by Sara King
“No!” Quad cried, grabbing her by the arm when he realized she meant to leave him there. Cheyenne had told him he only had five minutes with Anna before he had to be back for supper. He’d already used up three.
Get in, get out, Cheyenne had said. Offer to bring her and her sister back with you if you think it’s safe. If not, screw what Sirius wants and just come home.
“I can take you home with me!” Quad blurted in his excitement. “To the Core! I’m here to take you back to the Core with me! I’m your ride. To safety. Orion is back on Fortune and they don’t want him to find you by accident! Your daddy wants you safe.”
“Shhh!” Anna flinched and looked around them. “Aanaho, you’re worse than damn Wideman.” She pried his fingers from her arm. “Look, you just stay here and keep watch for Shriekers, okay? If you’re really quiet, maybe those nice soldiers out there won’t knock out a few teeth before you die of the Wide. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
Quad didn’t want to nod, but he’d been conditioned to nod from years of being yelled at when he didn’t hear people who were talking to him, and the pleasant tone of her question triggered an automatic reaction from his body even when he tried to fight the ingrained impulse with his frantic mind. He followed his nod with an immediate head-shake for clarification.
“Yeah, okay, cupcake.” Anna grinned and saluted him. “Good luck holding them off. I hear those cafeteria benches are killers in the dark.” Then, without looking back, she turned and left the chow hall tent.
Quad watched the place where she had disappeared for several minutes, chest aching with a pang of loss, before the cook came out from the cordoned-off kitchen brandishing a wooden spoon. “Hey! You! Kid! Where’d the other one go? She done making my life miserable already?”
Out of time, overwhelmed by his contact with Anna Landborn, unable to even contemplate the idea of talking to an adult, Quad simply grabbed the concept of his mother’s dinner table in the Core and pushed himself back to the Aashaanti anchor he had glued under the seat of his favorite chair in the family villa on Trinoi. Anchors made things easier.
“You’re late,” Cheyenne sighed, looking up as he appeared in his usual seat at her left hand. She had several datapads spread out in front of her, along with a few dozen luminescent Yolk vials, weighing scales, and ledgers. The Yolk, as always, had a buzzing turquoise fire-glow around it. The morning sun was shining outside, and it was obvious he’d missed dinner. She did not look happy. “I said five minutes, not two and a half weeks, Quad.”
Quad swallowed. He had just assumed Cheyenne meant he had five minutes after he started talking to Anna. “Sorry, Mom.” His mother, like everyone else Quad had met, didn’t understand the nuances of interstellar travel. Covering a distance like that between Fortune and the Core needed an anchor, and the really good anchors on or near Fortune were generally in the Tear or the Void Ring, which meant he needed a little extra time to figure out where Anna was and seek her out—which he had mostly done by following the unmistakable trail of datastreams that marked her passage.
Cheyenne just sighed. “I’m used to it.” She set down a ledger and looked him over. “I take it she didn’t want to come?”
Quad shook his head and picked at the tabletop, devastated by his own social inadequacy. He could have talked to her. He knew it. He spoke a different language than most people, but he’d heard her speak it, too. He’d just needed a couple more minutes to clear his head and start over. He had finally—finally—found someone who could empathize with his situation.
“Dammit, Quad, you’re gone for two weeks and you don’t have anything to say but ‘sorry’?”
“I…” Quad swallowed, still locked down with nerves from the cook yelling at him. “I…had trouble, Mom. She…” He lowered his head, remembering. “She walked away. Thought I had the Wide.”
Outside, the sound of subtropical birdsong filled the breezy Trinoi patio.
“Her loss,” Cheyenne said, going back to her accounts as if that was that. “Sirius will just pick her up later.”
But Quad knew there was something deeper, there. Some innate kinship that he had to pursue, a joining of two spirits on the same difficult path. He would see her again. “I didn’t really get a good chance to talk to her,” he said. “I need some more time.”
Cheyenne snorted. “If the little twit isn’t smart enough to give you a chance to talk, then she’s not ready for the program,” Cheyenne said. “Let Sirius deal with it. Definitely not our problem. He’s lucky I let you go in the first place.”
Quad nodded reluctantly, but he was planning out how to see Anna again without his mother finding out.
Cheyenne, who had picked up another glowing tube of Yolk with a set of tongs, frowned at Quad over the vial. “You’re not going back.” It wasn’t a question.
Quad shrugged.
“Quad.” Her voice was stern. “Sooner or later, those kids are gonna make an attack on Rath, and the AlphaGens can’t be seen to have any visible part in that rebellion whatsoever—you know Orion would use us breaking the Pact as an excuse to exterminate the rest of us. Hell, he’s on Fortune right now, trying to find that damned beacon.” She gave him a look. “A beacon that, given twenty seconds and a line of sight, you could put in his hands.”
“I wouldn’t, Mom,” Quad complained. He had to go back to Fortune. Anna was on Fortune.
But Cheyenne wasn’t listening. “We were putting you in unacceptable risk sending you the first time. You told me it would take five minutes and you were gone for seventeen days.”
“I wasn’t gonna get hurt, Mom,” Quad complained. “If Orion found me, I’d just leave.”
“That’s not the point,” Cheyenne growled. “The point is, I told you you had five minutes to talk to Anna Landborn and you didn’t show back up for more than two weeks. That needs to stop.”
Quad stared at the tabletop and shrugged again, replaying Anna’s casual dissertation on Trudine reactions and Drone-Bolagg effects in his mind. His heart was pounding with the thought of talking to her again. He would talk to her again.
“And stop shrugging!” Cheyenne snapped. “It’s rude.”
“Sorry, Mom,” Quad said, hunching in on himself.
His mother grunted. “Anyway, you don’t need to go back. That girl missed her chance. She obviously needs a few more years. If the reaction hasn’t happened by now, she should be safe. We’ll grab her as a teenager.”
But Quad knew that the failing was his, not hers. “It was my fault. I couldn’t even talk.”
“Quad.” This time, there was unmistakable warning in his mother’s voice. “Listen to me very carefully. You can’t—”
Irritated, Quad pushed himself to the other side of the room, facing her. “Can’t what, mom?” Adrenaline had started to rush through him at the idea of being forbidden to talk to the only one who understood him, and it loosened his tongue. “Can’t leave?”
It took Cheyenne a moment to locate him at his new position across the room, and when she did, she reddened. “Quad, I’ve told you that you can’t just jump around when you want to prove a—”
Quad pushed himself to the far door opposite her, making her struggle to locate him again. “Prove what, mom?” he asked, from behind her. “That things are different for me than they are for everyone else? Things like, oh, I dunno, the laws of physics?”
Cheyenne slammed her tongs of Yolk down beside her plate and spun on him. “Goddamn it, Quad! Sit!”
It was her tone that finally did it for him. After his epic failure with Anna Landborn, the only other person in the universe Quad had found whom he could relate to, in his mother’s command—a command given to a dog—Quad had found his tipping point.
“Mother,” Quad said calmly, his whole body alive with adrenaline in every conceivable dimension, “you know better than anyone that you can’t tell me what to do. No one can. Not even Sirius. Please remember that.” And then he pushed himself to an ancient Aashaanti anchor he’d dis
covered a few months ago at the other end of the galaxy.
When the dry heat of the desert planet hit him, he kicked at a crumbled Aashaanti statue and sat down amidst the rubble of a once-bustling alien hive to give himself some space to think. Aside from the temple’s anchor, which felt like a hard, black, symbol-etched sphere in the pliable material of space around him, the air of this planet was relatively unmarred with the colors of tech. He could see a few silvery spheres and drifting flamelike spirals deeper in the ruined city—signs of functioning tech with intact power-sources, probably locked in vaults to prevent the Phage from taking it—as well as the desperate chatter of a Phage warning recording still going off in the background, but in comparison to Fortune or Trinoi, it was a technological desert. The planet’s surface was hot, even in the shade, but overall, it was a good, quiet place to think.
Quad’s mind kept returning to Anna Landborn. Alone, like him. Burdened, like him. Different. She had known the best applications of a Trudine reaction. She had studied the Drone-Bolagg effect. She knew how to efficiently create nexus plasma. She was perfect.
I have to see her again, Quad decided, watching a silvery power-sphere glitter in the planet’s twilight about sixty meters away, doubtless buried under several meters of sand. He hated the silver ones—they were usually artifacts the Aashaanti priests used to exchange knowledge between their parishioners, and picking them up generally resulted in visions of a panicking, dying Aashaanti civilization, seizures, and weeks of serious headaches. After three such misfortunate incidents, whenever Quad came across them now, he left them where they lay. The blue ones, though, could be fun, and he could see an unusually big blue Aashaanti tech-sphere on the horizon that roiled with white-veined arcs of energy.
Normally, Quad would have been too upset with his failure on Fortune and his subsequent confrontation with Cheyenne to go investigate, but the fact that the energy field was visible even from this distance piqued his interest.
Quad got up to idly wander his way through the ruined city, seeking out the source of the crackling blue-white lightning cloud hovering at the edge of his multidimensional consciousness. When it came to Aashaanti tech, blue ones were generally either tools for work or tools for war, and both could be interesting to dismantle.
He stopped a few hundred meters later, staring at the obliterated seal of an Aashaanti archon half-buried in the sand, inconspicuously located in the side of an abandoned building. The glimmering black door was chipped and pocked with advanced weapons-fire, but the vault had remained unpenetrated by the ancient attack, the ruined surface indistinguishable from the rest of the shimmering stonemetal the ancient aliens had used to make their city. A million treasure-hunters would have walked right by the weapons-pocked block, never imagining the still-functioning gem hidden within.
In the background, the Aashaanti beacon droned, “…total Tyne quarantine. No travel to or from the hive Tyne is permitted. All visitors from Tyne in the last three days, report immediately to the Hive crematorium to be incinerated. Failure to do so will confirm infection and you will be isolated and interrogated…
Quad, who had long ago learned to tune out the dead civilization’s ancient chatter, bent down to run his fingers along the archon’s forgotten vault.
Authorization, please, the ebony guardmetal demanded in an emerald green burst, probably the first query pulse it had made in millennia.
Quad gave a return-pulse to the waiting lock that mimicked an archon’s mental signature and the normally iridescent ebony guardmetal flashed opaline as the vault slid open under his fingers. Inside, tucked in a long-forgotten stash three feet in diameter, he saw a stack of ancient Aashaanti tech—powerful artifacts that the city’s desperate residents had stuffed away to keep from their enemy before the city’s fall—and started sifting through it. By the overwhelming single-source energy signature he was seeing roiling around him, only one of them was still working. Quad dug through the ancient debris—some of which crumbled in his fingers—to reach the piece that still swirled with power. It was a shimmering silver livemetal rod an inch thick and a foot and a half long, etched with elegant alien runes. That, in itself, was interesting, as both the runed material and the sizzling energy field around it reminded him of Sirius’s staff.
Sirius had never allowed Quad to get close enough to his staff to examine it, but Quad had to assume that it consisted of a different substance than most other Aashaanti artifacts, considering its age and lack of power source. While the ubiquitous black guardmetal could survive for eons in stasis, the silvery livemetal of Sirius’s staff was similar to the opaline hivemetal, the basic component of Aashaanti hiveships, in that it was definitely unusual to find it functioning without a power-source—thus, most of it had died with the Aashaanti.
Even more interesting, the moment his fingers contacted the silver metal rod, it brightened to a brilliant white glow as it activated…like Sirius’s staff. But Quad didn’t have time to think about that. In an excited swirl of sizzling electric pulses, it simultaneously welcomed Quad, expressed its gratitude that he had found it, told Quad that its purpose was to advise and counsel, and asked Quad what hive he was from, what the year was, what happened to the Phage, what had happened to the Kelthari, Ra’u, Tebbe, Saoman, and Gobragi, whether the Aashaanti arks had gone undiscovered, whether the Mortari faction of the Second Hive had succeeded in taking over the Jagged Alliance by force, how many archon ancients evaded the extermination squads, and whether any Aashaanti from Hive Tyne had survived. At least, those were the few questions Quad could actually decipher from the barrage of Aashaanti demands. In truth, it had actually asked hundreds of questions. All within the span of a microsecond.
Quad, who had never before needed to give a complex response to anything as simple and straightforward as tech, immediately felt his throat constrict again. “Uh…”
The rod in his hand gave a confused pulse and asked the same questions again, followed by a few hundred more, most concerning the welfare of the Aashaanti and the date and whether the garrisons had managed to put down any ‘opportunistic scavengers’ that had come to feed on the remains of their dead.
Quad dropped the rod back into its hidden chamber and quickly wiped his hands on his pants, severing the object’s contact with his mind.
The same questions repeated in his head, plus a few dozen more. They were getting more insistent this time.
Having had no physical contact with the item, Quad immediately thought some form of brainwave-emulating nannite had slipped onto his skin, so he slipped dimensions, intending to burn off whatever remained. The questions went silent. He sat outside the visible spectrum for several minutes, watching the silvery rod resting in its bed of crumbled Aashaanti tech and thinking. All around him, the rod’s multidimensional energy arcs bathed his surroundings in a crackling blue-white glow.
As Quad considered how to proceed, his thoughts inevitably drifted to Anna Landborn’s face as she had casually spoken of plasma and Aashaanti transceivers. That face had instantly become the most beautiful image he had ever beheld, and his chest ached over his lost opportunity to talk with her.
In its chamber, the livemetal rod shifted into the shape of Anna Landborn’s face, becoming a perfect silver mask of that moment in time, the sarcastic sneer captured to the finest detail.
Its precise replication was enough to draw Quad back into the visible spectrum, and, after a moment of hesitation, to gingerly pick up the piece of tech once more so he could get a better look. This time, it didn’t bombard him with a thousand questions, but remained almost…meek. When he realized it wouldn’t ask him any more questions, Quad inwardly sagged in relief, and allowed himself to become thoroughly enraptured by the image of the one person who would ever understand him.
I have to find her again, he thought, looking down at the livemetal Anna mask. I have to talk to her about what the world’s really like.
CHAPTER 2: The Heist
Independence Day, 17th of May, 3006
>
Rath
Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
“When you told me you wanted to go out on another date,” Jeanne said, her tone utterly flat and even, “you never said anything about stealing my ship or ‘liberating’ Yolk from Rath.” She had a gun pointed on him again. A new one, this time, with an image of a starlope bounding in the sweetpod marshes engraved in stunning masterwork filigree in Fortune silver. From the attention to detail and the lifelike quality of the Fortune scenery, it was probably an original Brackett. From the cold look he was getting down the perfectly-oiled barrel, it was probably about to be used.
“Come on, Jeanne,” Joel said, from her chair at the captain’s console. “Cogitate for a second.”
Jeanne squinted at him. “Cogi-what?”
Joel frowned, realizing he’d used another weird word he didn’t remember learning, then shook himself and said, “Think about it. With them still being distracted by the fight over the Tear, it’s gonna be easy pickings.” He’d heard they’d dropped six regiments and five Nephyr platoons into the North Tear looking for the escaped operator captain Tatiana Eyre. That had seemed excessive, but it had emptied Rath of its remaining Bouncers and he wasn’t about to let a good thing go to waste.
“In case you forgot your geography, Joel, Rath is the heart of the Coalition on Fortune,” Jeanne said. “It’s crawling with Nephyrs, soldiers, Gryphons, and every other kind of nasty they have to throw at us. David Landborn even said they’ve got muskers in there, Joel. Plus, my ship has a couple warrants out on it. We get it into the wrong hands, I’m never getting it back. Going to Rath right now is like offering ourselves up on a platter.”
“I totally disagree,” Joel said, returning his attention to piloting them towards the city and its adjoining base. “See, your whole life of pirating, you just fly in, shoot everyone, and take what you want. To be a smuggler, you need to have finesse. You’ve gotta ease this baby into that big, bad city like a lover caressing his—”