Right. Fleeties needed orders. Funny how Sanda craved adherence to protocol only when it meant she didn’t have to make hard choices. As sweat poured down her temples and soaked the fitted foam of her helmet, Sanda said, “Approved.”
Sanda couldn’t hear the gunfire, but she could hear the curses of frustration from her team as they ran into Demas. A pang of guilt stabbed through her already aching body. Demas was one man, sure, but her crew had only two guns and he was guardcore. She’d known what GC could do, and then she’d seen it herself on Monte. The thought made her want to vomit. Or maybe that was the pain.
“I need some air,” she said over a private line to Liao.
The doctor checked Sanda’s system readout on her wristpad and shook her head. “Your lifepack is working fine. Are you feeling short of breath?”
“Short of everything.”
“We don’t know yet what this environment—”
“Doctor. My suit has been punctured. If there’s something infectious in here, we’re already acquainted. And if any more sweat builds up in this cursed helmet, then I might drown before I can bleed out.”
“I advise against this.”
“Noted.”
Liao helped her push the visor up. She wanted the whole thing off, but she’d have to tell her crew to switch channels to her wristpad, and they did not need that kind of distraction right now.
Sanda didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but her first breath of alien air was surprisingly boring. She almost laughed as she sucked down a massive lungful of air that hadn’t been run through a recycler hundreds of times. Whatever system was running HVAC on this thing, she had a feeling Knuth would have a field day figuring out how it worked. If they all survived this.
The panicked shouts in her helmet died down, but the swearing hadn’t.
“Commander,” Conway said, “Demas has the sphere and has boarded the Thorn.”
Sanda closed her eyes. Hard. “Do not pursue. I repeat, do not pursue.”
“But—” Nox began.
“You’ll be sitting goddamn ducks if you try to cross open space to get to him. The Thorn is damaged. He’ll have to move slowly.” And probably already had a pickup arranged on the other side of the gate, she thought, but didn’t say as much. “Knuth, find this ship’s engines and get us online. I’m betting it’s a whole hell of a lot faster than a damaged Point ship.”
“Aye,” he said.
“Nox, go with him. The rest of you, get back here. I want Arden and Conway going over this command deck with a fine-tooth comb.”
She slurred that last word, blinked cotton from her eyes, but the white fuzziness wouldn’t leave.
“Commander,” Liao whispered. “About that shot not hitting anything vital…”
“Figures,” Sanda said, and blacked out.
CHAPTER 63
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
ALWAYS A WEAPON
Consciousness came to Sanda in fits and starts. The pain faded to the background, overridden by a dull sense of floating, as if she were back in a NutriBath again, but that was impossible. Those few neurons she had that weren’t given over to keeping her failing body working—lungs and heart and temperature—remembered the impossible ship. For all its false gravity and human-appropriate HVAC, she hadn’t seen a single thing that looked medical.
“I know it’s a risk but—” Arden’s voice broke through the fog.
Sanda gripped someone’s arm like a lifeline, as if holding on could pull her out of the black from which her mind was drifting, and tried to say something—anything. She was their commanding officer and they were stranded on an alien ship and she needed to give them orders. Needed to stop the bickering and get them on track.
“If that thing is what you think it is, it could kill us all,” Liao said.
“Pretty sure we’re dead anyway,” Nox rumbled.
“And if you are right, Commander Greeve might very well kill you herself upon awakening.”
“I’ll take that risk to see that she wakes again.”
That was her name. Her rank. Not major whatever the fuck, but commander. And she should be commanding, not drifting in this endless nothing.
“Ar—” She thought she squeezed out their name, but the voices didn’t seem to notice; they got fuzzier, further away.
This was why Demas shot her. Downing their captain threw them into chaos. Cut off the head, she thought vaguely, and in her dream-state saw the floating face of Rayson Kenwick superimposed over her own, the chip connecting both their brain stems across time, bringing her to this impossible place where she would probably die because her damn crew couldn’t stop arguing.
“Do it.” Her words, through her lips. Thin and rasping and barely even syllables, but clear enough to get the point across to whoever was close enough that she could grip their arm.
She didn’t know what “it” was, but at least it was something. A direction, an order. Maybe it’d get her and the rest killed, but if she couldn’t stop the bleeding, then she at least had to stop the chaos.
There were voices again, but smoother, and though the damnable cotton in her ears kept her from making out the words, she knew through their tone that stability had returned. The captain had captained. Whatever happened next, at least she had done her duty.
The ground was warm and her hearing muffled and all the world drifted away.
Sharp and gasping, hot medicine pumping through her veins. Panic constricted her throat and she was pushing up, sitting up, pressing the heels of her palms down into a smooth metal surface. This was not a bath. Some analytical part of her that was coming back online puzzled over the idea. If she’d been bleeding out, then she’d need a NutriBath.
Pinpricks stung all over her skin. Sanda blinked furiously, willing her vision back, as ungloved hands pushed her, gently, back down.
“Easy,” Liao said.
“Where the fuck is your suit, Doctor?” Sanda barked the words out, her voice so clear and loud it surprised even her.
Nox laughed somewhere in the room. “She’s back.”
“The ship is safe now,” Liao said carefully enough to reveal she did not in fact believe that to be true.
Sanda set her jaw and forced her eyes open. She stared at a ceiling made of a neuron-esque cloud of filaments woven together so that they appeared to be far apart and distinct, but in fact made a perfect seal. In her peripheral vision, tendrils stood out from the walls of a narrow cubicle in which she lay in the middle. Their tips were pointed. A few were smeared with bright blood. Hers.
“What the fuck,” she said.
“Arden figured out a way to get the ship online,” Liao said. “Once activated, they initiated this vessel’s emergency medical systems. Ingenious, really. The medicines appear to be bioengineered nanocells, for lack of better terminology. Biology that acts like machines, working to repair tissue damage, then degrading once their work is done. I haven’t—”
“Doctor. Specifics later. Get me Arden.”
“I’m here, Commander,” Arden said.
Bracing herself against the metal bed, Sanda pushed herself up. Liao made a tutting noise but helped her all the same, pressing her palm into the middle of Sanda’s back to help her stabilize. If she’d come out of a NutriBath, she’d be weak and trembling and need that help. Now, she felt stronger than ever. Even the dull ache in the hip above her missing leg had settled, and the sting in the chafed skin—despite all efforts at sleeving and salving it—had faded away.
Arden stood next to Nox at the other end of the room, half a step behind him, as if the big man could shield them from her anger. The guilty look on their face was enough to make the hairs on the back of Sanda’s neck stand up.
“How did you get this ship online, Mx. Wyke?”
They lifted their chin. “I recalled what you said about the internal wiring resembling the wiring on The Light of Berossus and surmised that this ship was designed to run with a similar piece of software.”
; “Arden,” she said, “what have you done?”
“I established a connection with the ship’s systems from my wristpad and uploaded the nascent intelligence growing in the fringes of the net.”
Her stomach dropped, her palms went cold and clammy against the metal. “What about all your talk of data sets, or precautions? That was an infant mind, and you shoved it into an alien architecture.”
“Not exactly,” the ship said.
She was going to faint. Her heart had stopped and her mind had frozen and her body had gone as cold and lifeless as stone and this was not, not, happening. Could not happen. The hallucinations of a dying woman—but then, those weren’t this detailed, were they? She should know.
The voice was male and deep and as familiar to her as every scrape and scar her body had picked up in the emptiness of space.
“Bero?” she asked quietly.
“Why must I always be installed in a weapon?” The Light of Berossus said.
CHAPTER 64
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
COMING OUT OF THE COLD
Tomas had a Prime jumpsuit on his body and a drink of water on the side table he knew was his, but he couldn’t fill in the blanks regarding how he had gotten to this point. Sitta Caid sat across from him, legs crossed at the ankles as she leaned forward, her small hands fluttering as she gestured her way through a sentence that sounded like static to him.
He blinked.
Caid was down on one knee in front of him, talking into her wristpad in a crackling voice while she kept her fingers pressed against his wrist. Tomas put a hand over those fingers and found he could hear again. At least his own voice, anyway.
“Sitta,” he said.
She glanced from her fingers to his face and frowned. “Can you hear me, Cepko?”
“Yes. What’s happening?”
“You tell me. You were found floating in a MetBath near a civilian station. We got pinged when your Cepko-ident was scanned into their medi system. We’ve been looking for you since Monte.”
“No such thing as a MetBath,” he said, but wasn’t sure why. The words felt true on his lips, anyway.
Her frown brushed away and she switched to neutral—lights out, curtains drawn—and leaned back on her heels. “Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know, Sitta.” He shook his head, chasing away some fuzziness. There was something he was supposed to remember. Something he was supposed to say or do.
“Take it easy,” she said, patting his wrist. “You’ve been through something, and we’ll figure it out. You’re at Ordinal central. Safe.”
“Thanks,” he said, but the memories were coming back now, his pulse settling down as his body went about its repairs. He wasn’t in control of it, as Rainier had said he only had control over the same cells any other human would, but he could feel his cells rushing around, sealing up internal wounds and stabilizing his vital signs.
On the guardcore ship, he hadn’t believed Rainier. How could he? Her claims were insanity, the cruel imaginings of a deranged mind. But he could feel himself healing now in a way he never had before and wondered what other things Rainier might have tweaked beside his face while he’d been in that bath.
If he cut himself, would he see the same shiny titanium-white bone that Sanda had seen on Lavaux? She’d said Lavaux’s skin had knitted itself together so fast she could see it working. Tomas had ascribed that to trauma from being spaced.
He’d been an idiot.
“What do you remember?” Sitta asked, and there was a note of wariness in her voice.
They never told you? Rainier’s laughter came back to him, made his chest ache. Tomas had never been able to lie to Sitta, not effectively, but she’d found it easy to lie to him.
“Everything,” he said, which was the truth, but also a stalling tactic that she’d see through like wet tissue.
“Tell me,” she said.
He did not want to. He should. He should be furious. He should rage and stand tall and maybe even throw his chair against the wall while he demanded to know what the fuck had been done to him, and why did that woman know? What love was there between Rainier—the woman he’d been asked to find—and Sitta Caid? But there wasn’t any love, was there, because Rainier had said she was coming for Caid. Coming to kill her.
“I found Rainier Lavaux,” he said.
Sitta stood up, smoothed the creased front of her slacks, and tapped at her wristpad. “Good,” she said, but there was a hitch in her tone. How had he never noticed that before? That subtle, high crush of her vowels when she was nervous? Maybe Rainier’s tampering had given him the ability. Maybe he saw her for what she was now. Not a friend. Not even a colleague.
A puppet master.
“Okonkwo didn’t want me to find her, did she? It was you. You needed to know what she was doing, now that Keeper Lavaux is dead.”
She froze, breath arrested in her chest. “And did you find out?”
“Yes.” He laughed roughly and bent over, dragging his hands through his hair. “I can file a full report.”
Her hands dropped to her sides. “She told you.”
“Of course she fucking did. She scraped my corpse out of a shuttle on Monte and pieced me back together again. I shouldn’t have survived that. I couldn’t have. Sanda killed me. Did you know that? Do you know what that did to me?”
“What is Rainier doing?”
Tomas snorted and waved a dismissive hand. “She confirmed the amplifier network can turn the gates on and off at will. She wouldn’t tell me why. But that’s not the fucking point here, Sitta. How long? How long have I been like this?”
“Always, Tomas. You’ve always been like this. I’m sorry you had to find out that way, but there has been no time in your existence when you weren’t comprised of synthetic material. We printed biological cells into a fully formed human male, then introduced the ascension-agent to that construct.”
He blinked. Shut his emotions down, cut them off, buried the rising wail of pain. “My mom—”
“Your family is an implanted memory, a full fabrication. You’ve never talked to them, Tomas. Can you stand?”
He nodded, numbly, and pushed to his feet. His body had done its job. He was hale as he had ever been.
“Good, follow me. I have something to show you that may help explain.”
“Rainier claimed I was a subset of her,” he said, as Sitta led the way through deepening layers of security.
“She’s metaphorically correct. I stole the technology from her ages ago, when I was the Nazca assigned to investigate her multiple instances. I got so close to figuring her out, Tomas. I was with her and Lavaux for years before they made me and I had to escape. I hoped you might have better luck, being what you are. Did she tell you nothing else?”
He shook his head. This path was feeling familiar, the winding halls casting long shadows across his memories. He tried to think of why that might be, but pain bloomed behind his eyes that shielded the memory.
“She wanted me to send you a message. To tell you she’s coming for you.”
Sitta sniffed. “Well, no surprise there. I can’t imagine she was too happy to see I was successful in your creation.”
“It doesn’t worry you?”
“Of course not.”
Tomas hesitated before a door. The dilated pathway opened to a cavernous room filled with evac pods and two Met—no, reconstruction baths. “Are you like Lavaux? Did you take the ascension-agent?”
She shook her head. “No. I admit the thought had its charms, but the risks were too great, and now I have no access. Come here, Tomas.”
His head pounded. “There’s nothing for me here. I don’t need another stint in the baths.”
She sighed and leaned her weight against a rolling cart, its electromagnetic wheels switched on and locking it to the floor.
“Tomas, come now. Rainier may have given you a boost but you’re feeling it, aren’t you? The slow degradation? Your cells are failing, break
ing their bonds. You need to be reset.”
All he could feel was the ache in his head, blossoming across his thoughts, distorting his vision until he could have sworn he was in some other time—the same place, but cleaner, shinier. Newer.
“My head hurts.” He braced a hand against the doorframe and let it take his weight. “But I was healing, when I woke up. Rainier did something. She made me stronger.”
A flicker of concern across Sitta’s face broke through his brain fog, and he got the itching feeling that the concern wasn’t for his well-being. “We can’t know what she did. That woman likes to meddle.”
She was so damn calm, so composed. Nothing much ruffled Sitta, but having her agent discover he wasn’t human had to be high on the list of things that should have gotten a rise out of her. A suspicion needled him. “We’ve done this before.”
“Yes. Your system is designed with a fail-safe. You start to degrade once you realize what you are, and that’s happening to you now. If we’d gotten to you sooner…”
He clenched his jaw and shook his head, trying to see through the warm, gentle feeling of her words. Sitta wasn’t a gentle person. He held on to that. This was wrong. Something was wrong. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why keep me from knowing what I am?”
“We’ve tried it both ways and discovered that you perform better when you believe you have a body in need of all the same protections as any other human being. Your personal damage rates were too high with self-awareness. When you discover what you are, we roll your memory back. Realization of what you are triggers the degradation of your cells, so that you cannot hide the knowledge from us.”
There was a kernel of truth in that, but the way she poured out the words had the feeling of rote—and a rote instilled into her by someone else, at that. Tomas knew the way she spoke when she was speaking her mind, knew the cadence of her truth. Although something was definitely strange with his body, he didn’t feel like he was dying. Aside from the supernova in his head.
“What will I remember?” he asked.
“Most of your missions. The people, the specifics, though we will roll you back to a time before Rainier’s interference. Those memories will feel dull to you, uncompelling. You’ll be given a new face, a new understanding of who and what you are, but your core personality never changes. You’re our best, Tomas. You always have been, and it’s because of who you are, not what. Be proud.”
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