Her ident credentials got them through the unmanned checkpoints without question. Sanda led the way, and the others trailed behind at a respectful distance, matching their pace to her stuttering step. She was sweating by the time she reached the gunship, but she didn’t care. The ship took her breath away faster than exertion could.
Gunship-B612 waited for her against the dock in the firm grip of a mag clamp. She paused to take her in. The others waited.
Her design was as far away from Bero as it was possible to get while maintaining an eye toward limited forward surface area. Crafted to dart between ships, to sew chaos from the front line while Wave ships came up behind to crush any remaining opposition, she was sleek and narrow with a slight flare toward the engines, her paneling painted not in the customary Prime grey and cyan of transport ships and stations, but matted out in a black so dark it drew the light and soaked it up.
Those panels secreted the promise of death. Prime had never been stingy about their weapons. Point ships carried munitions enough to harry a station, to slug an advance wave into the void. Station-busting guns were left to the slower Wave-Class, but a Point did damage hard and fast, and it did it well. Sanda’s fingers itched for the trigger.
The spaces for humans carved out in the body of the weapon that was the ship were minimal, and Sanda knew the shape of them already. From front to back: command, common areas, quarters, cargo, weapons, and engines. Not a single space large enough to spin up for grav without turning them into vomit comets. Experiments had been made. They had not been made again.
The exterior airlock cracked open. Out stalked a woman with waves of grey hair corralled into a tightly braided bun, the snug fit of her jumpsuit revealing slabs of muscle on a short frame. She squinted at the open air of the docks as if it were getting ready to play a trick against her, then swiveled her head around and locked Sanda down with that gaze.
“What took you so long?”
Sanda grinned. “That how you greet your superiors?”
“We didn’t get slammed in this fixer-upper for being genteel, sir.” She snapped off a salute as an afterthought. “Name’s Conway, I’ll be babysitting your munitions. Knuth!”
A crash echoed from inside the airlock, metal on metal. Conway propped her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes to the heavens. An arm protruded from the airlock, grabbing the aperture, then the narrow torso of a man slung out sideways, a single mag boot clomping along. The other foot was clad in just a sock, with a hole in the toe.
“Bloody boot malfunctioning,” Knuth muttered under his breath.
Conway gave him a thump upside the head and he straightened, sighting down Sanda and her entourage. His salute was even sloppier than Conway’s.
“Sir,” he said, “Knuth, your engineer.”
“Who can’t even get a mag boot to work…” Conway muttered.
“Everything on this bucket is broken,” he shot back. They glared daggers at each other.
Sanda cleared her throat. “Is it your opinion that this ship is capable of safe maneuvering?”
“Oh, ship’s fine.” Knuth scratched his chin. “It’s everything in her that’s broken.”
Conway eyed Grippy, who waited with machine patience at Sanda’s feet. “Can that thing make coffee?”
“Grippy cannot,” Sanda said.
Conway closed her eyes like all the world was a joke orchestrated against her, and only her. “Di-os,” she whispered.
“I can take a look at your coffee machine,” Graham said.
Conway perked up immediately. “You’re the other Greeve, right? Graham? And those are…?”
“Arden”—Sanda jerked a thumb at them—“communications. And Nox.”
Conway’s eyes narrowed. “Nox don’t look like communications.”
“I’m not.” Nox brushed past Sanda and pushed through the airlock.
Stepping onto the deck of a gunship filled Sanda with warmth, a sense of purpose tingling from her toes to her scalp, raising the small hairs across her arms and neck. This was what she’d trained for. This was real, the realest thing she’d felt in months. Her old ship had been bigger, the deck set to accommodate twenty instead of the twelve chairs suspended from gyroscopes on board this one. But it had that… that smell she missed. The slight tinge of ozone and engine grease.
With Grippy trailing her heels, she approached the captain’s seat, pressed her palm against the panel inset on the armrest. It didn’t read the palm, those biometrics were too easy to fake, but the ident chip embedded in her wrist. The forward viewscreens lit up, showing local visuals underneath a steady stream of diagnostic data. Sanda’s starving gaze ate up the data.
“Welcome, Commander Greeve,” the masculine ship said.
Her fine hairs collapsed, the warm feeling in her belly settling into icy dread. The voice wasn’t Bero’s. This ship wasn’t even big enough to house the systems it took to run his software on. And yet… and yet.
“Ship”—she forced her voice to steady—“switch vocalization pack to gender-neutral, Prime Standard accent.”
“Is this an acceptable vocalization?” the ship asked in smoother tones.
“Perfect.” She cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
“Socialisms slow reaction time and are inadvisable for interactions with my class type.”
Sanda closed her eyes and let a silent bubble of laughter burst beneath her chest, then fade away. “Yeah. I know. I had the training. Some habits are hard to shake, ship. You got a name?”
“My serial number is—”
“Never mind. Crew, bunk up and prepare for departure in ten. Arden, get me those coords—the way we discussed. Knuth, figure out the name of this ship.”
“It doesn’t really matter…” Knuth was watching her with a wide, confused stare. Conway looked like she’d swallowed something sour.
“I’m not calling this bucket ‘ship’ for the next however many days. Get me a name. Get me a location, and get me a solid fucking meal. Clear?”
“Sir,” Conway and Knuth chorused.
Arden said, “A hard connection to the ship’s processing power will make this faster.”
She jabbed a finger at the nav chair. “That seat’s empty. Dock in. Run the checks you arranged.”
“Where are we going?” Conway asked.
Sanda pursed her lips. “Ordinal. Then? Who the hell knows.”
CHAPTER 19
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
QUID PRO NOPE
Anford had been true to her word. She’d locked down the piloting systems of the gunship, allowing it only to maneuver under the direction of a very stubborn AI that was having a hard time understanding that Sanda wanted it to go through the gate into Ordinal, then stay put for a while.
“The space on the Ordinal side of the Atrux–Ordinal gate is reserved for traffic patterns, stopping nearby is not permitted. If you would enter a desired station dock—”
Sanda pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes until she saw stars. “I don’t want you to hang out in the traffic, ship. I want you to drift nearby.”
“Nearby is not a recognizable—”
“Stop.” She clenched her jaw, loosened it with a crack. The viewscreens kept up a steady feed of all the celestial bodies in the neighborhood—Atrux, the orbiting Prime station, the gate to Ordinal, the gate to Ada, and the light-sucking silhouette of the elevator back down to Atrux. Sanda didn’t know where the coordinates in her head led to, but she was reasonably certain it was nothing in this neighborhood, and Ordinal had the widest variety of connections. She pressed her comm link to Arden’s pad. “Arden, do you have a location yet?”
“Uh… Kind of?”
“I require a yes or a no, and if the answer’s no, then you better back that up with an expected timeline. Preferably before I murder this ship.”
“We are on this ship,” Knuth said. She cut him a look and he ducked his head, going back to fiddling with one of the navigation panels on the forward console of th
e command deck. Not that the navigation panels did anything. They might as well have been bricks strapped to the nose of her ship. Her ship. She had to remember that. Remember that this wasn’t a symbiotic relationship, not anymore. She commanded the ship and the ship did what it was told. In theory.
“It’s just that, uh, can I show you?” Arden twisted in their chair and sent a sideways glance to Knuth at the forward nav and Conway in the weapons seat. Graham had stowed himself in the back somewhere, probably getting messages through to Ilan and Biran—messages she should send but couldn’t find it in herself to tackle yet—and Nox stood in the back of the deck, his mag boots keeping him firmly in place. He pretended to be deeply involved in whatever was on his wristpad, but Sanda felt his gaze brush her back and, by extension, the forward viewscreens every so often.
Sanda traced a seam along her armrest with one finger, considering.
The second Arden moved the coords from their private wristpad to the ship’s navigation system, General Anford would know them. It shouldn’t bother her. Anford was her direct commander, a woman Sanda trusted above all others in the fleet.
But every time she thought of those coordinates, she recalled the bite of Lavaux’s razor blade on the back of her head. Felt the cameras of The Light of Berossus crawl across her skin. Recalled the false view through that ship’s cameras, Bero distorting even the very basic input of her senses to keep her isolated. Sweat prickled her skin. Her heartbeat fluttered.
Sanda wanted to trust. Two years ago, she would have handed the coordinates over to Anford without a second thought and wondered only later what had become of them. But Graham had been right: They didn’t know who knew what. Couldn’t possibly know who to trust. And that included General Anford. Whatever was at those coordinates, whatever secret she had almost died for, she had to see it with her own eyes. Unadulterated. Her heartbeat settled.
The whole point of making a deal with Arden was so that Sanda could get the location of the coords with no one in the ’verse being the wiser. Naturally, as soon as they disabled Anford’s surveillance software, she’d be alerted.
Going to those coords without detection meant pirating this ship, and Arden was asking if Conway and Knuth could be trusted. Sanda didn’t know either of them well enough to make that call, and the amount of time it would take to get acquainted was far too long. Only one thing to do: roll the dice and see what fell out.
“Conway,” she said slowly, “Knuth.”
They turned to look at her. “Did Anford brief you on this mission?”
They shared a glance. Conway answered, “Didn’t talk to the general. Got a message we were going for a ride to surveil a location, no engagement. That still the case?”
“After a fashion,” Sanda said, and tipped her chin up to Arden. “Secure the vessel.”
“Understood,” they said.
Arden flicked at their wristpad, sending a program through the digital ether to collide with the systems of the ship. An alarm blared, the ship screeching and painting the deck in emergency lights as its intrusion detection systems went off, then wiped out into silence. The forward viewscreen crawled with ant lines of code executing itself.
Conway moved, but Sanda had a stunner out and pointed her way before she’d even finished telling Arden to send the program. Nox had his stunner out, getting a tight bead on Knuth.
Everyone panted. Seconds. It’d been a matter of only seconds.
“What the fuck,” Knuth said, but Conway was looking at Sanda with the ghost of a smile.
“We’ve been pirated,” Conway said, and chuckled.
Sanda sighed. “I’m tired of being called a pirate.”
“And yet,” Conway said.
“And yet,” Sanda agreed, and didn’t back her thumb off of the stunner trigger. “We are still going somewhere, to have a look at something, and not engage in any gunfire if we are very lucky. But I need to make damn sure there are no sniffers in the software of this ship that can pick up the coordinates we are going to. You are welcome to come along, under my command, or I can put you in pods and launch you to the nearest station, where you can tell stories of how you fought bravely to save your ship, but ultimately failed. Your choice.”
“Question for you.” Conway rested back in her seat. “Is this the right thing that you’re doing? I watched all that shit on the news. I got a hard time believing you’re stealing this ship for the joyride. Or to work against Prime.”
“I don’t know. I believe it’s the right thing, but I don’t know.”
“Lot of shit I don’t know,” Conway mused, “but all we can do is try.”
“I, uh…” Knuth looked to the stunner pointed at his chest, courtesy of Nox, to Conway, to Sanda, and back again. “Aww hell. They won’t let us near the front lines anyway, will they, Cons? You think you can do some good, Major, then I’m with you, too.”
Too easy. Sanda wondered which one of them was Anford’s plant, if not both, but if Arden controlled the comms, then their presence may tell her more than their absence. Dios, she was thinking like Tomas.
A red ripple broke across her wristpad; Anford calling, priority.
“You have ten seconds to change your minds.”
Both shook their heads and settled back into their seats. Sanda and Nox put their weapons down in sequence, and Sanda flicked Anford’s call up to the viewscreen.
The general was not at home this time. She stood in the war room of Ada’s Cannery, the screens displaying the data involved in the war with Icarion blanked out behind her, but Sanda knew them well enough. Sanda had expected anger, but Anford’s expression was mostly blank. Maybe a little tired. She peered down into the camera lens at Sanda, taking stock of the two people she did not recognize on the deck of the ship, and the three she did.
Anford sighed heavily. “Major Greeve, there appears to be something wrong with your gunship’s systems. It is no longer phoning home.”
“Are we really going to do this dance, General? A systems malfunction wouldn’t flash straight to you. You’ve been spying on me.”
“I have been keeping tabs on you, yes. Spying is a strong word. I’m not convinced it’s possible for me to spy on a subordinate which you, Major, are.”
“I would rather not do it this way, but I’m not flying out to those coordinates to discover a fleet flotilla has gotten there ahead of me and blown whatever slim element of surprise we have. I know how the fleet works. Whatever Lavaux was running toward, it won’t last a second if a flotilla shows up on its doorstep.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions, Greeve.”
“My instincts have kept me alive against some fucking spectacular odds lately. I will tell you what I find, after I find it. Greeve out.”
Her hands were shaking as she tapped the disconnect, Anford’s feed wiping away before she parted her lips to get another word out. Silence stretched on the deck.
Arden said, “I think that was treason.”
“Definitely treason,” Conway added.
“Anford knows I’m working on behalf of Prime. Is it done, Arden? Do you have complete control?”
“Yeeeaahhh…” They drew out the word as they tapped frantically at their wristpad, then nodded to themself. “It’s clean. Nothing’s broadcasting into or out of this ship without my permission. Uh, I mean, your permission.”
“Good. Put up the coords. Let’s see what door we’re knocking on.”
It was just a location. Nothing more. No Pandora’s box—there’d be no answer to why the coordinates were buried in her skull from discerning where they were. There probably wouldn’t even be a visual. Tomas hadn’t recognized the local system indicator, for fuck’s sake. Chances of her learning anything of worth from knowing where the path in her head led were slim to none.
Her palms sweat anyway.
“It’s nowhere, really,” Arden said, oblivious to her inner turmoil as they pushed the coords from their wristpad to the forward viewscreen. Graphic black took over the center
panel, indicating that there were no live satellite feeds on the spot. Galactic coordinate lines, bright white with the numbers that’d been pulled out of her head, sparked into life across the black, intersecting in three points over absolutely nothing.
“What is the nearest celestial body?” Sanda asked. There had to be something charted nearby, had to be.
“The system’s mostly empty,” Arden said, scrolling through a stream of data. “The star hasn’t even been named, still has the old serial designation.”
“Maybe Lavaux wanted to stick the thing where no one would look,” Nox said. “Could be nothing there, and that’s why—”
“Oh,” Arden said.
“What?” Sanda tried to keep from shouting. Kenwick wouldn’t flee to Icarion with dud coordinates in his head.
“There’s a Casimir Gate here. Unnamed. It’s a dead system, though, not even a dwarf planet nearby to drop a settlement on. Prime must have been real pissed off about that, huge waste of resources.”
“What’s on the other side of that gate?” Her heart thundered in her throat.
“… Ordinal, it’s an Ordinal jump point. But the gate’s dead, completely offline.”
“I’ll get through,” she said.
“Hold on a tick,” Conway said. “We’re along for the ride here, but what is so important about that spot of empty space? Thought we were going to a station, or something like that. The brief indicated a possible hostile settlement.”
“That is the location Keeper Lavaux was attempting to take The Light of Berossus, without orders, before his death.” The lie came easier this time. It was safer for everyone involved if they didn’t know the coords were hidden in her head.
Knuth whistled low. “That is some heavy shit.”
“I bet there’s something there,” Conway said, rubbing her hands together. “Bigwig like Lavaux coulda hidden something easily enough. No one could pay much attention to what’s going on behind a deadgate.”
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