Nox was trying to get their attention.
Reluctantly, Arden blinked out of net space and pushed the goggles up onto their forehead. Nox stopped tapping their shoulder and stepped back, giving Arden a moment to adjust to the real world again.
They hated coming back. They didn’t mind meat space the way some netheads did. In fact, they’d rather be out than in. It was the disorientation that they hated, the readjusting of senses and the sudden, crushing press of gravity reasserting itself. Maybe it’d be easier in low-g, they’d never been off-planet so they couldn’t say for sure, but somehow they doubted it.
Arden pinched their nose between two fingers. “Ugh.”
“Anything useful?” he asked.
Arden shook their head, blinking their eyes open. They liked to dip into the net on the command deck of the docked ship, because at least when they woke up, the foam seat cradled their body, but the smearing lights on the console made them nauseous.
“Not yet. I was hoping useful information was why you brought me up?”
The world looked a little streaky, but Arden forced themself to watch Nox as he shrugged and slung the rifle off his shoulder, propping it against a bulkhead. Arden marveled at how casual the motion was and wondered if someday the sight of weapons wouldn’t make their own skin crawl. They doubted it.
“Information, but not useful,” Nox said. “The dockmaster has been walking by us more and more. I think she knows someone is living in here.”
“Not possible. I’ve wiped us from all the local camera feeds, the dock lease is paid up, and we don’t use nearly enough power to draw attention.”
“All of that is kind of moot if the dockmaster takes a stroll when I’m walking out the door.”
“Ugh.”
“Yeah, meat space is a real fuckin’ nightmare sometimes. We have to leave, Arden, and soon. If we get caught, we’re never getting out of prison. If we even make it to prison.”
“We aren’t going to get caught, and this ship isn’t ready to move. The thing was derelict when we took it over, and it’s hardly any better now. I’m not even sure if it could take vacuum, let alone a trip to Ordinal.”
“Repairs going that well?”
Arden wrinkled their nose. “The circuits are so fried I wouldn’t trust it to tell me if it was holding a seal or not. I can solder everything in the damn ship shut and I still wouldn’t trust it not to leak atmo. This thing is a pile. There’s a reason it was abandoned to dock authority before we moved in. Not to mention, a hauler’s not enough to get us where we want to go.”
“A hauler is all we got, and I can’t stand waiting much longer.’”
The argument wasn’t new, but this time around it had a different feel to it—a shape more jagged than all the times they’d circled each other before. Arden counted themself as pretty good at reading expressions—a substantial chunk of netdiving was social engineering, after all—but Nox’s moods had always passed by Arden too quickly.
Nox wasn’t a stormy man, not exactly. A lot of people would have called him quick-tempered because he was prone to violence, but Nox never squeezed a trigger without a damn good reason. His emotions were more like microbursts, surges in the hormonal tides of his mind that bubbled up to the surface and popped, spent as soon as they appeared.
“What’s gone wrong?” Arden asked, because they’d learned a long time ago that trying to guess what was boiling over in Nox’s head was a fool’s game that got them both burned.
Nox grunted and broke eye contact, a sure sign something was up. “We’re not drawing Jules or the woman out. It’s not working and we’ve run out of targets.”
Ah, right, the fires. A substantial portion of Arden’s net time over the past two years since Jules and Lolla disappeared had been spent trawling through white noise, looking for glimpses of warehouses that resembled the one their team had lifted that wraith from.
They’d spent even more time staking out the likely candidates, hijacking security systems, and stringing a digital net so wide and intricate that the tiniest vibration would draw their attention.
It’d given them nothing until the night before that Icarion planet-buster had escaped Prime’s control. That night was seared into Arden’s memory. Not because they gave a shit about Icarion’s pissing match with Prime, although the tech used in creating The Light of Berossus was interesting, but because that night one of their digital wires had been tripped. A woman, all in white, had approached one of the look-alike warehouses on the edge of the Grotta.
Something about that woman set Arden’s stomach churning. Nox had agreed. Within an hour, they were at the warehouse. It was empty. So they burned it down to flush the rats out.
And another, and another, and every time one rotted-out husk of a building went up in smoke, Arden felt a piece of their network shrivel and die—their web contracting, shrinking, until soon they’d have nowhere left in the city to watch. Arden knew who she was—Rainier Lavaux, wife of a Keeper—and despite their best efforts, they could not pinpoint her exact location.
“We know where she is,” Nox said, dragging Arden back out of their ruminations.
“Who? Rainier Lavaux?”
“No. Jules.”
Arden fiddled with their wristpad, absentmindedly bringing up one of the other nets they had spread around the city. This one watched for any mention of them—or Nox—to alert them if the authorities were getting close. Having a data stream pouring into one ear helped them keep focused. Calm.
“We cannot barge onto a Keeper research ship and ask for her back.”
“If we could talk to her—”
Arden clenched their jaw. “I told you, even I can’t get a tightbeam through that security. It’s not just Keeper tech. I’ve fiddled with that stuff before, thanks to Jules. There’re varieties of encryption at that station I haven’t even seen before, and that’s just the outskirts that nosy types like me can see. We can’t knock on her door. We can’t get a message through. We need another way in, or at the very least more information.”
“Flushing that woman out isn’t working. If we could get to Ordinal—”
“Which this ship is not capable of—”
They locked gazes. Arden hated this. Hated the arguing. Sometimes they wished they could bump foreheads with Nox and somehow share everything they knew, everything they understood about the greater net and the dangers within it. Nox probably wished he could do the same—that he could force Arden to see all the physical threats they faced.
The trouble was, even with their combined skill sets, all paths currently led to death.
Nox broke eye contact first and reached for his weapon. “Gotta clean this—”
“Wait.” Something tickled the back of Arden’s mind, something they’d heard in the white noise data stream. Nox put the weapon back down and waited while Arden’s attention diverted wholly into the stream, rolling what they’d just listened to backward until…
Audio feed from a shop they no longer frequented. Nothing obvious, not a detective asking about their name or anything like that, but a confluence of two concepts: a nethead, and a gardener.
Arden blinked the color of roses from their eyes.
“Someone’s asking after me at Hassan’s.”
“The fuck?” Nox picked up his weapon again. Arden thought he carried that gun for the same reasons Arden kept the white noise of their net purring into their ear.
“Hold on.”
They pulled up a self-made program on their wristpad—all their programs were self-made—and dove into the security cameras in the area, bypassing audio for visual. Hassan was a shady bastard and liked to keep cameras in his shop because he expected everyone he encountered to be as shady as himself. He was probably right.
Cheap as the junk in Hassan’s shop was, the cameras were high-end, the best he could afford. It took Arden thirty seconds to punch into them.
They sucked air through their teeth.
“What?” Nox asked.
“You’re… not going to like this.”
“Ain’t a lot I do like.”
Arden puffed their cheeks out with a held breath, debating forgetting they’d ever seen anything at all. It’d be no use, Nox knew something had rattled them and wouldn’t let it go. He was a hound dog sometimes—shaking a bone until all the useful marrow had bled out.
“This is the person asking after me,” Arden said, and turned the wristpad around so Nox could see.
They’d never seen the big man so pale before. The blood drained from his cheeks, stubble sticking out like a threatened porcupine as he sucked his lips in.
“Graham Greeve,” Nox said out loud, just to put the name in the air, though they both knew it. They just hadn’t spoken it in years.
“Yes,” Arden agreed.
The years hadn’t been kind to Graham. The last time Arden had seen him, Graham could fill a room with his presence. Now, though his eyes were sharp, Graham had a hunch to him that made him look older than his age. Made him look worn thin.
At twenty-six, Graham had been the oldest of Harlan’s crew. In retrospect, that should have set off some alarm bells about the kind of people Harlan liked to manipulate into working for him, but he was dead and it wasn’t worth ruminating over. Graham had been young and brilliant and full of ideas that didn’t involve dancing to Prime’s tune. Nox, nineteen and a fresh runaway from the fleet with the scales ripped from his eyes, had been the most hopeful.
When Graham left the crew for Ilan, for a stable life stepping to Prime’s drumbeat, it had damn near broken Nox’s heart. They’d had other crew members after that, but then there’d been Jules, and Lolla, and Harlan’s crew had settled into a rhythm that lasted until that night at the warehouse.
“What the fuck is he doing crawling around Hassan’s?” Nox asked.
“I don’t know… Looks like he’s getting a fix for that repair bot.”
Arden moved to take their wristpad away from him, but Nox snapped out a hand and grabbed their forearm. Normally, Arden would find that kind of intrusion rude in the extreme. Now, well… It was understandable.
“Who’s the woman with him?”
“Hold on.” Arden opened his facial recognition program and ran it, expecting to have to wait for the results. It came back in microseconds:
Major Sanda Maram Greeve. Stationed, Ada Prime.
“His daughter,” Nox said.
“Shit,” Arden said.
“Looks like him.”
“Yes.” Left carefully unsaid: And not at all like Ilan.
“Fuck, his kid’s an adult,” Nox said.
“That’s how time works,” Arden said. Nox didn’t even blink.
“Isn’t she…?”
“The one who brought back The Light of Berossus? I believe so.”
“And she’s accused of killing a Keeper,” Nox added.
“Yes.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Nox…”
“They won’t last a day on their own. He used one of your aliases in a location he knows you monitor. He needs help.”
“Not our problem.”
Nox dropped Arden’s arm and slung his weapon back up on his shoulder. “Adjust those dock camera filters for two more, will you? I’ll be right back.”
“This is real fucking stupid.”
Nox stopped one step from the airlock door. About a thousand possible things to say crowded into Arden’s brain, threatened to spill past their lips. They should stop him, they really fucking should, because getting Graham Greeve involved in their affairs again was a surefire way to get them all burned down before they ever saw the Ordinal system, let alone saved Jules and Lolla.
Nox’s big shoulders rose and fell in a heavy, body-shaking sigh. “I have a plan.”
Nox stepped out the door and went to get his ex-boyfriend back.
CHAPTER 11
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
MAKING NEW FRIENDS
As the elevator clanked its way up the building, Sanda unbuckled her prosthetic and tested the weight in her hand. With the microcontroller ripped out, the SynthFlesh on the calf wriggled as she hefted it, the slit that opened to the missing electronics smacking together like too-wet lips. The build was light by design, but there was strength in those titanium bones. It could do some damage if she swung it just right.
“You just got that,” Graham said. “Going to break it already?”
“Our tail let us come back to the hotel, which means one of two things. Either they got spooked and bailed—”
“Or there’s company waiting for us in the room.” Graham punctuated the thought with a heavy sigh.
“I don’t have time to get used to walking on this thing before we come to blows, so I better make it useful.”
“They probably have guns, Sanda.”
“I know,” she said, and put the prosthetic back in place, but did not pull the straps taut. “We could leave.”
“Could do.”
“But you want to see who’s in there as badly as I do, don’t you?”
“Could let me go in alone,” Graham said.
“Could do.”
The elevator door swished open and they rolled out. Sanda pointed up to the security cameras in the hallway. They’d been blacked out by paint—a quick and dirty job. Not something the authorities would bother with, and she had a feeling Arden Wyke wouldn’t lower themself to such contrivances. If they’d wanted the cameras off, they’d be off. So they were dealing with small-timers, maybe a normal mugging. How refreshing.
Graham raised a brow at her and she shrugged, tipping her chin toward the door. To her surprise, Graham nodded and pulled a sleek, grey-bodied handblaster from the interior of his coat. Sanda was one breath away from taking it from him—she was the one with fleet training, after all—when he tapped the side to show her the biometric lock. Figured.
She swiped her ident over the lock and went in first. Graham could shoot over her head, but she couldn’t swing through him. The lights came up. Three SecureSite, still in uniform, were going through their things.
“Excuse me,” Sanda said, “but I don’t recall extending you an invitation.”
All three swung around to look at her. One pulled a handblaster. They had the startled look of kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar, but that lasted only a second. A woman with a shaved head stepped forward, taking control easily in hand. She smiled like a shark. Sanda had an urge to punch her teeth out.
“SecureSite,” she said smoothly, holding out her ident long enough for Sanda to get an impression of the badge, but not long enough for her to read the name. “We’re here to detain you, Major Greeve, until the fleet arrives to collect you. Where is your father?”
“No you’re not,” Sanda said, and tilted her head toward the door. “If you were here on official business, you wouldn’t have blacked out the cameras. What do you want? I’m tired and you’re between me and my bed.”
The woman’s too-smooth smile faltered, cracked at the edges. “Detective Laguna—”
“Isn’t here and didn’t authorize this. Try again.”
“I told you she wouldn’t go down easy,” another woman with a shock of pink hair said, cracking her knuckles. “The major comes with a reputation, that’s why the bounty’s so high.”
“Bounty? That’s what this is about? Prime won’t pay out for my capture once that video is debunked. You’ll just get in trouble for roughing up a major. Walk now, and I won’t tell on you to Okonkwo.”
“You don’t know Okonkwo,” the bald one said. True enough, but Sanda’s brain was too fried to remember who the general of the Atrux fleet was, so she’d gone for the next biggest fish.
She rolled a shoulder. “My brother does. This is not a situation you want to fuck up, friend.”
A man wearing a too-crisp uniform—new blood—found his voice. “If the video’s fake…”
“It’s not,” the bald one snapped. “Enough of this. Gag her until the fleet
delegate gets here. We’ll round up the dad later.”
“Gladly.” Pink Hair took a step toward Sanda. She stopped dead as Graham stepped up behind Sanda, handblaster leveled at the bald one’s head.
“I’m disappointed,” he said. “I thought you were more than common toughs.”
New Suit fumbled for his weapon, Graham arched a brow, and the bald one cut a hand at him. He froze.
“We’re SecureSite. We have the authority to detain you, Mr. Greeve.”
“You’re not detaining shit,” Sanda said. “You’re trying to sit on us until the fleet shows up to whisk us away, and surprise, they’ll never pay you for your trouble. You’re less than civilians to the soldiers of the fleet. You’re overstuffed civvies pretending at power.”
“Fuck you,” Pink Hair said, taking a step that put her, finally, within Sanda’s striking distance. She restrained, for now.
“Hold,” the bald one said. “Everyone fucking hold on to your asses. The fleet will make good on the bounty.”
Sanda snorted. “They won’t. I’m fleet, remember? I used to scoop up scum people like you held down until we could show up. They won’t even ask your names, let alone your ident numbers to send the credits to. We’re leaving. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave before the fleet gets here, too.”
“Like hell—” Pink Hair made a grab for the front of Sanda’s jumpsuit.
The last fight Sanda had been in was for her life against Lavaux in Bero’s cargo bay. She’d thought she was all right. Thought all her previous hand-to-hand experience, and training for the fleet, would deaden the sense of abject terror she’d felt in those few moments when all she could do was scrabble and kick and scream. She’d been wrong.
For the first time in her life, Sanda froze.
Pink Hair grabbed a fist of FitFlex jumpsuit over Sanda’s collarbone and yanked, jerking her partway out of the chair. She grabbed the arms of the chair, desperate for purchase, felt the wheels lift, and a white-hot rage surged through her, burning away the fear.
Chaos Vector Page 9