“Open this door,” she demanded.
“Like hell.” He took a step forward and she pressed her back against the door, clutching the laptop to her chest. “Why, Anaia? Why keep us from chasing The Light? Why keep me from saving my sister?!”
“I’m sorry,” she said, voice catching. “I didn’t mean for Sanda to get tangled up in this—I was just doing my job.”
“Job? What job?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Lavaux said from behind him.
Biran flinched at the voice, stepping aside as Lavaux approached, four security guards surrounding him, bearing down upon Anaia. Biran had to press his back against the wall as they moved around him and cornered Anaia, taking her laptop in the same motion they clasped her wrists in electronic cuffs.
“She’s a spy,” Lavaux said with a sliver of respect. “A rather good one, too. I’m dying to figure out how Icarion fudged your birth paperwork. Lock her up, please, and send a brief report to Director Olver. He’s not so angry at us that he won’t want to hear about this.”
“A spy?” Biran asked around the lump in his throat. She snorted in response, but dropped her head, unwilling to look him in the eye.
“Good work.” Lavaux patted him on the shoulder while the security guards shuffled Anaia by. He caught a whiff of her perfume—sweet berries and sticky toffee—as she passed. Probably the last time he’d ever smell it. The thought made him want to vomit.
“Now let’s go get your sister.”
CHAPTER 45
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
DAY ?
Foam encased her. Shoved itself up her nostrils, sealed her eyes open. Slithered its way beneath her suit and filled every crevice until she was a pressurized vessel, capable of surviving just as easily on the bottom of the sea as she was in the vacuum of space. The pod had been created to be its own pressure vessel, but the nature of spacefaring engineering was redundancies.
She waited for the somnolence of coldsleep. Waited for the sedatives in the foam to drag her under. For the sweet bliss of coma.
Still awake.
Okay. They were taking longer than usual. That was fine. There were two bodies in here, and she had already been suspicious that they hadn’t loaded it up with enough of the drug. There’d been so little left after prying them both out of their respective pods. She could feel Tomas against her, somewhere in the grey mass that hardened, locking her into place. His knee pressed against her thigh, his hand caught in the crook of her elbow. He was cold all over, but then so was she. That was the point of the coldsleep. Slow everything down. Preserve.
Even thought slowed. Though she knew better, she tried to move. Tried to shift her arm, her leg. Tried to crane her head to get a look at her surroundings. Nothing budged. The foam held her tight, locked in place like a mosquito in amber, a gift for future generations to puzzle over.
A pain formed in the back of her mind. Not the dull throb of coldsleep headaches, but the sharp ache of something else. Something more immediate. Had she been injured before going in the foam? She couldn’t recall. Bero had stopped the spin of the habs and she’d crashed into the ceiling, yes, but the pain burgeoning on the back of her skull was something more than that—something not borne of blunt-force trauma. It was sharp, and it was bright, like licking a battery. Maybe Bero had gotten her with those surgical tools after all.
Vague memories tumbled in her slowed thoughts. Sluggish, blurred. Hazy gleams of steel and glittering white smearing across the vault of her world. There was something in that. Something she should know, should remember. Sanda forced herself to think, neurons firing away, chasing down the haunted shapes and echoes of sharpness. Something had happened. Something she should know. Something important.
The dull ache returned. She tried to reach back to rub her head, but of course that was pointless. Couldn’t even scream, not really, with her throat full of hardened sludge.
Those memories teasing her, just on the edge. How long had they been there? It could have been months since she jumped in the pod with Tomas. Could have been years.
Even preservation foam couldn’t hold back cancer, or an aneurysm, if that’s what your body was destined to have. Panic gripped her in slow, tense ebbs, creeping through her coldsleep-slowed brain until she wanted to scream, thinking she might be hyperventilating, but that was impossible, the foam mandated her oxygen levels.
Panic pushed aside all the reasoning that’d brought her to this point. There was no guarantee Biran would ever find them. No guarantee Icarion would scoop them up, when their real prize was Bero. Could be she’d traded one mausoleum for another.
She collapsed. Hardened foam turned to goo around her, grey-purple sludge slipping through freed fingers, dripping into her eyes, expunging itself from her throat and other internal cavities. Tomas splayed beneath her, her head over his shoulder, both hacking and shivering and convulsing with the shock of reawakening.
“There’s two in here,” a woman said.
Sanda heaved herself to her side, pressed her back against the lip of the pod, and pushed Tomas away with trembling arms so she wouldn’t vomit on him. Not that it did any good, they had both already filled the pod with a variety of fluids no one should be expected to share with another living being.
“Ugh,” Tomas said, rubbing his eyes with trembling fingers.
“Urk,” she replied.
The sharp ache was gone from her skull. White light pierced her vision, threatening to return it. Whatever imagery her brain had been puzzling over slipped away. A sickening sense of déjà vu filled her. Sterile lights, a blank ceiling. But she’d heard a woman’s voice, somewhere on the periphery. This wasn’t Bero’s medibay.
But it was Icarion’s.
“Restrain them.” The general’s voice, the clean-shaven man she’d spoken with before Bero cut them off. She tried to stifle a laugh, then realized she couldn’t. Lying in a pool of mixed fluids, she laughed like a madwoman. They’d only been in the pod a few hours, maybe even just a few minutes. It’d felt like lifetimes. She wondered if the experience had been the same for Tomas. For his sake, she hoped not.
Hands grabbed her, heaved her limp body into the aggressive light. Cold metal circled her wrists, and she almost laughed again, because didn’t they realize how weak she was? She couldn’t swat a fly without falling on her face.
“That is unnecessary.” The woman again.
Sanda swiveled her head like a bat seeking a moth, trying to pinpoint which blur in the sea of blurs crowding her was advocating on her behalf. An oval of a face, a pointed chin, the hint of dark hair haloing it. She tried to focus, but the foam was still slick beneath her lids and with her hands restrained all she had were tears, dribbling purplish gunk down her cheeks, to clear them.
“Are they medically sound?” the general asked.
“It seems that way, but any exposure to coldsleep conditions requires careful monitoring.”
“You can monitor them from a cell.”
“General Negassi, I must insist you allow me to take their vitals.”
“Make it quick, Dr. Yu.”
The blurry oval face and hair came closer. Fingers probed around Sanda’s throat and face, flashed a pinpoint of light into her eyes, ears, and nose.
“She’s stable. I’d like to take a closer look at the man. His oxygen levels are concerning. He may be anemic.”
Sanda tried to make her mouth work, tried to tell them he’d been hypoxic and they should probably check out his brain, just to be safe, but all she managed to do was drool.
“You can look at that one all you like, I recognize him now. He’s that Nazca we hired. Hose the other one down, then lock her up.”
They had that backward, she thought blearily as someone took her arm and steered her around. Biran had hired the Nazca—hired Tomas—not Icarion. What a silly mistake for the general to make. Something in her hindbrain screamed at her, but she ignored it, trying to swallow back another urge to vomit.
CHAPTER 46
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3541
IN A SYSTEM FAR, FAR AWAY
Jules got her leg propped up on Nox’s steel table and tipped her head back, eyes closed. The plastiskin patch over her gash had come with a cool, numbing gel that Jules was pretty sure was doing more to make her sleepy than her actual lack of sleep. Too bad Nox and Arden were being too loud to let her rest.
“What in the hell just happened?” Arden slouched onto a chair, then popped back up, paced around the table, tapped the glass on a cabinet, and sat back down again, bouncing their leg against the foot brace on the stool. She wished they’d just sit still already.
“We ripped off the wrong damned people,” Nox grumbled. He dumped his weapons onto the table with a clatter and sorted through them, checking and rechecking each to make sure it was ready for action.
“Yeah, no shit. Maybe I’ve lost my mind, but it looked like those were guardcore. Please, please tell me I’m going insane and that those people shooting at us weren’t guardcore.”
“They were guardcore,” Jules said.
“Fuuuuck.” Arden dropped their head against the cold steel of the table and folded their arms. “Why? What do they want with you guys?”
“We don’t know,” Jules admitted. She forced herself to pry her eyes open. “They’re after those smartboards we took, obviously, but something feels… off.”
“Off? Like being shot at in broad daylight? Or having an insane woman chatting to you through the speakers of my apartment building? Oh, or having the whole fucking building burn down—and—and not to mention what happened to Harlan, and Lolla…”
“She doesn’t mean the facts, idiot.” Nox put a weapon down and pointed at them with the gun oil–stained rag he’d been using to clean it. “She means the details.”
Arden picked their head up and squinted at Nox with the same raw bewilderment Jules thought they might express if a houseplant had suddenly up and started lecturing them on orbital mechanics. “Which. Details. Exactly?”
“The guardcore themselves, for starters,” she said, swooping in to explain things before those two idiots got themselves into a fight that’d slow everything down. “No insignia, small numbers. And yeah, they hit your place in the morning, but I don’t think they would have if they hadn’t been in a rush to clean up what they’d missed after hitting our”—she cleared her throat—“house. If it was some kind of official action of the Keepers, I don’t think we would have stood a chance. Those people were off duty, I guess.”
“So, dirty?”
“Maybe. I don’t know, but it seems likely, right? I mean—those smartboards we found. They weren’t exactly locked up in Keeper HQ, or anything like that. They were in a rotted-out facility on the edge of the Grotta, for fuck’s sake. Whoever put that lab there had gone to a lot of effort to keep it away from official channels. Bad luck for them we stumbled across it.” She grimaced. “Bad luck for us, too.”
“Sure about that? That it was bad luck?” Nox asked.
She frowned at him. “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
Nox sighed and grabbed an amber bottle and a couple of glasses from a cabinet—bourbon. Jules recognized the smell the second he pulled the stop and poured out three glasses. After they all drank, Nox shook himself like he was chasing off an alcohol shiver and set his glass down between his hands on the table.
“Look. I know that your op was all about that wraith, Jules. Don’t think I’m insinuating anything about your motives here. But I’ve been tooling around the Grotta a long time, and I ain’t never just stumbled across an outfit that fancy before. There was serious money behind that lab, and as our friends in black pointed out to us earlier, serious power, too. So I can’t help but wonder—what was the wraith doing there? It’s not cheap shit, I’ll grant you, but a couple of crates just hanging out in that secret hallway?”
“Secret hallway?” Arden cut in, their eyes brightening with interest.
“Not as cool as you’d think,” Jules said. Arden slumped back down with a sigh.
“As I was saying.” Nox cut Arden a look. “Seems weird, right? Smugglers moving wraith through a hall like that, and one of them was definitely dead. I don’t think they would have tripped over the place.”
“You think they were lured there?”
“I think we were lured there.”
Her muscles were heavier than they had any right to be. “Not possible. And what the fuck for? There wasn’t anyone in that lab, aside from the dead guy in the hallway. It’s not like we were ambushed. Sure, we set off the alarm, but we made it out okay.”
“Might not have been the people that run the lab that lured us there. Could be another opposing faction—damned politicians, and Keepers, are all snakes—that wanted a couple of lowlifes to run across it to see what shook out. I don’t think they expected we’d actually get anything of value, though, hence the guardcore. Someone’s trying to tie up loose ends.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Arden raised their hand like they were asking a teacher a question. “Let me get this straight. You think you and the crew were led to that wraith cache by some other rogue Keeper faction that knew about the lab and wanted to get you inside for… some reason?… To shake up the people that founded the lab or something?”
“I don’t know what the fuck their reasons were, Arden. Maybe they wanted to test the defenses, see if a bunch of Grotta scum could break in. It doesn’t matter. Someone put us there, and the people who operate that lab don’t seem too happy about it.”
“Fuck, man, if Keepers are after us, then we’re dead. Seriously, seriously, dead.”
“Did you get the data?” Jules asked.
“Not yet, I was, as you might recall, interrupted.” Arden scooped their bag off the floor and pulled out the smartboard, then plunked it on the table and synced it up to some program running on their wristpad. “Like I said, this thing isn’t very locked down. Whoever owned it really didn’t expect it to go missing, so either it’s full of junk that won’t help us or your rogue Keeper was so full of themselves that they didn’t bother with high-level security. Which seems unlikely, considering their entire existence is about data security.”
“Or we were supposed to take the boards, too,” Nox put in.
“Okay.” Jules shook her head. “Now you’re getting paranoid. And I gotta admit, I’m starting to think those weren’t Keepers running that lab.”
“Explain the fucking guardcore, then,” Nox snapped.
“Your setup team, the rogue faction.” Jules dragged both hands through her hair, then rubbed her cheeks. “Look, I know what I saw in there. There was some kind of drug being manufactured in that facility, I’m sure.” I touched it, she wanted to say. I spilled some on my hand and it kept me high all night. Hell, I still feel stronger than I should be right now, but she kept that down. Didn’t want the others thinking she was spun out and coming up with weird conspiracy theories. This was crazy enough as it was. “Maybe they were starting with wraith, or something, but all this Keeper connection makes me think they were working on something for the Keepers.”
Arden cocked their head to one side. “Can’t Keepers get high just like the rest of us? It’s not like they’re androids, they just have that one chip—plus the usual ident and wristpad sync-ups.”
“Yeah, sure they can, but there’s two reasons I can think of that you might want specialty stuff for them.”
“Enlighten us, oh wise queen of getting high,” Nox drawled.
“You’re such an ass. Anyway. One: They might get in trouble for it, right? They’re supposed to be ridiculously good at keeping secrets, at protecting the data tapped into their skulls. So if they get high, they might say something stupid, even if it’s just for recreational purposes. So they’d want something special, something that clears the system in a hurry. I mean, we’ve all seen that Keepers can drink—they’re always having those fancy galas on the news or whatever—but have you ever seen a Keeper high? I mean, seriously lit the fu
ck up?”
“No, I haven’t,” Nox said, “but then, they don’t invite guys like me to those parties. Too worried my handsome mug will steal all their high-brow ladies away.”
“You’re gross.”
“But…” Arden frowned at her. “That seems like a hell of an overreaction to a party drug. Murder, burning down Udon-Voodun in broad daylight? I don’t see it.”
She grimaced. “Yeah. Neither do I. Which leads to the second option: It’s not the Keepers making that shit. It’s being made to work on Keepers. Something to get them spun so hard that they can’t see straight and they’re happy to give up the goods.”
“Shit.” Arden stood up so fast their stool screeched back against the floor. “Insurgents? You mean someone trying to figure out how to build a Casimir Gate by getting a bunch of Keepers high? We have to tell someone.”
Jules blinked owlishly at them. “You think they don’t already know?”
“Oh.” He sat back down. “And they lured you guys in to… Check the defenses, like Nox said. And if things went sideways, then it wasn’t any of their people making the news that evening.”
“It’s just a theory,” Jules hedged.
“It’s a really fucking good one,” Nox said. “So we don’t know who hit the crew’s house. Maybe it was our insurgent friends, maybe it was the Keepers, but we know for sure the Keepers hit Arden’s place.”
“Right,” Jules said.
“So what? What do we do?” Arden’s voice had a slight whine to it. “We can’t get tangled up with the insurgents, we can’t go to the cops, we can’t exactly stroll up to Keep Station—you know, not just because it’s in orbit—and say, ‘Hi, guys, found a lab of bad guys making a drug to steal all your data, sorry about the mix-up, we cool?’”
“I… don’t know,” Jules admitted. “All I know for sure right now is that they have Lolla, and I’m going to get her back. But we need more data. We have to know what the fuck we’re dealing with here—and if there’s anyone we can trust. Once you’ve got that board cracked, we’ll check it out and reevaluate.”
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