Local Star

by Aimee Ogden

  “Gods . . .” Both of his hands dug through his hair. “I don’t know. A subordinate officer with a grudge. Or a senior officer. Someone living on that Arcology who would rather blow it up than let the Fleet take it back.”

  Skepticism knit Triz’s forehead. “A planetsider who just happened to be stockpiling, uh . . . Starblaster missiles?”

  “A few arcologies and Habs out there are built from the wreckage of Fleet vessels!” Kalo argued, but he wilted under the heat of Triz’s disdain. “But, no. Not Golros. I’m just saying, the Fleet’s whole Fourth Wing defected three years back, and no one knows where they all settled. It’s not outside the realm of possibility.”

  “Sure. But my Ceebee thing is completely wild.” Triz poured again but missed her glass. Clear liquid spread across the table and turned it bluish-black. “You don’t—you don’t have any more idea than me. But you have to act like you do. Don’t you?” She shot to her feet, black holes sucking at the edges of her vision.

  “Triz, sit down.” Kalo pulled at her hand, but she snatched her fingers away. “Shitting stars. I asked if you were okay, I didn’t want an object lesson in just how not-okay you are.”

  The neck of the pitcher offered a reassuring weight to her hand. It would probably make a good weapon, too, if he kept trying to get her to sit back down. “Suck methane, Kalo. I’ll handle this on my own.”

  The noise of the birdflute swallowed Kalo’s objections, and the lift doors accepted her without accusation. She lifted the pitcher to her mouth as they started to whisper shut. A hand between the lift doors had triggered the safety stop. When they opened again, Kalo leaned inside. “Hey,” he said. “Just let me see you safely home. For old times’ sake?”

  I don’t need any help. I don’t want any help. Especially not from you. The words had been in her mouth a moment ago, but it seemed the last of the ‘shine had washed them away. “Kalo,” she said, and lurched forward. She caught the front of Kalo’s uniform before darkness caught her.

  Chapter Six

  Triz was—

  Awake. Unfortunately.

  The bed was cold. Triz groped in the tangled covers for a smooth back, the familiar curve of a shoulder, until the last warm wisps of dream evaporated and she found herself alone. Casne was in Justice, alone, and Triz was—here.

  She pushed off her cot with a sticky groan; her tongue clung aggressively to the roof of her mouth while her head pounded an arrhythmic staccato. When she swung her leg out of bed, her bare foot found a puddle. She bent and fumbled around, and came up with an empty pitcher reeking of ‘shine. Oh . . . oh.

  Further examination informed her she was still fully dressed except for her boots and socks. Those waited for her at the end of her bed, just out of reach of the spilled ‘shine, fortunately. Triz left them in their place for the time being and emerged from her sleeping chamber for a dearly needed visit to the toilet.

  She stopped and her stomach turned.

  Kalo was folded up on the tiny sofa in her living area.

  He hadn’t undressed either, except to take off his uniform jacket and roll it up under his head. In fact, his boots were still on and left dirty marks on the cushion where they rested. Triz put one hand on her clanging head, turned her back on him, and went to pay her dues.

  When Triz left the bathroom, Kalo sat up. He spread his jacket out over his lap, trying to knead out some of the deep wrinkles in the fabric. He smiled ruefully at her. “I’d ask if you slept well, but . . .” He shrugged. “Sorry about last night—”

  “Shut up.” Her lips tightened. “Did we . . . ?”

  “Did we? Did we wha—oh.” He gave his jacket one last shake-out, but his expression had closed off from whatever openness had tried to put itself on offer a moment before.

  Seven gods, had she hurt his feelings?

  “No, I did not take advantage of you in your less-than-optimal state. And good morning to you, too.” He turned the inside of his wrist to check his fob. “Good almost-morning. Good I-survived-flight-academy-and-I-still-don’t-think-people-should-be-up-this-early-o’clock.”

  Bile crawled up the back of her throat. She swallowed it but didn’t manage to swallow the words that went along with it. She was supposed to be thinking about Casne, Casne who needed her, Casne who was depending on her to put all this right. Casne was who she cared about. But the uncanny familiarity of having Kalo here, in her quarters, had thrown her off-kilter. When she opened her mouth to tell him to go, the wrong words spilled out instead. “What happened at Hedgehome?”

  One of his shoulders came up slightly like she’d hit him. Maybe she had finally ended up hitting him with the pitcher last night. “What do you mean, what happened at Hedgehome? I’ve already told you I don’t know how that Arcology got destroyed.” He knotted his jacket up in his hands again, undoing any progress he’d made in smoothing it out. “I wish I knew, and if I did, I’d blast it from the nearest wallport to every interhab band I could get access to.”

  “Not Casne. I mean . . .” She leaned back against the bathroom door for support, but it wasn’t enough. Her legs bent and she slid to the floor opposite him. “What happened to you at Hedgehome?”

  He sucked on his front teeth and looked down at his fob. “I can read you the commendation if you want. Let’s see: For meritorious service against overwhelming odds, Kalo Ro-1 Ingte is awarded Allibek’s Wings. I took out nine of theirs, if you were wondering what overwhelming odds entail. Stopped an end-run against the flagship’s shieldfault and everything. Barely made it out of medbay after they stitched me back—”

  “Show me.”

  Kalo opened his mouth but caught his tongue between his teeth instead of arguing. He leaned forward and pulled up the hem of his shirt. The wound over his left hip hadn’t yet healed, and he winced when Triz crawled across the floor to brush one finger over it. She retreated immediately, but not all the way back to the wall, and he let his shirt drop back into place. How long had she made him stand around and wait in the wrenchworks, with a fresh hole in him? She was so stupid. “You should have died,” she said, then winced. That wasn’t what she’d meant.

  But he took no offense. “Got pretty sloppy in there.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “Until the air pipes slurped up all the juice.” Juice. She hated how that sounded. Blood. She hated even more how he was looking at her now. “Triz . . .”

  “This is stupid,” Triz said, and hiccupped. She hadn’t realized she was crying, but, well. No putting spilled coolant back in its tube. “I don’t want you to die. I wasn’t supposed to have to care anymore. You left me.”

  “You’d already left,” he said, not unkindly. She looked away. He edged toward her until he could just reach her knee, and patted it sheepishly. She went to knock his hand away, but when her fingers landed on top of his, they stayed there.

  “Well, the good news is, uh, I also don’t want me to die. Skimmers don’t just blow when they’re hit like the old Alchemists and Darts used to do, so unless I take a direct hit, the galaxy is more or less stuck with me.” The jocularity bled from his voice. He held her knee and said, “I’m not going to ground myself, Triz. I can’t do it. Flying is—well, you can’t know what it’s like if you didn’t grow up at the bottom of an Arcology. Nothing but steel for a sky, until you’re out there ,and you can go anywhere you want, as fast as you can fly.” A rueful grin chipped its way free of the sudden seriousness. “Anywhere you want that you can bend orders to mean, at least. If that’s a dealbreaker, it’s a dealbreaker, but this is what I do. And I was never going to stop doing it.” The grin dried up. “Not even for you.”

  “Who’s asking you to give it up?” She dragged her sleeve across her face and rolled her eyes. “Nothing but steel for a sky,” she repeated. “Because of course, growing up inside a recycling engine is nothing but beams of sunshine and, and—rainmows. I mean, rainbows?” She stumbled over the strange word, and Kalo’s hand receded.

  They were so different. Suns and moons, all over again. But may
be that didn’t matter.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to launch us into the Divine Trials of the Shitty Childhoods.” His elbows rested on his knees, and he leaned forward to rest his head in his hands. “I don’t know what I meant to do. I don’t know how to pull out of this tailspin. If we could just—”

  She didn’t give him a chance to spill his latest half-brained idea. She stopped his mouth with hers. Her hands locked onto the collar of his shirt to hold on to the moment just a little longer, before he pulled away and turned this from maybe into absolutely not.

  His hands locked onto her elbows. But instead of pushing her away, he lifted her higher, pulled her against him. Against her lips, he hissed in pain at the sudden movement. He didn’t break the contact, though, only held on tighter, his fingers winding into her hair where sleep had loosened it from her braid. “Triz,” he said, into the hungry space of her mouth, and she choked on a sob.

  Then he did pull away, keeping her close with his hands on her face. She didn’t let go of his collar either, wasn’t sure her fingers would have uncurled even if she tried. Too many impossible things welled up inside her, and no time to say them all, and no words to say the things she really wanted to, so she blurted the most impossible of all. “I can have your fighter fixed before the tribunes get here. Today even, if I hit it with everything I’ve got.” The minor issue of her unemployment could be resolved when it became a problem. She would break Quelian’s fob and lock him in storage if she had to. “You could blow a hole in the top of the Hab and pull her out of Justice. Fly her off to wherever she’ll be safe.”

  “That is—what?” Now he did let go of her, and she sat down hard on the floor between his feet. “Triz, I can’t do that.”

  “Right. Of course not.” Her lips pulled back in a feral snarl, an echo of the expression she’d worn the first time a Tolvian mendicant had cracked open the recycling pits and called down to ask who was in there. A broken shard of light, so very far away, and now, just like then, she was afraid to see what it might show. “I wish I could fly. I’d do it myself. The same way everything gets done around here.” She didn’t wish she could fly. All that cold black on every side . . . the thought churned her stomach. She hadn’t thrown up in the bathroom, but she wasn’t ruling out throwing up on Kalo’s shirt right now. That offered some small comfort. He reached for her wrist, but she shook him off. “But no, of course not. You can’t risk your precious commission.”

  “I can’t risk blowing a hole in Justice!” he shouted and it sent a lock of hair into his eyes.

  Triz had never heard Kalo raise his voice before. It took the photons right out of her sails, and her shoulders slumped.

  When he spoke again, he kept his voice lower, but it came out raw and red as the knotted hurt inside her. “There are other prisoners in there—”

  Yeah, Rocan and his Ceebee buddies, missing important appendages.

  “Not to mention wardens and clerks. There is no such thing as a safe hull breach. You know better than that.”

  Triz didn’t answer, but she didn’t stop him from taking her by the hand this time. They sat like that, tethered together by their limp arms, for several long shuddering breaths. Kalo was the first to break the silence. “If you had something else in the wrenchworks. A Scooper, maybe. Something that’ll hold a passenger.”

  Scoopers usually held crews of two or three and had cargo space to boot. Quelian had several come into the wrenchworks before the Fleet arrived and knocked everything else several slots down their work queues. At least one of them should still be there, probably wanting just a few more hours of attention to get up and flying again. And Quelian wouldn’t be down there at this hour. And she would bet a week’s pay that he hadn’t yet reconfigured the security system to exclude her fob. . . “How are you going to get her out of Justice in a Scooper?”

  “How am I going to—will you just listen a second?” Kalo let go of her wrist and ran both hands through his hair. “Look. This is not Plan Alpha, Triz. There’s going to be a trial, Admiral Savelian will see to it she gets a fair hearing. And any fair hearing is going to clear her name. There’s no doubt of that as far as I’m concerned. Okay?”

  Before she could open her mouth to spit daggers at him, he kept talking. “But if things go explosive-decompression-style, somehow . . . let’s just call it a backup plan. A couple days to get things ready, and get them ready safely.” As her anger softened, he pressed on: “A Scooper has passenger room, plenty of it, and a fighter doesn’t. Now, obviously, I can’t scoop a hole out of the top of the Hab. We’ll have to figure out a way to get her out of there. There’s a drill bit on a Scooper, isn’t there? Maybe I could use it to . . . or we could figure out a way to smuggle her to the works . . .”

  Belas’ face swam up in Triz’s vision. “I know someone in Justice who might be willing to help us. It’s a big might.”

  “But better than nothing. We’ll make it work. Right?”

  She didn’t answer. Her fingers found his lips and parted them gently, as if she could pry free the answers she needed. “You’d do that for me?”

  “I’d do it for her,” he said. “Is that . . . ?”

  She stood up, pulling him up by his hand. “It’s good enough,” she said, and she thought maybe it could be. “Meet me at the wrenchworks tonight. I’ll work on Justice today.”

  “I have an appointment back on the Dailos I can’t really miss.” Kalo grimaced and Triz made a point not to look while he touched the healing wound through the fabric of his shirt. “If you think of anything I can do from there?”

  She wanted to be mad at him for that, for failing to be invincible. But if they were making plans of dubious legality, it might be better to make as small a footprint as possible, so that no one thought to ask the questions to which they wouldn’t have the answers. “Tonight, then,” she said. She still had his hand in hers, so she gave it an awkward shake before he broke away and retreated from her rooms.

  Triz, who’d never been one to turn up her nose at food, forced herself to choke down half a crispbread for breakfast. She poured the spicy sauces from the mealcase into the recycling port—she didn’t want to risk anything more than bland bread in her jumping stomach.

  Justice didn’t open its doors to Hab residents for another hour and change. Counting down the minutes left Triz’s patience more brittle than a bad batch of plastisteel. More than once, she stepped up to the door of her pairhome and put her fob to the door to go down to the quad and loop them into this wild plan. Veling would be up for it, and she was a recycling engineer, smart, cool-headed, able to spot the bugs in Triz and Kalo’s kludged-up machinations. Casne’s damu Othine knew how to fly most of the rigs that came through eir quadhusband’s wrenchworks, which would build in some redundancy where Kalo was concerned—not that Triz meant to cut Kalo out of the loop entirely. Or did she? She shelved that question for later. Casne’s daddy Idha was quiet but loved his quaddaughter and quadwife enough that, Triz thought, he’d go with Veling on this.

  The problem was Quelian. Triz couldn’t count on him not to be there, couldn’t count on him not catching wind of this somehow. Othine didn’t like secrets, e’d spoiled the surprise of Triz’s first-ever Remembrance gift before Casne ever gave it to her. Would this be different? Could it?

  Each time she got up to go to the door, Triz sat back down. Her cuticles were a bloodied mess by the time her fob alert chirped to let her know Justice’s doors had opened.

  Queues had already formed by the time Triz emerged from the lift at the top of the Hab. Belas’ was long, but she tucked herself into it anyway, behind a man talking loudly into his fob about the indignity of having to pay an import fee for Erreti dry-pearls when he held dual citizenship in one of the arcologies there.

  When at last the line shuffled Triz to Belas’ counter, he greeted her with a sad smile. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to perform the same trick this time. Security is spacetight these days.” He lowered his voice. “It’ll be on
the newschannels tonight, but the Fleet detected an encrypted tight-beam transmission to the Webward Pearls.”

  “I don’t understand. Someone’s calling in pirates?” The Pearls had harbored raiders for years, small lightsail gunships that hopped between the system’s dozens of miniature moons faster than Fleet fighters could follow. “What does that have to do with Casne?”

  “Not her in particular and not pirates at all. The Pearls are where the remnants of Ceebee forces are supposed to have ended up after Hedgehome.”

  “But all the Ceebees are locked up in . . .” Triz rocked back on her heels. “Someone’s smuggling messages out of Justice.”

  “The Fleet might have some questions for you,” Belas said, and shrugged apologetically. His stylus flicked up and down between his fingers, tapping out an anxious rhythm against the countertop. “Considering you paid a visit to Justice recently, under less-than-official circumstances.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess they would.” Triz would deal with that when it came up. Along with the fallout from whatever more dangerous plans she enacted in the meantime. She cleared her throat. “I actually came up here to talk to you, though, Belas. I wanted to know, uh . . . what they’ll do with Casne if she’s convicted. Where she’ll go.” How they would take her there and who would be holding the keys.

  Belas set the stylus carefully down, ending its staccato song. “I have a long queue, Triz. I can’t really get into the particulars.” He folded his hands. “But if you would like to meet in the Terraria before my shift starts tomorrow morning, I would be happy to explain more to you. The greenery is a very soothing environment for difficult discussions.”

  And a private one. “Yes. That would be nice. I appreciate it.”

  “Of course.” He gave her a white-lipped smile. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a chance to just catch up, too, despite being neighbors! I have some pictures my daughter sent me from her new dig site on Sanishar. It’s pretty far out—part of the Sei Worldhold, in fact, so she had to get special diplomatic permission to land there!”