by K. B. Wagers
“Call for you, Commander. Commander Yevchenko.”
“Put him through.”
“Rosa.” Stephan’s face appeared on the screen. He looked tired, with bluish-purple circles under his eyes, and his hair was in disarray. “Sorry I didn’t call earlier—we’ve been trying to facilitate things between here and Trappist-1e since the explosion.”
“It’s all right. We’d already heard about it.”
“I know. Heard about your freighter collar, too. Good work there. Just got off the com with Master Chief Ma; he wouldn’t tell me the details beyond the fact that you found something interesting. We’re going to meet them as soon as they dock. Nika will have a full escort and detail to the hospital. If whoever is doing this wants to try again, they’re going to have to come through all of us.”
“I appreciate that.” Rosa rubbed at her chest, blinking back the tears with a smile. “Do you have any leads?”
“Nothing yet, which I don’t have to tell you pisses me the hell off.” Stephan’s jaw muscle tightened for a moment as he stared off-camera. “We’re working on it, though. Admiral Chen has given me permission to do whatever it takes to find out what’s going on.”
“We’re about to go over what we have here and then Zuma’s Ghost will be headed for Earth. I’ll message you as soon as we have something.”
“I’ve got new encryption for you. Only you, me, and the Admiral will have it.”
Rosa raised an eyebrow and Stephan answered it with a tight smile. “You think it’s that bad?”
“I don’t know what to think right now except that someone has managed to kill people on board a naval vessel and attempt to kill two Neos by getting into facilities that should have been secure. What I do know is I’m done. No one else is getting hurt, not on my watch.”
Rosa recognized the venom in Stephan’s voice because it was the same anger rolling around in her own head. “Not on my watch,” she echoed. “I’ll talk to you when we have something or when we’re under way, Stephan.”
“Sounds good. I’ll see you soon.”
Max sat by Nika’s side, the hum of the machines a counterpoint to the book she was attempting to read out loud to his still form. She hadn’t questioned the fact that her father had put her on the list of approved visitors. It was better not to and just take the blessing.
“My favorite line from that is the one about standing in the waves, feeling them try to steal the very ground from beneath your feet. I would not have pegged you for a fan of Alice Schuman, Max Carmichael.”
“I’m a woman of many mysteries.” She smiled, reaching for Nika’s left hand and squeezing it gently. His fingers tangled with hers, held. “I read this a lot growing up. Alice’s poetry is a comfort.”
“This is a new dream,” he murmured, and her heart ached.
Why are you dreaming of me?
“Not a dream.” She watched the confusion flicker through his blue eyes.
“Why are you here? Where is here?”
“It’s all right, you’re on the CHNS Hamilton Bane. Do you remember what happened?”
“No.” He tried to move, and the frustrated growl when he realized he couldn’t was surprising.
Max slid from the stool, setting aside her tablet and touching Nika’s face, drawing his attention back to her. “You were in an explosion. You were hurt and need to lie still. Jenks and Ma and I are here.”
“How bad?”
“I’ll get my fath—your doctor.” She started to pull away, stopped when he tightened his grip.
“I need you to tell me. Please.”
Max dragged in a breath and leaned against the edge of the bed. “Your right arm is badly damaged. They don’t think they can fix it.” She knew everything else was secondary to that, so she left the list of his other injuries unsaid.
His hand flexed around hers. “It’s still attached? What were they waiting for?”
“You to wake up so you could make a decision. I told your doctor that Jenks wouldn’t want to make that call and since you weren’t in any danger from it at the moment they could wait.”
“I can’t feel it,” he said.
“They shot you up with a nerve blocker,” she replied. “But your ulnar nerve was severed at your elbow when your arm was crushed.” It was harder than she thought to get the words out. She watched it filter through his eyes, striking with all the precision of a tactical plasma gun.
“How’s Jenks?” The question surprised her and Max blinked at him when a smile curved Nika’s mouth.
“She’s all right. We managed.”
“There’s a wealth of meaning in those words, but I’m going to go with the hope that she’s not in jail.” He turned his head slightly, pressing his lips against her palm, and Max’s stomach flopped. “You should probably go get the doctor and Jenks. I don’t know if they can take this arm off now, but—”
“Nika.”
“No,” he said, squeezing her fingers once more before letting her go. “It’s coming off, there’s no point in fighting it. Only question is when it happens, and I at least get to make that choice.”
“Okay. I’ll go find the doctor and be back.”
“You’re sure about this?” Jenks had managed to keep the tears at bay, but she couldn’t stop the quaver in her voice and she knew her brother heard it.
“What’s my option, Jenks? A useless arm?” Nika shook his head and smiled. “It’s better to get it over with and move forward. Right, Doc?”
The admiral nodded. “I could give you percentages and chances of recovery both with and without your arm, Commander, but it seems like you understand the decision you’re making.”
“I do.” He glanced at Jenks when she couldn’t stop her hand from tightening around his.
Admiral Carmichael nodded. “I’ll get the surgical team prepped. We should finish up the surgery just about the time we get to Earth.”
Jenks leaned down to kiss Nika’s cheek. “I love you.”
He turned his head and kissed her. “Love you, too. Watch your back.”
“Max has it. I trust her.” She watched the surprise flicker in his eyes and smiled. “Look at me, growing up and shit.”
“I’m proud of you.” He squeezed her hand one last time. “You’ll be there when I wake up?”
She swallowed at the words she’d always said to him in those early years together, when Nika had promised not to leave her alone. “Always.” Jenks nodded to Admiral Carmichael and turned on a heel. Beneath her calm composure her thoughts were whirling, and they carried her through the changing room and back to the shared quarters. Max and Ma looked up when she came in the room, the silent question hanging in the air.
“They’re going to amputate,” she said. “Dr. Carmichael feels it will be a relatively easy surgery. They should be finished about the time we get to Earth.”
“Rosa and the others are meeting us at Earth. Stephan will have a security detail for the ship to keep Nika safe, but you could stay here with him if you want,” Max offered, but Jenks was shaking her head before she got halfway through the sentence.
“Just long enough for him to wake up. Then we go.” She fisted her hands. “Someone’s going to pay for this.”
Max shared a look with Ma before she stepped into the other woman’s way and slowed her pacing. “What do you think is going to happen here?”
“I’m going to put the hurt on someone.”
Max muffled a sigh. “I don’t think so, Jenks. You and I both know Nika wouldn’t want you getting in trouble for his sake.”
“You’ll want to stay out of my way on this, Lieutenant.” Jenks flexed her hands, the need to hit something a painful shard in her chest. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will.”
Max smiled and reached in, catching her by the back of the neck before she could dance away. “You’re my team, Jenks. I can’t let you go off and get yourself killed, and make no mistake, whoever is behind this will try to kill you. They’ve tried once before. If you go
off on your own now, there won’t be anyone to watch your back.”
You trust her, Jenks. It’s okay. She won’t let you down.
Jenks dropped the facade and Max followed her to the floor, holding her as she cried. “They tried to kill Nika, Max. I don’t care about myself, but they tried to kill my brother.”
“I know. For the record, I care about both of you. As far as I’m concerned you’re all my teammates,” Max murmured against Jenks’s forehead. “And ‘tried’ is the operative word there. He’s still alive, so are you, so are the rest of us. And I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to sit here and wait for them to try again.”
Jenks hiccupped. “I thought you said—”
“I said no going off on your own.” She pulled back and cupped Jenks’s face in her hands. “So dry your damn tears, Petty Officer, get on your feet, and let’s go to Earth. We’ll figure out who’s decided they can wage war against the NeoG.”
T-minus Sixteen Weeks until the Boarding Games
Max rubbed the heels of her hands into her tired eyes with a groan as the words in front of her blurred for the third time. The smell of coffee suddenly floated across the air and she dropped her hands, looking up to see Luis.
“You are a blessing,” she said when he handed a steaming cup over. “And also, how does a guy as big as you move so quietly?”
“A lot of practice trying to be invisible as a kid so the other kids didn’t start shit with me,” he replied, settling into the chair next to her. “You’ve been at that for a few hours, I figured you could use a break.”
“You’re not wrong.” Max sipped the coffee, grimaced, and shot Luis a sidelong glance when he chuckled.
“I probably should have told you to save your praise until after you tasted it.”
“I’d forgotten how bad this is. How is the coffee on Jupiter so much better?”
“Hoboins is a coffee hound. Chen drinks tea.” Luis shrugged and drank his own with relish. “I’m surprised you didn’t pick up the tea habit as her aide.”
“I’ve never cared for it.” She lifted her cup. “I do wonder sometimes if this stuff is so vastly different from the coffee that existed before the Collapse.”
“Jenks could tell you, probably.” Luis grinned. “She’s fascinated with that whole era.”
“I have figured that out. Though I still don’t know what she’s talking about most of the time.”
“No one does, beyond a few hundred history buffs and nerds in her online group.” Luis took a drink of his own coffee. “I know there are a handful of places that have tried to cultivate original strains of coffee beans instead of the synthetically modded ones. I’ve never had the cash to give it a try.”
“I’m not sure I’d want to develop a taste for something so hard to get. This is coffee.” She grimaced again. “Horrible coffee, but still.” She put her mug down and stretched. “So you don’t share Jenks’s interest in the Collapse?”
Luis shrugged a shoulder. “It’s over and done, isn’t it? We survived, and when I say ‘we’ I mean humanity and some of the species on Earth. But damned if we didn’t do a good job trying to kill everyone and everything on this planet with our greed. As far as I’m concerned that’s the lesson to take away; anything else is disaster porn.” He smiled. “In Dai’s defense, what she loves is the years prior to the Collapse, at the bright and shiny point when humanity was partying before the fall happened.”
“I don’t blame her for that.” Max studied him for a moment before taking a deep breath. They’d been at HQ for almost a week and she’d started to get a handle on the people around her. “Feel free to tell me to piss off if this subject is way too personal, but are things okay with you two?”
His grin was bright. “With Dai it’s sometimes hard to tell. I’m working on not rocking the boat, for obvious reasons.”
“She cares about you, you know.”
“I do, and for right now that’s enough.” Luis grinned again. “I’m a patient man, Max, and Altandai is something else.” He sighed her full name, making Max smile.
“I’m not great at this whole relationship thing, but I know that look.” She bumped her shoulder into his. “You’re a good man, Luis Armstrong. For what it’s worth I’m rooting for you.”
“It means a lot, actually. So, what are you going over?”
“A very detailed report from Sapphi about the serum we found on the freighter. It’s not LifeEx. I’m not a chemist, but it is impressively close.” She’d asked Rosa to let her keep the information between her and Sapphi, trying to preserve as much of her family’s intellectual property rights as she could.
“You think that’s what they were making in the lab that blew?”
“I do.” Max sipped at her coffee. “What I can’t figure out is if the lab blew on purpose or accidentally, and why they were shipping it back to Earth.”
“Why manufacture it on Trappist in the first place? Seems like a lot of work to get supplies out there.”
“They’d have to.” Max shook her head. “There’re too many eyes on Earth. Trappist actually makes perfect sense. What I can’t figure out is how they did it.” She didn’t elaborate, even though she felt Luis’s amber gaze on her. The varieties of red algae her great-grandfather had hunted down and rescued from extinction in the tidal pools along the rocky coast of Ireland would go on to form the component maishkin in LifeEx. It was now a closely guarded crop with some of the tightest regulations in the CHN.
But she could see it right there in the makeup of the serum they’d found on Bandit’s Bane. Or something very much like it. The dupe wasn’t perfect.
“You are hard to read, Max, but you’re not telling me something.”
She laughed. “Family is messy.”
“Tell me about it.” He grinned. “I suspect yours is a little more so, circumstances being what they are.”
“Maybe. They’re—” Max broke off.
“You know how dangerous the risk of knockoffs is.”
Ria had known.
“Max?”
Coffee sloshed in her cup as she set it down and got up to pace the room. She didn’t know how she knew that. Couldn’t even articulate it to herself, much less to Luis, who was watching her.
Knockoffs were always a concern for the family, but never a serious one. The control of the ingredients, the secrecy of the formula, all of it was there to safeguard against the possibility of a knockoff. But that had been Ria’s first response when they’d talked all those weeks ago.
And she wasn’t the least bit surprised when I told her we found traces of maishkin. She just wanted to know where we found it . . .
“Where’s everyone else?” Max spun back around, her mind going a million miles an hour.
“Rosa and Jenks are at the hospital visiting Nika. I’m not sure where the others are, possibly with Stephan.”
She grabbed him by the wrist, bumping her cup and spilling coffee on the counter in the process. “I’ll call them on the way. Come on.”
“Max, I am really good at my job, but I’m not a mind-reader.”
“Right, sorry. We need to go see my sister.” She pulled Luis from his chair. “We need a transport to LifeEx headquarters. I’ll explain on the way, promise.”
Rosa watched the way Jenks’s fingers curled around Doge’s collar and knew that bringing the robot along with them had been a good choice. As silly as some people thought it, the robot was good at grounding all of them when they needed it.
Which didn’t stop the strange looks from the medical personnel as they strode down the hallway of General Kyo Hyo-Jin Hospital near the NeoG headquarters.
Those looks didn’t concern her, though. What she was keen on was the fact that Jenks seemed to have settled in the last week, and all of Max’s reports had confirmed the petty officer was doing as well as could be expected.
“Nika looked good, considering,” Rosa said as they passed through the doors into the bright sunshine.
“He looked better t
han on the ship.”
“His adrenaline and cortisol were elevated,” Doge chimed in. “Though that’s to be expected in the situation. He’s also experiencing some phantom pain, but he was doing a good job hiding it from both of you.”
Rosa’s DD chip pinged and she answered the call from Max. “Lieutenant?”
“Oh good, that must mean you’re out of the hospital. Is Jenks with you?”
“She is.”
“Meet us at the hospital landing pad, we’ll pick you up.”
Rosa looked at Jenks, who was watching her expectantly. “Come on.”
“What is it?”
“I have no idea, because Max is nearly as bad as you are about telling me what she’s going to do before she does it.” She grabbed Jenks by the arm and headed across the wide pavilion toward the flashing marker on her map.
“Did she apologize?”
Rosa chuckled and pulled Jenks into a hug as the military transport zoomed through the sky, settling down onto the landing pad several meters ahead of them. “She did not, and to be honest, I’m not sure if that’s good news or bad.” What she did know was that it was nice to hear Jenks making jokes again.
The ramp lowered and they went up it at a half jog, Max meeting them just inside the door. “They’re in, Luis.” Rosa spotted Armstrong in the pilot seat of the tiny transport and gave Jenks a little push toward the front of the plane.
Jenks didn’t argue, which was also a good sign, and Max patted Doge on their way by.
“Commander,” she greeted Rosa.
Rosa smiled when Jenks took Luis’s offered hand and leaned in for a kiss. “I’m hoping you didn’t steal this, Carmichael.”
Max grinned and Luis laughed. “No, Commander, it’s Intel’s. I borrowed it—with permission,” he said over his shoulder.
“We’re going to talk to my sister. This seemed the fastest way to get from here to there.” Max sat on one of the benches, strapping herself in as she answered. “Did you know that LifeEx bought the system jumper from Off-Earth almost as soon as the Navy turned it over?”