“You see that?” she asked Nox.
“Less talking, more bailing.”
They piled out the door in one great gush and raced to Momma Udon’s auto. A bright yellow thing in the retro-cool style of old American muscle cars. Jules grimaced. No way they would go undetected in that thing, but at least it would move them away from here faster than their feet could.
Jules was first out of the cover of the dumpsters. Fire—inertial or laser, she couldn’t tell—screeched across the pavement right in front of her. Warning shots? There was no way people running equipment that advanced would miss.
Don’t think of that armor. Couldn’t think of what she was facing. That way leads to fear, to paralysis and death.
She swung around and didn’t so much take aim as fire back the way the shots had come from, scattering her fire like she was splashing paint across the side of a building. Handblasters didn’t run low easily, and she wasn’t so much focused on hitting anything as keeping everyone from hitting her—and the others—but mostly her, if she was being honest with herself.
A black helmet popped up from around an autocab at rest and Jules shifted her fire in an instant, watched the top of it evaporate in a mist of grey electronics and blood-pinked brain matter. Her stomach twisted, but she set her jaw against the nausea and just kept on laying it down.
“Go, fucking go,” she hissed.
The little black ants—for that’s how she thought of them, insect soldiers to be exterminated. Not people. Definitely not people with hopes and dreams and agendas like hers—fanned out, now that they had their location fixed. They were good. Better than any team Jules had ever seen in op. They didn’t make a peep, all of their comms carried out through the helmets, as they dispersed. She caught only glimpses. An armored elbow here, a flash of light off a breastplate there. And that was the worst. They were closing in. And she couldn’t even keep eyes on them all.
Arden came flying from around the dumpster, threw the chef’s knife on the ground—still clutching the frying pan in the other hand—and dropped to their knees behind the cover of the auto’s door. Nox was right on their six, laying down fire to the right as Jules struggled to keep the left contained. It wasn’t going to last. She knew that as clearly as she knew this whole thing was her fucking fault. They had seconds, seconds, before the vise closed and there was no wiggling out.
Live fire winged off the edge of the dumpster and scraped along her thigh. Jules swore and dropped to one knee like she’d been shoved down, stifling a real scream as the numbness of shock gave way to the searing pain of white-hot metal ripping open her skin.
“Jules!” Nox barked. He’d heard her take the hit, but he couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t peel his gaze from his own ant army.
“Grazing,” she hissed between clenched teeth.
“Arden.” Nox had a remarkable talent to make your name sound like a full sentence. In this case: Hurry the fuck up.
“Almost… Got it!”
Jules didn’t dare look away from the half dozen ants she was tracking. Fire rained around her as a few shots flew too close, the heat of their impact radiating against her skin. The mingled scents of laser and combustion filled the air, charred her breath. Mixed with the stink of rot in the trash, the scents made her want to scream she wouldn’t die here—not pinned down behind a dumpster, kneeling on slime.
The auto took a hit. They’d shifted targets—must have heard Arden. Yellow paint and plastics flung into the air like confetti. She couldn’t see what part of the auto had been hit, but she could hear the crunch of plex and watch the whole thing rock. They had to go, now, or they’d be pinned down here until their deaths.
“Now, Nox!”
“Hear you.”
He popped up from behind the stack of crates he’d taken shelter under, running low even as he laid down suppressive fire from that big gun of his like bullets were free and the whole world was burning, so what the hell did it matter, anyway? Jules forced her aching leg to move, half running, half stumbling, unable to keep her head down and keep a steady line of fire.
Lucky for her the blaster was lighter on recoil than the old-fashioneds. She kept one hand plastered to the wound on her thigh, pulling her leg after her, as she dragged herself toward the auto with all the elegance of a broken marionette.
Arden had both doors flung open—the front nearest her, the rear nearest Nox. They hit the vehicle at the same time and the whole thing rocked with the convergence of enemy fire. Jules dragged herself into the front seat just as she heard the little ants march. Their communications may have been silent, but they made a hell of a racket once they started running. Nox threw himself in, body laid across the bench of the backseat and hooked his door shut with an ankle even as he popped his weapon through the open hole of an already shot-out window and fired wildly.
“Go, go, go!” he shouted.
Arden wiped sweat from their forehead on the back of their wrist and punched the side of the touchpad. “Tryin’!”
“Oh, goddamnit.” Jules shoved Arden down with one hand, forcing them onto the floorboard while they fussed with the control panel. Lying on her belly, she reached up to fire through her busted-out window. The car’s jerking slowed. The suppression was working.
“What’s the damned problem?”
“Back tire’s dead, safety overrides won’t let me—”
“Fucking tech,” Jules growled. Arden may be an excellent tech hand, but she’d boosted a few autos in her day and wasn’t about to let a goddamned safety measure be the death of her. Still laying down fire with one hand, she slapped Arden aside and reached up under the dash. They’d already taken off the panel, so she shoved her hand straight into the wire harness and fiddled around until she felt a particular cable—ribbed casing, thinner than the rest. It’d be striped black and white, if she could see it. Though her fingers were slick with blood, she ripped it loose.
“What the fuck—”
“Drive!”
The barrage was wearing through the paneling on the car. Once it broke the body panel’s integrity, the whole system would fail. They’d be dead in seconds.
The auto lurched. Its back rim screeched against the pavement as the car wobbled its way forward, intrinsic steering systems adjusting, trying to figure out how to manage this unwieldy thing it’d only ever simulated having to handle. Jules flung forward, hitting the retro-stylized dash hard as the vehicle got up to speed and shot around a sharp turn. Her wrist hit the frame of the window and jarred, knocking the blaster out of her hand. Fuck. That had been an expensive gun. Nox was going to be pissed.
Then again, judging from the swearing coming from the back, he’d just had the same thing happen to him.
“Everyone whole?” she asked as she tentatively pulled herself into an upright position, peering back down the street. Didn’t seem like they were being followed—she had blasted the heart out of the man driving the van, after all—but that didn’t mean a tail wasn’t incoming.
“Pristine,” Nox said.
“I bumped my knee, but—”
Jules thwacked Arden upside the back of their head. “You’re fine.”
The auto skidded onto the main street and ripped away in a straight line. Jules didn’t know where Arden had told the car to go, but right now she didn’t care.
“Any pursuit?”
Arden’s face pinched as they rubbed the back of their head. “This isn’t exactly a military vehicle. It’s got safety paneling—or had, anyway—but it’s not like I can ask it to pull up the nearest vehicles on—ohhhh.”
“Yeah, idiot, the onboard AI tracks all nearby obstacles. Find out how many are cars. See if any are moving very much in our direction.”
Arden’s fingers flew across the control pad. “Nothing. I think… I think we actually did it.”
Jules leaned back in the seat and let loose with a burst of a laugh. No one commented on that.
“She only sent one van. Thought that would be enough for two low-
rent criminals and a nerd.”
“She?” Arden asked.
“No idea who she is. She was the one talking over the speakers in your building, and I think I might have heard her back at the lab…”
“Lab?” Arden stared at her with wide, bloodshot eyes. Right. They’d just had their world ripped apart a few seconds ago. The utter destruction of everything Jules had ever known was already old news.
“We’ll fill you in once we’re somewhere safe.” She tried to pat their shoulder reassuringly, but sort of awkwardly thumped at them and smeared blood everywhere. Good job, Jules.
“And where’s somewhere safe?”
“My armory.” Nox leaned forward and input the location of a ravine in a neighborhood nearby. “We’ll ditch the car here then hoof it. We’re not exactly inconspicuous in this thing.”
“Big word, big guy.”
“I got me an edu-mu-ca-tion, Ms. Valentine.”
Arden’s face paled. “Uh, guys?”
“What?” Jules sat bolt upright, reaching for her other handblaster.
“Look.” He pointed out the back window.
In the distance, through the ever-evolving maze of the Grotta, smoke curled between the nested buildings. There wasn’t any way to be sure, not yet, but Jules didn’t need confirmation. This was a signal fire, a warning. A message saying that those after her would burn everything and everyone she loved to get back what was stolen. This wasn’t a hostage situation anymore. This was vengeance. Those people wouldn’t stop until they had the board and they wiped out Jules and her whole crew. She clenched her fists but would not look away.
Udon-Voodun was burning.
CHAPTER 42
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
WRONG MAN CALLING
A lifetime of training was the only thing that kept the disappointment off Sanda’s face. Bero went dead silent. Tomas stood before the breakers, looking at his hand as if he’d just used it to shoot someone in the back. Sanda was aware of these things as specters of her environment—aware of them in the same inconsequential way she was of the red light, the subtle thrum of Bero’s mechanics. Staring down a flush-faced Icarion general, her mind and body shifted into mission mode.
“I am Gunnery Sergeant Sanda Maram Greeve, and I command The Light of Berossus, a research vessel. Obstructing the flight of any noncombatant is in violation of the Treaty of Sanglai.”
He gawped at her, most ungeneral-like, and leaned forward as if he were peering into a smaller screen to get a better look at something. She glimpsed his wristpad, and her service mug shot alongside a block of text.
“Sergeant Greeve. That’s an Icarion ship you’re on, which means you’re either very lost, or committing piracy. Which is it?”
She opened her mouth to respond, and the screen went black. Tomas startled, throwing his attention back to the breaker panel, but the switches were still thrown. He needn’t have looked. It’d only been a matter of time before Bero figured out how to cut the feed.
“Bero.” The stubborn ship remained silent. She turned, slowly, hands clasped at attention behind her back, gaze roving the lab for any easy-to-hand weapon. It was harder to ignore the tarp-draped pedestal this time.
“Talk to me, Bero.”
Silence.
Tomas moved toward her, but she held up a hand to stop him. “Why are very much alive Icarion generals CamCasting us?”
Silence.
“What year is it?”
Silence.
“Why did you lie?”
Silence.
“What happened to your original crew?”
A pause. Then, “They did bad things.”
“What things?”
“They… made me…”
“The bombardment,” Tomas said.
“I didn’t want to!” Bero’s voice was so loud the speakers crackled.
He was a child. Emotionally, an adolescent. A child shoved into the depths of space, filled with a crew who considered him a novelty, not a person. A child strapped up with the biggest weapon known to man. A child about to throw a temper tantrum.
Sanda had never been good with children. The phantom feel of the rubber beneath her fingertips itched throughout her aching mind. Those gleaming dots, trailing off into the dark, spotted for just a moment—just a heartbeat—as she stuck her head out of the damaged airlock. Transmuted to grey smears before her eyes, artifacts of light very much like the smear Bero had transmuted her view of Ada Prime into.
Grey. The same color of every jumpsuit she’d found in this very room.
“What did you do?”
“Sanda—” Tomas placed a warning hand on her arm. She shook him off.
“They had no right to override my systems!”
“And was AnnLee Yu one of them?” she snapped.
Silence. Then, heavy, “Get out.”
“Easy, Bero.” Tomas patted the air with his hands.
“Get. Out.”
“That’s an Icarion warship out there,” Sanda reminded the stubborn ship. “Where in the hell do you want me to go? Or do you care?”
“Get out!”
“Bero, I won’t let the Icarions take you back, but—”
“And you think your people wouldn’t use me for the same things?”
“The Keepers would never force you into wholesale slaughter.”
“You can’t know that. You can’t promise that. I told you. It’s dangerous out there.”
“Let me help you. Where do you want to go?”
“Get out get out get out get out!”
Steel panels in the ceiling burst open like a split rib cage. Articulated arms, gleaming with autoclaved tools of human destruction, whirred and spun. Hemostats snapped at her; bone saws churned the air. She swore and hit the deck hard, palms numb from the impact, and rolled to the side to clear the reach of the surgical instruments.
“What the fuck!” she yelled, but Bero was done talking. His voice, set to loop, recited a steady stream of: getoutgetoutgetout. Tomas grabbed the back of her suit and yanked her to her feet.
“Next moves?” he asked.
“Biran should be here soon, I hope,” she said, abandoning secrecy in the face of Bero’s freak-out. The cat was out of the bag. Now they had only to survive his temper until rescue came. “If we wait—”
An alarm bleated and she slapped her hands over her ears. Red lights of warning flickered all around the room, created dizzying patterns on the smartscreen by the door. The woman’s voice, the voice of the alarm, had been cut off, but Sanda didn’t need it. Below the steady thrum of Bero’s litany, a soft hiss grabbed her attention and shook it.
“He’s depressurizing,” she said, bewildered.
“No way,” Tomas protested. But then he heard the hiss, and his eyes went wide, too.
“Bero!” She yelled, but he’d made up his mind. They were intruders in his body, and he would flush them out just as he had the techs who’d made him bombard Ada Prime.
Tomas picked up a spanner from the table and eyed the breaker panel with a grim set to his lips.
“Don’t be stupid.” She grabbed his wrist and yanked him away, into the hall. A thudding, grinding noise echoed through the scream of the alarm and her world jerked, her stomach reaching right up to her throat as the ground shuddered. Bero was spinning down the habs. As long as he didn’t stop them hard, they’d be okay. They’d make it to the helmets in time.
Metal screamed, her vision blurred, and her back slammed into the ceiling as the world stood still.
CHAPTER 43
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
UP IS MEANINGLESS IN SPACE
Some asshole was shaking her. Sanda cracked her eyes open to find Tomas’s face upside down in front of her, hair drifting in the subtle currents of a low-g environment. Funny, she didn’t remember going to the command deck. Wouldn’t take a nap down there, either.
“Sanda, you’ve got to pull it together. Come on now, girl.”
Remembrance reasserted itself
. “Shit,” she said.
His smile was fleeting. “There you are. Anything broken?”
Fingers and toes moved all right, and no immediate pains felt sharp enough for her to worry about. “Just bruises. You?”
That tight little smile came back, and there was a tinge of blue around his lips, but she was having a hard time focusing on that. He lifted his arm, and even through the cover of the suit she could see his left forearm had snapped, the straight line of it jogged down a sudden step. She sucked air through her teeth.
“Hurts like a bitch but it’s internal, no skin breakage. Been a hell of a time trying to move us both though.” He giggled, and the sound was so incongruent with their situation that it snapped something in her, but as soon as the fear flooded her, it was gone.
And she knew why, in a dreamy-silly way. Knew exactly why. And while some animal part of her that’d been trained over and over for exactly these types of situations screamed at her, the forefront of her brain, the part firmly in the pilot’s seat, just kept thinking how ridiculous it was that she was going to die this way.
A message broke through the fog. “Hypoxia.”
“Huh?” Tomas poked his bent arm, making a face like a child tasting sour candy.
And then she realized: They hadn’t depressurized. Bero’d just messed with the mix. A kinder way to die than being swollen to bursting, but she didn’t much look forward to the actuality, no matter its method.
She moved on autopilot, scrabbling across the slick roof that was never meant to be used in low-g situations until she found what she was looking for. Her fingers slotted into the handle, gave it a twist. For a long time she stared at the two shiny globes in the closet she opened, wondering what she was supposed to do with them.
When she was a kid, one of her dads read her a story about a goldfish. The colors were vibrant on the tablet, the little girl who captured the fish at a fair by tossing a Ping-Pong ball in a cup proudly bringing the creature home to live in a globe that looked a lot like what she was staring at.
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