her nothing. As long as she remained inside the ship, it continued to be blocked.
Dashiel?
I’m here! You’re awake—and safe?
Undamaged, so far.
Good. You’re on an unregistered space station in an undeveloped system four hundred ten parsecs from Synra.
How do you know where I am? My tracker still isn’t transmitting.
I’ll tell you later. The important thing is, I’m in position two megameters from your location. If I need to crash into the station to get you
out, I’m prepared to do it.
Wow. She grinned to herself as all sorts of warm and fuzzy sentiments buoyed her heart.
I appreciate the offer. But give me a chance to find a less dramatic way off first. Dynes are unloading the stasis chambers, so I’m going to try to sneak off the ship and take a look around.
Be careful?
I’ll do one better. I’ll be smart.
She watched the activity outside the cabinet until she had a good sense of the patterns. When the closest dyne next turned toward the hatch, she confirmed her kamero filter was at maximum strength and eased the cabinet door open. A centimeter at a time, she moved out into the aisle and closed the door behind her.
She crept along behind the dyne and the stasis chamber it shepherded. Her focus remained locked ahead, but her peripheral vision took in the occupied stasis chambers lining the aisle. People, alive but locked in a state of unconsciousness so minimal it resided only a breath above total neural shutdown.
The lost. The vanished. The people she would save.
A dyne returned to the ship for another load and proceeded down the aisle in her direction. Soon—she would save them soon.
She flattened herself against the curving shell of one of the stasis chambers. The climate suit had adapted to the conditions it found itself in, and the glass felt cool through the material. Each chamber contained its own self-powering system, and the slightest hum penetrated the suit to tickle her skin.
The dyne passed by her with less than a meter to spare, taking no apparent notice of her presence. She waited until it was another meter past her, then cautiously stepped back into the aisle. She had to consciously restrain herself from running for the hatch. One step, then another.
Many agonizing seconds later she reached her immediate goal and the ramp extending out to the floor below.
The force field barriers bounding the far ends of the structure confirmed its status as a space station. It appeared to predominantly function as a warehouse. Housing people.
Asterion Noir: The Complete Collection (Amaranthe Collections Book 4) Page 45