“We’re not removing anything,” Sanda said. “Taking that thing out may break it, or the ship, or us, for all we know. It could be a trigger to a very elaborate trap.”
“You don’t believe that,” Demas countered.
“I don’t believe anything about this situation.”
“Commander,” Demas said, “the High Protectorate must be alerted.”
“And so must General Anford, but we’re not doing that with the Thorn in the state it’s in, and I don’t know what you’ve heard, Demas, but messenger pigeons don’t do well in hard vacuum.”
“Commander,” Knuth said tentatively, “if this is a ship, then it must have its own method of communication. If I could get a look at, uh, whatever the command deck is, then maybe we could send a message.”
If their faceplates hadn’t been set to mirror, she and Demas would be staring each other down.
“Excellent idea, Knuth. Let’s try to find the command deck.”
“I’ll keep scanning—” Arden started, but Sanda cut them off.
“No. We stay together. All of us. Pathways have a way of opening and closing on their own on this ship. I can’t take the risk that we’d be cut off.”
Arden made a small grunting noise of complaint. “Understood.”
Sanda gathered her wayward charges in a diamond formation and led the point, putting Nox at the rear, and started the careful walk back in the direction she thought the command deck might be.
She opened a private comm link to Nox. “Keep an eye on our guest, will you?”
“Way ahead of you, Commander.”
CHAPTER 60
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
TO SEND A MESSAGE
Being told he wasn’t human hadn’t exactly been covered in Tomas’s training as Nazca, but disinformation had been, and he knew when he was being played against his organization. It wasn’t the first time a target had tried to turn him against his handlers, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“Fine. I’ll bite. What am I, if not human?” He held his arms out to either side to display his bare chest. “Alien? Cryptoid? Maybe I’m a ghost. I was reasonably certain I had died there for a moment.”
“You are an inferior instance of me.”
He… had not expected that. Tomas brought his arms back in slowly and crossed them. “Hate to break it to you, Rainier, but the body morphology is all wrong, and I’d never marry Keeper Lavaux.”
She sniffed. “Morphology is irrelevant. But you are dancing, dancing, to the Nazca strings pulling you, hoping to twist me around and squeeze out a droplet of truth for you to take back to your makers, but there’s no need. I have no reason to be dishonest with you, subset. I put the Tomas face back on. I liked it better.”
She flicked her wrist, flashing her bare palm at him. The skin shimmered, shading from pale apricot to stark silver until he was staring at his own reflection cradled in the mercury-smooth surface of her palm. Tomas’s face, as Sanda had known him, stared back. All the details that had added up to make him Leo Novak erased. He should have been elated, it was what he had wanted. Instead, he shuddered.
“How did you do that?”
“The face? You’ve been in a reconstruction bath before, silly. At least Caid wasn’t foolish enough to keep those from you. Too valuable, I suppose. Though I wonder what she does when they break down. It’s not like she has the knowledge to fix them. She stole them.”
“She bought the MetBaths, just like anyone else. And I meant the hand.”
Rainier pulled her palm back and tipped it up, gazing into her own reflection. “A simple thing, when the connections are in place. You couldn’t do it, of course. Your subset type was grown of biologics.”
Tomas pinched the thick flesh of his thumb. “Yep. Definitely all meat.”
“No. A reasonable approximation of the appearance and function of meat, railroaded into performing all the same functions as a human’s body. You were grown, Tomas. Or printed, if we’re being specific. A man’s body cobbled together out of biological cells, then devoured and transformed by the ascension-agent into something more. Caid based you off of the method used to create my body.
“Unfortunately, the armature determines the properties of the agent’s transformation. Your body keeps acting like a body because it thinks it should. The neural connections to shift your transformed cells into a mirror, for example, don’t exist. I, however, was created purely of synthetics and am capable of many tricks you lack. But don’t feel too inadequate. Those who were birthed and grew to adulthood before encountering the agent have even less control over their cells than you do.”
“I’ll try to keep my privilege in mind. However, I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
She sighed dramatically. “Of course you don’t, but try to pay attention. You were grown, a fully formed man in a vat, like Athena springing from her father’s forehead. Then Caid took the ascension-agent from me and dumped it on you, and it transformed all your useless biological cells into mechanical ones, more or less. You don’t really have the terminology to understand it. Oh! Think of yourself as a butterfly, transforming from worthless goo into something beautiful.”
Rainier smiled wistfully. “Lavaux would have been furious if he realized what you were. He was always a jealous boy.”
That chilled him. “Lavaux was like you? There are multiple instances of him?”
“I said, pay attention.” She snapped in front of his face. “He had been a mortal man, before he found me and brought me out of my long sleep.” She clasped her hands together. “With my gift we built the ascension-agent, transforming countless mice into scions of eternity until, at last, he dosed himself so that he too might live out the ages.”
“Bet those ages were shorter than he expected,” Tomas said dryly.
She whipped around and smiled at him. “Yes. He is dead now. Isn’t that funny? Your friend made things easier for me, really. I think Lavaux was growing suspicious of me, and he alone knew what could be my undoing.” She leaned over and pressed his cheeks between her hands. “Thank you. You and Sanda set me free in ways you’ll never understand. It’s why I saved you.”
He tried to ignore her smooshing his cheeks around. It took every scrap of his skill to keep from succumbing to panic. She was mad, absolutely insane. That was the only explanation that made sense. “Rainier, even if I told you I was on your side, that I believed you and I’ll fight for you because we’re the same, you wouldn’t believe me. So what now? You couldn’t have saved me to kill me again.”
“I told you, I want you to deliver a message for me. One she’ll believe because it came from you.”
“To who?”
“Your handler, Sitta Caid.” Rainier braced herself on either side of the bath’s walls and hovered over him, her face scant centimeters from his. All of the amused sense of play washed out of her body language, leaving an expression of steel behind. “Tell that bitch I’m coming for her next.”
A cold fist of dread clenched his stomach. Maybe those were the words of a rambling madwoman, he’d encountered plenty of over-the-top bad guys in his years of service, but something about her struck him as too calculating to give in to raw passions. This woman, this being, did everything for a reason. And threatening Caid wasn’t a good-enough reason to let him go.
“You’re letting me go to threaten my boss? Sorry, Rainier, but I thought you were smarter than this. You know who I am, what I do. The second I’m off this ship, I’ll do everything I can to keep you from using the amplifiers to ransom the gates. You say you’re coming for Caid. Well, I’m coming for you.”
“Brave words from a man with his head in the tiger’s maw.” She stepped back and brushed her palms together, shaking off the threatening demeanor as if it were a scrap of lint. “Deliver my message, doubting Tomas, and you’ll see. As for your threats, well, I’m flattered for the attention, but really, if there was anything at all you could do to hamper me, you’d have bled out on Monte. Goo
dbye, subset.”
The bottom of the reconstruction bath shuddered, making him slip down, his head dunking beneath the thick fluid as the walls reached up, sealing him in from above. Tomas swore and braced himself against the side walls, pressing up on the ceiling of the bath with his feet, every muscle in his body straining, straining, futilely against a mechanism designed to withstand vacuum. Metal creaked.
Sedatives seeped into his system. Dragged his eyelids down. Slowed his breathing. Made his arms weak and so, so heavy until he couldn’t push anymore.
CHAPTER 61
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
AT LEAST WE’RE ALL TOGETHER
The ship proved as obliging in helping them find their way to the command deck as it had been in showing them to the sphere. Unfortunately, that’s where the vessel’s hospitality ended.
Sanda had seen a lot of weird ships in her day. While Prime’s fleet was standard-issue and mass-produced for economy and ease’s sake, she’d flown her fair share of civilian vessels and even a handful of experimental Prime ships. She thought she knew her way around any command console.
She didn’t.
“Are we sure this is the deck?” Conway tactfully asked no one in particular.
“Unless you saw another one…?” Sanda said.
“No, sir.”
It had the general shape of a command deck on any human ship—a half circle, with the curve at the end where the nose of the ship should be—but that’s where the similarities ended. The closest thing Sanda could approximate to a console were thick trunks of filaments, risen to about hip height, their flat surfaces perfectly smooth and subtly glowing. From the ceiling—and it was a true ceiling, she reminded herself, as they walked here under gravity—thin tendrils of metal curled down to above head height, as if one were intended to reach up and manipulate them. They reminded Sanda of circuit breaker panels on the ceilings of old aircraft cockpits.
But these assumptions were all human. If one of the native pilots of this ship could see them now, they’d probably laugh at how helpless the little gathering of Homo stellaris sapiens looked. If they could, or did, laugh. After being on this ship a grand total of an hour, Sanda was certain the creating species had a sense of humor, but not necessarily a kind one.
“Things might become clearer if we could get some power routed to this end,” Knuth said. “There’s not an obvious ignition, but this thing seems to be in some sort of stasis. If I could get a look at the engines, then I might be able to spool them up.”
“How?” Nox asked, reaching one gloved hand up to fondle the so-far unresponsive ceiling neurons. “You going to tickle them? This thing has a mind of its own. When it wants to wake up, it’ll wake up.”
“That’s a huge assumption,” Sanda said.
“You said yourself the wiring looked like what you saw on Bero,” Arden said, but their voice had the vague tone of someone who was only half listening. “It’s entirely possible it is sleeping.”
“Then it needs to wake up,” Nox said, and started jumping up and down.
Sanda sighed. “Belay that, Nox. Demas, do you have any idea what we’re dealing with here?”
He shook his head. It was easier for her to talk to him when he was suited and helmeted; it reminded her he was GC. Even his body language seemed more comfortable behind the shield of his visor, though he hadn’t seemed ill at ease before. “I wish I could tell you. At this point, I can’t even be certain it’s a ship. It could very well be a display vehicle.”
“Like a mobile museum?” Liao asked.
He gave her the exaggerated nod of all spacefarers. “Yes. So far we’ve discovered nothing aside from the fibers and the sphere. Presumably whoever built this place, no matter their anatomy, would need a little more than that to fly.”
“Maybe the ship was stripped by scavengers,” Nox said.
“Of everything except the sphere, when that object is so blatantly important? I don’t think so,” Liao said.
“Unless it’s dangerous.” Sanda hmmed to herself, but let the sound come across the open channel. “Knuth, could it be the engine core?”
“It’s possible,” he said, “but I’d have to investigate further.”
“Which is why we need to take the sphere to professionals,” Demas said.
“I am a professional.” Knuth half turned toward him. Sanda was shocked to see the usually calm man’s fists clench. “Nothing on this ship is safe to manipulate, let alone remove, until we’ve at the very least developed a working knowledge of its energy systems.”
“There’s writing on that sphere,” Demas pressed on doggedly. “It’s a message for us, and those fibers are covering up parts of it and we don’t have the equipment to read the numbers, let alone parse what they mean. The sphere must be brought to Ordinal.”
“It’s a message for someone,” Sanda said, “but it doesn’t have to be for us. Just because we can read binary means nothing. Fuck, it might be a giant warning sign telling us not to touch the thing without proper precautions.”
“What do you propose we do?” Demas asked. The annoyance had been stripped from his voice, he was all calm now. Sanda knew better than most that when a soldier went calm, they were at their most dangerous.
“We’ll leave behind a skeleton team to monitor the ship. Knuth, Liao, and Arden, you three are our biggest brains. See what you can figure out without messing with any of the systems. The rest of us will cross the gate and get a message out.”
“To whom?” Demas pressed.
“General Anford, to start. She is my commanding officer.”
“I see,” Demas said.
Then he shot her in the stomach.
CHAPTER 62
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
CUT OFF THE HEAD
There was a very great deal of shouting then, but none of it louder than the twin thoughts screaming through Sanda’s mind. First: Fucking ow. Second: Where did he get the gun? She’d eyeballed everyone stepping off the Thorn, and there weren’t a lot of places to hide a sidearm of any flavor on a Prime jumpsuit.
She dropped to her knees, weirdly grateful for the artificial gravity of the ship as her mind, always working ahead on a problem, supplied her with the helpful fact that bleeding internally in zero-g was a death sentence. Maybe getting shot in the stomach was, too, but she didn’t think so, and anyway, now was really the time to focus on the positives.
Her body moved without conscious thought. One hand went to her belly and squeezed, the other to the holster at her hip. She may have been on her knees, but she was fast, and she winged off two shots before Demas disappeared down a hallway branching off from the deck.
Her crew surrounded her.
“He’s going for the sphere,” she snapped over open comms. “Leave me to bleed and fucking stop him. Conway—” She crammed her blaster into that woman’s startled hand. “You’re our next best shot. Go.”
Doctor Liao did not go, but the rest scattered, and Sanda was too concerned with the searing pain chasing off the cold icicles of shock to reprimand her. The doctor tried to lay her down, but Sanda resisted, instead leaning so that her back pressed up against the wall, or bulkhead, or whatever the fuck it was called on a ship like this.
Liao made a soft, grunting noise of disapproval but said nothing. Sanda had her gaze locked on the door through which Demas, and her team, had fled. Liao had to know Sanda wouldn’t look away until her team returned unharmed.
“Lucky you,” Liao said after a too-long moment of poking and prodding around the wound. “I’m no medical doctor, but this appears to have missed anything vital, and the gravity, atmo, and pressure in this ship means we don’t have to worry about the suit puncture.”
“I’m more worried about the gut puncture.” She winced as Liao pressed down, slowing the flow of blood.
“I don’t believe you’ll die anytime soon.”
“So encouraging.”
“Again, not a medical doctor. Hold still.”
S
anda bared her teeth at Liao as the woman pressed down on the wound with one hand and half turned, digging into the small pack of emergency supplies strapped to her hip that all spacefarers carried when off-ship. Right. Demas had probably emptied his emergency pack and stashed the gun there.
Most of the kit was for patching suit punctures, but there were a few quick fixes for medical issues. Mostly they were stimpacks to keep you alert while dealing with the vacuum.
While Liao was busy slapping a patch over her stomach, Sanda kicked Demas out of the open channel and hissed, “Update.”
“The fucker’s controlling the ship somehow,” Nox said.
“Or it’s reacting to the appearance of someone attempting to escape armed pursuers,” Arden put in.
“Did it not fucking see the escapee shoot our commander?”
“I don’t know how this thing works, Nox.”
“Neither should he!”
“Report.” Sanda put all her years of training as a captain into that voice, and even though it hurt, it sounded firm and loud across the line.
“He’s throwing up walls behind him, Commander,” Conway said, voice smooth and calm. “I winged him, but he’s mobile. I’ve been pinging the Thorn, but I can’t tell if I’m not getting a report because of the damage or because he’s locked us out.”
“Fucking GC,” Nox hissed.
“Keep the ad-lib off open channels,” Sanda snapped. Stars beyond. She liked Nox and Arden well enough, but this was an active mission and even though they weren’t soldiers, Nox had been. He should know the goddamn protocol.
“Switch priority to securing the exit.”
“If the sphere’s a power source—” Knuth started.
“It’s not,” she said, not knowing how she knew but, fuck it, her teeth were chattering and she was real tired of the what-if dance they’d been doing earlier. “He knows what it is and he wouldn’t risk grabbing it if he suspected it would nuke us all. Don’t let him off this fucking ship.”
“Shoot to kill?” Conway asked.
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