The people—who by now I assumed were the upper echelon of the Nine—shuffled their personal holoscreens and mumbled among themselves, until Aleksey cleared his throat and looked with purpose right at me. I wondered if he’d ever fucked up in his entire life, or if he’d always been at the front of the room, giving the orders so that others could fuck up for him.
“That brings us to the main thrust of this meeting,” he said, all business, no nervous smiles, no needless chatter. “Your recent mission to secure a large consignment of explosives was fruitful, although the loss of your tugship was of course unfortunate. The vessel, Starscream was it?”
I smiled a yes, wishing he’d cut the wordy crap.
“She was rather integral to our forthcoming mission, but I’m sure we can make do with your recently acquired Candelario harrier. And as we understand it, your second has command of a fleet-designated warbird, Raptor Nine-Nine-One.” A statement, not a question.
I glanced at Fran.
She nodded at Aleksey “What of it?”
“We’d like for you both—Captain Shepperd and Special Commander Francisca—to pilot the raptor, reinstated as fleet-designated, with the harrier in tow, through fleet’s checkpoints to Janus. Once docked at Janus Orbit Station, you will vacate the station and remotely trigger the explosives placed throughout the Candelario harrier.”
Holy shit.
Fran let loose a hail of vicious Spanish.
“How much of the explosives?” I asked, a bitter taste in my mouth.
“All of it.”
I couldn’t find the right words. A glance at my brother didn’t help; he was staring at the jumpgate map. Seventy tons of the Candes’ high-density explosives would rip Janus apart. Two hundred and fifty thousand people, give or take a few, lived and worked on that orbit station. Women, children, innocent civilians who happened to be unlucky enough to work alongside Chitec HQ, including the doc’s sister. No wonder they’d asked Lloyd to leave.
Fran’s face was the picture of horror. She skewed a warning glare in my direction, the kind that said all it needed to: You are not doing this.
“That’s a fuckload of civilians taking friendly fire,” I deadpanned.
Bren twisted in his seat and settled his commander-grade glower on me. “Chen Hung rarely—if ever—leaves his towers. The one synthetic unit who can get close to him can’t directly hurt him in any way. If he suspects we’re launching an attack, he will plunge the nine systems into a second Blackout. A surgical strike like this, at the heart of Chitec, is the only way.”
I looked at my brother, at the faces around the table all peering back at me, and at Aleksey. “Then why send One at all?”
“We need sensitive internal information before we proceed. Information she can retrieve.”
Or they just wanted her at ground zero when the ship blew.
I dragged a hand down the back of my neck, brushing away a cool prickle of sweat. I had to pose as fleet, get through the gate, dock on Janus, and blow the place to shit to save lives by killing hundreds of thousands of people? My moral compass was broken at the best of times, but this just didn’t feel right. “I thought the Nine were meant to save people?”
“If there was another way to cripple Chitec in what is a limited amount of time, we’d pursue it. Do you know of any other solution?”
I couldn’t even save myself. What the fuck did I know about saving lives?
Aleksey didn’t wait for me to fumble an excuse and continued his speech. “It’s about saving the nine systems. Without gate travel, the infrastructure will fall apart. How many people will die then, Captain Shepperd? The entire population of the nine systems stands at ninety billion, at the last best estimate. How many will survive a second Blackout? Accurate records don’t exist from before, but we can safely estimate over sixty percent of the human race was wiped out. We, as a species, may not survive a second Blackout.”
As a species? Well, that was either going a bit far or fucking terrifying. Aleksey was talking about the greater good—the favorite excuse of politicians and fleet commanders everywhere. It was wrong, so fucking wrong.
“And how will you get One out?” I asked and got blank faces in return. “You’re sending her into the heart of Chitec, to Chen Hung. She’s risking everything to get you this sensitive information.” I so wanted to call bullshit on that. “So how are you going to get her out before we blow the cargo?”
Their subtle avoidance of my eyes and silence confirmed my fears. They had no intention of getting One out. She was synthetic. Why should they care what happened to a machine? I did though, and I wouldn’t be leaving Janus without her, not even to save the nine systems or the human race. Fuck ‘em. I’d let them all die before I let her go.
“And you’re going to just waltz on in, clean up after Chitec, and take over the gates? Just like that?”
“We’ve been preparing for almost a decade. We’ve stockpiled the necessary equipment and have a highly skilled workforce in position. All we need is for Chitec to relinquish control. With your synthetic’s help and a surprise strike at the heart of their operation, we’ll simultaneously cripple and overpower their system-wide control. The war will begin and end with Janus.”
She’s not my synthetic. She doesn’t belong to anyone.
“Think of the greater good,” someone added. I didn’t care who. Why should I care about the greater good? It had never cared about me.
I smiled. What were these people risking? A few sleepless nights? “You can think of the greater good back here on your island while me and Fran have to look those Janus folks in the eye, knowing they’re about to die.”
Unease twisted and turned in my gut. I’d be the one pressing that trigger. Two hundred and fifty thousand people dead at the flick of a switch. I wasn’t sure I could do it.
I rested my elbow on the table and massaged my temples. Mass fucking murder.
“Why us?”
“You’re ex-fleet officers. You know fleet protocol should they stop you and search the harrier.”
It sounded about right, but it was bullshit.
“All you nice folks sitting around this table, you can issue the orders without getting your hands dirty, right? What’s a few more deaths to criminals like us?” I’d killed for less noble reasons, so had Fran, but we hadn’t killed innocents. We were bad, but not that bad.
I looked to my brother for help, but he didn’t quite meet my eyes. I figured I knew why. He walked the Island’s corridors as though he’d been here before. He sat at the far end of the table, perfectly comfortable. He knew these people. He was one of the Nine. For how long, I couldn’t be sure. If he wasn’t involved in concocting this plan at some level, then I was a fucking virgin. I’d have words with him, but not here.
“Give me some time to consider this.”
“There is no time to give you, Captain. Chen Hung might strike at any moment. We’re already prepping Francisca’s raptor. The ship will be flight-ready at universal five hundred hours. The Chitec transport is about to dock at Mimir. Events are already in motion.”
Fran spat something acidic in Spanish. She stormed from the room after that, leaving icy glares and uncomfortable murmurs in her wake. I couldn’t blame her.
“Tell your second to toe the line, Captain,” Aleksey advised.
I was tempted to tell him where he could shove his line. I stood, chewing on all manner of replies and bumped my fist against the table. These weren’t my people. I couldn’t fight them like I could Bruno or the Candes. This was a whole other game with a different set of rules.
“If we do this, me and my crew, we’re protected for life. If you even think of throwing us to the wolves when this is done, I’ll fuck you over so hard you’ll wish you were on that orbit station, yah hear?”
“Caleb-Joe …” Bren growled.
“And you?” He looked away. “Fuck you, Brother.”
I left the room, hot on Fran’s heels, and found her standing by the windows in the ass
embly room. She slipped into stride beside me as we walked on, heading anywhere, so long as it was away from the nice folks in their nice clothes issuing nice kill orders.
“Where’s One?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Her and the doc were already gone when I got out of there.” She lowered her voice as we approached a group of engineers. “We can’t do this.”
People flowed back and forth, paying us no mind, but my outlook of the Island had changed; this place had taken on a jagged edge.
I steered Fran into an empty storage room where we could talk away from prying eyes and nudged the door closed.
“All those people …” she whispered, slumping back against the wall.
She looked tired and beaten, nothing like the steely Fran who regularly kicked my ass. Her lips had paled and her eyes glistened with too much moisture. Shit, if she was losing it, that meant we really were in trouble.
“Look, we can do this.” Saying it didn’t make it easier. Words were cheap. “Getting through fleet to Janus should be easy enough with your raptor. Once there, we’ll figure something out.”
Her smile was a sorry, pitiful thing. “You know why they’re sending us, don’t you?”
She waited. I didn’t reply. We both knew why.
“Because we’re expendable. They don’t give a shit what happens to us. If we get caught, they’ll barely notice.”
I chewed on my lip and breathed deep to settle my rattling nerves. If I said no, there was no way in the nine systems the Fenrir Nine would let my crew leave. We knew too much. Fuck.
I kicked the nearby shelving, shaking the stacks of cleaning equipment, and then threw Fran a worthless smile. “C’mon. When have we ever let the odds scare us off?”
“This is different. Say we do it, how do we live with that?”
“Whiskey, I reckon. A whole lot of whiskey.”
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “What if they’re wrong? What if Hung doesn’t want to shut the gates down?”
Stars are wishes and wishes are dreams.
“He’s a killer. They’re all killers. They don’t know any other way. He already killed thousands when he shut the main gate down.”
“We don’t know for sure that was him.”
“One saw what he is, what he’s done. I saw him. I’ve seen it kill. He—it is a monster.”
“One though? She’s different. Maybe Hung …” Fran trailed off, realizing she was grasping at hope.
One had slaughtered the active nine, and she had killed Creet, although that had been Lloyd’s fuckup. She’d killed others while escaping Ganymede with Jesse. One had no problem with killing. Besides Hung, she was probably the most dangerous synthetic alive. She was different, but without that unique part of her, she was the same as the others—just one more.
Fran bumped her head back against the wall and cast her gaze toward the ceiling. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
I splayed my hand on the wall beside her, crowding in close, and looked her in those pretty green eyes. “It’s easier if you don’t think about it. Shut it away, think about something else. Drink, fuck, do what you gotta do. Bury it so fucking deep it can’t touch you. And before long, you’ll forget what it was you were worried about.”
Her lips turned down at the corners. She closed her eyes and sighed. “Is that what you do?”
“It works.” Or it did, until recently. Until One somehow made me look at myself through her eyes. Now I had shit going on in my head, like not wanting to let her down, not wanting to let any of them down. Like this life and my place in it might actually mean something. That kinda thinking could get a man killed.
She met my gaze with a steady one of her own. “All right, Captain. We do this, but we do it right.”
“All right.” It was probably time for me to move back and give her space, but I didn’t feel much like retreating. Me and Fran, we had issues—enough issues for a head doc to get hard over—but the woman she was now, the woman looking back at me, the fighter, the survivor, I knew her. I just hoped there weren’t any more surprises up her sleeve.
“I need you, Fran,” I said quieter. I kept my arm braced and locked, maintaining enough distance to avoid her womanly distractions. “I need to know you have my back. If I’m going to fly a raptor into fleet territory, I can’t be worrying about you turning me in.”
Her smile grew and that sly humor flooded back into her eyes.
“I got your six.” She shoved away from the wall and nudged by me, smacking me on the ass as she went. “Always.”
There was the Fran who did whatever it took to get the job done.
Opening the door, she said, “And who says you’re flying? My ship, my rules, right?” She glanced back with a you-can’t-touch-this glean in her eyes. “I outrank you, Captain.”
“Aye, Commander,” I drawled, cracking a smile, but it didn’t last. I followed after her, wondering what lay ahead for us, for One, for the Nine and their “greater good.” There was one thing I knew for certain: that synthetic bastard Chen Hung was living on borrowed time.
Chapter Ten: One
The shuttle lifted off the Island. I watched the massive ship shrink in the small window.
“Mimir landfall in twenty minutes,” the shuttle pilot announced via the internal comms.
Caleb would have tried to stop me. He would have told me that I didn’t have to go, that I had a choice. I would have seen fresh pain on his face, combining with the pain he tried so hard to hide from the world—the pain I’d seen in him from the beginning.
I had spared him from that goodbye.
There was no choice here, just logic. I wasn’t going for the Nine and their many motives, although I would help filter information back to them if I could. I didn’t follow any orders except my own and there was only one: Hung—and his synthetics—must be stopped. As one of them, I was uniquely suited to hunt among them. But beyond what I needed to do, I wanted to go back, to face him—Chen Hung. Perhaps it was always meant to be this way.
I spread my hand on the shuttle’s small window. Water droplets jerked in streams on the outside, fracturing my view of the Island base.
There had been many lies in the Fenrir Nine’s meeting—and many layers of truth—but all who had sat around the table believed in their cause.
I’d seen only a fraction of the Fenrir Nine’s operation, but it was enough to know they had the infrastructure and numbers to take control when Chitec fell. Would life in the nine systems be better? That remained to be seen. Either way, the survival of the long-term nine systems wasn’t my objective. As Caleb would say, it wasn’t my fight. My fight was with the synthetic masquerading as a man, the synthetic who had billions of lives cradled in his artificial hands.
Chen Hung must be stopped.
Turbulence rocked the shuttle, jolting the little craft. Doctor Lloyd sucked in a sharp gasp. He was a man riddled with fears, a potential risk to the success of my objective, but his presence was necessary if I was going to return to Chitec without delay.
The shuttle banked sharply. Clouds swallowed my view of the Island, and I wondered if I would see Caleb again. What might it have been like to go with him on his excursion? I might never know.
Gray clouds churned against the window.
Leaving him was the right thing to do.
I wished I’d sat with him awhile.
Stars are wishes and wishes are dreams.
Haley would have told me to stay, to hold his hand, to just be with him. I’d died and returned; I understood what it meant to leave much unfinished, to have it all ripped away. I would not be that powerless again. I am One and I will live.
“One, you er … Are you okay? I mean, I just … I didn’t want …”
I slid my gaze to Doctor Lloyd. He was strapped rigid in a passenger flight chair. I couldn’t reach him without unbuckling my belt. But, should I wish it, he’d be dead before the pilot could safely land and attempt to stop me.
Lloyd swallowed. Fear flitte
d through his body’s vital signs. “You aren’t okay. I understand. Of course you’re not okay. But, I er … I brought you back. You. Not Haley …” He trailed off, bloodshot eyes restless.
“You do not need to concern yourself. You are perfectly safe while you’re an asset, Doctor Lloyd.”
Fran was correct. My lies were faultless.
We landed on a Mimir floating dock in the midst of dazzling daylight. I walked the boardwalk alongside Lloyd, my gaze wandering toward the branches of Mimir’s waterhomes. The sea lapped at the house trusses where Caleb and I had once hidden from fleet. He had held me in his arms to keep me warm. For a man so beaten by life, he harbored a gentler side few ever witnessed.
“For this to work,” Doctor Lloyd said, clutching his briefcase under his arm, “you must appear to be operating in your default state. The Chitec personnel must believe you’re obedient, or they’ll lock you down and ship you with the cargo.”
The sound of his shoes on the boardwalk beat out the same fast rhythm as his heart.
I slid my gaze farther down the docks to where a gray Chitec transport vessel squatted on its struts. Steam rolled off its shielding, curling like the yin-yang Chitec logo branded on the ship’s flank. I slid my hand to the back of my neck and ran my fingers over the same raised brand.
“Do you understand, One? Whatever they say, whatever they do, you must appear to be in your default state. It’s imperative we arrive at Janus with you in full control. If they shut you down, I may not be able to get to you in time to reboot you.”
I locked my default expression on my face. “Yes, Doctor Lloyd. I understand perfectly.”
He glanced at me. Once. Twice. His heart fluttered. I could break his neck before he took his next breath, but doing so would ensure Chitec reacted aggressively. It was imperative that I appear controlled. I had no desire for them to shut me down again.
Two Chitec personnel guarded the boarding pontoon, armed with pulse rifles. One woman. One man. Clad in gray from head to toe.
“Identification,” the woman barked.
Lloyd fumbled in his pockets. “I er …” He set his briefcase down and patted his coat. “I’m er … Lloyd. Doctor James Lloyd. I have my ID, just …”
Girl From Above #4: Trust Page 6