by Aimee Ogden
The inner doors dilated with a hiss of cold, misty air. Kalo dropped to his belly at the widening rim. “Give me your hand,” he said, and thrust one arm, his good one, down into the lock. Five space-dark fingers with frost-spangled stars closed around his wrist.
Triz’s heart leaped sideways in her chest. She ran across the works and left skin on the decking where she threw herself down beside Kalo. Casne clung one-handed to Kalo’s arm: She must have jumped from the bottom of the lock ten feet below. Triz stretched with both arms and Casne flung her free hand up to grab a second hold. Her fingers were so cold they burned, but Triz didn’t care. Casne’s boots paddled the misty air, but she cranked her head back to find Triz. Ice rimed her face. Her frozen features were split into a stupid grin.
Triz’s throat spasmed. “I could’ve gotten a ladder if you’d waited one shitting minute.” Her arms strained, Kalo grunted, and then they were moving back as Casne’s boots found purchase on the lip of the airlock. For a moment, they all stared at each other, sprawled flat-out on the deck. Then Casne lunged forward to tackle them both with arms spread wide.
Her skin still burned where it touched Triz, and when it burned, it drove waves of breathless smoky laughter out of her, all the grief she had shoved down and put aside converted to impossible, ever-expanding joy. They were all laughing, less giddy than hysterical, and when the laughter guttered and ran dry, they only clung to each other. As if making up for lost time, and Triz had lost so much time already. As if letting go would make the image unravel like a ‘port drama gone off the rails.
When Triz had the breath to ask the impossible question, she did. “How did you survive?”
“I’m modded, Triz. And I was lucky to have my Fleet boots on in my cell. They magnetize when they detect depressurization. Never out of uniform, right?” Casne’s half-smile faded. The press of fingers and lips had erased some of the rime from her face, but hazy nebulae still mottled her forehead. She rubbed her forearms with her hands and looked at Kalo, who shrugged and avoided Triz’s eyes. “I know you don’t like the idea, but combat adaptations save lives.”
“I’m coded for conditional production of cold resistance proteins too,” Kalo said, to the deck. “And infected with hypoxia-activated Aerobacter. Only reason I’m still flying.”
Triz rubbed her wet eyes. “I’m not—I’m glad you’re alive, Cas!” She could barely believe it, but she was glad. “I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. That once you crossed the line between human and Ceebee, you’d just keep crossing lines.” Casne and Kalo flicked a gaze at one another. “But I guess it’s not really that simple.”
“That’s a good way to start thinking about it,” said Casne, at the same time Kalo said, “Well, seeing as I haven’t tried terraforming an alien intelligence out of existence to build myself a castle, yeah.”
They all three laughed.
Before the lift doors exploded.
Chapter Ten
Triz’s ears rang. She lifted her hands from her head. No sign of Casne and Kalo beside her. No! She’d just gotten Casne back; she couldn’t lose her again. She struggled to her knees, then her feet, and looked around.
She could still hear human voices under the shrill of the ringing, but they seemed so terribly far away. Muffled by the yellow-gray smoke drifting through the works, maybe.
Smoke? In the wrenchworks?
Triz spun. The smoke billowed out from the blistered lift doors. And amid the conflagration, four figures traded blows.
Casne. Kalo. Lanniq. Rocan.
Casne fought with Lanniq for control of a lancet gun. Kalo forced Rocan’s tunnelgun, buried where his wrist and hand should be in his flesh, down just in time for a blast to slice through the nearest Skimmer. The fighter canted sideways, misbalanced by the weight of the slice of missing fuselage that crashed to the floor in the opposite direction. When the fighter struck the deck, it rattled Triz’s teeth, but she barely heard the sound. She was focused on the two people in front of her, the two pieces of her heart battling for their lives. Even to her untrained eye, both Casne and Kalo moved slower than Lanniq and Rocan, muted by exhaustion and injury.
Lanniq swept Casne’s feet out from under her and the lancet gun went skittering across the floor.
Kalo dove for it, and the tunnelgun cut a long narrow swath through the floor between him and the weapon. This one bled darkness—space and dark matter—before the unstable tunnel faltered and closed off, leaving only a ragged, smoking canyon in the deck.
That could easily have been a hull breach if Rocan’s aim had been a little higher. The others might survive a breach if they were lucky. Triz wouldn’t.
Triz grabbed for the sealant canister she’d dropped before. She caught it by the hose and dragged it along behind her. If Rocan breached the hull again—if he aimed faster or better this time—
Rocan spun to meet Triz. He didn’t raise the tunnelgun embedded in his wrist toward her. Maybe it needed to recharge? He came toward her, snarling. Rage glinted in his eyes—the silvered marble of his right implant, and the dull gray of the left, which must have been damaged in the melee. Triz stumbled back, but he was on her, and his elbow met her sternum with startling precision. She doubled over in silent paroxysms. Rocan seized her hair and slammed her face into his knee. Stars exploded red and gold behind her eyes, and she swung the sealant blindly as she fell. It connected with something, not Rocan, and spun out of Triz’s hand. Rocan’s knee hit Triz’s chin this time and split her lip.
The lancet gun cried out a warning.
Something heavy struck Triz hard. She fell with it. Her head rebounded off the deck; her mouth opened around a yelp, but she had no air in her lungs to give it voice. Blood dribbled down the back of her throat. She scrabbled to get the weight off of her chest, her legs, but it was so heavy she was so afraid of what she’d see when the daze of stars lifted. This was it, then. That’s what she got for trying to claw her way out of the gutter.
“Triz!” The pressure lifted off Triz slowly, then all at once, and Kalo’s hands were on her. “Shitting, shitting stars.” He ripped open her jacket, ran fingers over her chest and belly and down her legs. “Are you hit? I shouldn’t have taken the shot. It was too close.”
The deck shuddered beneath them. Kalo dropped Triz and looked around wildly. “He was just here!” he said, and whirled around as Triz’s freshly fixed Scooper rose into the air of the bay and then lurched forward off its blocks.
“Rocan!” Kalo cried, and ran across the wrenchworks.
Triz turned back to the lifeless body beside her. She stared stupidly at Lanniq, whose lifeless eyes were fixed on a point somewhere above. Human eyes, not like Rocan’s. Triz’s hand found his shoulder, and she shook it, hard. He didn’t respond. She took off her jacket and tried to blot the blood welling up on his shirt. Why was she trying to help him? She didn’t know. She felt the floor hum as the airlock dilated, though all she could hear was Kalo’s scream of frustration.
“Triz.” Casne again, her voice a distant tinny shout. She crawled over to Triz and took her hands off Lanniq. Triz drank in the sight of Casne’s face, pinched with pain but still whole. “He’s gone.” Triz dropped the jacket, and Casne tugged it over Lanniq’s staring face. The fabric draped over the mass of lancets embedded in his chest, too. “He took the shot for Rocan.”
Triz dragged her hand across her chin, and her wrist came away streaked in scarlet. “I thought he hated the Ceebees.” Her hearing had started to return, shaken loose by the blunt hammering of her own voice against the insides of her ears. “Why die for one?”
“I don’t know.” Casne’s tone hardened. “But I can guess. He wouldn’t be the first Fleet officer they’ve compromised.” Casne tried to stand, but her right leg wobbled. Triz realized what she’d hit with the sealant canister.
“That missing nephew,” Casne said. “If he led the Cyberbionautic Alliance to Lanniq’s triad? Instantly compromised officer.” Her jaw jutted out as she looked over Lanniq�
��s still body.
Triz wondered what Casne would have done in the same situation.
Kalo loped back alongside them. “I need a ship, and fast,” he said without preamble. “Rocan’s got the Scooper.”
“The Scooper.” Triz rubbed her eyes. “Right. He won’t get far, not very fast. Scoopers aren’t built for speed.”
“We thought the Ceebees were coming here to collect him. But he must need to make it to a rendezvous point . . . which means he’s expecting a pickup waiting somewhere close by.” Kalo’s feet shuffled on the deck as if he would have liked to simply run Rocan’s Scooper down. “Get me in any fighter that’ll hold atmo.”
“Kalo, I don’t have anything spaceworthy to give you. The next closest thing to ready is still just a Tiresh with a misfiring injector, and it’s not like you can fly it while I’ve still got it up on the blocks—” She bit her tongue to cut that idea short. Best not to put a thought in Kalo’s head before she could work out all the implications. Implications like: Triz, in the fragile canopy of a Light Attack ship, out in the big black.
But Casne beat her there. “The Tiresh-15 is a four-man gunship. Could you pull open the ventral engine from inside and, and . . .”
Triz picked up where technical know-how failed Casne. “I could manually throttle injections, I think. Yeah.”
“Okay.” Casne put her hand on Kalo’s shoulder. He bent to accommodate her added weight, and his arm wrapped around her waist. “Get me to that Tiresh, and let’s get out of here.”
“What do you mean, let’s?” Kalo objected. Triz stumbled to her feet too, somehow less graceful than Casne despite two functional legs. She felt a stab of guilt over that but pushed it and a reflexive apology aside. Kalo went on, “You’re hurt, Cas. Triz and I have got this covered.”
“Excuse me, Lieutenant?” Casne’s eyebrows shot up. “You don’t get to give me orders. And I’m not the one who’s medically grounded, either.”
“Casne, it’s okay,” Triz cut in. “We don’t need you to fly the ship or handle the engine.” But the words felt like a lie as soon as they left her mouth. The endless void of space loomed over her, and maybe she didn’t need Casne the way she had needed a friend when she stumbled into the bright lights of a new Hab. But, oh yes, she surely did want her there. Casne grinned at her, and Triz felt a foolish smile lift her own cheeks in answer.
“We’re finishing this together.”
They ran to throw cleaning pods and coolant lines clear of the Tiresh. Kalo slid into the pilot’s couch, and Casne buckled herself into the restraints of the forward gunner’s rack. Triz settled for the rear gunner’s position. With the harness snugly fastened, her legs just barely reached the floor. A swift sweep of her cutting tool opened an impromptu ventral access panel in the grating between her feet. “I’m set here,” she called over her shoulder as she pinned a clamp into place to reroute the injection shunt. Another thought occurred to her. “Wait—Kalo, how are you going to fly this thing one-handed?”
“There’s a galaxy of distance between one-handed and one-armed.” Unbearably smug. Triz rolled her head far to the side to peer at him. He’d ripped the sleeve off his (or rather Triz’s) shirt and was tying his drooping hand to one side of the steering yoke. “I can do everything I need to.”
“Except finish that knot.” Casne took pity on him and helped pull it taut. “Didn’t the surgeons put those mods in after the thing with the nerve agents at Urnok? Only you could find a way to short out topline exonerves.”
“Chance encounter with the business end of a metal recycler. Don’t recommend it.” Kalo gave the knot a few tentative tugs, then used his good hand to work through a complicated series of hooks, levers, and switches. The Tiresh’s engines hummed, one beneath Triz’s boots and the other one over her head. “You both ready to do this?”
No, screamed Triz’s stomach. “Stop talking and get us out there,” she said. She was relieved to hear her voice didn’t shake as much as her hands did. She tugged on her heat conversion gloves to hide the trembling as well as protect her from any splatter.
Kalo complied. With the lifttrain’s help, the Tiresh cleared its slab, and the airlock dilated at Kalo’s request. The Tiresh eased through, the lifttrain retracted, and Triz stared up through the cockpit plastiglass as the wrenchworks disappeared behind the closing lock. A hiss heralded the air pumps kicking in, but the sound slowly faded as the pumps did their job.
Triz couldn’t see the outer lock open, but when the ship maneuvered away from the Hab, the lip of the opening couldn’t have been more than inches away from the plastiglass shell over her head. “Shitting stars!” she yelped, but the deepening hum of the engine covered her voice. She cursed and fumbled with her gloves to direct the cannula for manual injection. As she watched, the fat, fluted cylinder of Vivik Hab shrank away. Just behind the Hab, the local star flared like a jewel, eclipsed by the crown of the Arcade. At the Hab’s midsection, the pair of whaleships on their umbilici dwindled to marbles, then to nothing at all. Triz swallowed. The Hab was still there, she made herself remember, and it still would be when the Tiresh turned homeward.
“Keep us together back there,” Kalo said. She could barely hear him over the engines; had he said us or it? “I’ve got visual on that Skimmer. No sign of other ships yet, but we’ll see what turns up.”
Triz’s eyes flicked upward. Or what she thought of as upward, at least, not that such a thing mattered out here. That thought made the stars spin sickeningly. She stuck her sore tongue between her teeth and bit gently to distract herself as she hand-pumped the siphon. The engine’s noise receded to a dull groaning.
“That’s doing it,” Casne called out. “That’s great, Triz.”
Triz’s brain couldn’t process a response, so she just nodded, unseen, in the rear couch. Too much work to keep an eye on her jury-rigged bypass—and to remember to breathe with that bottomless black painting the paper-thin plastiglass. She inhaled deeply through her nose until heated air scorched her nostrils. She opened the shunt for another injection just as Kalo shouted, “Coming up on him fast!”
Triz risked a peek over her shoulder and his at the view out in front of the Tiresh. She could see the Scooper now too, dull-battered steel light against the dark background. Even as she watched, it grew in size; the Tiresh was gulping down the space between them. The Scooper’s engines barely glowed. Of course, Triz hadn’t refueled it yet. No acceleration for Rocan.
But as she stared, a glimmer sparked at the front of the Skimmer, near the cockpit. Something bigger than the far-off stars just beyond, though she couldn’t have said what exactly. “What was that?” she said.
Kalo didn’t jump at her voice in his ear. “That light? Don’t know. Looked almost like he was firing something, but Scoopers aren’t equipped with—what is that?”
All three of them leaned toward the front plastiglass. Far in front of the Skimmer, no bigger than Triz’s thumbnail, a patch of space suddenly shone golden-white. “Son of a Golrosk,” said Casne softly. “He’s got a tunneler.”
Triz frowned. “A tunnelgun?”
“No,” said Kalo, just as Casne said, “Sort of.” Casne went on: “The tech is related, but the tunneler is more complicated. It’s a big, temporary stable tunnel to somewhere else. A more predictable somewhere-else than what comes out of a tunnelgun.” She cursed. “He was blind in his left eye during that fight. I thought his tech was just on the fritz. If the Ceebees have miniaturized tunneltech that small . . .”
“So he’s going to get away?” The Tiresh couldn’t intercept in time, even with the Scooper’s lazy drift. Triz let herself fall back against her seat. Through the dorsal plastiglass, Vivik hung, familiar but far. Still in sight. At least they could still go back safely . . .
“Not a chance.” Kalo reached across his body for a set of controls down on his left side. “Triz, back in position. I’m going to need you to time a double injection. And for all gods’ sake, make sure your harness is tight.”
She gave the restraints a testing tug even as a scowl crimped her face. “A double shot will just slow us down. I don’t see how that’s going to help.”
“Just buckle up, Triz, before I turn you into a smear on the rear ‘glass.”
Triz buckled. She also opened her mouth to tell him where to shoot his attitude, just as the Tiresh shuddered hard. Her teeth clacked together, and the shunt jumped out of her hand. She snatched it out of its dead float just before the Tiresh coughed angrily and screamed forward into space. Triz opened the shunt just in time and let the engines guzzle deeply. “You shorted the butterfly valve,” she shouted. “Are you crazy? They aren’t built for that!”
“Don’t. Tell me. How to do. My job.”
Triz craned her neck. The Tiresh was closing the distance to the Scooper at an alarming rate now. Kalo was angling to put the gunship between the tunnel and Rocan. Triz hissed and clutched at her restraints as if they would protect her from a mid-space collision.
“Prepare to fire,” said Kalo.
“No, Lieutenant.” Casne’s voice was steel-hard. Strange to hear her sound like a Fleet captain and not an old friend. “Rocan’s getting a trial so he can testify in front of all of the Confederated Worlds what he did. To Hedgehome, to the Golrosk. To me.”
Silence from Kalo. They were almost to the Scooper now. Triz wanted to say something and didn’t dare interrupt now. “Okay,” Kalo said finally. “Proposals?”
“There’s a hole in his plastiglass where the tunneler went through.” Grim satisfaction from Casne. “The Tiresh has a boarding hook. Vent the cockpit.”