Anford shifted her weight, arms clasped behind her back. The subtle motion was the most uncomfortable Biran had ever seen her. “No. Are you secure?”
“It’s just me and the guardcore.”
“Moments after the attack on the convoy, Icarion fired upon an asteroid passing within close proximity of Ada in an attempt to bombard us with debris. What you experienced was a blowback impact event.”
Biran swallowed. “A small one.”
“Yes. Their weapon pulverized the asteroid more than they were expecting, I believe. Smaller pieces.”
“Lucky us.”
“Indeed. I’ll send the auto.”
“No.”
Anford cleared her throat. “Speaker Greeve, the Protectorate is getting ready to convene. You will want to be here.” To help decide what happened next, she meant. If they tried again for peace, or if they reached for Icarion’s annihilation.
Icarion had the evac pods. Without peace… Biran’s stomach soured as he watched the civilians run back and forth across the street, shouting for aid, rallying around one another. He hoped the medivan that’d picked up Kan had ditched him to help the wounded instead.
“Biran,” he said quietly.
“What was that?”
“Call me Biran, please… And, thank you, Jessa. I know what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate it, but right now I’m needed here. We both know the Protectorate will spend the next couple of hours bickering. There will be time for that. Later.”
She half smiled and inclined her head. “As you wish. I will send an auto regardless—with spare guardcore. With all the Keepers fleeing to the Cannery, we don’t need so many out to keep an eye on them.”
“Thank you.”
“Anford out.” Jessa disappeared from the screen.
Biran took a second to swipe a quick I’m okay, talk soon message to Graham and Ilan, then blanked his wristpad. Anything else could wait. The impact had proven that much.
“How good is your medical training?” he asked the guardcore.
“Better than yours,” she said, and slung her stunner away on her belt.
“Let’s put that to the test.”
She nodded, and they walked side by side toward the dust. Toward the screaming and the terror and the pain. And though the people were angry, and though they sometimes shouted at him, cursed him as they recognized him just to have something—some icon of authority—to curse at, the guardcore did not take her stunner out.
CHAPTER 24
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3771
DAY TWENTY-FIVE OF TOO MANY
Warm light flooded her room, shoving an ice pick of a headache straight through her right eye. Sanda jerked upright, flailed in the grey-and-orange sheets, until she came fully awake and realized just where she was. Still not a dream. Damn.
“Thanks for the smooth morning, Bero,” she muttered as she swung her leg off the side of the bed and adjusted sleep-twisted pajamas.
“I apologize for not easing the light settings, but Tomas is awake. He’s in the mess.”
“So? Let the man have breakfast. He doesn’t need me to babysit.”
“He has attempted to set a new course via his tablet. I overrode his input.”
Sanda grabbed the prosthetic she kept propped against the nightstand and yanked the straps tight. Raw skin stung at the touch, making her blink watery eyes. She needed to find a better powder to stop the chafing. “What course? We’ve been relatively stationary since we took him on board.”
“He wished to direct me into orbit around Farion, one of Kalcus’s moons.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said he would explain ‘when the gang’s all here.’ I presume he meant upon your arrival.”
“Yeah, gotcha.” She yanked the last strap tight and winced as the clammy rubber gripped her skin. Pushing to her feet, she tested the stability of her prosthetic as she did every morning. It had a new tendency to lean her forward, no doubt due to the abuse it took in the mag boot. She sighed. She’d have to machine a replacement for her makeshift calf. In the meantime, she had some answers to demand.
After a rushed attempt to wash up and set her clothing straight, Sanda stomped down the hall to the mess, forcing herself to breathe in the calming pattern she’d been taught in basic training. Tomas sprang to his feet the second she stepped into the room and pulled out a chair for her.
“Sit, sit,” he said, bustling toward Bero’s cabinetry. “I’ve got Bero brewing some coffee, and I figured out that if you split a nutrient block in quarters and hit it with a torch, close your eyes and imagine real hard, it’s just like toast.”
The proffered chair creaked as she sat. She eyed Tomas as he fussed over breakfast, a dread feeling growing in the pit of her stomach. A feeling worse than being told he’d been trying to adjust their course without her input.
“You’re a morning person, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Huh?” He glanced over his shoulder at her, grin big, a knife frozen halfway through the business of slicing a brick longways. “Oh, yeah, I guess. Nothing like a star rise, right? Er.” He glanced at the daylight-real lighting in the ceiling. “Or the synthetic equivalent, I guess.”
“Seems fine to me. Bero gets the little red smear before full star just right.”
He paused, half a nutrient brick in each hand, and squinted at the lighting. “No variation, though?”
“Standard cycling. Just like home.”
“Oh. Right. You Primes live in hab domes…” He frowned at the food in his hands, beginning to drip, and jumped to applying the heat. “I always forget that. Seems strange to go a whole life without seeing a true sky.”
Bero’s coffee dispenser beeped, and she trundled over to grab a cup. Leaning against the cabinet, she sipped the steaming brew, savoring the bite of near-boiling heat across the tip of her tongue. It even scorched her a little, a few taste buds going dark. The sharp heat was almost a better pick-me-up than the caffeine itself.
“It’s not bad. We see it sometimes, visiting other planets. Though no one from Ada had gone to Icarion since I’d been born. Well, not as a tourist. Hostilities wouldn’t allow it. And anyway, the real sky above Ada wasn’t much to look at. Nice starscape, but the system’s star is so far out we barely get a glimpse of her. You can go up to the observatories to get a real look, but I never bothered. Sims are enough for me.”
“Not for me. I like real dirt under my feet and a proper magnetosphere-atmosphere combo making the natural sky safe to look at.”
“It’s literally no different.”
He shrugged. “Maybe I’m just a purist.”
“You’re a comms man. Don’t tell me you’re a luddite.”
“Me? Naw.” He shook his head as he finished toasting the block slices. “I appreciate both sides, just have my heart in one a little more, you know?”
“I guess. But without the domes, humanity would be stuck on Earth. If we hadn’t destroyed the place and ourselves by now. Really poor early enviro management, there. Had to hab the whole planet to keep it from becoming uninhabitable, and that didn’t last long.”
“True enough. Hungry?”
He slapped the toasted bricks of nutrients onto a plate and offered it up to her like a trophy. She stifled a smile and wondered how long she’d let him keep messing with the dispensers before she told him the cupboards were still loaded with canned fruit, veg, and textured protein.
“Thanks.” She took the plate and slid back into her seat at the table across from him, setting the coffee down reluctantly. She dragged her fingertip around the rim of the cup, thinking, while she spooned a bite of nutrient toast into her mouth. It was crunchy, melty. Not bad, really.
After wiping up the dishes with a microcleanse, he joined her. Forearms against the edge of the table, he hovered over his food as if it were a specimen for dissection. She pushed images of Kenwick’s head, flayed and floating, out of her mind. Tomas hadn’t done that. Didn’t work for any part of Icarion that had anything to do wit
h it.
He began to hum an offworld show tune, muffled around bites of his meal. She was definitely going to wait to tell him about the other foodstuff.
“Are you always so chipper?”
“When a lovely stranger fishes me out of the middle of nowhere, revives me, and gives me a shot at surviving a disaster that wiped out the entire star system? Yeah. I’m usually pretty chipper then.”
“Lovely?”
He stared at his food. “Just stating facts.”
“I am radiant.” She fluffed chopped and frizzy hair with one palm. He laughed.
She sipped scalding coffee and cradled the cup to warm her palms, and to do something with her hands. Gaze locked on every line of his face, she steeled herself, and asked, “About that. Bero tells me you tried to enter a new flight plan. Why?”
“Ah. That.” He took a final, gulping bite, pushed his plate away, and leaned back, meeting her gaze. Nothing alerted her about his expression. Eyes bright from early morning energy, a neutral set to his lips, a slight tenseness along the jaw. There might be something in that tension, but she wasn’t trained for this kind of thing. She just pointed the big guns at what her superiors wanted blown to bits and made damn sure she hit.
“I’m not going to insult you by dancing around the fact, Sanda. The truth is, I lied about who I am.”
Her fingers tensed on the cup. Plastic crinkled. “Really. And does this have anything to do with the fact I found your evac pod in the debris field of an auto-transport ship that carried no atmosphere?”
He grimaced. The tension in his jaw definitely flexed. She filed that little bit of info away. “I wondered if you’d noticed that.”
“Hard not to.”
“Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat and leaned forward, pressing his forearms against the tabletop. His eyes were sharp, earnest. Something in them put her in mind of some of the asteroids she’d seen, grey and hard and limned in sharp ice. “I’m sorry I lied. I didn’t know who you were, or if this was a test. My name really is Tomas Cepko. I am a comms specialist, and I’m from out-system. That’s all true.”
“But?”
“But. Have you ever heard of the Nazca?”
She let her puzzled expression tell him all he needed to know. He pressed on.
“They were an indigenous tribe of the South American continent on Earth. They lived up in the high mountains and made pictures in the dirt. Big pictures. You couldn’t tell what they were up close. From the ground they looked like random lines, but you could see them from the sky just fine. Birds, frogs, things like that.
“No one really knows why they made them. The Nazca themselves couldn’t get up high enough to see their pictures whole. But the lines stuck around in the dirt, because of the arid climate, and remained all but whole save for a few idiot tourists riding scooters out to take a look at them.”
“What a charming cultural tale. Now, please tell me why I shouldn’t blow you out the airlock for lying to me.”
“I work for an organization who call themselves the Nazca. We examine small traces on the ground, so to speak, look for hints of patterns, try to assemble the discordant intel into a big picture.”
He’d gone dead still. His jaw relaxed; his gaze held hers nice and steady. Nothing at all told her he was lying. But then, if he were what he was dancing around saying outright, he’d be practiced at keeping every inch of his body schooled into portraying whatever emotive state he wanted.
“You’re a merc. An Icarion spy.”
His nostrils flared with distaste. “I’m a Nazca. There are subtle differences. But, yes. We are a consortium of independent information brokers. We don’t choose sides.”
“Who hired you?”
“No one. We heard scuttlebutt that Icarion was gearing for something big and wanted to check it out. They planted me in the wreck of the transport to be scooped up by recovery procedures.”
Coffee dribbled over her fingers as her grip tightened. She forced herself to relax. “And how the hell were you going to sell that to them?”
“They’d been hiring a lot of offworld specialists for quiet work. My superiors were supposed to have my name on those lists before I was found. A paperwork mix-up, but a happy one, because they’d have my expertise without having to pay to smuggle me through the gates.”
“You really expect me to believe all this?”
He spread his hands. “No. Not really. But it’s the truth, and I hope you’ll come around in time.”
“What was the Nazca looking for?”
He glanced pointedly around the ship.
“Bero?”
“Or the research that led to his creation, yes. Sorry, Bero, buddy, but as soon as I went nosing through your sys specs I knew what I’d been scooped up by. You’re one of the first steps on their way to interstellar travel without the gates. Or, you were supposed to be, before Icarion initiated the Protocol.”
“You sure it wasn’t the Protocol itself you were looking for? A weapon that can bust up multiple planets seems like just the kind of thing your people would be interested in digging up information on.”
His lips pursed. “They’re the same thing, aren’t they?”
“Never say that.” Bero’s voice filled the mess, and they both jumped. “I am not the same as the Protocol. I would never, never, have any part in what they’ve done. That’s why they gave me a personality, isn’t it? Why not just use a dumb ship? No—they made me so that I could make the right choice. Whoever pulled the trigger on the Protocol, they’re nothing like me.”
Tomas looked for a camera. “Bero, I’m sorry, I just meant that the research pipeline was the same.”
“But I am not the same.”
“No, of course not.”
“Good.” Bero fell silent, and Sanda couldn’t help but think of the horror she’d stumbled across when she’d entered Bero’s research bay. The smartship himself may be a different animal than his Protocol cousin, but that didn’t mean similar horrors weren’t worked on board his body. She wondered if that was what had made him so jumpy, so distrustful. Watching a bunch of researchers peel a man’s head apart to discover its secrets, then set it up like an idol for veneration, would have made her distrustful of humanity, too.
“All right,” Sanda said. “Fine. Say I believe you, for theory’s sake. If you’re some infiltrating Nazca badass, why tell me? I was already distrustful of you—sorry, but hey, a girl’s gotta look after herself—and here you go taking all the fragile agreement between us and dash it to the proverbial rocks.
“You gotta have a reason, right? An angle? Otherwise this could wait for a more opportune time, when I haven’t been dragged out of my bed to sip rapidly cooling coffee.”
Before she could blink, he grabbed the coffee cup and hurried over to the dispenser to top it off with a fresh, near-boiling splash. He spoke as he worked, tapping a thumb against the side of his thigh. Blasted man could just not sit still. How the hell did that parlay into a career as some kind of spy? Last time she checked, spies weren’t prone to singing show tunes and drumming out obscure jazz riffs.
“See? You’re sharp. That’s why I’m not bullshitting you.”
“Shove the flattery, Cepko. What do you want?”
He plunked back down across from her and pushed the coffee her way. She gave it a hesitant sip, holding it like a wall between them. He leaned across the table, folding his hands together, and all his buzzing, cheerful energy drained away. The man sitting across from her was suddenly, deadly, serious, and there was a firmness to his musculature she’d missed before. Blurred by the fun of silly, drunk jokes, stories of dancing, and, of course, the show tunes.
So that was how he worked. Interesting.
“I want to survive this, Sanda. I’m being honest with you now, because I’m going to reveal some information to you that I discovered before being set adrift. Information that, quite frankly, you wouldn’t believe a low-level comms man to have.”
“But an Icarion high
er up in the ranks, with classified clearance, would,” she guessed.
He inclined his head. She sucked air through her teeth. “And how do I know that’s not what you are?”
He spread his hands again, and that lopsided smile came back. “You can’t be sure. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. I’m a spy, Sanda. There’s no way for me to prove it. If there were, I’d be a really shitty one.”
“Fair point. So I guess you’re just going to have to spill.”
He pulled a tablet from his waistband and plunked it on the table directly between them, then spun it around so it faced her. With a few deft taps, he brought up a view of the local star system.
“Using Bero’s in-system nuclear propulsion, we’re about two weeks of acceleration away from entering the orbit of Farion, Kalcus’s smallest rock moon.”
“And why would we want to do that?”
“Yeah. Here’s the thing about Farion.” He pinch-zoomed the rough ball of rock. “About twenty years ago, Icarion bigwigs dropped a space station into orbit around that little rock. They called it Farion-X2.”
“I’ve never heard of—”
He held up a hand. “That’s the point. It was a black op. They built the sucker when Farion was on the long leg of its orbit, hidden behind Kalcus, and when Kalcus was hidden behind Cronus from Ada Prime. Unless your guys were really, really looking for it, they’d never see it. With Kalcus a nominal no-man’s-land between the two planets, they figured any routine sweeps your people did of the area they could skirmish off. And they set it up because of its orbital path.
“Every ten years–ish, Kalcus’s orbit takes it as close as it ever can to Ada Prime. Close on a cosmic scale, we’re still talking hundreds of millions of miles—but, anyway. The point is, they put the station out here to see if they could do a little eavesdropping when Kalcus got close. Didn’t cost ’em much, the station was all prefabbed, and the staff was paid crap for their trouble because they only shuttled out there once every ten years to have a listen. Nothing good ever came out of the project, so they abandoned it. But the station’s still there. Get it? Equipment, maybe even evac pods. It’s been sitting stale for hundreds of years now, but it’s the best shot we’ve got. I doubt even the Protocol hit it. Maybe some debris damage, if we’re unlucky, but it’s probably pristine, if powered down.”
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