by Amie Kaufman
Katya Kowalska’s mother, Martha, is in the launch bay with at least a hundred others. She now knows her daughter is still alive on the planet below. She’s sitting with a widower from Kerenza IV named Rob Maier. Rob’s son and daughter, Douglas and Rowena, sit between them. Maier has his arms around all of them, holding tight as the Mao accelerates toward the Churchill. The bass rumble of the engines reverberates through the walls, and Kowalska takes Maier’s hand and squeezes. Tight.
Claire Houston and Keiko Sato and Nicole Brinkley were Hanna Donnelly’s girlfriends back on Heimdall. A crew of trust fund princesses whose biggest challenge was not rocking the party in the same pair of shoes as another member of their posse. They’re huddled in the Mao’s launch bay now with Keiko’s folks—the only parental units to survive the Heimdall assault. Brinkley is crying. Houston is hugging her friend. Sato is praying, despite a complete lack of evidence that anyone out there is listening.
Over in the mess hall on Level 6, Cara and Luke Douglas are gathered with fifty or so others. Luke has asked his mother where Uncle Ben is at least seventeen times, cuddling his homemade bear to his chest. As the first Warlock fighters reach the Mao and the lighting shifts to Alert Red, Cara whispers Ben Garver’s name. The shipwide alert klaxon sounds, and the rest of her words are lost in the clamor.
Martina, Christopher and Hypatia Hernandez are in the mess hall, too. The Mao’s Defense Grid System arcs to life, zeroing the incoming BeiTech Warlocks. The thunder of anti-fighter batteries rings through the ship. ThudThudThud. ThudThudThud. Beneath that, you can hear a sound almost like rain—Warlock auto-cannon fire peppering the hull. Martina looks to the thin metal walls around them. Christopher is clutching the only breather unit his family has. It’s too big for his daughter; in the event of a hull breach, Hypatia will die along with her parents.
ThudThudThud.
Little Hypatia is watching the people around her with wide brown eyes. I dunno what it is with this kid, but in all the footage I’ve watched, I’ve never seen her cry. Not when her folks shipped her over during Hypatia’s final minutes. Not when AIDAN murdered two thousand people around her. Not through any of it.
Then something big hits them. Something hard. The impact rocks the Mao on its side, and the emergency lighting fails for a moment, plunging the ship into a few agonizing seconds of pitch blackness before they flicker back on. The passengers in the mess scream and wail, terror in their eyes.
Surely they can’t have come this far to fail now?
Surely it can’t end like this?
ThudThudThud.
>> ALL HANDS, HULL BREACH LEVEL FIVE.
>> REPEAT, HULL BREACH ON FIVE.
ThudThudThud.
Can it?
And as if she knows the answer
As if she knows what’s coming
Little Hypatia Hernandez finally starts to cry.
RADIO TRANSMISSION: TRANSPORT MAO—COMMAND CHANNEL 001
PARTICIPANTS:
Kady Grant, Systems Chief
Isaac Grant, Engineer
Yulin Zhuang, Head of Engineering
Ella Malikova, Grand Master of Funk
DATE: 09/05/75
TIMESTAMP: 10:08
MALIKOVA, E: WHAT THE **** WAS THAT?
GRANT, K: Are you okay down there?
MALIKOVA, E: Never mind me, what the **** hit us?
GRANT, I: Kady, what was that impact? Engines are offline!
GRANT, K: Hold on, tactical comms are…
GRANT, K: Oh, ****.
GRANT, K: Tac comm is saying it was a rail gun round.
MALIKOVA, E: What the ****?
GRANT, I: How is that possible? If Churchill cut their power feeds manually, they couldn’t be using their RGs on us again that quick?
GRANT, K: Tac comm is saying the shot came from the Kenyatta.
MALIKOVA, E: …I thought that thing was a scrap heap? BT’s own report said they decomm—
GRANT, K: ****. ****. ****.
GRANT, I: Language, young lady.
GRANT, K: Yulin, do you read me?
ZHUANG, Y: I’m here, Kady.
GRANT, K: BeiTech must have a crew on board that derelict dreadnought. They’re firing on us and the Churchill with the Kenyatta’s rail guns. We need to use our nuke.
GRANT, I: Kady, we have rail guns of our own.
GRANT, K: And we’re using them! But they’re a bigger ship and they have more. We lose a war of attrition. We need something bigger. How soon can we fire it?
ZHUANG, Y: Just a second.
Grant, K [shipwide]: All hands, all hands! Incoming fire, brace for impact!
[SOUND OF COLLISION]
[SHIPWIDE KLAXON]
MALIKOVA, E: Jesus H. *****-****ing Christ!
GRANT, I: Language, young lady!
ZHUANG, Y: GOD****INGDAMMIT.
GRANT, I: Am I just talking to mys—
GRANT, K: Dad, time and place! Yulin, report status!
ZHUANG, Y: That first rail gun round sliced clean through the hull and took out the missile firing system and launch tube.
GRANT, K: Okay, what does that mean?
ZHUANG, Y: It means we can’t fire the goddamn nuke. Even if we fix fire control, the launch tube is mincemeat. The projectile won’t make it out of the ship.
[SOUND OF COLLISION]
[SHIPWIDE KLAXON]
MALIKOVA, E: ****.
GRANT, K: ****!
GRANT, I: Yes, all right. ****.
The servers of the Magellan look kind of familiar, now that I think about it.
They remind me of the Alexander.
It makes sense—Alexander had its own jump gate generator, damaged beyond repair in the engagement at Kerenza. And the Magellan is BeiTech’s own prototype jump platform. One of a kind. Worth over 40 trillion ISĦ. No wonder Frobisher’s ****ed off it went missing. Just saying.
The servers required to run that kind of operation are pretty much the same, whether you’re the military or a private corporation. You need to devote whole levels of your ship to them, stretching out as far as the eye can see. They look like they belong on a spaceship, you feel me? The banks of servers are lit a twilight blue, standing about two meters tall, set out in long corridors and frequent crossroads. It’s like the world’s biggest, least challenging maze.
Of the Magellan’s four hundred and eleven crew members, the vast majority are devoted to getting the jump gate up and running, but some fifty-three goons are working in the servers. And four in particular are in the way of harm just now.
You’d think being technerds, they’d be weedy, exactly the sorts you’d pick to go up against hand to hand. Gotta trade off something for all those smarts, right? Otherwise, it’s not fair. But all four are members of BeiTech’s acquisitions arm, which means they made it through basic and boot camp with flying colors. Strapping specimens of humanity. And right now these specimens are standing in Aisle 239B like they own it, studying a wall of servers and arguing in urgent tones. They’re in the middle of a battle, after all.
Server Cores are prone to getting hot, so the vast chamber has ventilation shafts all over the ceiling. Aisle 240B, the next aisle along from our BeiTech friends, is directly under a removable cover. Which means that anyone planning on descending from the vents to **** with these particular servers has two choices:
Drop down on the other side of the server bank from the goons and pray they don’t notice.
Drop down several hundred meters away and brave at least two other goon squads without raising the alarm on the way here.
Hey, if hostile battleship takeovers were easy, everybody would do it.
The vent cover above Aisle 240B wobbles and almost soundlessly begins to lower itself, hanging from Hanna Donnelly�
�s hand. She’s practiced from her time playing with Falk’s audit team on Heimdall, and before she lets the vent cover fall, she drops her jacket to the ground to muffle the sound. Then, quick and graceful, she jumps down after it, stepping aside so her old dojo master, Kim Rivera, can follow. Michelle Dennis lowers herself down last, Hanna helping to minimize the sound of her landing. She squeezes the other girl’s shoulder, and Dennis nods. She’s here for her programming smarts—it’s up to the other two to clear the way.
Hanna and Kim are both carrying sidearms, but Ella and Kady have made it abundantly clear (Ella drew a diagram) that firing their weapons in a room full of servers required to make the jump gate work should be a very last resort. Also, there are those other goons and alarms to worry about.
Rivera is wearing a black envirosuit, but Donnelly is in her tactical armor, the name KALI still embossed on the breastplate. The access point they need is being inspected by the BeiTech team in 239B, and so they need them gone. Dennis remains behind, pressed in against the servers, hoping her envirosuit will keep her camouflaged if anyone walks past. Hoping she won’t have to hide for long.
Rivera and Donnelly seem to flow up the server wall, deadly and graceful and soundless. They move like human art, framed against the hard-edged science of their surroundings. Crouching atop the server bank, they look down at their prey. Three of the techgoons are arguing, the last rolling his eyes to the ceiling in supplication. When he spots two black-clad figures staring back down at him, he freezes. The world stands still, just for a moment.
Hanna Donnelly drops straight onto him, one boot to the face, the other to the solar plexus. Rivera is a second behind Donnelly, dropping onto a second goon’s shoulders and sending him to his knees. With a midair twist, she lands behind him, driving her boot into the back of his head and his face into the server bank.
That’s the first three seconds.
But the other two BeiTech techgoons are a long way from helpless. One lunges for Donnelly, and though the girl has the edge in skills, the techie is bigger, stronger, and anyone who tells you that doesn’t make a difference just plain hasn’t tried it themselves. The man gets a blow past Donnelly’s defenses, snapping her head back. Donnelly’s counterpunch collides with his larynx, cutting off his warning cry and sending him staggering back and choking.
Rivera and the final goon are wrestling, the techie refusing to let Rivera get any distance. He fights with gritted teeth, his arms and legs wrapped around Rivera, messy as hell. Rivera has her hand on the techhead’s mouth so he can’t yell for help, and the goon bites at the soft flesh of Rivera’s palm through her envirosuit, scrabbling madly.
Donnelly has the edge on her opponent now—in a succession of blows I have to slow down the footage to even see, she drives the guy backward, finishing with a roundhouse kick that I’d call showy, except that the goon literally sails through the air, slams into a bank of machinery and slithers bonelessly to the ground.
Hanna swings around to head to Rivera’s aid and freezes.
The techie has yanked the sidearm from the dojo master’s belt, pressed it to her helmet, hand shaking so hard the muzzle rattles against the plexiglass face shield.
Rat-a-tat-tat.
Donnelly holds up her hands in a whoa, there gesture, mind no doubt ticking through a dozen possibilities. But there’s no way to get close enough. No way to take down the last obstacle—the last thing standing between her and her mission, a mission everything hinges on—without sacrificing her teacher.
And she’s already sacrificed so much.
What else will she have to give before all this is over?
The geeball field is complete bedlam by the time Lindstrom and Grant make it back.
Mason and his Chimeras have pounded the hell out of it. The buildings are mostly rubble, though Flyboy and his crew have wisely avoided blasting the hangars or fuel dumps. BeiTech pounders are scattered inside the broken concrete shells, huddled low.
But as Lindstrom looks to the sky and curses, half a dozen BeiTech Warlocks drop through the cloud cover and zero in on the Chimera group. Mason’s crew is forced to lean off the ground assault, turn to deal with the fighters now swarming out of the clouds. Auto-fire rips the air overheard, pulse missiles weave long gray smoke trails as they streak through the skies.
A ragged cheer goes up from the beleaguered BeiTech forces at the sight of their Warlocks, but the scene on the ground is still one of carnage. Bodies of dead pounders and smoking APCs litter the streets. The colony is in ruins. The BT troops really should have blown the bridge leading into town, but I guess without comms or leadership, with death raining from above, it’s hard for the average grunt to be thinking that clearly. And so the bridge was left intact, allowing Joran Karalis and his rebel pitdiggers to drive their buses and hijacked military transports back into the colony, laying siege to the BeiTech pounders who’d retreated to the LZ.
Three cheers for the chaos of warfare.
Despite the **** up with the bridge, retreat was a smart play on BeiTech’s part. They can still get air support if they control the landing field, and the only way these civis are getting off this rock is with the BT shuttles in the hangar bays. So what you’ve got here is the classic standoff. Except nobody is doing much standing around.
Lindstrom and Grant are marked by half a dozen rebel miners on their way to the landing zone, but even if they don’t know the rookie, most of them know Grant, or at least note her hospital uniform. The pair make it all the way to the front line, to the row of buildings across from the geeball field the miners are using as a crude HQ.
Karalis is huddled in the shelter of a crumbling store, barking into a stolen comms unit. He’s a big guy, bearded and bearlike. It looks like he’s calling the shots and not doing a bad job of it, considering twenty-four hours ago he was digging pits for a living.
When he catches sight of Grant, he actually drops his burst rifle, sweeps her up in a crushing hug. Tears are shining in his eyes.
“I thought we lost you,” he says.
Karalis raises an eyebrow at Lindstrom’s (somehow still perfect) quiff and gives him a wary nod—without the kid, this rebellion wouldn’t be happening. But then, without the BT troops there, none of this would be happening.
Grant speaks into Karalis’s chest, her voice muffled. “Have you seen Katya?”
Karalis frowns down at her, still caught up in his hug. “Who?”
“A girl, a little girl.” Grant’s eyes are frantic. “Katya Kowalska.”
“…Stan and Martha’s girl? I haven’t seen her since the invasion. I tho—”
Grant pushes out of Karalis’s arms, squints through the snow. Lindstrom drags her low as a spray of high-velocity rounds rakes across their cover. The miners around them return fire, the deafening clatter of burst rifles and grenades filling the air. Lindstrom peeks out, scanning the BT position. He sees a familiar figure through the haze, yelling orders at the pounders around her. A female figure in an ATLAS rig.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL printed on her breastplate.
“Oshiro,” he whispers.
“Rhys, we have to find Katya!” Grant pleads.
Lindstrom turns away from the ruins, looks Grant in the eye.
“We have to stay low,” he insists. “She’s a smart kid, Ash, she stayed hidden for seven months. If she’s in there—”
“If she’s in there, she’s terrified! And I promised I’d look after her!”
“Asha, the best thing we can—”
“No, you don’t get it! You don’t get it!!”
A Chimera roars overhead, pursued by two Warlocks. Snow turning to steam in their wake and falling like rain. The Chimera rips off a few hundred armor-piercing rounds into the ruins of the LZ as it passes, carving a few more pounders to mince. Screams of pain. Bursts of return fire. Grant watching in agony.
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“Rhys, we have to stop them shooting!” she moans.
“We’ve got no comms to the fighters, how are we going to—”
“Oh my God.” Grant grabs Lindstrom’s arm. “Look!”
Again, Lindstrom peers over the edge of the broken wall they’re sheltering behind. He squints through the falling snow, the smoke and flame. And there, huddled in the ruins of the geeball field admin building, inside the twisted wreckage of an aluminum vent, is a tiny figure in a puffy pink jumpsuit. A mouse.
The cleverest mouse.
You can barely see her. Filthy, tear-streaked cheeks. Long hair plastered with concrete dust. Clutching a plush gladiator toy to her chest, wide-eyed and terrified.
The firing on both sides lulls, only a few rounds chattering. The roar of fighter engines can be heard above the thunder. The child looks out over the shattered street, the broken buildings, desperation in her eyes. And she sees Grant. Huddled among the buildings just across the road. The girl who’s looked after her these last five months. The girl who kept her fed, kept her safe. If anyone can protect her, if anyone can make all the bad things go away, it’d be her, right?
You can see the logic in it.
It just hurts to watch, is all.
The scene plays out in slow motion. Katya’s face brightens as she catches sight of Grant. A little smile lights her grubby face. The guns have fallen quiet. The bad planes aren’t in the sky for now. And so, without even thinking—only knowing that the one who’s kept her safe since all the bad things started happening is right there, right there—the cleverest mouse scrambles out of the vent and makes a run for it.
Grant screams at Katya to get back, rising up from cover and crying, “NO!” Lindstrom grabs her, tries to haul her back to shelter, but Grant’s like a girl possessed. Punching and kicking loose, breaking from the cover of her wall.