Olver stepped behind her. A guardcore reached out, gently pushing up the back of Anaia’s hair. Her head dipped down, jaw slackening as the sedative ran its course.
Weight constricted Biran’s chest. He closed the distance between them, dropped to one knee, and grabbed her hand—strapped down to the chair. He clung to the tips of her fingers. She forced her eyes up. Blown pupils reflected his own stricken face back to him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“I know.”
The gun fired. Her body jerked, spasming against the restraints. Her fingers dug into his, nails biting, eyes rolling back and then… Nothing. She went slack, head lolling to one side. Her chest rose and fell, breaths deepening, but those eyes slid shut and would not open.
Biran scrubbed the back of his wrist across his eyes, clinging to those limp fingers. “What now?” he rasped.
Olver handed the gun off to a guardcore. “She will be cleaned, given antibiotics to fight off any infection caused by the excision, and placed in stasis.”
“Stasis?” Biran forced himself to look up at Olver, whose face was empty.
“Show him,” Hitton said. “He should know where his friend will be buried.”
“Very well.” Olver gestured to the guardcore. “Prepare her. Biran, come with me.”
He did not want to leave Anaia alone with those strangers. A stupid thought, he knew, but every instinct in his body screamed against him just… walking away while she sat there, unconscious and vulnerable. Not that there was any guarantee she was even in her own mind. There was no solid research on what happened to a brain once the chip was removed. A coma, sometimes death. He wished, bitterly, that she had died instead of fallen into the coma. At least then she’d know real peace.
Olver waited, the door half-opened. Reluctantly, Biran let her fingers come to rest against the arm of the chair and stood, hovering, wondering if he should say something. Wondering if she could even hear him.
“I’ll see you soon,” he whispered, patting the back of her hand once before stepping away. Somehow, that image of her—shocked and nearly vibrating with guilt—would not return to his mind. He saw her only as she existed in that chair. Limp, hollowed out.
He hoped, when they discovered he had helped Sanda escape with an illegal chip in her head, that the removal would kill him.
Olver took a few short steps down the hall before scanning his wristpad to open the nearest unmarked door. It blinked green and swung inward on its own. Yellow lights came up, flickering on down the length of a long, narrow room. And they just kept on coming.
“What…?”
His eyes adjusted. Rows upon rows of evac pods lined the walls of the room, stretching off into an indeterminable distance.
“How many?” he asked, when the silence had stretched as long as those lines of coffins.
“Dozens,” Olver said quietly, as if he were afraid that to raise his voice would wake the sleeping dead. “Not all traitors, like Anaia. For some the Keeper chip did not sit well, their bodies rejected it, and we did what we could to recover them. Others… Catastrophically failed duties. Smaller betrayals. We all know the risks before we take the chip.”
“And what will be done with them?”
Director Olver half turned, beckoning Biran back into the hall. Back to the party, from which Sanda was—if all had gone well—making her escape.
“That,” he said, “is above my pay grade.”
CHAPTER 76
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
IF YOU CAN’T FIX IT, BREAK IT
Sanda hit the panel release just as Lavaux brought up his stunner. A crackling sizzle filled the air. The cupboard door shuddered under the strike. She choked on the scent of ozone, hacked up a cough, and grasped whatever she could get her hands on in the cupboard. Metal, cold and heavy. She clenched her fist and yanked out an oversized ratchet.
Before she could get her arm up to swing, Lavaux’s stunner hummed to life again. She threw herself down, cursing as she rolled under the body of the Hermes and scrambled to her feet on the other side.
Lavaux laughed. “I appreciate your pluck, but you have nowhere to go, Greeve. The hangar is mine. The cameras are mine. It’s just the two of us. And, I am sorry to say, it was me who put in the work order for that leg of yours.”
A soft glow radiated from the back end of the Hermes, Lavaux’s wristpad brought live. She heard the subtle shudder of haptic feedback, buttons vibrating under Lavaux’s touch, and then her prosthetic went limp, dead weight. She swore and gripped the rim of the open cockpit to keep herself from buckling under the loss of strength.
“You’re a sadistic sonuvabitch, Lavaux. I wonder just how many laws you’re violating right now.”
“Wrong question. You should be wondering just how many who enforce those laws will care.” He stepped around the ship, faced her dead-on, and tipped the stunner back, resting it against his shoulder. Slowly, he strolled toward her, flicking ash from his cigarette. “One, maybe?” he mused, cocking his head to the side. “Your brother, no doubt, might raise some objections. But I’ve been at this a very, very long time. Do you want to know what your story will be? What the new headlines will say?”
“I have a terrible feeling that you’re going to tell me.” She struggled to straighten herself, hooked her elbow over the edge of the cockpit, and clung on for all she was worth. The stupid silk of her dress made it easier for her to slip back down.
“Major Greeve’s mind”—he tapped his temple with the business end of the stunner—“shattered by Icarion torture. Hero driven to self-annihilation on the deck of the ship that broke her. That sort of thing.”
“Not very catchy,” she said, digging her fingers into the internal molding of the cockpit for all she was worth. If she could just get some purchase, some leverage, she could get a good swing in. He was in spitting distance now.
“Tragedy has never needed to be clever.” He brought the stunner up, aimed it straight at her chest. A shot like that’d be enough to send her heart into a rhythm from which she’d never recover. She got the feeling this wasn’t Lavaux’s first dance.
But it wasn’t hers, either. She gripped the molded interior of the cockpit for all she was worth and swung her body around on a pivot, slamming her chest into the hull of the Hermes as she brought the ratchet down on the jammer. Sparks exploded from the box, followed by a wisp of blue-grey smoke. Burnt plastic perfumed the air as, one by one, those little LEDs winked out.
Lavaux’s shot scorched the floor where the bulk of her body had been just a second before. A low hum filled the hangar, vibrating deep in the metal all around them. Sanda grinned. Bero was waking up.
“Not just the two of us anymore, is it?” she said.
“You fucking bitch.”
He grabbed her hair and yanked. Sanda hit the ground, her prosthetic bouncing against her good leg hard enough to leave a bruise. She flipped to her back, got her palms on the ground and pushed, scrambling backward, away from Lavaux. His cigarette was gone, a tuft of her hair in his fingers instead.
She lashed out with her good leg, caught him in the shin and made him jump before he could get the stunner leveled. The ratchet was—she cast around—there, an arm’s length away. She dove for it and gripped it in both hands, rolling sideways as she brought it around in a wide arc.
Her arms shuddered from the impact. A direct hit. Lavaux swore and dropped to one knee, the leg of his pants torn open over the shin where she’d hit. For just a second she saw a gleam of metal, of titanium-white, beneath his split flesh, a hint of red trickling out. Lavaux fired the stunner, grazed her hip. She juddered and jerked, vision going white at the edges, every muscle in her body flexing to the current.
Before he could take aim again she lashed out, aimed for his forearm. Something hard and brittle cracked under the force of her blow and then the stunner flung away—clattered beneath the Hermes, raining pieces. She laughed, spat blood on the floor.
“Think that’s fun
ny?” Lavaux said. Fucker wasn’t even out of breath.
She pushed to her knee, bum leg dragging beneath her, and settled into the tightest crouch she could manage, ratchet poised to strike, every muscle that would answer her demand flexed and ready to uncoil. “Funniest damn thing I’ve seen in two years.”
He smirked. Stood slowly, unfolding to his full height. She tensed, expecting a strike, but he just brought a hand up and pushed back his ruffled hair, set straight the collar of his dinner jacket.
“You’ll find I do not need a weapon to achieve my goals. Though I tend to prefer cleaner solutions.”
She got a good look at his leg, then. He gave her time enough to take it all in.
Where milky white bone should have been, a shaft of material she’d never seen before gleamed. Pale as titanium, reflective as chrome. Her own eyes stared back at her out of that horror show of a skeleton, but not for long.
His flesh crept back across the gaping wound, a network of synthetic vascularity weaving its way over the exposed bone. Muscle thickened. Oozed bright blood, but not at the rate a wound of that size should dump the stuff. The edges of his coffee-dark flesh quivered, hinting at their own reweaving.
“What are you?”
He smiled, flicked his torn pant leg to clean off a few specks of blood. “Humanity’s next great leap forward. Or did you think there was only the secret of the gates to be found between the stars?”
“Found? You really are crazy.”
She crept backward, putting space between them while the wound she’d dealt him reknit itself. Her leg dragged, metal squealing against metal, but he didn’t seem to notice, or to care. That was what really unsettled her. Flesh regeneration aside, it was his blasé manner that gave her chills straight down to her perfectly normal spine. He behaved as if this were already a done deal. As if she were dead, the information he sought recovered, and everything else was a boring formality.
Bero hummed all around them, waking, but too slow. Then she realized. She’d thought Kenwick was a product of identity theft, of too-smooth plastic surgery. She’d been so, so wrong.
“Dios fuck. Kenwick. It wasn’t a false identity. He was the same man, the same man through two hundred years. How? How is that possible? How are you possible?”
He raised both brows at her. “You didn’t know, then? Hmm. I’d expected as much, but couldn’t be certain.” He cracked his wrist, popping it into socket after the blow of her ratchet. “Poor stupid Kenwick, to run so far so fast, only to die unknown, alone, at the hands of those who mistook him for a Keeper. Foolish, to be taken by a smartship of all things. I wonder if the Icarions ever realized what they held. What he was.” Lavaux’s lips curled with pure disgust. “Such wealth lies in your head, Major Greeve. And you don’t even know how to use it.”
“The coordinates,” she said, then cursed herself for saying anything at all.
“You’ve seen them? Ah. That… That just won’t do.” He cracked his knuckles and stepped toward her.
CHAPTER 77
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
SAFETY PROCEDURES ARE ONLY SUGGESTIONS
Lavaux struck so quickly she didn’t have a moment to brace herself. Sanda gasped, pain radiating from her stomach as his first punch landed. She jerked right, threw herself to the side, and brought the ratchet up to strike, or at the very least, slow him down. He batted it away and grunted.
“Stop embarrassing yourself, Greeve. You’re injured. Tired. Weak from malnutrition. You feel all that, don’t you? Weighing you down?”
“Fuck yourself,” she hissed. But he was right. Moving was like swimming through congealing amber. Whatever strength she’d felt after a few glasses of champagne and a handful of appetizers at the party was long gone. She needed rest. Food. And to get this deadweight prosthetic off her damn leg.
He grabbed her forearm, yanked her to her knees, and leaned down close to get a good look at her. Not her face. He obviously didn’t give a shit about her. No, his other hand tangled in her hair and he pushed her head down, parting her hair with thumb and forefinger to find the telltale scar of a chip implant just above the base of her neck.
She took a swing at him with her free hand but didn’t even get close.
“Remarkable,” he said, mostly to himself. “I can’t believe they got it to take. You must be very strong, Greeve. Thank you, for being a good host for my wayward friend’s possession.”
She heard the wasp-wing flutter of a pocket knife being flicked from its housing. Panic constricted her throat. The humming in the hangar intensified. LEDs lining the walls flicked through random reels of color. Maybe Bero couldn’t find his way back to consciousness. Maybe the damage was already done. And even if he could, what could Bero do to help her, talk Lavaux to death? She had to stall.
“They kept his head,” she blurted. “Kenwick’s. As a trophy. Splayed it open like a butterfly and suspended it in the middle of their lab. He didn’t look like you. He looked human.”
He paused, grip tightening on her wrist. “I am human. And Kenwick was a fool. He took the coordinates because he believed what we were becoming was wrong, corrupted. If he figured out a reversal of the process…” Lavaux blinked, shook himself. “Never mind that. I’ve been waiting ages for this.”
The tip of the knife bit the skin at the back of her neck. She jerked forward, tried to lean, to squirm away, but she was stuck. Crumpled on the floor, weakened, unable to use her deadweight leg. She might as well be a kitten drunk on milk, for all the fight she had left in her.
Blood welled. Trickled down the back of her neck. She gritted her teeth and strained anyway.
“Enough,” Bero said.
Lavaux cocked his head to the side and smiled. “Ah. The Light. You’ve been a very naughty spaceship. You and I are going to have a good, long talk about what you’ve seen.”
“Get out.”
That tone was new. Deep. Not the panic she was used to.
“Clever ship you may be, but you don’t call the shots here, Tin Man,” Lavaux said. He sounded amused, like he was watching a child try to wheedle its way into getting an extra cookie.
“You are going to step away from Sanda and leave my cargo bay, or I will render this station and all its inhabitants to plasma.”
Lavaux rolled his eyes. “So dramatic. Your engines have been cut off. I should know. I’m the one who gave the order.”
“Your puppets forgot. I’ve been looking after myself for a long, long time.”
Alarms blared, red LEDs flashing in gleaming arcs all across the ceiling and floor. The bland woman’s voice was gone, muted forever if Bero had managed it, but Sanda didn’t need the alert to know what was going on. Bero’s engines fired into life, rumbling as they gained power. Even in Bero’s cargo bay, so far from his engines, their piercing shriek pained her ears.
Lavaux lurched backward, dropped his knife as he brought his hands up to cover his ears. Sanda fell to the ground, covered her ears with her hands, and screamed above the wail of the engines.
“Bero! You’ve made your point!”
No answer. Metal screeched as Bero initiated the forcible closing of his cargo bay doors. Her stomach dropped. There was no way in hell she was getting trapped on this ship again. Not with Lavaux.
“Open the hangar doors,” Bero said.
“You’re not leaving this station.” Lavaux got his feet back under him and made for Sanda. She swore and army crawled to the Hermes.
Bero said, “I am leaving. You have five seconds to initiate opening the hangar doors.”
Dios. Bero’s cargo doors wouldn’t even be closed in time. She wanted to snap at him for trying to kill her after she’d removed the jammer that’d made him lose control of himself, but she needed every single molecule of air she could get.
“Don’t be idiotic,” Lavaux said. “You will damage yourself severely if you try to force those doors.”
“One,” Bero said.
Sanda was two meters from the Hermes.
Lavaux screamed something, but Sanda’s world was comprised of nothing but effort. All she could hear was the strain of her breath, the wail of the sirens, and the blood pounding in her ears.
“Three.”
She grimaced, stretched out an arm, and gripped the Hermes’s undercarriage.
“Four.”
Halfway up. One knee bracing on the ground, her prosthetic dangling behind her. If Bero would just give her a few extra seconds, then—
“Five.”
Bero’s engines fired. He slewed around, pointing his nose at the massive doors of the hangar bay, and hit the throttle. He wasn’t anywhere near relativistic speeds but, then, he didn’t need to be to rip a space dock apart.
A concussive whumph deadened her hearing, all the complaints of metal and propellant reduced to little more than a cotton-stuffed whine in her head. As the ship turned, she slammed into the side of the Hermes, damn near lost her grip, cursed and gasped and tried to yank herself into the shuttle. Its air filter was broken. It hadn’t been topped up. But it was something, anything, between her and the empty black.
Impact jarred her, rattled her bones and made her bite off the tip of her tongue. She turned her head, saw through the narrow opening in Bero’s cargo doors debris wash away from him. Bits of twisted metal spiraled outward, a shredding hurricane, a cluster of junk was all she could see and then—the exterior of the hangar bay, and the hole blown straight through its doors.
Bero pulled away from the station. Black filled the view through the gap. Lights and alarms screamed about atmosphere and pressure, but Sanda knew she was already dead.
Her grasp gave out. She fell away from the Hermes and slid across the floor, unable to stop herself. One last burst of power from Bero, one sharp turn. What little cargo was left in the bay flung through that slit in one great purge. Grippy slammed into her chest. She wrapped her arms around him, held him close.
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