Velocity Weapon

by Megan E O'Keefe

  Jules pulled her arm back. “Consider us saving your skin a bonus.”

  She cut the line and arched an eyebrow at Nox. “You want to go after Arden guns blazing, but we ain’t got no guns. How long do you think we’ll last against a well-armed team with just our stunners and our wit?”

  “Yeah. About that.” He caught the waitress’s eye. “Going round back.” She nodded.

  Out back, it turned out, was just a door in the back wall of the diner, dropping curls of blue paint and rust into a heap on the ground. Nox swiped his wristpad over the lock and it clicked, swinging open into a room that had to have been an illegal addition to the back end of the shop. He pulled a string for the lights, and Jules’s eyes lit up along with them.

  A single steel workbench sat in the center of the room, a stool tucked under it with the backside well worn. The walls had been converted to shelves—open-faced cabinets, really—each and every one crammed with mounted weapons. Rifles, pistols, modified stunners. Shit, Nox even had a small selection of high-end handblasters, the kind of stuff only the military got to use, and even then only on spaceships and up-station.

  “Where did you get all this?”

  He waved a hand and ushered her inside, shutting the door tight behind them. “Here and there. Doesn’t matter. Fact was, Harlan was a good enough boss, but when he ordered the switch to stunners, I moved my good stuff out. Didn’t want to rub him the wrong way. And I wanted access, you know, just in case.”

  “Just in case a higher-paying job came along, you mean.”

  “Don’t give me shit, Jules. You were having Arden fence that board out from under us.”

  “You in the killing trade?” she asked.

  He gave her a hard look. “You so sure you’re not?”

  “You’re an ass, Nox.”

  “Yeah, but I got great aim.”

  She picked up a handblaster and stroked the smooth, matte black side against her fingers. Nothing in her life had ever felt as solid as that object. It held the weight of her promise in its sleek body. She picked a holster to match and outfitted herself as Nox selected his own weapons.

  When they finished, she felt twenty pounds heavier. That weight gave her hope. Made her feel like she could affect the world, like it would bend to her now. That she was enough. She’d have to be. Arden and Lolla were counting on her.

  “Come on,” she said, holstering a final handblaster. “Let’s go get our nerds back.”

  CHAPTER 38

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3771

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  DAY THIRTY-EIGHT

  Tomas set to work overriding the cargo bay door as Sanda stepped outside the room, well aware Bero could see their warm blips of life moving through the station. Her helmet was heavier in her hands than it had any right to be.

  After all this time, she’d learned to trust Bero. To care for him, in a way. She’d thought he was her friend. But he’d been lying to her all along; she’d been his perfect little putz. It didn’t take her long to figure out why he’d scooped her. She was a gunnery sergeant, young for her post, likely to have had extensive training in many subjects, including basic electronics and systems repair. But she wasn’t specialized enough to pose any real threat to his lies.

  And, being of Ada Prime, she’d been quick to assume the AI meant her no harm, that talking to it was little different from talking to her house. But Icarion gave its AIs personalities. And personalities changed. Grew in dangerous ways. Could be real assholes sometimes.

  Her palms sweat in the gloves of her suit. He’d been so scared. So lonely. Reluctant to let her into his life, but eventually sharing pieces of himself. Showing her the woman who’d raised him—AnnLee Yu. Sanda wondered if AnnLee was out there, looking for her lost protégé with the same intensity Biran looked for her.

  With steady hands, she twisted on the helmet and locked in the lifepack. Diagnostics flared to life in her HUD, and she blinked against their bright glare.

  “Sanda? Sanda? What happened?” Bero’s voice ratcheted up higher than she’d ever heard it. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay. So’s Tomas.” She took a breath, preparing to feed the ship the story they’d concocted. “There was a signal jammer in there, small-range. Scrammed our systems but left the mechanics of the lifepack working.”

  Don’t worry, you mad bastard. We didn’t see anything you didn’t want us to.

  “I’m so glad you’re safe. You frightened me.”

  “Sorry about that. We were so intent on the switch panel we didn’t notice the HUDs had cut. Our alarms went dark, too, but local comms worked. Hell of a thing. Tomas is in there finishing up. He’ll be out in a sec, but once we realized what was going on, I knew I needed to race out here and tell you.”

  She prodded at her wristpad, pretending a normal diagnostic check, while she tensed all over, waiting to see if Bero bought their lie. When Tomas had fed the schematics of the station to Bero for their map, he’d failed to mention that window. It should be enough.

  “Can he override the cargo bay door on his own? If I could get a look at the system—”

  “No need, he’s got it worked out. We’ll be dining on canned pears tonight. No pods, though. But I shuffled through a couple more of the manifests and I’m sure we have enough supplies to make repairs to both. The foam’s going to be tough, but Tomas is sure there’s some equip in the lab that can transform the nutriblocks into a workable substitute.”

  “That sounds manageable.”

  The light on the door flicked to green, and she turned away, making certain her visor faced away from Tomas should he exit without his helmet. He clipped it on, and his comm channel lit up, a reassuring CEPKO in small caps on the top left of her HUD. Bero may be a right bastard, but at least she had someone on her side.

  “Hey, Bero,” Tomas called out, annoyingly chipper. “That door should come down in ten seconds—Sanda explain the jammer?”

  “She did. I have the arm in position.”

  Metal groaned. Even through the muffle of the helmet, she could hear the station complain as the cargo bay door was forced open, no doubt to never close again. The ground shuddered beneath her feet, vibrating her teeth. Tomas lost his footing and stumbled. She snapped out a hand, grabbed his, and held him steady. She twined her fingers in his. He squeezed.

  They left their hands in each other’s, below the register of Bero’s cameras, while Farion-X2 yelled metallic complaints.

  “How’s it look out there, Bero?” she asked.

  “The crates are spilling out at a steady rate, and I’m having no trouble catching them, but it will be a slow process. If you exit the station through the airlock you entered, you will be clear of any rogue debris.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” she said, and irritated herself with how unconvinced she sounded, even to her own ears. The last thing she wanted was to step foot back on Bero. The damned ship was a bomb waiting to go off, literally and figuratively. But Biran was out there, maybe even her dads, and now that she was certain what Bero was, what destruction he could wield, she was determined not to let him anywhere near her family, or her world.

  Even if that meant going with him, all the way to Atrux.

  “Is something wrong, Sanda?” Bero asked.

  “It just seems such a waste to abandon this station here,” she lied.

  “It is for the best,” Bero assured her.

  “You got that right.”

  Maybe Tomas sensed something in her tone, maybe he felt something through the tension in her hand, but when she tried to peel away from him, he held on a little longer, tugged her arm, pulled her around to look at him. They stared at each other’s helmets, not seeing one another’s faces, knowing Bero was probably growing impatient. He angled forward, shifted his weight, squeezed her hand a little harder. Something sat on the tip of his tongue, something he was struggling with, but couldn’t say. Wouldn’t be able to say, until they were off of Bero, and outside of his systems. If she ever
made it off of Bero.

  Under the circumstances, she was glad for his silence.

  She tugged her hand away and began the slow trek back to the belly of the beast.

  INTERLUDE: ALEXANDRA

  PRIME HAS NOT YET BECOME A STANDARD

  EARTH, THE MOMENT OF CHANGE

  Lex did not leave the Puerto Rican station for a year. It was, as the pundits reminded her through flashing white teeth or tastefully structured think pieces, the longest she’d stayed at any one facility since Prime had begun construction on its first space elevator. They never said first, though, that was her own little mental correction. They didn’t know about the second.

  Her very presence, she knew, strained the project. Speculation swirled about the facility’s importance, about what secret experiments Lex got up to behind the pristine lab walls. Weapons, viruses, biomechanical interfaces. Deathstars. Some even said Lex herself had died that day, the day she swept down to the Caribbean after a perfectly normal television junket. She chuckled, whenever poorly overdrawn videos of her speaking “revealed” the truth that she was some sort of CGI or cyborg.

  Some of the rumors were true, of course, but those were the closest to the fringe. The ignored and insane. But she browsed them, in her rare moments of downtime, curious to see who was closest. Curious, too, to see if there were any leaks in those pristine lab walls.

  Someone knocked at her bungalow door. Lex kicked her rolling chair back from her desk and stood, stretching long arms above her head. The tablet inset in her desktop revealed the face of Dr. Maria Salvez at her door, her lab coat slightly askew, dark half-moons throwing penumbral shadows beneath her eyes. Lex checked the time: 0200. Salvez had been working late into the night, but for her to visit before she went off shift was unprecedented.

  In her pajamas—silk-like tank top, loose-fit pants, shaggy slippers— Lex opened the door. Salvez did not so much as blink at her boss’s appearance. Most would grovel for the perceived slight of having wakened her. This was why she liked Salvez. No bullshit.

  “Come. It’s done. I have something to show you.”

  Lex shivered in the warm, tropical air. She’d taken up residence on the Prime compound on Caja de Muertos, her front door mere steps from the lab that sheltered her greatest prize. The thick air hung heavy on her shoulders as she stepped out, not bothering to find a robe or proper shoes. A storm, maybe, threatening in the distance. She hadn’t yet spent enough time outside on the island to grow in tune with the vagaries of its weather patterns. The only storm she cared about right now was the one inside her mind.

  It’s done.

  She crossed the plaza under the glare of security lights, Salvez leading the way with her determined, stalking gait. Outside the walls of the compound, the wood of palm trees groaned as they swayed under the winds. Leaves hissed against one another. But in the main building, silence, aside from the subtle rumble of the HVAC working overtime to keep the air cool and humidity down.

  A cupola had been erected in the heart of the building. Mirrors lined the curved dome of the ceiling, a silvery kaleidoscope hiding cameras and measurement devices. If the newscasters had asked her about this, she would have winked and made a crack about it being some sort of inverse disco ball, shining down on the real party below. But they’d never see this.

  This wasn’t for them. It wasn’t even for her. In the grand scheme of things, nothing was, for in the grand scheme of things all accomplishments were smeared into so much meaningless space dust.

  That was what she told herself as her heart ramped its pace with every step she took closer to the balcony lining the interior of the cupola about three stories up. This was a facsimile, a test run. A gambit to see if the directions of the sphere could even be followed and produce something meaningful. A scale model, one-thousandth of its real size. Nonfunctional.

  She also told herself that, even if this worked, the course of history might not change. Humanity would still be ground to nothing by the inevitable march of time.

  She told herself a lot of things. Her palms still sweat as she gripped the rail.

  Two rings, one larger than the other, took up the whole of the space. They arched from floor to ceiling, their widest points pushing at the edges of the space as if desiring to stretch, to swallow the building whole. Slender as they were, the dark materials that made their body sucked up the light in the room, promised space beyond the mere dimensions of mortal eyes. It dwarfed the Prime scientists who swarmed at the base, their white coats giving the illusion of stars against the black metal.

  If it were powered appropriately, the rings would spin in opposite directions, swooping through each other, building the strength to punch through space, and, by definition, time.

  She did not understand it. None of them understood it. Looking at the math involved was like presenting a differential equation to a toddler and asking them to explain. But the directions to build had been simple enough, and the location—the location was, according to the sphere, the key to the whole thing.

  Real, real, real. Oh, it didn’t work, but that was besides the point. It would work when built to its full size. She knew the moment she laid eyes on it. Everything the sphere promised—a bridge between worlds—was real.

  “Do you think it will work?” Salvez asked. Her hands were in her pockets, her gaze sizing up the beautiful monster skeptically.

  “I can’t know,” she said, that old instinct for rationalism kicking in her chest.

  “Lex.” Maria said her name with a slight drag, a husky intonation that peeled her gaze away from the model. “What do you think?”

  She licked her lips, staring into those whirlpool dark eyes. “I think we have to find out.”

  And with those words, plans set into motion in her mind. Fractions of possibilities spilling out one into the next, ideas bubbling up and being shot down for better, stronger plans.

  First: She would have to move. This compound had drawn too much attention, she’d lingered too long. All the old ways of keeping secrets wouldn’t do anymore, not with a secret like this. She’d have to figure out something else, something new, to keep her people—and their data—safe from the grasping hands of this world.

  Implications spun like orbital lines through her mind, slingshotting off one another, leading to conclusions and insights that took her breath away. It was too much for one woman to carry. She knew that as surely as she knew, but would not speak aloud, that the thing they had found was real.

  That it would change everything.

  CHAPTER 39

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  THIRTY-NINE DAYS OF LIES

  They spent the next day working in six-hour shifts, breaking only to eat and strategize. A pall hung over them both, and Bero was oddly quiet—only offering suggestions when they seemed confused by the contents of the crates. Sanda suspected Tomas knew what each one held, but he was doing an excellent job of feigning surprise.

  The whole time she worked, a subtle headache nagged at her, a dull echo to the down tempo of her thoughts. Tomas was right. If he hadn’t given her Biran’s voice, she would never have believed him. And a sliver of her still wanted to deny what he’d revealed. It rankled, to have been taken hostage by a spaceship of all things. It rankled even more to know she’d found a friend in her captor.

  “I don’t know about you,” Tomas said, and stretched languidly upward, “but I’m done for the night. My brain’s stuffed full.”

  The carcass of her evac pod lay before them on a clear space they’d finagled on the floor of the cargo bay. Tomas’s tests regarding the foams seemed to work. She eyed the aerator they’d modified to accept the new substance, and the catalyst dispenser that was meant to harden it around the body shoved inside. She wasn’t sure they’d gotten the coma-inducing med mix right, and she didn’t relish finding out the hard way.

  Not that she had any intention of getting in that pod unless she absolutely had to.

  “It’s a good start,” she agreed, wip
ing grease onto her FitFlex-suited thigh. The smartfibers went to work breaking it down, and already the grease was faded. “Bero, how long until you’re in position to begin the gravity assist?”

  Tomas shot her a look, but she ignored him. It was a reasonable enough question to ask, and she wanted a rough idea of how long Biran had to find her.

  “Forty-seven hours.”

  Two days. And they were well inside Icarion space. Her stomach clenched. Just because he knew where she was didn’t guarantee he’d reach them in time. Once Bero completed his burn through the gravity assist, his ramjet would kick into gear. Nothing in Ada Prime’s fleet could catch a ship at any substantial fraction of the speed of light, let alone 8 percent. She needed contingency plans, but she couldn’t even try to talk to Tomas without risking tipping off Bero.

  “Can’t wait to get out of this ghost town,” she said.

  “It will take weeks to exit the system.”

  “Hey, just being on our way is a relief.”

  “Agreed.”

  While she chatted with Bero, Tomas helped her secure their tools. He’d rolled the sleeves of his jumpsuit up, and grease streaked his forearms there, making dark tracks she felt the sudden desire to trace with her fingertips.

  Dios. She ducked her head down to hide the heat in her cheeks. The strength of his hand in hers, that brief hesitation before they’d left the station. Even the feel of his chest pressed to hers while she fought for her life raised rather uncomfortable images in her head. Well, not uncomfortable, unless he was quite a bit less flexible than she’d guessed.

  “Sanda?” Tomas asked.

  She started, realizing she’d been rubbing at a grease smear on the side of the pod for a good couple of minutes, and it had long been reduced to a faint, pearly sheen.

  “Yeah? Sorry. Zoned out. I’ve got this… ache, in my head.” Among other things, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. If Biran didn’t find them in time, she might have to shove him in this pod and jettison him, for fuck’s sake. And he’d been hired to find her, to make sure she was safe. For all she knew, his friendship had been a part of his plan.