“I may be able to locate a private address,” Vakar said. “Min may also have some methods to—”
“Can we just not!” Eva exclaimed. The silence that fell in the cargo bay was broken only by the low rumble of a dozen cats purring simultaneously.
“Do you have other ideas?” Pink asked, her eyebrows rising even as she crossed her arms over her chest. Vakar had started to smell a bit minty; Eva hated that he was getting anxious over this.
“We go back to Abelgard and find Miles Erck,” Eva said. “We make him tell us what he knows, then we airlock him for the good of the universe and go from there.” Her suit’s error blinked at her again, and she wished she could rip the whole helmet off at once to be rid of the damn thing. With her luck, it would take her face off with it.
“And if we can’t find him?” Pink asked. “Last I saw, he was getting hustled out of there by Nara Sumas and her new friend. What if he isn’t even on Abelgard anymore? Or if we do find him and he won’t talk? Because we both know he’s a slimy piece of rotten egg. Or if he talks and his information doesn’t help, then what?”
“We’ll figure that out when we get there.”
“Eva, stop building your escape pod while the ship is on fire and think ahead.” Pink shook her head. “If you want to try going back down to Abelgard, fine. We’re already here. But if we come up empty, and you don’t get another lead from your mama, we need to work with what we’ve got.”
Eva could feel the walls closing in around her. “I’ve got to get out of this fucking suit,” she said. The Protean armor became twice as oppressive, her breath coming in tense inhalations that didn’t seem to fill her lungs, made worse by the injuries she’d already sustained to her rib cage. She leaned forward and rested her hands on her thighs, eyes closed, desperately wishing she could run somewhere, anywhere else in that moment.
“Error 13,” the suit repeated. “Command failure.”
The purring of the cats intensified, and waves of calm washed over her, but her mental beach was all rocks and broken glass. Instead of being soothed, she was drowning, and it took every scrap of self-control she possessed to stay above water.
“All right,” Pink said, suddenly next to her. Eva hadn’t even seen her move. “You’re going to the med bay now. If you argue, Vakar is carrying your stubborn ass.”
Eva didn’t argue.
The med bay was always clean, Pink’s many tools and gadgets and supplies tucked away into cabinets or other storage containers. A new remote-imaging device had been attached to the ceiling once Pink started her q-net practice, but otherwise it was the same room it had been since they started flying together on La Sirena Negra over eight years earlier.
After Garilia.
Eva lay quietly on the examination table as Pink and Vakar determined how to get the Protean armor off. She stayed quiet as they flushed the suit with a solvent to dissolve the protective insulation inside, as they slowly and carefully disassembled the exterior components one at a time in the order described in the manual. Bit by bit, piece by piece, Eva was freed from the confines of the protective layers, but she was also exposed. Unmasked.
By the time the helmet was fully removed, the last of the parts packed away into the briefcase, Eva had more or less calmed down. Except it wasn’t so much peace as it was exhaustion, a mere absence of her earlier agitation instead of the presence of positive feelings in its place.
When Pink finally spoke, Eva flinched, then blushed in shame that she’d been distant enough from her surroundings to be so taken by surprise.
“Vakar, would you mind?” Pink asked.
Vakar smelled uncertain for a moment, then shrugged in the quennian equivalent of a nod and left the room, the scent of incense trailing after him. As the door to the med bay closed, Pink turned her attention back to Eva, flipping up her eye patch to let her cybernetic eye do its work.
“You have a few bruised ribs and other minor injuries, and that solvent is gonna leave a rash, but you were lucky as hell.” Pink’s nose wrinkled. “Bot fights are fine when there’s no one inside, but that was reckless.”
“When have I ever been reckful?” Eva asked, the corners of her lips turning up when Pink snorted. They both fell into a thoughtful silence as Pink tended to her injuries.
“You wanna talk?” Pink asked quietly.
Eva sighed. “Do I have a choice?”
“You know I’m not gonna twist your arm, hon.”
Eva stared into the dark sphere of the holovid projector, its glassy surface reflecting a distorted image of the room, including her own tight-jawed face. Pink waited, applying the appropriate creams and bandages and otherwise letting Eva take the time she needed to get her head together.
“Are you sure Nara took Miles?” Eva asked.
“I watched her do it myself,” Pink said. “Dragged him through that hole in the wall like a cat with a naughty kitten.”
Eva winced as Pink tagged her with a shot. “I could ask my dad for Nara’s contact info. She might—”
“She’s a bounty hunter,” Pink interrupted, gentle but chiding. “If Miles was her target, she’s not going to turn him over to you. She probably won’t even take your call, and she’ll trash your q-mail faster than we can jump through a Gate.”
“We could try.”
“We could,” Pink said, laying her jet injector on the counter. “Or we could go to Garilia.”
Eva closed her eyes, willing them to stop filling up with tears like she was a baby who needed a nap.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said finally. She aimed at a firm tone, but it sounded strained even to her ears.
“I know,” Pink said.
“It’s three cycles to get there, and to get back. If it’s another dead end, then we’ve wasted six cycles, which is almost half the time they gave us to find this guy, and it’s already been a week.”
Pink pulled off her gloves and tossed them into the recycler. “Floating around in the black with no leads isn’t any better, is it?”
“We could look for more leads while we floated,” Eva said.
“We could do that while we fly to Garilia,” Pink countered. “And if we did find something, we could haul ass back, or call Mari and let her do her own damn job while we stuck to our plan.”
Eva exhaled, shoulders sagging in defeat. “Yeah. You’re right.”
“I know, and you knew that before you opened your damn mouth.” Pink leaned back against the counter and flipped her eye patch down. “Have you told anyone else about Garilia?”
Eva shook her head, unable to speak.
“Not even Vakar?”
Eva shook her head again. Her fingers moved to her cheek of their own volition, tracing the scar there, the ridges and raised tissue, slowly fading over time as her skin replaced itself but never completely disappearing.
The thing about scars was, they stayed with you. You could almost forget they were there, but then you’d catch a glimpse of them while taking off your pants, or rubbing expired pain gel on a new bruise, or god forbid while looking at your face in the mirror to be sure it wouldn’t worry your crew. Sometimes they itched. Sometimes they burned. Sometimes they got stuck like a bad seam of sealant, and they’d stretch the skin around them until you thought you’d tear a new hole in yourself just doing something normal like holstering your gun.
Scars were your body’s way of reminding you how you fucked up. And once a thing was well and truly fucked, there was no unfucking it. All you could do was hope the scar would fade over time. That you learned from your mistake so you wouldn’t fuck up again.
Eva had a lot of scars. Garilia was the worst of them.
“I think you should,” Pink said. “Tell them, I mean. Get it off your chest.”
It was all Eva could do to choke out a hoarse “No. I can’t.”
Pink raised her hands, palms out. “I know. I was there. And I didn’t approve of what you did, regardless of what you knew or didn’t know, but I’m still here, aren�
�t I?”
Eva hid her face. “I don’t deserve you. I never have.”
“Hey.” A dark finger tucked under Eva’s chin and raised her head so that Pink’s eye met hers. “I told you before. You don’t get to decide that.”
That didn’t make Eva feel any better. If anything, it made her feel worse, that someone knew the darkest part of her and stayed anyway. Because she probably wouldn’t have been so understanding if the situation were reversed. She would be full of righteous indignation like a ship whose fuel was topped off and ready to burn for a month straight.
“You tell the truth,” Pink continued, “and you let other people make their own choices, and you live with the consequences. You give them what Pete and Tito didn’t give you that day.” She released Eva’s chin, and Eva dropped her gaze again, to the scuffed flooring that no longer held a polish, that should probably have been replaced but that didn’t seem to bother Pink, either.
“You’re right,” Eva said again, her voice just above a whisper. Then, louder, “Do you ever get tired of being right?”
Pink smirked. “It’s like using a muscle; gets easy the more you do it.”
Eva stared at her gravboots, at her hands, at the place inside her mind where she locked away her memories of that day because otherwise she’d never stop shaking. She had always been good at compartmentalizing, at rationalizing her choices, until the day she hadn’t. Garilia was where her life had ended, and started, and even though she’d done things she regretted since then—she’d blown up an entire gmaarg fathership, for fuck’s sake—she’d never gone back to being the Eva who pulled the trigger that won a revolution. Or lost it, depending on whose side you were on.
“Let’s get everyone in the mess,” Eva said. “Might as well get this over with.”
Pink rested a hand on Eva’s arm. “You sure you don’t want to take a minute?”
Eva shook her head and stood, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. They were surprisingly dry.
“No time to waste,” Eva said. “We’ve got shit to do.”
Chapter 10
The Incident at Garilia
“So,” Eva said, once everyone had settled in the mess. No one had gotten food, or drinks, though Pink handed Eva a cup of water and a pair of pills once she sat down. They all stared at her expectantly, and she took a shaky breath, flattening her palms against the top of the table.
Mala jumped up in front of her, startling her into sitting back in her chair. With a smug rattle of her tail, Mala climbed into Eva’s lap and began kneading her thighs.
“Is everything okay?” Sue blurted out. “Are we in trouble? Are we still looking for Josh?”
Eva half smiled at Sue, whose face was blotchy from crying. “We’re looking, and we’re going to find him. Min has already started flying us toward Garilia.”
Sue sat lower in her seat, as if she had deflated slightly from relief.
“Before we get there,” Eva said slowly, “I need to tell you all about something that happened . . . Something I did on Garilia. It may make things easier for us there, or harder. I don’t know. But you may not like me very much by the end of this story, and if you want us to drop you off somewhere, I’ll understand. Even you, Min.” She glanced at the pilot, who had moved her human body to the room to join them, possibly under orders from Pink.
“Not likely, Cap,” Min replied. Sue, however, had paled, glancing at Pink, who leaned back in her own seat with her arms crossed.
Vakar smelled like someone had crashed into a perfume store. Tar, incense, ozone, vanilla, rosewater, mint, licorice; he was all kinds of worried and unsure of what to expect, but with an underlying anticipation that told Eva he’d never dug into this with all his Wraith tools and skills. He’d respected her privacy this whole time, even as she had respected his when he first joined their crew.
He’d almost left her once because she lied to him. She hoped this wouldn’t be a similar situation, even if she didn’t deserve him.
Eva’s hand began stroking Mala’s soft, smooth fur, almost of its own volition. Mala purred, and Eva snorted as she remembered something her father had said once: you were never alone as long as you had a cat.
“So,” Eva repeated, gathering her courage. “Once upon a time, there was a mercenary who thought she was hot shit.”
Garilia was a BOFA-Defended Emergent Ethno-Zone for Noncontributing Undeveloped Technological Species, which was a fancy way of saying it was a planet discovered by the Benevolent Organization of Federated Astrostates before anyone else. Standard procedure was to maintain surveillance until particular conditions were met, then make first contact and offer no-strings-attached protected status, then eventually allow the planet to join BOFA as a junior member with economic incentives but no voting privileges, and so on.
By the time Eva got there, they’d been under protected status for almost thirty years, during which time the various cultures and their respective political coalitions had scrambled to put together a unified central government, in order to cohesively negotiate with BOFA and the rest of the suddenly reachable universe.
This had not worked out well.
Back then, Pete Larsen, Eva’s father, oversaw a sprawling syndicate of various enterprises of dubious legality with his perfectly lawful spaceship-selling operation as its hub. Smuggling was the least objectionable rung on the ladder of criminal severity, but it could be among the most dangerous; that was where Eva and her fellow mercs came in, under the command of incorrigibly competent asshole Tito Santiago.
As far as Eva had known, their task on Garilia was simple: ensure the cargo of the SS Yamamoto reached its destination. Tito had briefed them on the challenges, namely that they were landing in the middle of a rebellion and might have to protect the cargo while fighting their way through to the recipients. The terrain at the drop point was loosely termed forested, with trees the size of skyscrapers whose crowns spread out for hundreds of meters, their branches falling like thick cables halfway to the ground, each leaf the size of an average human. Local buildings were constructed on or between branches, with cable cars or ziplines connecting them to each other. The native sentient species was the xana, who were as susceptible to standard weapons as most people, and whose psychic abilities were intra-species and thus deemed irrelevant.
Tito had a bad habit of deeming things irrelevant when they might have mattered to someone who wasn’t him.
When they landed, a pitched battle was already in progress. Later, they would learn that the world government forces had located the main rebel encampment and launched an offensive, which had pushed the rebels to accelerate their plans to complete their total takeover of the planet’s capital city, Rilia. When they arrived, the rebels were on the run, more or less, pursued by innumerable soldiers from one branch to the next, their own number dwindling as they struggled to survive.
But Tito’s squad were professionals, and they got the job done as long as the pay was good and the danger was surmountable. They located their missing contact, bunkering in a cramped structure in the next tree over from where they had touched down. Between them were clusters of government fighters and the companion animals they called Attuned, some gliding back and forth between branches, others in sniper positions above the rebels, still others setting up complex webs of some sticky substance to restrict movement to particular pathways and airspaces.
All Tito and his people had to do was get through the line, deliver the cargo, and get back to their ship.
Tito informed them that taking out one particular leader of the government fighters would make their job much easier, might even halt the fighting altogether for a while if they were lucky. For the purpose of the mission, she was code named “Mother,” and while her location was uncertain, the rebels thought she might be in a section of the tree they’d been unable to reach since they were pinned down.
So Tito’s mercs split into three groups. The A Squad was tasked with getting through to the rebels while safeguarding th
e cargo, while the B Squad was sent to find and eliminate Mother. The C Squad stayed back at the ship in case anyone needed to be extracted quickly.
Tito led the A Squad. Eva led the B Squad. Pink was on the C Squad. None of them were especially worried, as they’d seen worse situations and made it out just fine.
A Squad was hampered by the terrain more than expected; the buildings were translucent and only partially resistant to projectile weaponry, so the squad had to rely on finicky personal shielding rather than structural cover. The government fighters were quick, agile, well camouflaged by the tree, and able to move between branches much more easily than Tito and the others, especially given the restrictive webbing. Their companion Attuned made it even more difficult, striking without warning and retreating into the leaves.
It was like fighting angry psychic ghosts, someone said later.
More like giant flying squirrels, Tito had said, but then he’d always been a little racist.
Meanwhile, Eva and the rest of B Squad followed a circuitous route behind the body of fighters, up and down through the branches to where Mother was expected to be, trying to maintain a low profile so they wouldn’t be noticed. There were several buildings where the xana leader could have been stationed, assuming she was even indoors rather than on some open platform behind a giant leaf, or moving between branches along one of the many ziplines, or even traveling up and down in one of the cable cars to get a better view of the conflict.
All their speculation was absurd in retrospect, and could have been avoided if Tito had told them everything he knew. The things he deemed irrelevant. But he hadn’t, and so they proceeded.
B Squad was ambushed by a half dozen xana and their Attuned, working with a cohesion Eva had never seen in her years as a merc. It was like they had rehearsed a carefully choreographed dance for weeks and were simply following the steps, while Eva and her comrades tried in vain to learn it as they went. Their shots met empty air, and in close quarters each of them seemed to find themselves facing multiple foes at a time despite their numbers being even.
Prime Deceptions Page 14