The inflatable passage between the ships couldn’t have been more than two meters in length, but with Biran standing at the other end, it looked like light-years to Sanda. She pushed back an urge to sprint to him, her one knee suddenly weak, and offered a tiny, embarrassed smile, as his gaze swept her, rested on her halved leg, and grew furious.
“Did they do this to you?” Biran demanded. The two burly-looking soldiers with automatic blasters in their hands flanking him puffed up.
“Railgun during Dralee,” she said before Negassi could work up a self-righteous response. “Evac pod saved me.”
“Fascinating,” Negassi said, “but I am on a tight schedule. March.”
The guards released her and Tomas, then stepped back to flank their general. Tomas got his good arm up and across her shoulders to steady her as they pulled their way through the passage. “We,” he whispered against her ear, “are perfectly balanced.”
She snort-laughed, drawing a warm smile from Biran. She’d been snort-laughing since she was five, and he’d never let her forget she sounded just like an angry piglet.
“Sergeant Greeve,” Dr. Yu said, her voice strained with desperation.
Here we go. Now she was going to demand some last kernel of knowledge, some sliver of information about her poor, fucked-up ship. Sanda forced herself to turn, with Tomas’s help, and look at her.
Yu stepped out in front of Negassi, who shot her a nasty look. Her cheeks were so pale, her forehead sheened with sweat. Any second now, she’d faint dead away from anxiety.
“What is it, Dr. Yu?” Sanda asked.
Something hardened in the doctor. She stopped fidgeting, stood straight, squared herself, and pulled a standard-issue handblaster out of her sleeve, leveled straight at Sanda’s heart.
“He was my ship, you pirate bitch!”
She fired.
CHAPTER 51
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
SURVIVING DAY FORTY ISN’T EASY
Tomas moved before the words were out of Yu’s mouth. He turned into Sanda, spinning them hard against the inflatable wall. It bulged beneath them, an uncomfortable reminder of just how thin the barrier was between them and space. Red filled Sanda’s vision, bright and stinging. She swore, brought her arm up to wipe her eyes and smeared blood across half her face. Droplets drifted by.
“Tomas!”
“Just a scratch,” he hissed between clenched teeth.
The top of his shoulder was torn wide open, the FitFlex curling away from seared edges of flesh, a steady pulse of blood splashing across Sanda’s neck and chest. The pain in her jaw hit her a second later, pinpoints of hot white light dancing behind her eyelids as the agony spread across her entire face.
Tentatively, she probed her jawline with her fingertips. A narrow gash ran along her cheek like a sideways smile. She worked her jaw around, felt the bone move easily, though the muscle screamed in pain.
Biran’s people were on them, guns waving in the general direction of the Icarions, but not yet firing. Not a smart thing, firing any kind of weapon when the only thing between you and the void was inflatable tubing. The wall scrunched beneath her back. Sanda became aware of a soft hissing.
“Fuck,” she said. Tomas got the gist. With Biran’s help, they yanked their way onto the Prime ship, Tomas cursing with every jostle of his arm and Sanda cursing just because it felt like the right thing to do.
They hit solid ground.
“Lock in,” Biran ordered. Heavy clicks sounded as he and his crew flipped on their mag boots, securing themselves to the deck of the Taso.
Sanda jerked to a halt, getting blood all over Biran’s fancy Speaker uniform as she used him to stay in place, and swung around to get a look behind her. The Prime soldiers were coming up, guns out to cover their retreat, but the Icarions had bigger problems than losing their prisoners in such an undignified fashion.
Yu floated in the middle of the chamber, handblaster thrust right up against her temple, other arm gesticulating wildly at Negassi. He and his loyals stepped back, deeper into their ship, hands out to soothe the ranting doctor. Biran moved to close the ship’s airlock door on the tube, but Sanda put a hand over his. She wanted to hear what the doctor had to say.
“He is my project!” she screeched. “I will not allow you to—to—besmirch my reputation by usurping what is mine—that research is mine!”
“Of course it is,” Negassi said in what was the most diplomatic tone Sanda had yet heard from him. “No one denies your investment in the project, Doctor. Please, come inside the ship so we can talk this out.”
Her shoulders went slack, her posture lost its rigidity. “You want to talk this out?”
“Yes, I do. But you’re going to have to put down the weapon.”
“I see.” Yu half turned toward Sanda, a look in her eyes so dreamy that it made Sanda’s stomach clench. “I hope you were good to him.”
She blew a hole in the transfer tube’s floor.
The whoosh took Sanda’s breath away. The tube collapsed inward, tore itself away from both mounts and flung into the desolate black of space. A bolt whipped right past her head, ripped from the airlock frame.
An Icarion guard, one foot on the ship’s deck, one in the tube, lost his footing and stumbled, horror writ clear on his face as he twisted, struggled to reach back for the entrance, but he’d already drifted out of arm’s reach. He hadn’t locked his boot down yet. General Negassi closed the door behind him.
Biran’s hand was already on the door pad, initiating the closing sequence.
“Recover that man!” Sanda barked, putting command into her voice.
His head jerked toward her, hair covering most of his face as the vacuum outside the ship desperately tried to equalize with the pressure inside. His brow furrowed, then he nodded to himself and tore open a panel set into the wall.
“Brace positions!” Biran shouted, turning his head to make his voice carry into the body of the ship, then yanked a tether-loaded flare gun from the panel and shot it into space.
The white rope uncoiled, preceded by the gunpowder-scented blast of the flare. Biran’s aim was true. The tether struck the soldier in the side, leaving a nasty bruise and maybe breaking a few ribs, but no doubt saving his life. Fumbling, the soldier wrapped his arms around the tether as they’d all been taught how to do—Icarion, Prime, this made no difference—in case of emergency severance from a vessel in space. Even if he lost consciousness now, they had him.
Biran hit the auto-return and the winch system went into overdrive, jerking the soldier toward the Prime ship as quickly as its little engine could turn. The soldier reached the deck, and Biran closed the door.
“Medis, move in,” he said, as if he’d been giving orders all his life. By the look of the wrinkles around his eyes, he’d been giving orders at least a couple of years now.
Medis who’d been waiting in the wings until the guns were down swooped in, separating the injured and generally making a fuss.
“Biran,” Sanda said around a mouthful of numbing agent as her medis packed the gash on her cheek. He looked over at her, his smile small and sad. “If you don’t get over here and hug me right this second, I’m going to knock your head into the next galaxy.”
He grinned, the sadness vanishing in a flash, and before she could get another breath he’d scooped her up, enveloped her in his arms, and swung her around, much to the tutting of the medis. She buried her face in his shoulder, caught the scent of sweat and FitFlex and the same old crappy cologne he and their dads had been using for as long as she could remember.
She hurt like hell, but she was home.
CHAPTER 52
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
THIS DAY’S NOT DONE WITH HER YET
The three of them crammed into the cabin meant to be Sanda’s, if she could ever get these two men she cared about to leave her alone so she could get some damned rest. Tomas perched on the edge of the bed, his doubly injured arm puffed up to twice its normal size bet
ween the sling, cast, and gauze packing his shoulder. He kept fiddling with his sleeve, which made Sanda anxious, as that’s exactly what Yu had done before she’d pulled the blaster. Biran, unable to sit still, paced the length of the cabin over and over again.
“Do you two ever stop moving?”
They froze. Biran looked at his feet; Tomas glanced at his sleeve. “Sorry,” they said in unison.
“If one of you could explain what in the hell’s been going on in this system since I’ve been gone, that’d be just super.”
“I need to speak with you first, Sanda,” Tomas said.
She cut him a look. “I thought that’s what we’re doing here.”
“Alone.”
“Absolutely not,” Biran said. “Anything you have to say to my sister, I should be able to hear as well. Need I remind you who hired you to find her?”
“You need not,” Tomas said slowly, “but my contract ended, technically, the second I delivered her safely into your care. And there is information I am unsure of that I believe she has a right to know—privately—before she makes any decisions regarding sharing that information.”
Biran turned to her. “Sanda?”
She caught Tomas’s eye and held it. He struggled to keep from picking at his sleeve again, dimples appearing on his cheeks as his jaw flexed.
“Give us a few minutes, okay? I’ll call you back when we’re finished.”
“If you say so. You know how to pull the emergency alarm?”
“Get out of here, little brother, before I drag you out.”
He dropped a kiss on her forehead, casting one last derisive glance at Tomas before stepping through the door. It swished shut, and she raised both her brows at Tomas.
“Well, Spy Dancer, what is it you have to tell me?”
He grimaced and bowed his head, running his good hand through his hair, then glanced up from beneath his lashes. Even though his expression was tense with anxiety, that hooded look gave her a slight shiver.
“I found something on Bero. A memory chip embedded in the rubber gasket that failed. A strip of the rubber—where those three tears were—had been peeled back, and this chip shoved inside. Someone desperate left it there.”
He pulled a thin chip from his sling and held it up for her to see. Copper glinted at her against a plastic backing.
“Well? What is it?”
“I didn’t watch it on Bero. I want to make that very clear. I had read the research on Kenwick, but it cut off after his death. I didn’t know this—or have any inkling—when we, ah…” He flushed. She rolled her eyes.
“Don’t get shy on me now.”
“I watched it on Empedocles, as I didn’t know what was on it and didn’t want Bero to know I’d seen it just in case. It’s… complicated. I signal-jammed the room while I watched it, and I’ll do so here, now, so you and I are the only ones who ever have to see this. If that’s what you want.”
She swallowed. “You’re freaking me out.”
“Yeah, sorry. There’s really no good way to go about this. You’re just going to have to watch.”
He pulled a slim rectangle of black-coated metal from his pocket, dialed in a few switches, then locked in a lever. A soft squeal escaped the box, then settled. He nodded to himself and set it on the bed.
“No one can see or hear what’s going on in here now. Not through cameras or mics, at least, and I doubt your brother’s eavesdropping at the door.”
Tomas fumbled a tablet from his pocket and grimaced, realizing he lacked the dexterity to insert the chip with his arm bound up. “Could you…?”
She leaned across from the room’s only chair, a half-eggshell affair that was more for looks than comfort. As she took the tablet, he brushed his index finger against the underside of her palm. A brief gesture, hard to tell if it was intentional, but she wanted it to be.
She cleared her throat and sat back, then slotted the chip. The tablet prompted her to accept a video autoplay, and she tapped yes.
A woman whose cheeks were flush with exertion, her forehead gleaming with sweat, filled the screen. She flicked a glance over her shoulder, hunched down so that her body covered the camera. Sanda leaned forward as the pixelated woman leaned into the camera, eyes wide and pupils dilated. She spoke in hushed tones, the background a sliver of grey and flame orange Sanda recognized all too well from Bero’s captain’s quarters.
“Sanda Greeve. If you’re watching this, then I’ve failed you. Failed both our nations. My crew is dead and I with them.”
Her voice caught. She threw a worried glance toward the door. Her jaw flexed. When she looked back into the camera, her eyes narrowed with determination.
“There is not enough time for all the apologies I owe you. Owe the intergalactic nations. I will aim to be brief and clear. Time is so limited, now, and The Light… I do not know what he will tell you. But I know he will lie to you.
“My crew and I tailed your gunship for six months when the Battle of Dralee broke out. Icarion was arranging for an interception, a smash-and-grab to kidnap you, Sergeant Greeve. But The Light had grown impatient. He was the one who sent the tip-off to your recon team that Icarion ghost ships were in the vicinity. He wanted to speed up grabbing you in the chaos, but hadn’t counted on your injury during the battle. You spent a month in the tank. The Light was furious with the delay, but we took the time to tinker with your neural connections while you were in the NutriBath.
“You’ve probably already guessed we wanted you because of your brother, Keeper Biran, but we did not want you as leverage. The chip we recovered from Keeper Kenwick was proving difficult to crack. The Light suspected the neural password may be based in shared Prime experience and wanted a surrogate to test the hypothesis. You were the ideal candidate.
“In preparing you for testing, we… we inhibited your ability to form new memories. I am so, so sorry. The Light insisted the testing would be easier this way. As of my recording this message, you have been on The Light for two standard years. Every day you wake up is the first time you’ve awoken on this ship.
“Ever since we preformed the bombardment of Ada—as we were ordered!—he has grown increasingly reticent. He no longer trusts us. We no longer trust him.
“The Light has found something. I do not know what. He is desperate to leave this star system. We know that you accessed the Kenwick chip, and The Light viewed that information. He refuses to share what he found on the chip with us. We’ve lost all control.
“Tonight we try to disable him. I do not think we will succeed. Icarion ghost ships have attempted to take him down, but The Light is our best. Our biggest weapon. Our biggest failure.
“I have put you back in the tank for the night with new instructions programmed into the NutriBath. Earth willing, the neural connections we damaged should regrow. You may not remember your time on this ship, but you will be able to form new memories going forward.
“When you awake, you will be our last hope. Our final line of defense. Make no mistake, The Light has gone mad, and there’s something out there he wants. Desperately.
“You are a Keeper now, Sanda Greeve. Do your job. Save us all.”
The screen faded to black.
“No,” she said.
“The timeline fits.”
“Two years.” Her fingers shook, jittering the tablet. She set it on the tops of her thighs and gripped both armrests as tight as she could. “Two years.”
Biran’s stress-grey hair. His rank. The troubled look on Tomas’s face whenever she spoke of how long she’d been on board Bero.
“Two years and another forty days, beginning the day you woke from the NutriBath this woman put you in. It follows, Sanda. They put me in the evac pod you picked up two months after you disappeared. You’d been awake only twenty days when we met, and my body showed signs of atrophy, which I attributed to the advanced timeline Bero presented. Without Bero’s story of the Fibon Protocol, there’s no other explanation. I was in that pod for a little under
two years, and you… You were awake through most of it. You just don’t remember.”
“It’s wrong. I would remember. I would remember two years of my fucking life!” She slammed her fist into the edge of the chair, savored the sharp pain that shot through the side of her hand. Pain she would remember. Pain that could prove she was living, not some shambling zombie test subject.
His expression contorted through too many emotions for her to catalogue. He composed himself though he was having a hard time looking her in the eyes. “Sanda… This is the truth: It has been two years and forty days since the Battle of Dralee. I checked, on Empedocles. You and I both know we weren’t in those pods for hundreds of years. The longest an Imm Project survivor made it in a pod was seven months. They had to have been taking you in and out of that pod over the last two years, but you can’t remember any of it. You tell me what the other explanation is.”
“But I don’t… I don’t have a chip.” She’d have felt it. Showering. Cutting her hair. Brushing her hair. She’d know. This video was bullshit.
He winced. “About that… Your coldsleep headaches? I think they’re related to the implant. Kenwick was getting them, too. I thought it was odd, that they scrubbed every trace of you from Bero’s files, but now—”
“I. Don’t. Have. A. Chip.”
He rubbed his forehead with his fingers, then pushed to his feet and took the tablet from her lap. After a few quick jabs, he pulled up mirror mode. Without a word, he spun her ludicrous chair around to face a mirror on the wall, then held up the tablet behind her head.
The scarring was subtle, but she could see it through the wispy remains of the hair she’d chopped off. Hesitantly, she reached up, parted her hair with shaking fingers.
She knew that scar. Had seen it on the back of Keepers’ necks all her life. Usually they kept the area shaved, to show off their status.
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