Velocity Weapon

by Megan E O'Keefe

  Next to the globes rested two long cylinders with LIFEPACK engraved on their sides. Those sparked an idea.

  “Hey,” she said, mouth splitting in the widest yawn she’d ever had. “I think we’re dying.”

  “Huh.” Tomas pushed off the ceiling and drifted close to her, still upside down. “We should put those on.”

  She didn’t see why not, so she grabbed the packs and the helmets and got hers on, then helped Tomas into his. They looked silly, but she remembered in a vague way that the little girl who won the goldfish had an accident bringing him home.

  The bag she’d won him in sprung a leak, and Sanda recalled those images with stark clarity: the girl running down the lane, tears springing from her eyes, the little fish fighting for its life, flopping around, until she dumped it into the bowl full of water just in time.

  If you’re dying, Sanda’s stuttering mind reasoned, bowls like these are probably the thing to use. By the time she screwed Tomas’s on and plugged him into the pack, clarity was seeping back into her mind.

  She wanted to weep with relief, realizing how close she had come to a fumbling, confused death. Forcing herself to take a breath of the perfect air mix hissing in through the lifepack, she grabbed Tomas by the shoulders and gave him a shake. His eyes were glazed, but he blinked them clear.

  “We gotta get out of here,” he said over the comm line.

  “Where?” she demanded, and he gave her a noncommittal shrug.

  “I don’t know, but Bero’s hooked up to these, too. It’s just a matter of time.”

  Bero could hear them. See whatever they saw. Edit it, too, if it came to that. She knew damned well that’s what he did to her, every time she’d glanced Ada’s way.

  This must have been the same way he’d herded the original crew out: messing with the air, pushing them toward ’locks as a last resort. Probably they thought they could pressurize the ’lock, jam the system’s doors, and wait for rescue. She’d seen how that plan worked out, and she wasn’t about to repeat it.

  Her O2 meter flashed green, but she didn’t trust it for a hot minute. Tomas drifted aimlessly beside her, his eyes going glassy again. Bero’d always been pretty clear he’d be pleased as punch to off Tomas and keep Sanda along for the ride to Atrux.

  “Shit.”

  She grabbed Tomas’s good arm and pushed off the wall at an awkward angle, sweating in her suit as she rocketed down the hallway, lugging the big Nazca bastard along behind her. He hadn’t seemed half so heavy when she’d been pushing him around in the sheets. But she’d had her full breath then—or most of it, anyway.

  “I know you can hear me,” she said as she angled them down the ladder chute to the command deck, wincing every time she bumped Tomas against the wall. “I don’t blame you for kicking your old crew out. They made you do a terrible thing, they cost a lot of lives. But Tomas doesn’t mean you or anyone else harm.”

  “He was going to hit me.”

  That damned spanner. Stupid man. “He was scared. He thought he needed to defend himself. You understand being scared, don’t you?”

  Tomas’s head lolled in the helmet. She clenched her jaw. Wanted to scream at the stupid fucking ship to give the man his air back already. But Bero wasn’t a ship, not wholly. What he was, deep down, was a scared kid with way too much responsibility on his shoulders.

  She pivoted in the command deck, using the handles to drag herself and Tomas to the cargo bay. Everything was right where they’d left it: Grippy lingering near the door, inventoried supplies locked down on mag pallets, and the repaired evac pod with its lid hauled back, interior gleaming. There was no way she could get Tomas there in time. She only had one shot at this.

  “You know where I am, Bero?”

  “The cargo bay.”

  “That’s right,” she said, and popped her helmet off. The high CO2 hit her instantly, now that she knew what was waiting for her. She couldn’t smell it, but she imagined it dribbling into her already overtaxed respiratory system, singing her neural cells a hypnotic lullaby. Before she could lose focus, she popped Tomas’s helmet off, too. She told herself that Bero wouldn’t kill her, that he’d just wanted to addle her until he could escape, so having Tomas breathe the same mix as her was her best shot at getting them to safety. She really hoped she was right.

  “Put your helmet back on!” Bero yelled.

  “No chance, Big B. If you’re going to gas Tomas, you’re going to gas me, too. I’ll make you a deal, though. You bring the mix back up. Soon as Tomas here looks stable, I’ll pop him in the evac pod and send him back to Icarion. They can ask him all the questions they want while you and I burn for Atrux.”

  “Why would you do that?” His tone was wary, distrustful. She couldn’t blame him.

  “I could tell you a lot of reasons you wouldn’t believe, but…” She looked down at Tomas’s rolling head, his greying lips, and sighed. “At the end of the day, it’s just a trade I’m willing to make. And count on this—I don’t want you in Icarion’s hands any more than you do. Those simulations you showed me. You may have been lying that they’d happened already, but those were legit projections. I know… I know you don’t want to be that weapon. I know you don’t want to be responsible for the destruction of life in an entire star system. And if my staying stops that reality from happening, then it’s worth everything.”

  She tried to hold her breath, but ended up taking tiny sips of not-air while Bero thought over what she had to say. It really was all she had, too. She didn’t have Tomas’s spycraft, or Bero’s willingness to deceive. She wanted Tomas to live. She didn’t want Bero to return to Icarion hands. It was as simple as that. Except, not really, but that’s what she was willing to tell herself for the time being.

  The evac pod was up on straps, suspended toward the back of the hold, dead in its vertical center. Taunting her. She tried not to stare at it too hard, told herself to be still while Bero made his decision. If she forced herself to push for the pod now, her body would burn through the thin air she had left from exertion. She’d never make it, and then they’d both be unconscious.

  Air vents hissed as Bero adjusted the mix, and she almost laughed with giddy relief. Without mag boots, she had to push off the locked-in crates to drift them closer to the pod. Nothing stood between the pod and the door behind it. Tomas would have a clean ride as soon as the lid snapped down and disengaged the straps.

  He stirred in her arms, gasping hard to clear the poison that’d settled in his lungs. CO2 was damned near impossible to vent out of a body in low-g scenarios, but the foam in the pod would do the rest of the work, adjusting his blood ox to optimum levels. One eye fluttered, then the other. Beneath her fingers, the thready pulse that’d been thumping through his wrist grew stronger, stabilized. Time to cut him loose.

  Gripping the edge of the pod’s cradle, she twisted to maneuver him into it and had to pull the strap across his chest and limbs to keep his bits from getting severed by the pod lid’s collapse. They hadn’t set it up for override yet, so the only way to trigger the lid was to give the thing an emergency situation. Blowing the cargo door should do the trick.

  “Got a question for you, Bero. Were you ever going to tell me? If we reached Atrux, I would have found out eventually.”

  “I hadn’t thought that far in advance.”

  She didn’t believe him. Not for a second. Big brain like Bero’s, he had to have filtered through all the possibilities. He’d chosen Atrux for a reason—not just its proximity—and it was a reason he didn’t want to share.

  Her skin, clammy from sweat, crawled beneath the tight fit of her suit. Maybe he hadn’t expected her to survive that long. It wasn’t an unreasonable solution to arrive at, especially now that she was sacrificing her best evac pod to get Tomas off the ship.

  As she watched the color bleed back into his lips, felt the chill fade from his forehead, she thought of all she’d seen in the lab. All those surgical instruments. All that research. Bero’d had access to all of it;
no scrap of information was hidden from him on this ship. Here was a treasure trove of research, deep insight into what the Icarions knew about Keeper technology. She’d wasted so much time, assuming it was all meaningless.

  Tomas stirred, murmured her name, but couldn’t quite get his eyes open. She was past time for leaving. Past time for blowing Tomas out the bay and returning to Bero’s interior. Her state-of-the-art mausoleum. At least she’d gotten to hear Biran’s voice one last time.

  “Fuck it,” she said, and jumped into the evac pod alongside Tomas.

  “What are you doing?” Bero demanded.

  “Surviving.”

  She grabbed the spanner shoved in Tomas’s belt and held it up, whistling. “Grippy! Grippy!”

  The little bot perked, head lifting as its camera and sonar worked in concert to find her voice. Soon as he sighted her, she shook the spanner. “Fetch!”

  She hurled it at the door controls. In low-g, the spanner windmilled end-over-end with ease, not arcing, not twisting. Her aim was true. Grippy’s mag-treads drove him forward. He snagged the spanner from the air, his arm clanging against the release panel.

  The last thing she heard was two cheery beeps of victory before the air rushed out and the evac pod’s lid crashed down.

  CHAPTER 44

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  HOURS AWAY

  Biran did not sleep. His body screamed at him every hour he stretched his limits, but between stimpacks and a never-ending supply of coffee, Biran pushed through the jitters. Through the headaches. Crew rotated through shifts on the bridge and still Biran did not peel his gaze from the forward viewscreen, a constant display of The Light and the Empedocles, and the distance between them, visible in the lower left corner. They’d make it, he told himself, even as those two Icarion ships drew closer and closer together. They’d get there first.

  “Status report,” Lavaux demanded.

  He hadn’t left his captain’s chair, either, and though Biran never saw the man take a sip of coffee, he suspected the water the crew brought him was loaded with stimulants. Let the man do what he needed to do. As long as his mind was clear, Biran wouldn’t judge. He was strung out to the limits himself.

  Pilli, having rotated back through to the navigation console after an appropriate rest, made a frustrated sound. “That ship is jumping all over the damned map,” she snarled, as if the inconsistent movement of The Light were a personal affront.

  “What do you mean jumping?” Lavaux snapped. Stimulants made even the calmest men short-tempered.

  “Exactly what I said, sir, which isn’t possible. Ships don’t judder around like this. And every time the damned thing moves, I have to replot the course. At these speeds we can’t afford to be even a little off. We’d either blow right by it, or into it, neither of which would help us capture the thing.”

  Biran could practically hear her gritting her teeth. “Is the satellite feed corrupt?”

  “I think so, but there’s no way Icarion would know to send us bad data. Empedocles doesn’t know we’re coming, and neither does The Light, as far as I know. My back doors are flawless. No one should know I’m skimming their systems.”

  “The Light is a clever ship, if my reports are to be believed,” Lavaux said. “It may obscure its position on purpose.”

  “I don’t think it can. It’d need a direct back door into the satellites, and begging your pardon, sir, but these are old feeds. If the ship even knows about them, I don’t think it would have access.”

  “You do,” Biran countered.

  Pilli snorted. “I’ve spent my life getting eyes on this solar system. That ship’s got nothing on me.”

  Biran smiled to himself, glancing over his shoulder to seek out Anaia, who’d also spent her whole life finding back doors into satellites to keep a wary eye on the movement of the stars. She wasn’t there. Sometime during the chase, she’d left her position in one of the empty chairs at the forward console, her lidded mug of coffee left to go cold in the cup holder of the chair’s arm, a streak of her bright lipstick all the evidence she had ever been there.

  A sinking sensation worked its way into his mind. Strange, that she should leave the bridge at such a critical moment. But it wasn’t really a moment, was it? It had been hours of chase, crawling through the empty black of space—never mind they were burning at the ship’s max speed. Maybe she had gone to take a rest.

  Maybe.

  Something about that mug needled at him. It wasn’t the kind of thing Anaia would leave behind. She’d always been conscientious about the rules of space travel, and you didn’t leave a container of liquid unattended, even if it had a lid.

  Biran got up and reached his arms above his head, stretching from side to side. Joints creaked and popped as he moved them fully for the first time in hours. He picked up the coffee mug and turned it around in his hand to look at the lipstick smear as if he could divine answers from it. He couldn’t.

  “Everything all right, Speaker?” Lavaux asked without taking his gaze from the data readout in front of him.

  “Going to stretch my legs.”

  Lavaux nodded at him, distracted by the immediate problem, and Biran stepped out into the hall, pinging his wristpad to query where Anaia’s room was. Not too far from his own. He hadn’t even been there since he’d been on board. His luggage was still stored in the cargo net on the bridge.

  Biran knocked once and swiped his wristpad over Anaia’s door scanner to announce his presence—forgetting that his new status as Speaker made it so his wristpad was able to override most locks, even those on Lavaux’s ship, as the security system had been, by necessity, outfitted by the Keepers.

  The door dilated instantly. Anaia had been sitting at her desk with her back to the door, a laptop propped open in front of her. At the swish of the door, she let out a startled squeak and jumped, knocking her chair back. Just far enough for Biran to make out the screen of the laptop.

  Video feed of The Light, split-screened with a stream of data. Not just data. Commands. He knew the look of her command window from watching her manipulate the satellites into showing him the location of the green light in the rubble field. Only her feed wasn’t jittery. On Anaia’s screen, The Light was perfectly still, traveling in a straight line.

  “Biran!” She slammed the laptop closed and spun around to face him, cheeks deep red. “Didn’t anyone teach you to knock?”

  He stepped into the room and put her mug down on the nightstand, struggling to process what he’d seen. What his gut was screaming at him was true, but his brain hadn’t caught up to yet.

  “What the hell are you doing, Anaia?”

  She licked her lips and darted a glance at the laptop. “Trying to get my own eyes on things.”

  “Bullshit. Your feed was still.”

  She tensed, fingers curling under the arm of her chair. “I’ve been working on some stabilizing algorithms.”

  “Show me.”

  They stared at each other, neither wanting to break the fragile peace they were in. Dios, how long had he known Anaia? Since they passed their aptitude tests, at least. Since they were barely ten years old. There’d never been a lot of room in Biran’s life for other people—his family and his education to become a Keeper had filled almost every moment.

  But in the cracks? Those times when he let himself just be, let himself have friends and do stupid things like get shit-faced in zero-g or play card games he hardly knew the rules to with the rest of his cohort? She’d been there. Anaia’d always been there. And not just because they were in the same year. Because, somehow, early on, they’d realized they could just be around each other.

  She was the only friend he’d ever had.

  And so maybe he’d never really had a friend at all.

  Biran brought up his wristpad and hit the button for the ship’s AI. “Tell Lavaux—”

  Anaia slammed into him. He never saw her coming. His back slapped the door, head slamming into the thin metal. His ears rang a
nd then he realized he was on the ground, sprawled, arms flung out, and Anaia was gone, her laptop was gone, and her footsteps were thundering down the hallway at a dead sprint.

  Biran groaned and rolled to his side, fumbling at his wristpad until he got the AI to pipe him directly into the bridge.

  “Lavaux—”

  “We’re busy,” he said. “The feed cleared up.”

  “It’s Anaia. Keeper Lionetti. She hacked the satellites and is running for the shuttles. Lock us down. Lock everything down.”

  Sirens blared through the rooms, echoed down the halls, red lights flashing in brilliant strobes that painted sunset colors against the walls. Biran grunted and pushed to his feet, cutting the line to Lavaux. He stumbled out into the hall, bracing one hand against the doorframe, and oriented himself. She’d struck him hard in the head, an expert hit—when in the hell had she learned to do that?—before taking off, so it took a second for him to shake the fuzz from his thoughts.

  Once his vision stopped swimming, he sprinted after her, launching himself with everything he had toward the bay where the shuttles were housed. He would not let her get off this ship. Would not let her escape. Would not let her leave without answering for what she had done.

  Panting hard, he caught sight of her shadow—just a sliver—twisting around a corner. Biran slapped a hand against a wall to steady himself and spun around after her. At the end of the hall the door to the shuttle bay stood shut—locked. The red lights of the alarms painted Anaia’s skin in shades of watered-down blood, her laptop shoved under one arm, as she frantically tried to convince the lock on the door to let her through.

  “Anaia!”

  She turned, eyes huge, and for a breath guilt stung his heart—a thread of doubt wanting him to believe that there was some other explanation for what she’d done. But those wide eyes narrowed, her lips curled in a snarl, and reality came crashing back down on his shoulders. Down the hall, the march of Lavaux’s security personnel echoed.