“But you wouldn’t have lost me!”
“No? I did when you went off to Mars.”
“You could have come with me! I asked, but you said no.”
“You could have asked why!”
“You could have at least told me something was wrong! We could have found a way to fix it!”
“Fix it?!” Mari shouted. “How do you fix what you are?”
“There are doctors—”
“I’d endanger my whole family!”
“There are doctors so far away they’ve never heard of Cernee, or the Asiig, or any of it!”
“I can’t take that risk. I am what I am, Arelyn,” Mari said. “If you can’t be friends with me without ‘fixing’ me first, then we aren’t friends.”
“I just want what’s best for you.” Arelyn looked at Fergus for the first time. “You explain it to her,” she said.
“Well,” he said, wishing desperately that he were anywhere else. “Arelyn is probably right that there are doctors far enough from Cernee for you to be safely anonymous. There’s no guarantee they’d be able to do anything for you or that if they could, the change would be one you’d want. And Mari is right that being her friend can’t be conditional on her changing who she is for you.”
Arelyn stood up, flinging the chair back. “And here I felt bad for hitting you with that pipe,” she said, and she stormed out.
The sudden silence in the kitchenette was almost painful.
“Great food?” Mari said eventually.
“So I’m told.”
“How big’s the sky?”
“Don’t think about it,” he said. “Try a biscuit.”
* * *
—
The Ọlẹaja was, to Fergus’s surprise, not only atmosphere-capable, but had the proper permits to land directly on Coralla. The pilot took them in without delay and set down on the shuttleport tarmac. “Rintennan Island,” she announced over the ship’s comms as they gathered at the open cargo bay door. “Don’t forget to check under your bunks for your personal belongings as you get off my ship.”
Fergus snorted. “All I have is the clothes on my back.”
“I heard that,” the pilot answered. “You can also keep the towel you were walking around in when your clothes were in the wash. The ship surveillance footage will cost you extra.”
Bale coughed. “I have something for you,” he said. He picked up a cargo bag, held it out.
Fergus took it and undid the flap. Nestled inside was his MCA suit. He held it up, scrutinizing the military-grade smartfabric, unable to find a single blemish. “How the hell did you manage to fix this?” he asked at last, astonished.
Bale smiled. “I didn’t.”
“Then how—”
Bale cracked his knuckles, one set after the other. “The highly skilled application of the element of surprise,” he said.
Mari snorted. “Somewhere there’s a very tall, very pissed off, very freshly scented MCA soldier trying to explain how he got stuck in the Mars Orbital laundry processing chute.”
“I swapped out the screen on the pad you left in the buggy, so that’s in there too,” Bale said. “It’s not much, but, well. Didn’t have time to buy you goodbye flowers.”
“You going to be okay?” Fergus asked.
Bale frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “We can’t reach our Crossroads contact. We’ve got six hours in dock till the next launch window, and then one way or another we’ve got to go. I don’t know what’s waiting for us or how I’m going to get back to Cernee under the nose of the Asiig, but hey, if you can pull off the impossible, maybe I can too. Especially if I’m not worrying about the rest of you lot.”
Fergus held out a hand, and Bale shook it. “Good luck,” he said.
“Try to stay out of trouble for once, okay?” Bale said. He turned to Mari and Arelyn. “You two. If all goes well, I’ll be back for you soon.”
“Thanks, Bale,” Arelyn said, while Mari stood with her arms crossed, lips pressed tightly together, scowling.
Fergus stepped out of the cargo bay into the shuttleport, giving them a few minutes alone whether they wanted it or not. It wasn’t about him anymore. Standing at the threshold of the gates, he felt unbalanced, wavering on a point, like he could teeter and fall into this new world or back into his old one.
The guard at the gate had his back turned, was talking to someone over his comm. “Yeah, long gone now,” he was saying. “Too fast for anyone up at the orbital to get a good look at it. Yeah. Like a big black triangle, they said.”
Fall forward, Fergus told himself. Fall away from all of this as fast as you can. He hurried past the guard, away from the Ọlẹaja, out into the warm air and sunlight and clear skies of Coralla. He stopped on the edge of the boardwalk and stood there, trying to feel real again.
After a few minutes, the other two emerged behind him, and the security guard pulled the gates closed. Mari put her hands up over her eyes and hunched over in the bright sun, groaning. “I hate this place already,” she said.
“It’s almost sunset,” Arelyn said. “You’ll live. Dad’s got a contact on the other side of the island who says there’s a decent hotel a short walk down the beach from here. You and I can get a room for the night, and then he’ll meet us in the morning.”
“And Fergus?” Mari asked.
Arelyn threw a dangerous glance in his direction. “What about him?” she said.
“It’s okay,” Fergus interrupted. “I’ll find my own way from here. You two were friends before I came along, and even though I didn’t cause this fight, I don’t think you’ll figure out how to be friends again until I’m gone. So I’m going.” He picked up his duffel, turned his back on them, and walked down the boardwalk toward the gentle sloping sands beyond.
“Fergus . . .” Mari called after him, but he kept walking.
The boardwalk curved toward the beach, then finally disappeared beneath it. The pure white sand was tinged a faint pink now as the sun slid toward the far horizon. There were people and umbrellas scattered like strange weeds here and there, and the beginnings of a bonfire near the waterline. The ocean went on forever, the water dark, the waves mesmerizing.
At last Fergus dared to turn and look behind him, up toward the shuttleport. There was no one standing there any longer, no one waiting for him, no one watching him. That, he thought, is for the best.
He dropped the duffel and sat down in the sand, digging his fingers into it as if to burrow in. It was still warm from the sun, and it ran through his fingers like liquid silk.
I’m alive, he thought. More than that, his friends were still alive, and without him around, maybe they’d stay that way.
The sun finally kissed the horizon, a giant orange globe of fire. The bonfire was now a roaring beacon, and he could hear the mingled chaos of music and laughter from the people gathered around it. The pale half circle of one of Coralla’s moons was just visible in the deepening dark high above. He let out a long breath, feeling as if he were exhaling air that had been trapped in his lungs since the day he left Earth. Most peaceful place in the galaxy? He believed it with all his heart. This was the place people ran away to, to find—or lose—themselves forever.
I could stay right here for the rest of my life, he thought. I’m free. I can be nobody, nothing, without disappointing anyone else ever again. He was tipping over the boat, ready to sink, no one standing on the shore to watch him go. Everything he’d ever been had been scoured clean.
He was ready to drown.
Except.
There was one thing, one promise, one last indelible piece of who he was that refused to yield. Letting the last of the sand slip from his hands, he stood up, brushed off his legs, and picked up his duffel. He stepped back up onto the boardwalk.
“What’re ye doin’, ye daft bugger?” he asked out lou
d. Then he turned back toward the shuttleport and its bright lights and began to walk. He could imagine the waves of the ocean behind him reaching out, trying to close over him and pull him down for good. He was sick of being pulled from one place to another, one job to another, like a bit of flotsam. It was time to push.
“I am Fergus Ferguson, and I find lost things,” he answered himself. “I’m going to bring Venetia’s Sword home because I said I would, and if I have to go through Gilger and the Asiig to do it, so be it.”
Chapter 23
He had a handpad, an MCA exosuit, a T-shirt that looked like it had come out the back side of a black hole, a small amount of credit left to his name, and not much else. He needed to get back to Cernee, and there was only one ship he was sure was heading that way. Assuming he could get back onto it—as laissez-faire-bordering-on-absentee as Coralla’s work culture was, he was certain that if shuttleport security asked Bale if he should be let in, Bale was going to say no. Shout it, probably.
Improvise, Fergus.
There was a small village just past the port, 90 percent of which was stores dedicated to souvenirs, sunscreen, and a wide range of intoxicants. He found an app kiosk, jacked in his handpad, and bought the only useful thing he could think of: the aptly-named Dot Is Down. It was designed for people in nonplanetary environments where gravity could appear, disappear, or change direction without warning.
As he had expected, the shuttleport gates were closed. The guard from earlier was gone, replaced by a bored-looking night-shifter perched on a tall stool. Fergus closed the distance with as much purpose as he could put into his gait, trying to recreate the mental feel of the fancy bizsuit he still owed Harcourt for.
It worked well enough that the guard got down off his stool and stood. Before the man could speak, Fergus pointed at him and scowled. “First, if anyone asks,” he said, “I was never here.”
“. . . What?”
Fergus held up his pad with its Guratahan Sfazil Security Service logo bright on its case. “I’m Agent Cheefer, and this is an undercover operation,” he said. “I’ve been tracking a dangerous fugitive across half the galaxy, and I need to get into that berth before that ship launches.”
The guard stared at him. “You don’t look like an agent.”
Fergus scowled. “If I showed up in a bright red jumpsuit with ‘AGENT’ scrawled across the back, I wouldn’t be undercover, would I?”
“Um, no,” the guard said. “Why this ship?”
Fergus held out the pad with its bright red, blinking dot in the center of the display. “See?” he said, tilting it toward the doors and slightly down. The red dot moved to the leading edge of the pad, blinking faster. Yep, gravity is still down, Fergus thought. Let’s hope this guy hasn’t spent much time off-planet.
“Oh. Well, okay.” The guard stepped back and keyed open the gates.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Fergus thought.
As he stepped forward, the guard put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. “Before you go in,” he said. “Your fugitive. You can tell me. It’s the woman, right?”
“What?”
The guard nodded, a smug smile on his face. “I knew that story about forgetting her dance shoes was total buggo.”
Nonplussed, Fergus hurried through the gates and onto the tarmac of the shuttleport. The Ọlẹaja sat serenely in the center like a giant gray origami bird in a nest of cables. Standing under a wing with his back to the gates, Bale was shouting at someone, punctuating his words with expansive gestures.
There was only one person Fergus could think of who could make Bale that mad, other than himself. Sure enough, Mari peered around Bale and threw her own hands up. “Oh, fucking great!” she shouted.
Bale turned, whatever he was saying frozen on his lips. Behind Fergus, the guard called from the doorway. “Do you need me to call some backup for you, Agent Cheefer?”
“What the hell is going on?” Mari demanded.
Fergus raised his pad to show off the GS Security Service logo. “You know why I’m here. Either we can go on board and talk this over quietly, or I can have a squad here and we can talk it over on the way to a detention facility.”
Bale was staring at him. “Are you serious?” Mari asked.
“He’s undercover!” the guard helpfully called out from the gate.
“We aren’t even on Guratahan Sfazil,” Mari said. “Isn’t this out of your jurisdiction?”
Bale rounded on Mari. “This is your fault!”
“Yessss!” the guard shouted, pumping his fist. “I knew it!”
“Are we going inside?” Fergus asked.
Bale turned to the guard. “If you let any more people into my private shuttleport berth—I don’t care who they are—I will come back out here and shoot you!” he hollered.
The guard hurried outside and closed the gate.
“Where the hell is Arelyn?” Bale asked.
“Back at the hotel,” Mari said. “I told her I was going out for fresh air.”
“You just abandoned her?”
“It was my turn,” Mari snapped.
“And when she comes looking for you?”
“I was hoping not to wait around until then.”
Fergus suddenly sidestepped around Bale and through the open cargo bay door onto the ship. Bale raced after him, and Mari slipped in behind. Bale turned, waving his hands in frustration. “Get back out!” he yelled.
“I just want to go home,” she said. She stabbed a hand toward Fergus. “You got what you wanted and a full out. Why the hell are you here?”
“Because I promised a ship I’d bring it home,” he said.
The pilot’s voice came over the comms. “We’ve got clearance to go, and I’m disengaging the resupply lines,” she said. “You have a problem down there, you solve it in the next thirty seconds.”
“That’s it—no more talking. Both of you get off my ship,” Bale said.
Fergus held out his hands and jumped a spark from one palm to the other. “You going to throw me out?”
Bale turned to Mari, though whether it was for help or sympathy wasn’t clear. “I bite,” Mari said.
Bale gave a wordless snarl. “You,” he said, pointing to Mari. “If anything happens to you, I’m telling your family you stowed away without me knowing. And you!” He turned to Fergus. “If anything bad happens to you, I’m going to tell everyone I killed you myself. I’ll probably get a medal.”
“I’m sealing the ship,” the pilot announced. “Say your goodbyes to the nice warm sandy beaches and fresh air. I strongly advise you all to be strapped down in your bunks in three minutes or less.”
“Yeah,” Mari said. “You two stay here and argue. I don’t need any more bruises.” She grabbed the ladder up onto the main deck of the Ọlẹaja as the bay door swung up and shut. The sealing bolts locked like muffled gunshots.
“Move fast,” Bale growled.
* * *
—
By the time the all clear sounded that they were safely in the jump conduit, Fergus was the only one still awake. He unstrapped himself and got up, grateful for the solitude. He still felt insubstantial, tenuous. Wandering back down to the cargo bay, he stared for a while at the escape pods, then returned to the kitchenette. He tried soaking a packet of biscuits in water to see if they’d turn into a more palatable mush.
The pilot came in, watched him for a few minutes, then laughed. “Those biscuits came with the ship,” she said. “A whole lot of people far more desperate than you haven’t found a way to make them edible either, but it’s always fun to see what people try.” She walked over to the cabinets and, with her back to him, did something he couldn’t see; when she turned around, the cabinets looked the same as before, but she had two bulbs of instacoffee in her hands.
She handed him one. He shook it, waiting for it to heat itself
up, as she did the same. “So, you’re still with us,” she said.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Through to the bitter end.”
She nodded. “Mr. Bale’s contact at Crossroads is still offline,” she said. “We’ve got one last jump at the Zanzjan Minor orbital. If we don’t get word by then, we aren’t going to.”
“I have contacts at Crossroads that I can try to reach from there,” Fergus said.
“We’ll only be in normal space in the Zjan system for half an hour before we jump for Crossroads,” she said. “I’ve already locked and verified the jump window for our mass rating. You could send from there, but we wouldn’t get a reply until we’re already out the far side.”
The Crossroads jump point was in the wake of a dead and heavily pocked ice planet named Dadekan that once upon a time had been the third-closest object to Cernee’s star. Planets one and two had been chewed to crumbs by rockcrappers during the early days of system settlement. Thanks to the substantial speed differences, it was a short trip via active jump into the system at Crossroads, but a much longer one in passive, past a trio of gas giants out to the orbit of Cernee. Having some idea of what—and more particularly, who—might be waiting for them at Cernee was critical.
“If we don’t hear from Bale’s contact at the orbital, I’ll send mine a message,” Fergus said. “It’s better than nothing.”
“As you like,” the pilot said.
“If nothing else, it’ll give me something to think about as I’m losing yet another hand of Venusian Monkeypoker,” Fergus said. “I can’t help but think everyone knows some secret rules I don’t.”
“Of course there are secret rules. It depends on what cards you hold,” she said. “That’s why it’s so hard to know who’s winning until they’ve won. Misleading the other players is key. If you make them spend most of the game trying to guess your strategy, at some point they’ll hand you just what you need because they think you don’t want it.”
“Huh,” he said.
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