Grand Cross

by Merethe Walther

  “No,” she said, and charged for the end of the hall, beating a fist against the electronic keypad until it acquiesced to her silent demand.

  The door opened onto a set of stairs that she took two at a time, her heartbeat a pounding pell-mell allegro through her chest. At the top, she recognized the deck where they’d landed the Phantom. The ships were gone. Only a handful remained, including the Phantom, docked about 500 yards from where she was standing.

  Rage, hot and heady coursed through Aralyn as Kita and Apollo hurried up behind her. Kita held the boy close, sorrow in her eyes. Aralyn knew she must be wondering if the length of time it had taken her to open the door had cost them Kragg, but she didn’t have the ability to comfort her. As strong as the fury had come on it burned away at her; stripped the forest of her mind clean. There wasn’t anything remotely resembling humanity within her at that moment. There was only the thought of revenge. They’d taken something precious from her. Twice. Someone needed to pay.

  Aralyn didn’t stop to think. She drew her gun, turned, and started marching back toward the stairs where the pounding on the doors had grown as it echoed through the narrow chamber.

  Apollo called after her, “Aralyn, wait―”

  She hit the stairs with a forceful stride, going down them almost as quickly as she’d come up. At the bottom, she raised her gun, pointed it toward the porthole on the door, and fired. The slaver’s eyes went wide as the bolt tore through the center of his head, cleaving it backward and leaving a singe in the wall behind him.

  Arm still raised, gun sighted, she waited for the next imbecile to pop his head up to try and take a shot, but no one did. For one sickening moment, ghoulish delight at the guard’s death coursed through her, sent her breath rasping. She wondered if any thoughts of remorse had gone through his head before she’d blown it from his shoulders. A laugh burbled out of her then, something twisted and dark that she didn’t even recognize as her own voice at first.

  “Who’s next, you bastards?!” she screamed.

  All she could see was Kragg on the block. Drugged and weary looking. The metal of his new eyes gleaming back at her like accusations. You couldn’t save me. You failed again.

  She let loose a howl as a guard raised his gun and tried to fire at her through the bloodstained glass, but another shot from her weapon sent his fingers flying off in another direction.

  “Come on!” she screeched. “I’ll execute every last one of you!”

  Behind her, hands grabbed at her shoulders, keeping her from going any farther, slowing her down. She whipped around, the barrel of her gun coming within inches of Caden’s face. Aralyn watched his mouth move, heard the sounds come out, but couldn’t make out the meaning behind them. She glared at him, gun still drawn. His hands were up close to his head where she could see them. So that she could see he was unarmed. Aralyn blinked, turned around, and tried to keep walking toward the door at the end.

  Nothing mattered. Nothing. She’d broken every promise that had ever meant something. Months of searching for the man who’d been more than a father to her, months of tracking down leads to run across him on a coincidental crossing of paths on a slave trading ship in the middle of the fucking galaxy, and she let him slip right out of her reach. Again.

  Pain burst within her chest, cracking the wall of rage and agony that kept her vision hazing red. Aralyn looked down in disbelief at the needle poking out of her chest, her legs weakening, her breath slowing. From her right, Kita stared at her, eyes clouded by fear and concern.

  “You fucking stabbed me… with a needle,” Aralyn said, though the words were coming out sluggish, like her tongue was suddenly too large in her mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” Kita whispered.

  She took the gun from Aralyn’s hand as Caden scooped her up in his arms and rushed back up the stairs to the waiting ship.

  Chapter Nine

  Aralyn’s eyelids felt swollen when she opened them; her body was heavy. Her chest hurt. No, she realized, not just her chest, her heart. She could still feel where Kita had injected her with the sedative. The pain she felt far more acutely though, came a little bit closer to the middle on the left side. She rolled onto her side, curling up into a ball.

  Pajamas. Someone had dressed her while she was out, but she didn’t care who.

  “Kragg,” she whispered, squeezing her legs as tightly to her chest as they would go.

  I wonder where he is, she thought. If he’s okay.

  The door opened with a soft sigh and Caden walked in, carrying a tray. The aroma hit her nose and her stomach rumbled with hunger, but she clamped down on the sensation. Caden looked weary; there were dark circles under his eyes and he’d grown a thick five o’clock shadow along his jaw.

  Slowly, he placed the tray on the nightstand beside the bed. There was a bowl of soup, some saltines, and a mug of tea. He scooted her over and sat down beside her with a soft sigh.

  “You should eat,” he said. “You’ve been out for three days.”

  Three days. The news startled Aralyn, but her whole body was too stiff and sluggish to react. She let the information pass through her, undisturbed.

  “Kita’s really worried about you,” he continued. “She feels bad about… you know.”

  “Drugging me?”

  “That’s not fair and you know it.”

  Aralyn didn’t answer. She pushed herself into an upright position and slid back until she could lean against the wall. “What the hell was in that stuff, anyway?” she asked, her voice a dry croak. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a meteor.”

  “We had to keep you out for a little while,” Caden admitted, looking away. “You were crying in your sleep. Shouting. We were afraid you’d hurt yourself.”

  From his disheveled appearance, Aralyn figured he probably hadn’t been sleeping much. Guilt began to gnaw away at her, but she pushed it back down, accepting the void that had swallowed her emotions whole for the time being. She wanted numbness. She didn’t want to face the fact that she’d put a gun in Caden’s face; put them all in jeopardy for the sake of making herself feel better on some petty quest for revenge at her own fuck up. She looked down at the tray and picked up a cracker, chewing at it in small bites like a rat.

  “They told me… what happened,” Caden began. “To Kragg. Why he wasn’t there.”

  Stubborn to the end, Aralyn kept quiet; kept chewing at her cracker.

  He cleared his throat. “I know how much he means to you. But they need you. I need you. I don’t think you’re dealing with everything we’ve been through in the best way―”

  “Oh I’m not?” Aralyn snapped, glaring at him. “You spend ninety percent of your time off in la-la-land imagining all the ways you’ll skin your father for his pelt once you get your hands on him. Your brain is usually off in a million different tangents, and some days you’ve barely said three words to me because you’re so busy tracking down any info that might help in your ‘hunt.’ You think you get to talk about not dealing with shit in the best way?” She threw the cracker down on the tray again, abandoned.

  “I don’t need a fucking shrink eval, Caden,” she spat. “I need to get Kragg back. It’s my fault he’s in there, and it’s up to me to fix this. I don’t care what I have to sacrifice in order to do it. I need to make this right because I owe that man. He saved my life. He―”

  The image of Caden facing down the gun in her hand and Kragg’s new metallic eyes staring back at her sent a wave of sorrow through Aralyn that she couldn’t fight down. She choked back an involuntary sob and looked away, desperate to regain the fury she’d felt days before. Why couldn’t that stay with her instead of the pain?

  Caden eyed her, his face so blank he could have still been wearing the mask from Redux. “Join us when you’re ready.” He stood and exiting the room without a backward glance.

  Aralyn contemplated throwing the tray at the door once he’d gone, but her guilt was already coming back in full force and tears slipped down her cheeks ins
tead. Caden was off… Was he that angry at her? Shame followed shortly after. Were the others as angry?

  Mechanically, she forced some of the food down her throat, swiping angrily at every tear that kept coming after the first, and then headed to the showers. Water was the best way she knew how to feel even close to human again.

  After a longer than necessary wash, she slipped into a black tank top and some khaki cargo pants from the crew drawers before getting her boots on, lamenting the loss of her switchblade. The space that it always occupied next to her ankle somehow made her feel naked. Squaring her shoulders, she walked down the hall toward the cockpit, ready for whatever backlash would come from her mental break. The thought made her misstep a bit. She shook her head.

  What if I can’t do this after all? she wondered. She’d spent so much time pushing forward and trying to forget the past, but it all felt like a weight around her neck, dragging her back. She shoved the thought from her mind, just as she would any other time painful memories surfaced. Focus, she reminded herself.

  “Ari!” Kita squealed the moment she popped around the corner.

  The hacker ran from her seat at the back of the ephemeris area and collided into a hug that nearly knocked Aralyn off of her feet.

  “I’m so sorry,” Kita said, squeezing hard. “I didn’t know what else to do. It was like you couldn’t even hear us and I just―”

  “Kita, it’s all right, really,” Aralyn said, forcing a smile. “You did the right thing. I…” She contemplated how to phrase the situation, but it was mostly a blur. “I don’t think I was actually capable of understanding anything you guys said.”

  Apollo and Riordan approached as well, but Caden lingered in the cockpit, leaning against a chair and watching, arms crossed loosely.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” said Apollo, somewhat apprehensively.

  “Really? You don’t look it,” Aralyn quipped.

  Apollo shrugged. “You can certainly get… interesting… when you want to.”

  Riordan interrupted with an awkward wave before she could reply. “Sorry about Kragg,” he said, in what she assumed was his most sincere voice.

  Aralyn gave him a half-hearted smile. “Thanks. So, not to cut this uncomfortable reunion short,” she said, “but where exactly are we?”

  “Hitching a ride on an inbound meteor,” Caden answered, pressing a button on the ephemeris table and bringing up their position on a port alongside the belly of a meteor barge.

  Aralyn nodded. Meteors didn’t make for FTL travel like a ship, but when you needed a helping hand or just wanted some time to explore your options, they were practically perfection.

  “Good choice,” she said. “Have we had any luck with―”

  Before she could finish her sentence, she noticed two dark eyes staring at her from over near the computers, wide as they could possibly go.

  Kita turned and exclaimed, “Oh!” before hurrying over to the computer bank and kneeling down, speaking in hushed whispers and extending her hand.

  The boy, clearly hesitant, placed a hand in hers and let himself be pulled forward from behind the electronics. Kita guided him forward, until they were roughly a yard and a half apart. Though he’d been cleaned and groomed, they hadn’t had any child-sized clothing on board, Aralyn was sure, because he’d been dressed in slim women’s coveralls with the arms and legs cut for length and an electrical cord tied around his waist to keep the still too large jumpsuit from sliding right off of him. Kita held his hand the whole way, encouraging him quietly with every step he took.

  “This is Aralyn,” Kita said, pointing to her. “She puts on a mean face sometimes, but she’s really nice, I promise. She helped me save you.”

  Aralyn forced a smile she didn’t feel, so she wasn’t accidentally giving him a “mean face,” and lowered herself down. “Hey,” she said quietly. “What’s your name?”

  The boy looked at Kita, then looked back at Aralyn and then down to the ground, defeat hanging his shoulders low.

  “He hasn’t talked yet,” Caden said. “We’re not actually sure if he can.”

  The boy’s pale cheeks flushed, and he didn’t look back up, but clung tighter to Kita.

  “We’ve had him in the galley for a couple days, getting used to everyone, learning the sounds of the ship,” Kita said. “But he’s been following me around the last day or so. I think he’s been feeling better now that the orachal’s out of him.”

  “Helios, you make him sound like a rescue cat,” Riordan muttered.

  Kita glared at him but didn’t respond. Instead, she turned to the boy and said, “Let’s get you something to eat, okay?” At his enthusiastic nod, she led him down the hall to the kitchen. Aralyn watched them go and forced her attention on the matter at hand.

  “The datasticks―”

  “What are we supposed to do with a damaged little kid onboard the ship?” Riordan cut in, glaring at everyone present. “It’s bad enough we have to fight so hard to keep ourselves alive. Now we have to protect him, too?”

  Aralyn frowned. She was secretly glad that Kita had insisted on rescuing the boy, but at the same time, she couldn’t fault Riordan for pointing out the obvious flaw in their plan. There would be complications with a child along for the ride. Hell, they didn’t even have a decent pair of shoes to slap on his feet, much less the resources to help a mentally scarred former orachal slave. Would he wake up with the same kind of night terrors everyone else on the ship seemed to have for one reason or another?

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she said. “For now, I think we need to figure out what’s in those documents we pulled from the safe and see if there’s anything in there tying Proctor to all of this.”

  “The sooner we get those files, the sooner we can call the cavalry,” said Caden.

  “Exactly,” Aralyn said.

  “As far as the datasticks go, you’ll be disappointed to know that your hackers gave it their best attempts, but in the end, they were simply no match for my superior skills,” said Apollo with a grin.

  “He means he knew the password,” Riordan pouted.

  “And?” asked Aralyn. “You guys are kind of burying the lede here.”

  “You’re not going to like it,” said Caden, his voice flat.

  “When do I ever?” Aralyn muttered.

  “There’s a lot of nonsense encryption covering up the important things in there,” Riordan admitted. “But there were a couple of defining trails on the saved files―some with distinct Jovian signatures.”

  Aralyn boggled. How many times had they passed by there in the last several months on their misguided “work” to find Eladia in the ass-end of the galaxy? They’d literally been playing right in her front yard and had missed her completely.

  “Jupiter?” she said. “No, too simple”―a thought occurred to her and she nearly slapped a palm against her face―“let me guess: One of its moons.”

  “Ding-ding-ding,” we have a winner!” Rio declared. “One of its nearly eighty moons holds another of her safe houses.”

  “Apollo?” Aralyn asked, turning to their informant.

  He straightened his coat and shook his head. “I’m afraid I will be of no use on this decision. The fact that I even knew about the safe on her ship was… well, largely by accident, and partially because…” He didn’t finish the thought. “Her secrets have secrets. And those secrets have pockets where they keep still more secrets. The truth is she could be anywhere out there.”

  “Then we go by possibility,” Aralyn said, slipping past them and heading for the ephemeris table. She pulled up a map of the floating stations along Jupiter’s least storm-riddled belt and then extended the search to outer moons―all seventy-nine of them. “Phantom AI,” she called out, “show me only the moons around Jupiter without a significant UDA presence.”

  The 3D map immediately shifted and nearly twenty-five satellites―including the largest of the group, the Galilean moons, along with most of the inner moons�
��dropped from their view around the gas giant.

  “Well, only fifty more to go,” Aralyn said miserably.

  “How do we even know for sure this is where her safe house is?” asked Caden. “The datasticks didn’t really hold relevant information―”

  “I haven’t figured out what they have on them yet,” Riordan corrected. “I told you, it’s unique encryption. This isn’t like the last one that I’d done. When I got shipped off to Tartarys, Eladia must have found a new encoder. I don’t recognize it yet. It could be useful.”

  “Which doesn’t help in the meantime, unfortunately,” said Kita, rounding the corner, the small boy following at her heels, sandwich in hand.

  “Oh wait,” Aralyn said, looking around the room for her coat. She found it hanging on a hook near the airlock and went over to rustle through the small pocket along the back of it. “We found more of this weird orachal there―like the kind we found on Eris station.”

  “The stuff Taav confiscated from us?” Riordan asked, shifting his glasses back up onto his nose. “But what does that matter?”

  “Because now we have proof that it’s connected to her,” Aralyn said, showing the vials in her hand. “We’ve got the partial list of smugglers from the original datastick, we’ve got the orachal itself from her room below the ship, plus the huge crate of it we got from Eris, and―”

  “And nothing,” said Caden. “Remember? That kind of thinking just puts us back at square one.” He walked forward and took the vials, staring at the milky contents within.

  “It might be enough to get her in,” Kita said. “And if we can get the UDA tracking her down, then maybe Taav can make her talk… specifically about your dad’s part in all of this mess.”

  Caden shook his head. “It won’t work. It’s circumstantial, at best.”

  “You maybe want to throw something helpful in here instead of just shitting over everyone else’s ideas?” Aralyn snapped at him. “Think the UDA really cares how ‘circumstantial’ the evidence is? They’ve reeled in big fish on much flimsier lines.”