Prime Deceptions

by Valerie Valdes

  “Sue?” Eva asked.

  After a few moments of silence, Sue replied. “Rusty buckets . . . We don’t know anything about them, or where they are, or why we’ve never run into them before. But if they can override Gate controls, the rest of the universe would be in serious trouble. We can’t take that chance.”

  Finally, Eva turned to Pink. “Well, Co-Captain? What’s your vote?”

  Pink rolled her eye, but it twinkled with mischief. “If you’re fool enough to take a spacewalk in the middle of a firefight, I ain’t stopping you. By my count, you’ve got at least three lives left, so you might as well do some good with them.”

  “For a change,” Eva said.

  Pink shook her head. “You changed a long time ago. It just took you a while to figure it out for yourself.”

  Eva snorted and bumped Pink with her hip, but her eyes threatened to fill with tears. “We’re all going to need a shitload of therapy after this,” she said.

  “Too fucking right,” Pink agreed.

  “All right, Dr. Carter,” Eva said, returning her attention to Emle. “Show me where the power sources are and how to get them out.”

  As Emle explained, Eva carefully, deliberately, did not think about her sister being stuck in another galaxy if she succeeded. Because if she were being honest, by the time she got the Gate closed—if she did it—Mari would probably already be dead.

  Digging into the mechanical guts of a reconstructed ancient device was substantially less thrilling when people were blowing each other up all around you, Eva decided. The power sources themselves were carefully shielded and buried deep inside the Gate, accessible through claustrophobia-inducing tunnels, leading to a small alcove where the expected energy cubes waited. They were housed in devices very like the latticed ones used in the Pod Pals; this must be where Josh got the design from, though he had modified it to be much smaller. These cubes were almost a meter on each side, and thankfully Eva didn’t have to physically remove them, because she couldn’t imagine having to carry the things out by herself.

  At the bottom of each power source was a small display that presumably gave information about something important, but Eva had no idea what it meant so she didn’t waste time examining it. Instead, she opened a panel next to it and stared at the thick collection of cables inside, each with a different-colored insulating jacket.

  “Me cago en diez,” Eva muttered, shining her spacesuit collar light on the bundle. She was supposed to cut the magenta wire, but some genius had decided to also use red, pink, and purple as color options. Even with her own light source, the energy cube cast a nearly magenta glow on everything around it, making it even harder to tell the difference. She had a flashback to arguing with Pink about matching shoes to a purse and sighed.

  Eva decided the magenta one was darker than pink and lighter than purple and gently pulled that one away from the others. Slowly, carefully, she eased her wire cutters around the cable and held her breath. If she was wrong, she didn’t know what might happen, but it probably wouldn’t be good.

  Dale, mija, she told herself, and squeezed the handles. Snip.

  Nothing happened. Or rather, nothing seemed to happen. There was no atmosphere inside the Gate, so there was no sound to indicate anything had changed, and the energy cube continued to glow as before. Mierda.

  She was about to open comms to Emle again when she realized the display in front of the device was flashing. It took a moment for her translators to resolve it into an error about the power source, and she exhaled in relief.

  One down, four to go.

  “Coming out now, Pink,” she said over comms. “Give me two minutes.”

  “On our way,” Pink replied. “You better hustle, Eva-Bee, this mystery ship is getting real imminent.”

  “Heard.” Eva used her hands to haul herself back down the shaft leading to the access tunnel that had brought her in. It had been a while since she’d done anything in low gravity, and her stomach was doing threatening somersaults every time she reoriented herself.

  A minute and a half later, Eva poked her head out of the tunnel entrance and peered at the ongoing space battle. More debris was flying everywhere, the fighters having taken massive casualties as they chased each other around, so now it was more or less down to the larger ships cleaning up what was left. The Forge station’s shields were still mostly intact, but some sections flickered weakly as they were hit, so that wasn’t likely to continue for much longer. They didn’t seem to have launched any evac vessels, which either meant everyone was prepared to go down fighting, or they didn’t think the ships would have a chance of escaping under the circumstances.

  Eva glanced through the Gate at the still-approaching mystery dreadnought and wondered why the other forces were still bickering with each other when that thing was on its way, but that was people for you.

  La Sirena Negra floated into view, hovering close enough that Eva could reach the emergency hatch. Within moments she was tucked inside, being shuttled to the next access-tunnel entrance.

  They managed to repeat this twice more, Eva’s muscles beginning to ache from the exertion of crawling and pushing herself around, before The Fridge seemed to notice something was happening. Just as Eva was about to climb out onto the surface of the Gate, the flash of laser fire nearby sent her scuttling back inside for cover.

  “Pink, status?” she asked.

  “Playing tag with assholes,” Pink answered. “Sit tight.”

  If there was one thing Eva hated almost more than anything, it was waiting. She crouched in the tunnel, tapping the toe of her gravboot against the wall. The sound of her own breathing started to annoy her, and she tried to count backwards from a thousand to stay calm and focused and definitely not think about how her crew was out there getting chased by Fridge fighters.

  “No puedo,” she said, and crawled out of the tunnel. Ships were still trading shots, but they’d moved to the edge of visual range. It was less than two thousand meters to the next access tunnel, which would take maybe a half hour of walking to reach if she was careful. Min would probably pick her up long before that, but at least she could make some progress.

  Eva began to trudge forward. Slow and steady, one step at a time, she worked her way clockwise up the face of the Gate. As before, only the sound of her breathing accompanied her, and she fought the urge to hum to break the silence. In her peripheral vision, ships flitted back and forth like fireflies, lit up when their shields deflected a shot or they managed to catch the glow of the system’s binary stars at the right angle. The Forge station drifted along its stately path in tandem with the Gate, practically inert except for its own shields and increasingly sporadic weapons fire in retaliation against the remaining Fridge battle cruiser.

  Without warning, Eva’s left gravboot stuck and wouldn’t release. She sent a command through her commlink to disable it, and after a few moments of desperate tugging, it finally came free. Her arms pinwheeled as inertia sent her falling backward, and she landed on her right hand with her right knee bent, gravboot still thankfully securing her to the Gate’s surface. It might have been a wicked-cool dance move in another context, but it was extremely uncomfortable in this one.

  Me cago en la mierda, Eva thought. Sue fixed this. Why was it acting up again, now of all times?

  With a grunt, Eva pushed herself back up, planting her left foot to stop her momentum from sending her all the way forward this time. Unfortunately, the boot stuck again, and her other boot took this as a sign that walking was happening, so it released to allow a normal gait. With an exasperated huff, Eva put that foot down, at which point the left boot miraculously worked as normal. This stumbling progress occurred for a few more steps as Eva swore in every language she knew, including some quennian Vakar had been teaching her.

  “Eva, where did you go?” Pink asked over comms.

  “Alabao, you’re okay,” Eva said, a wave of relief passing through her tired muscles. “I’m about three hundred meters from the last
access point.”

  “You couldn’t just wait? Of course you couldn’t. Don’t move, fool, we’re on our way.”

  La Sirena Negra appeared moments later, Min once again matching the speed and trajectory of the Gate. Eva grabbed the emergency-hatch ladder and started to climb.

  Except her gravboot was stuck again.

  Eva let go of the ladder and groaned in frustration. The damn boot wasn’t responding to her commands now, either. Perfect. And she still had two power sources to go . . .

  “Cap, what happened?” Min asked. “You’re not inside yet.”

  “Technical difficulties, stand by,” Eva said. She reached down and jabbed at the manual release, which ignored her like a pissy cat. It also kept her from simply taking the damn thing off, which would have been the next most obvious solution.

  There was no way she’d punch herself out of this one like she had on Kehma. A desperate poke with her wire cutters told her the Gate’s metallic surface was too strong to be cut apart, which she already knew. She considered trying to slice through the boots themselves, but that was asking to be electrocuted or worse.

  “Do you need help?” Pink asked. “We can’t stay here for much longer or someone’s going to get trigger-happy.”

  “My gravboot is cagado,” Eva said. “I’m stuck.”

  “Again?” Pink tsked so loudly Eva felt it in her bones. “Stay there. We’re gonna do a quick loop while Sue figures it out.”

  La Sirena Negra zipped away, leaving Eva once again alone on the surface of the Gate. She sighed and prodded the manual release a few more times, then stood up and kicked her own boot in disgust.

  The boot stayed stuck to the Gate, but it released her foot, which slid out immediately because she’d been pushing down on that leg. For a long moment, Eva hovered in free fall, a glance to one side revealing that she’d somehow ended up nearly at the edge of the metallic ring. Only a few meters stood between her and an unknown galaxy with its huge ship continuing to close in.

  Eva activated her other gravboot and it pulled her back onto the surface. Coño, that was close, she thought, standing there like a flamingo on one leg.

  Then she put her other foot down, her bootless foot, and her working gravboot thought she was walking so it released.

  Her brain hardly registered what happened at that point. The next thing she knew, she was tumbling through space, a slow forward rotation oriented along her spine at first, but soon twisted so that she was spinning almost sideways. In moments she was over the edge of the Gate, the hole between galaxies stretching beneath her like the surface of some impossible window. She tried to activate her working boot, but she couldn’t seem to get her foot pointed in the right direction for it to pull her back to where she’d been standing.

  Instead, it locked onto something on the other side and yanked her through.

  Chapter 24

  The Pit and the Paragon

  It took a few seconds for Eva to realize the shrieking sound hurting her ears was, in fact, coming out of her own mouth. Then her gravboot hit a huge piece of debris and stuck to it, and she had to bend her knees to cushion the blow.

  Because both Eva and the debris had been engaged in separate wild free-fall spins and were now stuck with each other, math happened and they proceeded to spin together, but more slowly. This was at least better than being in free fall alone, because Eva could use the debris to push herself back to the other side of the Gate as soon as she was able to aim her body properly.

  Sadly, her attention to that task was disrupted by the realization that not only was there a separate space battle still in progress here, it was uncomfortably close to her and trending in her general direction.

  The extremely massive dreadnought ship had also gotten looming down to a science. It was roughly wedge-shaped, tapering to a point in the front, with two long wings extending from either side and a tall fin rising from the top of the aft section. Like everything else, it appeared to be made of the same strange metal, with glowing pinkish lines tracing shapes along its surface.

  For all that she loved Pink, Eva found herself growing extremely tired of the color itself.

  This is fine, Eva thought. The Gate is above . . . left of . . . below you, and all you have to do is get back to it. Simple.

  Except, as she discovered, she was moving away from the Gate. Another awkward rotation showed her that the reason was almost certainly the strange planet, which was close enough that she’d apparently managed to end up at the edge of its gravity well. If she didn’t get away quickly, she’d eventually be pulled down to the surface, and even if there was no atmosphere to burn her up on the way down, she’d definitely have trouble with the sudden stop at the end of the long fall.

  There was only one chance to get this right. If Eva screwed up, didn’t get back through the Gate with her jump, she’d have nothing to push off from again. And then all she’d be able to do would be wait for the inevitable.

  She breathed. She watched. She prayed. Starless space surrounded her, littered with broken ships, pitiless and cold.

  Eva bent her knees, deactivated her gravboot, and leaped.

  For a few glorious moments, she soared toward the Gate, toward the stars she knew, where her crew waited to pull her back into the relative safety of her ship, her home. Then she was falling again, so slowly it was almost imperceptible, but falling nonetheless. She had failed.

  It was a shitty way to go, all things considered, and depending on her angle of descent she’d have quite a lot of time to consider all the things before she became a human pancake. She tried to look on the bright side: she’d be getting a close view of a world previously undiscovered by outsiders, beyond the edges of even the farthest fringes of known space.

  Yeah, that was about as bright as a black hole. Eva was good at lying to herself, but she wasn’t that good.

  “Pink, Min, Sue, can you hear me?” Eva asked over comms.

  No reply. Either something had happened to them—Eva discarded that idea immediately, because it fucking sucked—or something was interfering with comms, or they were too busy to answer. It didn’t matter anyway, because Pink was too smart to have Min fly through a weird Gate straight into a dreadnought, and Eva wouldn’t ask her to. That would be suicide. Her only hope at this point was that The Forge would beat both The Fridge and this new enemy ship and come pick her up.

  It figured. Not only was there only the slimmest chance of being rescued, she was having the last and most incredible experience of her life, and she had no one to tell about it.

  She hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye to Vakar. Not really. Sure, they’d said their usual see-you-laters and kissed each other and then some, but even knowing how dangerous their lives were, it hadn’t felt final. It was a comma, not a period.

  And yet, Eva found herself reluctant to call him. Because what if he answered? What could she tell him? What could he have to tell her? When you knew you were about to die, what the hell was there to say?

  And if he didn’t answer, would that be worse?

  He had said he was coming back, but he wasn’t as good a pilot as Min, despite his Wraith training. His ship was built for speed and stealth, not weapons or defenses. Flying through the battle around the Forge station was practically begging to get shot to pieces.

  Coño carajo, where was her ship? She told herself again not to think about it. Not to wonder if their quick loop around the Gate had turned into a dogfight, or worse. Not to imagine her crew falling through space like her, eternally drifting away from the force that had sent them flying, all the asshole cats endlessly tumbling in the black—

  Stop it, comemierda. Tears slid down her cheeks. There was nothing she could do about whatever was happening out there. There was nothing she could do at all, now.

  She hadn’t even managed to close the Gate. The dreadnought was above her now, would begin passing through to Suidana within minutes, and then who knew what would happen. If it attacked the Forge base, they were screwe
d.

  There was one other call she could make, one that might be a waste of time, but she had nothing but time until it ran out.

  Eva opened a line and waited, trying not to loose the hysterical scream crawling up her throat. After a few moments, a hoarse voice answered.

  “Eva, is that you?” Mari asked.

  “No, it’s the president of space,” Eva replied, swallowing her tears. “I’ve got a medal here for the universe’s biggest comemierda and it has your name on it.”

  “I don’t . . . that’s not funny,” Mari spluttered.

  “Then why am I smiling?” Eva asked. Because she was. Mari was alive. Not for much longer, maybe, but for now.

  “What do you want?” Mari asked.

  “Bueno, that’s a big question,” Eva said. “Usually I’d say money, or maybe sleep, or sex? But right now I think I want to not be slowly falling to my death over that weird-ass metal planet you found.”

  “You what?” Mari yelled. “Where are you?”

  “No sé, maybe a few hundred meters under that really big spaceship heading for the Gate. Do you think it’s full of robots?”

  “Oh, Eva. How did you . . . never mind.” Mari fell silent. “You’re caught in the planet’s gravity well?”

  “Bingo. Now you get a prize to go with your medal.” Eva had to admit, for someone slowly approaching her own mortality, she was feeling a lot better now that she wasn’t alone. The more she talked, the easier it was to shift her focus.

  As if sensing as much, Mari said, “I’m above the largest vessel. Ironically, I’m drifting toward the Gate, but I’m a few hundred meters too high to pass through it.”

  “De pinga.” Eva spread her arms out to at least try to stop rotating, but without any atmosphere to create friction, it was a fairly pointless exercise. “You could space yourself when you get closer and try to push off your ship to get through.”