Bang. Another knock, then a muffled, angry voice. “Fuck you, Fergus, let me the hell in!”
Mari?! He pushed to the wall, unlocked the door, and slid it open.
Mari tumbled in, breathing hard. “Took your damned time,” she said.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” Fergus answered. “What the hell are you doing here? How are you here?”
“I followed you,” she said. She unfastened her exosuit’s air bottles and plugged them into his room’s recharger. He could see the winking red lights on them from here.
“Followed me from where?”
“From Mezz Rock, asshole,” she said. “If you’re trying to be sneaky, leaving a trail of little smiley-faced holo-stars behind you isn’t what I’d call mastery of the art.”
Fergus put a hand to his forehead, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. Should’ve broken the projector sooner. “If you followed me from the Rock—”
“I was trying to find you and Bale,” she said. “Bale’s alive, by the way, though barely. Nice of you to ask.” She had finished with her bottles and finally seemed to be noticing the mess in the room. “Um . . . Fergus?”
He shook his head. “It’s complicated,” he said. Then he narrowed his eyes. “You couldn’t have followed me.”
“Why not?”
“Because you couldn’t have. You bugged my suit back when I was at the farm, didn’t you?”
“Well, we couldn’t let you take off with Mauda and all our crates without having some way of finding you,” she said. At his expression, she held up both hands. “It’s an old sleeper channel, low power, cycling eff pattern. Nothing anyone else is going to pick up unless they’re already looking for it. As it is, even knowing what I was tracking, I lost you between the Rock and here. Where the fuck did you go?”
“I was being chased, so I went the only place I could think of where no one would look for me: Turndown.”
She stared at him, her face warring to find a single expression. At last she spoke, her voice quiet. “Was it? Safe, I mean?”
“Yes and no,” he said. “I . . . Look, don’t ever go there. It was bad.”
“Yeah. Big surprise there.” Mari looked away into the room, her gaze avoiding his for a while. “I guess that explains the unmatched P2P interval. Harcourt’s got a few people here; they told me you’d been in touch with him.”
“About Harcourt—”
She began to pluck loose scraps of foil from the air, wrapping them around one finger of her glove, making a little ball. “He told me he’d asked you if you had anything to do with the Asiig. You didn’t tell him they’re around because of us,” she said.
“Even assuming that it’s true—which I’m in no way convinced of—it’s your business,” he answered. “If you haven’t shared it with him, you must have good reason. Either way, it’s not my place to tell. I know it has nothing to do with me.”
She looked up from her foil ball, met his eyes again. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s hard, growing up being told not to trust anyone.”
“You saying you trust me?”
“Don’t push it,” she said. “Harcourt is family, you know? When you have as many aunts as I do, an uncle is a nice change. That must seem strange to someone coming from a normal family.”
Fergus gave a short laugh. “There are all kinds of wonderful things people tell me exist or could exist in this universe— time travel, truly sentient machines, dragons on Venus, normal families—but I haven’t seen any direct evidence of any of them. My Da and I both loved my Ma more than anything else, but in the end it only ever brought us madness. We took our separate ways out.”
Mari nodded. “For a while I thought we were one family, the aunts and Harcourt and Arelyn and me. But I still never told Arelyn, though I wanted to a thousand times. And now after us playing and daydreaming everything Martian for most of our lives, she’s actually gone off there for real without me. It hurts being left behind, you know?”
“You didn’t want to go with her?”
“I did,” she said. “More than anything. But I can’t. Vahns don’t leave the farm.”
“Mars is far away, but it’s not a one-way trip. Harcourt says he still has connections there. If he was willing to let Arelyn go, he could get you there and back again safely, even if just for a visit. I suspect he’d be happy to do it.”
“I want to more than anything,” she said. “But I can’t, not ever, and the more Harcourt and Arelyn and now you talk about it, the harder that reality becomes. It’s bad enough that I’m out here running loose in Cernee. Mother understood, but Mauda would implode if she knew. She doesn’t know Arelyn is gone yet. When . . .”
She trailed off, her expression tightening. “What I need to understand,” she said at last, “is what the hell you’re doing in here. Really, I can’t even guess.” She pointed at the orange missile thumping forlornly along the distant wall.
“I’ll show you,” he said. He plucked a tennis ball out of the bag. Finding his knife, he opened the blade and carefully cut a slit through the ball halfway around, making a small notch at one end of the cut. Then he reached into the open box of adult toys and pulled out the next one, a lime-green E’zon, and snapped off the head. He extracted the vibration mechanism, careful to keep the switch intact. Then he squeezed the tennis ball to open the cut and slipped the vibrator in, pulling the switch out through the notch.
“I still don’t—”
He held up a hand: Wait. Reaching over to one wall, he unstuck the big gooey mass of candy he’d wedged there, pulling out long, sticky strands that he wrapped around the tennis ball. Then he grabbed a roll of shiny foil, cut out a square, and wrapped it around the sticky ball. “See?” he said, holding it out to her.
She took it reluctantly, found the switch, and turned it on. The ball began to shake in her hand. “I still don’t get it. What’s it for?”
“Gilger uses both smart mines and sentry bobs,” Fergus said. “I can make seventy-two of these, and when I turn them all on and throw them out on the edge of his territory, they’ll set off any mines they hit. The sentry bobs will think there’s some sort of attack. Every damn alarm Gilger has is going to go off.”
“But they’re just balls.”
“But he won’t know that until someone gets out there and catches one and takes it apart. Until then, he’ll have to assume his home base is in danger. He’ll pull his people back, and more importantly, he’s going to come running home himself. In my ship.”
“What about Vinsic?”
“Vinsic has his own game. I don’t know what it is, but he’s less than happy about Gilger’s focus being elsewhere. Gilger attacked Blackcans because he wants to cut the Wheels off from the Halo, and Vinsic wants his people far away from that.”
Her eyebrows went up. “How do you know all that?”
“I took a comm off one of Vinsic’s men.”
“Oh!” she said. “We can use that!”
“Not any more. It self-destructed.” He pointed to the blackened, warped smartfridge. “Mauda said Blackcans are friends of yours?”
“Of a sort, yeah. We did business with them from the farm.”
“Why is Vinsic so afraid of them?”
“They’re close allies of the Shielders. Most of the energy that feeds Cernee is generated by the sunshields. If the Shielders decided to start unplugging things . . . I don’t think they would, but they could, and that’s enough, you know? Same reason Ili is protected by holding the oxygen farms. And us? We have foil-covered balls, apparently.”
“Vibrating foil-covered balls,” Fergus said.
“You’re mad, you know.” Mari looked around the room again, took a deep breath, then let it out almost regretfully. “What can I do to help?”
“Are you familiar with the Celekai phrase C’ga A⊄?”
“What?”
Right. “Never mind.”
“How much time do you have left?”
He stifled a yawn. “Twenty-five hours, give or take.”
“And when was the last time you slept?”
“Turndown. I haven’t really wanted to sleep since.”
She rolled her eyes. “Show me again how to make these?”
“Why?”
“Because the only useful thing you can do for any of us is steal Gilger’s ship, and if you doze off on your way there, you’re going to get caught,” she said. “So I’ll make some of these while you sleep, and if you start having nightmares, I’ll kick you till they stop.”
“I don’t—”
“Did I ask? No.” Mari plucked his folded knife out of the air, took a tennis ball out of the sack, and stared at him until he gave in and showed her again.
* * *
—
He woke up five hours later, corpses and neon-colored organ replicas lurking in the periphery of his mind as he pulled his way back up into consciousness. His room stank like something large and unnatural had come in and died a terrible, gassy death. “What is that smell?” he asked, trying to untangle himself from the hammock.
Mari held out a takeout cup. “Lunch,” she said.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Reluctantly he took the cup from her and peered inside.
“It tastes better if you don’t look at it,” she added, and handed him a small pair of blue plastic tongs. She plucked her own back out of the air where she’d let them go, pulled out a mass of brownish goo from her own cup, and stuffed it in her mouth.
Fergus dipped his tongs in, and closing his eyes, put some in his mouth. When he could speak again, he said, “I think this makes the fifth time someone has tried to kill me since I got to Cernee.”
“Yeah, well, it’s nutritious, I’m told. I got it just for you, too.”
“What is it?”
“Some Celekai thing called something like fooge-burm. Don’t ask me to spell it. You mentioned the Celekai, so I figured it was something you were into. There’s an exotic foods vending machine two levels away, and it was one of the few still working and stocked. And it came in a two-pack.”
“Lucky us,” Fergus said.
She snagged the empty carton the cups had come in out of the air. “‘Best Fooge-burm in Human Space or Out!’,” she read out loud. “It’s even got a cute little cartoon character on the box, see?”
“I don’t—” he started to say, then blinked. “There’s what?” He snagged the box out of her hand and turned it around. A cartoonized alien in Celekai garb held out his hands over a stylized giant bowl of brown stringy goo. Over his head, it said, “Mr. Veekee says: Help me eat the delicious ⎡oo⎭g’B⊇rm!”
In a word balloon, the alien was saying, “C’ga A⊄!”
He grinned. “That’s the last key. ‘Mr. Veekee.’ You solved it, Mari!” Then he took the cup out of her hands, pushed to the far wall, and stuffed both into the broken flash recycler.
“Hey, I wasn’t done!”
“When someone who comes from the land of haggis and black pudding tells you something is inedible, you should trust them. We’ve got twenty hours left, which is enough time to finish up the last of these balls. Next meal is on me.”
“You’re damned right it is,” she said. She picked out another ball and sliced it open. “How do you plan on deploying these?”
“There’s a small untethered asteroid just outside Gilger’s territory. I’m going to haul these there and send them toward his perimeter. Then I’m going to go as fast as I can around to the far side of Burnbottle. As everyone is reacting to the surprise attack from the asteroid, I’ll sneak in and take the ship.”
“Even with all the fighting going on, Gilger’s got people on alert. You’re not going to get far from that asteroid before they catch you.”
“Well, that’s why I said I’ll go fast,” Fergus said.
“I’ll take them.”
“Take what?”
“The balls. To the asteroid.”
Just like Dru and me, he thought. They’d split up to do an end-run around a Martian Colonial Authority outpost, one the decoy, the other the courier. We thought we were having fun.
“No, you won’t,” he said as firmly as he could. “Look, I appreciate the offer, and I might not have gotten that last key if not for your attempt to poison me, but I’m not putting you in danger. I do this alone.”
“First off, no one tells me what to do—not Mauda, not Harcourt, and certainly not you,” she said. “Second, I know that asteroid, I know the old mine tunnels in it, and I can hide a lot better and a lot longer than you can. I’ve been spying on Gilger ever since I figured out how to get off the Wheels. So either you let me help you, or I’m going to make my own attempt on Gilger. We both have a better chance if we work together, and you know it. Maybe our only chance. Do we have a deal?”
Say no, he told himself. Find any reason you can to keep her out of this.
But she was right—it was the best chance. And he wasn’t going to be able to convince her otherwise. Dru wouldn’t have let him talk her out of their plan either, and the hell he would have paid if he had even tried . . .
“Under protest, and only if you stay put deep in that asteroid until it’s safe and then get the hell out of the area and back to the Wheels if you can, or somewhere else out of the way if you can’t. You’re not allowed to get yourself killed, not even slightly. That’s my nonnegotiable condition. If you won’t promise to keep yourself safe first and foremost, I’ll stuff you in that smartfridge and lock you in till it’s over,” he said. “You got that?”
“I got it,” she said, though her eyes flashed homicidal promises if he tried anything of the sort.
Fergus cracked the head off a neon yellow vibrator more violently than necessary and hauled out the little electronic guts. “Great. Gilger’s waiting for us. Let’s get this done.”
She smiled and stuck the knife deep into another ball.
Chapter 12
Mari retrieved her ’stick from Harcourt’s local contact just as Leakytown declared a full lockdown. They had thirty minutes to get out or they were going to sit out the war—or be overrun by it—trapped here.
The public area was empty except for the booth with the unfortunate soup and a few furtive lingerers hanging on the wall nets. Black sheets had been tethered down across storefronts, some more carefully than others. Fergus snagged one that had drifted free and bundled it around the mesh bag of balls to keep it concealed. By the time he’d finished, more than one desperate person had begun moving to intercept them.
“We ought to get out of here,” Fergus said.
Mari was already well ahead of him. “You’re slow as dirt, Earthman,” she called back.
It was awkward enough managing both the tennis balls and his ’stick while keeping a grip on the central bar, but with the added urgency, it became almost impossible. After a moment’s consideration of the wide, deserted corridors, Fergus let go of the bar and fired up his ’stick.
“Hey!” Mari shouted as he roared past her.
This is really stupid, he thought as he had to put out a foot and push off a wall to take a turn without flattening himself. He was reaching down for the ’stick’s kill switch when he heard Mari closing in behind him.
Screw that—I’m not losing my lead.
He careened around another corner, nearly clipping his head on a wall-mounted sign, then narrowly missing a startled man coming out of an adjoining corridor as he ducked under it. Mari’s ’stick was higher quality, or she was a better flier—or both, most likely—and she had nearly caught up to him by the time he flew the last length into the platform. He flipped the braking thrust on the flystick as he raised his feet and hit the far wall, letting his knees bend with the impact before springing back ou
t into the middle of the room.
Mari flew past, saw the wall just in time, and did a much less graceful version of the same maneuver. To be fair, Fergus had known before he entered the platform where the wall was going to be, but he still took a viscerally childish satisfaction in that brief look of panic as she’d flown past.
The rental kiosk that earlier had been surrounded by a frustrated mob was now a burned-out shell, with a security gate snapped down across the front of it.
When Mari had bounced back enough to reach him, he handed her the bag of tennis balls. “Hold this for a second,” he said, “and keep an eye out?”
She took it, and he let go of his ’stick and began stripping off his exosuit. From his pack he unfolded the one he’d acquired from Vinsic’s dead Blue and pulled it on with as much speed as care would allow. He would rather have changed in his room, but he couldn’t risk being mistaken for an active fighter while still inside Leakytown. He unclipped his comm unit from his own suit, attached it to his stolen one, and folded his old suit carefully back into his pack.
“You ready?” Mari asked.
He nodded. “As much as I’ll ever be.”
“Three-one-five,” she said, then sealed her face shield. As he switched his private link over to that channel, she pushed out through the platform envelope. Moments later when it rotated back, he followed.
Mari was tumbling away, twisting to get her ’stick under her with a graceful flair he assumed was meant to demonstrate that hitting the wall had been a singular lapse. Then, with the tennis balls dragging behind her, she disappeared out into the perpetual night. He took a deep breath and pushed off.
From Leakytown there was a line to a tiny, rusty residential hab named Humbug, which had locked all its outer doors and cut contact with the outside world as soon as hostilities had broken out. Lying low and hoping they don’t get run over, Fergus thought, and couldn’t blame them.
His plan had been to mingle with other stragglers, but with no one on or near the line, that wasn’t an option. He got that itchy-back feeling of being too conspicuous immediately. When he was moving at top speed, he shut his ’stick down, going dark.
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