He existed without flesh. Without bone and sinew and synapse. Dead. This was dead, and the famous white light. His neurons firing their last hurrah. Electrical impulses going wild, sending messages to nowhere.
The white light of death, so far as he knew, was not supposed to feel wet. His drowning reflex kicked in, rocking what was left of his drained-out corpse with clutching panic. Air. He needed air. Needed it needed it needed it.
Tomas-who-had-been-Nazca rode the panic reflex, watching his body from afar as it bucked and shook and panicked. He let his mind dissociate, because there was nothing to be done. If he was drowning, he was drowning in blood.
Sanda’s face, at the moment she’d pulled the trigger. It had been all he could see, as he’d lifted a hand to wave goodbye. His mistake. A moment of weakness. A break in the strict operating procedures of the Nazca. A hat tip to sentimentality that had gotten him, finally, killed.
He’d always thought he’d die on a torturer’s table, caught at last, clinging to his secrets as they pushed too far and threw his body into a cascade of crisis from which it would not recover. It wasn’t what most people hoped for, but he’d have taken it in a heartbeat over bleeding out while Sanda’s face hovered over him.
Worried, hurt. She’d been so goddamned pained that the man she’d shot was dying. Not Tomas. If the universe was kind—hah—she’d never know she’d put the bullet in her lover’s chest. But a traitor, a spy. Someone she had every right to drop, and she’d tried to save him. Still, she cared.
The universe did not deserve Sanda Maram Greeve.
Her name, carrying not just the history of her family but the history of Prime in its variations of Maria Salvez and Alexandra Halston, but hers. Envisioning her face became harder, fuzzier, but her name… He could hold on to that.
Funny. She’d been such a brief moment in his life. Another rescue/capture/recovery mission out of hundreds, a lover among dozens. Brief, intangible relationships he could hardly recall now. It should be his family filling his heart. Mom and Grandma and all the cousins. Their food, at the very least—his warm and comforting core. But it was Sanda he clung to as his body kicked and thrashed its last.
It thrashed less now. This was the point when numbness should take over. He knew enough about death to know all the ways a body found its end. Shock and adrenaline and the simple fact that his central nervous system was shutting down should give him some peace.
His eyes opened. Breath came, slow and stuttering, but full. The white enamel walls of a NutriBath curled up to either side of him. She’d done it. She’d gotten him into a bath before the end.
Enough lies. Enough Leo Novak. He’d convince her. He had to convince her—tell her everything. Tell her that, in his supposed final moments, all he’d wanted was to see her face again. One couldn’t leave the Nazca, not without leaving a trail of blood, but he’d find a way to make them believe allying himself with Sanda again was necessary. They’d give him back his face, and then she had to believe.
“Took you long enough,” an unfamiliar feminine voice said.
Instincts took over, pressing down his elation. Adrenaline surged, not the last panicky moments of a dying man, this time his implants kicking in, pushing his body into a heightened state of the normal human fight-or-flight response. His response to that biological cascade was, and always had been, extreme focus. It’s what made good fighter pilots, medis, and spies.
“Hello?” he rasped.
She clucked her tongue. “Don’t pretend. You’re fine. Ish. Sit up, at the very least. I hate having conversations with the goo.”
He was submerged, and speaking without choking? No matter what the woman said, his arms shook as he grasped either side of the cocoon and pulled himself up, shivering as the NutriBath liquid dribbled down his body and sloshed around his hips.
He scrubbed goo from his eyes with the back of his wrist and blinked, staring at the violet-tinged fluid on his skin.
“You put me in a MetBath? They’re just for cosmetic work.” Hesitantly, he probed at his chest with his fingertips, but there was no evidence of a wound. Not even the salmon-pink of new skin.
“Ah, he speaks in full sentences now. Marvelous. Caid called it a MetBath, did she? Cute, very Prime-like of her, but there’s no such thing. You’re sitting in a reconstruction chamber, and its abilities are limited to our kind.”
He looked up. Rainier Lavaux sat on a crate strapped to a mag pallet, hovering above him, though not in any form he’d seen her as before. This Rainier wasn’t as waifish as the others, she had extra muscle packed around her bones, and while her hair was ashen, it was shorn down to the scalp, leaving a halo glow of white fuzz.
“Who are you?” he squeaked out, buying time.
“I am one of Rainier Lavaux. But you already knew that. I forced your rebirth to pass you a message: Tell your Nazca masters to stay out of my business. Tell Sitta Caid she had her chance.” She crossed her legs, flexing her ankle.
A great many thoughts burst to life in Tomas’s mind, questions demanding answers, but he packed them away for later, drew deep to summon up the Nazca coolheadedness he was supposed to be known for.
Her foot, bouncing and stretching, lacked a mag boot, and he and the goo in the MetBath weren’t hovering. Gravity was definitely pulling his limbs down. The room appeared to be a cargo hangar—pallets and baths and a high ceiling with catwalks. Grips on the ceiling told him he was on a station, or a ship large enough to have spin-grav.
There wasn’t a lot of personality to a cargo space, but the little details gave it away. All the metal in the room was matte black, the pallets arranged with military precision. Tomas had never been inside a guardcore ship, but he had a feeling he was now.
“I don’t know who, or what, you’re talking about.”
She rolled her eyes and sighed dramatically. “Leo Novak, aka Tomas Cepko, aka a list so long if I read it all out we’d be here until Ordinal’s star went nova, do not bullshit me. You cannot bullshit me, though I suppose the effort is cute, isn’t it? I admit I was surprised to find you sniffing around Janus. I didn’t think Caid would be so bold.”
He crossed his legs and straightened his back, settling his palms onto his knees. Fine. She wanted to play with the truth, he could play that game, too. “How many of you are there, Rainier?”
She clapped her hands in front of her chest. “Better! I don’t mind telling you, but I don’t really know. It’s been ages since I’ve connected with all the others at once.”
“How do you communicate?”
She tilted her head and tapped her temple. “Minds are a series of electrical impulses, and those travel quite nicely.”
“The amplifiers,” he said. “You’re trying to increase your ability to communicate with yourself.”
She gave him a shark’s smile. “Clever, but no. I want control over the spin of the Casimir Gates.”
“Why?”
“What did I tell you about your order sniffing around, hmm? That’s a surprise.”
He spread his hands. “Can’t help it. Nazca instincts.”
“Try harder.”
He took a deep, steadying breath, savoring the flash of fear that made his heart rate kick up. Rainier might be the most dangerous person he’d ever come across, but that only made his curiosity sharper. She’d saved his life. He doubted she’d try to kill him again so soon. “I need to know something, Rainier. For my own curiosity.”
She leaned forward, crossing her arms over her knee. “What does the man inside of Cepko-Novak want to know?”
“How are you possible? What are you?”
She blinked, the careful, articulated movement of a lizard, and cocked her head, as if waiting for him to amend that, to ask more. He waited for her to fill the silence he let spread between them.
After a moment that drew out forever, she threw her head back and laughed uproariously, slapping her knee.
“You don’t know. You really don’t know. My gods, my gods, they never
told you. Oh, Caid, that trickster.”
Tomas swallowed. “My superiors know what you are?”
“Know? Oh my. Oh dear. Your confusion is so… sweet. No wonder Caid sent you to Janus. Ignorance is its own shield, isn’t it? But the truth—”
She moved faster than possible. One second she perched atop the crate, a goddess on high, the next she loomed over him, still as stone, a soft breeze against his bare skin the only evidence she had moved at all.
“Did they really not tell you? In all your long years of service?”
“Tell me what?”
“You didn’t think you were human, did you?”
CHAPTER 54
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
INTO THE DARK
The deadgate was almost invisible against the endless night of space. Sanda leaned toward the viewscreen as the ship approached, and though she knew the cameras were making the gate appear closer than it truly was, she felt drawn to it. Hooked.
When spun up, the structure of the Casimir Gates vanished to the human eye, the outline of the gate’s mouth delineated only by the lights attached to its frame, a warped horizon. Seeing one up close was the purview of Keepers, exclusively. While the cameras on board the Thorn could show her the gate in all its details, filters were in place—obfuscations produced by the gate itself—never quite allowing a full picture.
To see the gate in truth, one would have to float right up to it. Even then, she knew all too well how easy it would be for the visor of a helmet to be altered.
“We are within the safety envelope,” the ship said.
She threw a glance toward its system readout, craving the hands-on piloting she loved, but this ship was communicating with the gate, following strict Prime protocols. It was hands-off for her until they reached the other side.
“You’re up, Demas,” she said, gesturing to the forward console.
“The initial spin can be blinding, but the cameras will filter for that.” He pulled himself into the seat alongside Conway and transferred a process from his wristpad to the ship itself, using the Thorn’s superior transmitting ability to deliver the spin commands.
Arden watched their wristpad like a hawk, their long fingers tapping at speeds that felt impossible to Sanda as they monitored Demas’s brief interaction with the ship’s systems. She could have told them to back off, but she wasn’t sure of Demas herself. The GC didn’t appear bothered by the scrutiny.
Which meant he was so sure of himself that he wasn’t worried about a civ nethead like Arden, or he was legitimate. She hated that she couldn’t be certain either way.
Sanda clenched the arms of her chair, resisting an urge to blink as the deadgate began to glow with the soft, halo-like shine of its embedded lighting.
What the crew of the Thorn thought of Demas became irrelevant in that moment. Seeing a Casimir Gate spin up was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most Keepers, and something all others in the universe could only hope to see through filtered CamCasts. Even Liao had abandoned her dogged research into sightings of Rainier and Jules to strap in on deck and watch the spin.
There were dangers. The gate hadn’t been spun in decades, mechanical failures were possible—had happened, wiping out whole settlements—but it wasn’t fear that surged through Sanda as the great rings began, ponderously, to turn.
Elation lifted her up, made her grip the chair even tighter so she could feel the subtle movements of the thrusters, supposedly impossible for humans to detect due to inertial damping but present for her, as she watched the ship’s systems through the corner of her eye. She imagined she could feel the disturbance in the hard vacuum, microscopic bits of space dust swirling, flowing, moving as the gate displaced both time and space.
She didn’t know how it worked, but there were some basics even Prime couldn’t keep secret, and feeling the ship adjust to keep stationary, she sensed the truth of them. The gates punched through the fabric of space, and the ripple of that violence rocked the Thorn as easily as a ship at sea, no matter the vacuum.
“Flash in ten, nine…” Demas trailed off as the Thorn’s automated systems threw a filter over the viewscreen, shifting the view to a slight reddish tint as a violent burst of white light expanded from the gate.
“Punch-through achieved,” the Thorn said.
Those were rote words, dictated by Keepers, and endless speculation had branched off of their use. Were they descriptive of what the gates did—punch through time and space?—or were they a red herring, words loaded to make those trying to reverse-engineer the gates look in the wrong direction?
“Let’s go see what’s so important about a dead system,” she said.
Sanda’s heart was all she could hear as she tapped the coordinates hidden in her head into the Thorn’s navigational system. A small part of her expected disaster, negation by the system, a bug put into Prime ships that would outright deny that such a place existed and could ever be flown to. The heading flashed green, and the Thorn hooked up with the gate’s automatic pass-through systems. They moved.
The tension on deck was so high Sanda wanted to give orders to cut the silence.
“The coordinates are right on the other side, about a day’s flight from the gate. We should have visual immediately,” Arden said.
As they entered the gate’s sphere of influence, the ship began the slow, forced process of powering down all nonessential systems. Prime didn’t like non-Keepers getting a closeup view of the gates, and that included any monitoring equipment that might be smuggled on board a ship and need the power of the ship’s systems. The obvious workaround would be a generator or battery pack, but a gate would detect those and deny transit. If they turned on partway through, the gate would destroy the ship without prejudice. Devices small enough to avoid detection weren’t powerful enough to overcome Prime’s static and jammers.
The software governors of Prime crushed the Thorn’s power systems to a snail’s pace, throttling its engines, its batteries, everything that could squeeze out a drop of power to the absolute minimum needed to support the life on board.
“Makes your skin crawl,” Nox said.
Sanda could barely see him in the dark, but she caught a sharp flash from the whites of Demas’s eyes as he craned his neck around to regard Nox. “I find it exhilarating.”
“Yeah, but you wear all black and don’t even use your name unless you have to, so your creep factor is a little off, buddy.”
Demas chuckled. “I suppose. But this crossing opened the universe to humanity. This moment pushed us from a single-planet species into an intergalactic superpower.”
“Not this moment,” Sanda said. “I doubt Halston and her team went through with all the shrouding in place that we have now. I wonder what it was like—was it as dark as this? Was there nothing to see, or was there light within the gate?”
Demas waved a hand. “Irrelevant. Prime takes power from its secrets.”
“Gotta admit, I’m getting a little tired of secrets,” Sanda said.
“Coming back online,” Conway cut in. “Running systems checks.”
Sanda ran her own checks from the captain’s chair, scanning diagnostics for any red or yellow or slightly lime-green flags that may have popped while the ship was powered down. The lights weren’t even all the way up yet, but they were getting brighter, the subtle rumble of the engine pushing more power vibrating her chair.
Prime may force the power-down, but it allowed a ship’s crew to bring their vessel back online once through. Giving them time to troubleshoot any problems that may arise in the reboot of nonessential systems. Sanda knew the protocol inside and out. She always knew the protocol.
“All clear,” she said. The lights shot back up to full, making everyone blink, and the viewscreens filled with a view of local space underneath a steady stream of diagnostics. “Arden, get me a visual.”
“Yes, sir,” they said, but with only half the usual amount of sarcasm.
Arden flicked what was on their conso
le to the forward viewscreen. The coordinates, white text on black, flashed above a field of empty space for only a breath before an image resolved. A massive sphere of silver, large as Atlas’s burden, hung suspended in the void. The titanium-white gleam of metal glowed with an internal light, a gentle phosphorescence.
“It’s beautiful,” Nox said, then cleared his throat self-consciously.
In the corner of her eye, Demas’s body language changed. Stiffened. Sanda peeled her gaze away from the object in time to see him lean forward, fists clenched, jaw flexed with determination.
The sphere shattered.
Sanda’s breath caught, her whole body canted forward as the sphere broke into sections, expanding outward from an unseen center point, dissolving into pieces that, according to the scale drawn across the viewscreen, were approximately twenty meters long and wide.
“Did we break it?” Conway asked.
“No,” Sanda said through a dry throat. The sphere was unzipping, pulling apart methodically and along a preprogrammed path. The seams were too regular, the movement too coordinated.
The pieces moved away from whatever was in their center, whatever caused that glow, and shivered as they turned in one sharp, synchronized movement, shifting in seconds from sphere to shield. Though they appeared stationary, velocity indicators flashed around the edges, impossibly high. Nothing Prime made could move that fast, and they were burning straight toward them. A day. It should be a whole day’s flight at full thrust to those things, and yet, the time to impact kept plunging downward. The Thorn’s defense systems threw up warnings that the ship was being targeted.
“But it’s going to try to break us.”
CHAPTER 55
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
WE CAME TO THE WRONG NEIGHBORHOOD
The Thorn’s onboard evasion system took over, flipping them end over end. Sanda swore as she saw the ship’s AI had decided the only safe thing to do was to point them back through the gate and burn for safer pastures.
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