“Was that Harcourt?” he asked. “Is he okay?”
“No, he’s not fucking okay,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “May I use the P2P?”
“Fine.” She pushed herself up out of the grippy chair. He moved along the bar until he was close enough, grabbed the back of the seat, and pulled himself in. “Harcourt won’t want to talk to you,” she added.
Fergus knew that was meant to hurt him, to make her point that he wasn’t welcome, but he understood where that anger came from and let it go.
“I wasn’t going to call him,” he said instead. It took him a long moment to find and center Venetia’s Sword in the crosshairs. His hands itched as he lined up the scope. Magnified, the three alien ships seemed to be staring right at him. Chills ran through his hands and arms, tingling at the base of his skull as he flipped the P2P over to active. The green light came on. Venetia’s Sword was receiving.
“Control, voice command, acknowledge,” he said.
After an uncomfortable pause, the ship responded. “Channel authorized and-and open.”
“Engage engines, three percent max, along P2P trajectory.”
“Engaging,” the ship said. A moment later, it added, “Failure. Forward propulsion has not occurred. Shutting engines d-down and running dia-dia-diagnostics.”
“Ship, has there been any intrusion since I exited via the bay?”
“None has been detected.”
“Run a full scan on the ships in your immediate proximity.”
“There are no ships in my immediate proximity.”
“There are three within a hundred meters of you.”
“Unable to comply. There are no ships.”
“Run an exterior environmental scan, full sensors.”
“Failure. Sensors are unable to return data on ex-ex-exterior of the ship; there is no exterior environment.” There was a pause, then tentatively, “Are you still coming to get me?”
“I am,” Fergus said. “It might take me a while, though.”
“Acknowledged,” the ship said.
He leaned back and stared at the P2P, at a loss. “The ship can’t move, and it can’t detect anything outside of its own hull. It’s so unreachable it might as well not even exist.”
“We have already added it to the Narrative,” the Shielder said, frowning. “So it must exist, then and now and next.”
“What?” Fergus asked.
“Stars, you’re an idiot,” Mari said. She was angrily rubbing a tear from her cheek with a gloved fist. “Why can’t history work like that? Until it’s observed and recorded, it may or may not exist. So they draw the ship, and the ship becomes fixed, and the ship’s past and future with it. It gets to keep its history forever, and because they’ve probably drawn your sorry ass—”
“We drew all of him,” the Shielder said, offended.
“—we get stuck with you too. And you’re no good for anything at all, are you? You or your stupid ship.”
“I can’t get the ship to come to me,” Fergus said. “I’m stuck here too.”
“Where do you feel your pull?” the Shielder asked. “That’s how you become unstuck, by going where you are meant to be drawn, or where there are unfinished drawings of you that need completion.”
My pull? Fergus thought. He felt split into a million pieces. Nothing had ever pulled him, nowhere, not since Mars. Mars, where he just might’ve been able to do some good if he were there instead of here. Great hero, he thought. Always everyone’s disappointment.
Sitting on the surface of Mezz Rock, Harcourt had predicted that Mars would pull him back. It’s like Mars has crept into every conversation I’ve had here, Fergus thought. You’d think being a bazillion light-years and seven jump points away would be enough distance, especially without a ship.
But if I had another . . . He stared up at the Shielder in some surprise. “Do you have long-range escape pods?”
“We do,” the Shielder said. “Five. They were a gift from Mr. Harcourt in exchange for connecting the Wheel Collective to the power grid.”
“Would one get as far as Crossroads?” he asked.
“Why Crossroads?” Mari asked.
“That’s the nearest place to the system jump point, and I know people. From there, I can get us to Mars.”
“Mars?” Mari asked. “And what do you mean, ‘us’?”
“We can’t do any good here. With Harcourt out of the battle, the Governor can’t hold against both Gilger and Vinsic for long. The two of us . . . We wouldn’t change that with anything we could do here. But if we can get Harcourt back in the fight—”
“How? He can’t, or Gilger will kill Arelyn.”
“That’s what we can do. Don’t you see? Everything keeps pointing to Mars—Harcourt and Arelyn’s history, Gilger’s hatred, your fears. Maybe this was inevitable. I know Mars, and you know Arelyn. Together we could—”
“I can’t leave here! You know that!”
“Even if I found Arelyn, why should she trust me? She’s your best friend. You need to be there. And we have to go fast, because as soon as Gilger gets the upper hand, he won’t need a hostage anymore.”
Mari was silent for a full minute. “What if once I leave,” she asked at last, “I don’t want to come back?”
“What if? It’s a big universe out there. When you get sick of it, Cernee will still be waiting for you,” he said.
She turned to the Shielder. “Make him understand?”
The Shielder shrugged. “We have not yet drawn you staying or going, but if there were an easy way of depicting pointless arguing, we would have a whole wall of you two already. Follow me.” He turned and pushed off for the door.
“Where are we going?” Fergus asked the Shielder.
“To the pod bay. It has been agreed upon that we should send you away from Cernee before further events follow you here to us.” The Shielder turned at the transport tube, held his hand out to indicate they should go first. “We agree with the Earther; it is obvious you are both meant to go to Mars, although we will be satisfied with anywhere far, far away.”
Chapter 17
Three tubes later, they emerged in front of a large pair of blast doors. The Shielder came in a few moments after them and keyed in a short code. The doors split apart, revealing a small bay. A row of white pods sat in a perfect line, shaped like little more than huge grains of rice. One on the end was open. Fergus stopped and stared, uncertainty crashing in, and a quick glance at Mari showed she wasn’t feeling any more confident.
Hanging midair beside them, the Shielder was twitching his legs in a way that was distinctly reminiscent of someone tapping their feet. “You know your path. Why do you wait?”
Whatever Mari muttered under her breath, Fergus couldn’t hear it. He entered the bay and peered into the open pod. It was a standard passive-jump pod with cryo and semicryo capabilities. Two long, thin beds partially separated by a thin wall of instrumentation and xglass filled most of the front third; the entire back was engine and powerstore.
Mari stared at Fergus from the other side of the pod. The Shielder made an inarticulate sound—half sigh, half growl—and turned to Fergus. “You understand the launch systems?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. Now leave.” Without saying another word, the Shielder turned and floated out of the room.
“Well,” Mari said as the echo of the blast doors closing behind the Shielder faded. “It’s not a lot of space inside.”
“The pod will low-stat us to conserve oxygen and resources, so we’ll hardly notice.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “I’ve never been frozen.”
“It’s not full cryo, more like being in a really deep sleep. Which side do you want?” he asked.
“What the hell does it matter? Just get in.”
Hand still on the edge, Fergus flipped himself over to gently land on one couch, grabbing the handholds inside to keep from bouncing back out. Stretching his legs into the pod’s forward well, he found a toecatch and used that to keep himself steady as he pulled the retractable straps out from the sides and began to fasten himself down.
“Show-off,” Mari said, pulling herself in with no less grace than he had.
“I thought you said Shielders didn’t like to talk?” Fergus asked as he started powering on the pod systems.
“They don’t want you talking to them,” she said. “Although I’m starting to see two sides to that.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Do they all paint their faces?”
“All that I’ve met,” she said. “And never the same twice. They’ve got strange ideas about obscuring their identities that’s tied into this whole ‘Narrative’ thing, but I like it.”
“Me too,” he decided, “though I’m not convinced I like them yet. And I’m sure they don’t like me, so we should get out of here before they decide to just space us instead. I’m closing the pod, then we’ll launch, and assuming the pod and the sleep systems work correctly and there are no pirates or sudden rockstorms between here and there, we’ll wake up coming into Crossroads.”
He reached across his chest for the control panel, then pulled his hand back as it started tingling, itching.
“What?” Mari asked, noticing his hesitation.
“Nothing.” His hand was fine, same as always. He reached forward again tentatively, felt nothing, pressed the canopy button. The pod closed smoothly over them and sealed.
A control arm extended from either side, meeting in the middle and forming a curved bar directly overhead. The interior filled with a gentle, warm light. Energy levels were good, system checks were good—no reason to wait. He switched the tiny overhead display to the nav computer, set the coordinates, and triple-checked them.
“The bay has a rail-launcher system. It can be a rough start, but they’re pretty foolproof. On the count of three?” Fergus asked.
“Just do it,” Mari said. Her eyes were closed, and her hands were white-knuckled against the armrests.
He reached up, ignoring a resurgence of tingling in his hand, and initiated launch. The lights dimmed, and he could feel the grinding vibration of the launcher underneath the pod locking on. When the systems greenlit, he keyed the confirm, and automated systems took over.
The vibration grew, as did the sense of motion; Fergus knew they were dropping down through a chute and about to be crapped out into the universe at significant velocity, but the pod’s interior dampers were good; Harcourt had done well by the Shielders. He found himself relaxing just a little. The screen in front of him flashed up stats as they soared free of the sunshield.
I’m finally really leaving Cernee, he thought. Instead of relief, there was a sharp pang in his gut, a reminder of unfinished business, unfulfilled promises.
The pod systems were still green. “We’re out and on course,” he said. “You ready for a nap?”
Mari’s hands were still clenched, but she opened her eyes. “First tell me who Dru is.”
Fergus froze. “How did you—”
“You said her name a lot before you woke up.”
“Oh.” Fergus struggled for an answer. “Dru was you, kind of,” he said at last. “I was fifteen and new to Mars, she was nineteen and grew up there, and we were best friends. She wasn’t afraid of anything. We went on dangerous, wild adventures together, playing rebels and heroes like it was a game until the danger caught up to us. To her. And I couldn’t do a damned thing to save her.”
“So you honor her memory by blaming yourself for the fact that she made her own choices? Isn’t that a bit self-centered?”
“You wouldn’t get it,” Fergus said.
“No? Aren’t the two of us running off to Mars to play hero together, just like you two did then? Don’t you dare think that gives you the right to feel responsible for me.”
“Aren’t I?”
“I’m here because of Arelyn, not you. I could’ve talked the Shielders into letting me stay. They know and trust me. It’s you they wanted to get rid of,” she said, though it sounded like she was trying to convince herself of that at least as much as him. “That makes me an equal partner. Whatever happens, I am not some damned do-over for your misplaced conscience, and you do not have my permission to believe I don’t fully own my choices. Mother understood that, and so does Harcourt. Time you did too. You got that?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Great. Let’s never talk about it again. Now put us the fuck to sleep before I change my mind.”
“Right,” Fergus said. He punched in the sleep sequence. Almost immediately he felt warm, tired, his vision blurring. “See you in Crossroads,” he managed to say, but she was already out, so he closed his eyes too.
* * *
—
Coming back out of the haze, Fergus tried to count how many times he’d been low-statted over the years, but he couldn’t manage to wrap his fuzzy brain around a solid number. One thing he was sure of was that he was developing resistance to the aerosol cocktail ubiquitous to the systems. Not only was he waking up faster—Mari was still out like a light—but rather than the elapsed time being so opaque it seemed like a jump from one instant to another, there were remnants of a slow dream state at the fringes of his memory.
That wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t spent most of it dreaming there was a black triangle trailing in their wake.
He checked their position. The pod had come out of jump about an hour outside of Crossroads and closed half the remaining distance in the time it had taken it to initiate wakeup and for him to drag himself up out of his stupor. Beside him, Mari’s breathing and color were slowly returning to normal. She’d be awake in another ten or fifteen minutes.
The pod was close enough to the station to establish a comm link; Fergus popped a window open and sent a query to a “facilitator service” he’d worked with in the past. To his relief, the two-woman team was still in business—and not in jail or on the run—and took his call. When Mari finally began staring around her in disorientation, the meet was already set and the call over.
“What went wrong?” she said. “Why didn’t we go to sleep?”
“We did,” he answered. Now that was the sort of sleep he missed. “We’ll be pulling into the Sunward Dock at Crossroads in about eight minutes, and if things go smoothly, we should be out of here again within three or four hours.”
“Yeah? And how are we going to manage that?”
“Some friends are going to meet us,” Fergus said. At her look, he smiled. “Don’t worry. You’ll like them.”
“If you say so.”
The docking signal came through right on time. He keyed the pod to follow it but kept a hand on the override. He knew this place too well. Speaking of which . . . “We should talk about Crossroads,” he said. “Most of the people who live in Cernee are involved in legitimate work—growing lichen, asteroid, ice, and gas-giant mining, basic essentials trade. Crossroads isn’t like that. If there’s any honest trade here other than bartending, it’s a sideline to most of what goes on. The population is always in flux, and everyone and everything is potentially dangerous.”
“Even your friends?”
“Especially them,” he said.
The station was visible now; much like Cernee, it was a jumble of strung-together cans and dead ships, but unlike the loosely woven web of Cernee’s lines, it was as if a giant galactic cat had pulled its strings apart, batted it around for a bit, tried to eat it, and barfed it out again. The Sunward Dock was a massive, blocky rustcube on the fringes, dangling off the end of a bent pipe, surrounded by a thick cloud of debris and trash.
Dammit, Fergus swore. Once in a while scavengers came out and dredged through the flotsam, looking f
or anything saleable, and inadvertently kept the approach clean. By the look of things, they were overdue. “I’m slowing down the pod to minimum,” he said. “I’m also putting extra energy in the deflectors in the nose; if the lights dim, that’s why.”
Mari turned on her own screen. “What is all that stuff?” she asked. She jumped as the lower half of a body, desiccated and frozen, passed up and over the pod. “No, forget I asked.”
Something Fergus would’ve sworn was a can of beans bounced off the canopy right in front of the view camera, making both him and Mari reflexively duck. “This might be a bumpy landing,” Fergus said as something else thudded along the underside of the pod.
The automated systems finally locked on and pulled them through the last of the debris and toward a small bay. A mechanical arm latched onto the pod and dragged it in.
The screens went dark. “Huh,” Fergus said.
“Well? Are we in?”
“In, yes. We should have gotten atmosphere as soon as the bay closed. But the bay systems haven’t connected to us to get a readout, and the docking systems have let go, so I’ve got nothing. No idea what’s out there.”
“Why aren’t our screens working?”
“They are. It’s just pitch dark. If the lights didn’t come on, maybe the door didn’t close, or maybe it’s still vacuum inside. I wish I had my suit,” he said. “Any suit. Even one three sizes too small.”
“Do I have controls over here?” Mari asked.
“Yeah, full dual-pilot. Why?”
Mari scrolled through the interface for a moment, then hit a button. The pod groaned as if slapped by a massive hand, and the screen in front of Fergus flared white for an instant.
“What did you do?!”
She didn’t answer. The screen flickered, then settled into a dim, orangish image of the inside of the bay. “Bay’s closed,” she said. “And there’s atmo.”
“Did you just blast one of the maneuvering jets? Are you off your head? That could’ve started a fire!” he shouted.
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