“Thought you were going with them,” I said. Through the opening, I could see that all the ship’s pilot lights were on. Air-breathing jet engines whined, revving up for a vertical takeoff.
“I do not want to go where they are going.”
“Where are they going?”
MF wouldn’t answer. I figured I could bribe it out of him later. Right now, we had to find Robbie and get out of here.
“Come on, Marty.” I pulled him out into the snow. “Gotta call Dolph.”
Now that we were in the open air, the HF worked.
I got through to the bridge of the St. Clare.
I did not know that Sophia was sitting beside Dolph with a gun to his head.
*
“Got the TrZam 008.”
My jubilant voice crackled out of the HF. Sophia grinned in silent glee. Dolph closed his eyes.
She ground the muzzle of the Koiler against his head, prompting him to reply. “That’s great,” he said.
Sophia mouthed in his ear, “I’ll come and pick you up.”
Dolph wished he had never heard of the fucking TrZam 008. He had known from the beginning that it would destroy us. It had torn the crew apart when we had only thought that it might be worth a lot of money. The truth, according to Sophia, was immeasurably worse. Words rose to the tip of his tongue: Destroy it.
Impatient with his silence, Sophia frowned. The maintenance bot leaned over Dolph’s couch and pinned his right arm to the armrest. Dolph was so skinny that his veins popped out even when there wasn’t a robotic tentacle wrapped around his bicep like a tourniquet. The injector slid into his cubital vein and released a small dose of new-fangled shabu equivalent.
Within instants, a headrush of pharmaceutical calm took the edge off Dolph’s anguish. He relaxed, despite the gun still pressed to his head.
“Dolph? You there?” I said from the radio.
“I’ll come and pick you up,” Sophia whispered again.
“I’ll come and pick you up,” Dolph said. The drug clarified his priorities. He would think of something as soon as he retrieved me, Martin, and Robbie. “Where are you?”
*
I thought his responses sounded a bit flat. Off, somehow. But I let it go. I was squatting in the snow, icy wind slicing my face, and I didn’t like the noises I was hearing from the other side of the compound. Grinding crashes, and screams. “At the power plant,” I said. “Situation’s looking a bit precarious. I got a feeling the Travellers are about to break in. Martin and MF are with me, but we lost Robbie, and I don’t know how long it’s gonna take to find him. So, listen, there’s a ship here. It’s about ready to take off—”
I was going to tell him that after the other ship took off, there would be room for him to put the St. Clare down inside the compound. But I got no further.
A deafening boom resounded through the air, followed by the unmistakable noise of the Travellers’ .50 cal ship gun.
“Uh oh,” Martin said. “Sounds like the Travellers just tested that exodiamondite wall to destruction.”
I stood up to get a better view. The cooling towers loomed between us and the wall on that side of the compound. Except there was no more wall. Snow blew through a jagged gap. Floodlights mounted on the Traveller ship speared between the cooling towers, spotlighting Sixers—and a few Eks—running desperately towards us.
Out on the launch pad, the Sixer technicians scattered away from Pippa and Justin’s ship.
“Fuck!” I shouted. “Back into the bunker!” I grabbed the HF. Martin and I piled back through the arch-like opening in the exodiamondite wall.
The arrowhead cruiser took off. Its launch plume lit up the whole compound. After reaching VTOL altitude, the ship reared to a steep angle and burned into the clouds, lighting them up from inside for a moment like dawn. I remembered the nuclear dawn Dolph had jokingly promised me if we didn’t make it back. “Sayonara,” I murmured.
“Barricade the door and wait?” Martin said.
“Can’t. We gotta find Robbie.”
We left the bunker, carrying our rifles. MF clambered effortfully behind us, using his grippers to swing himself from stair to stair. He couldn’t fly, as there wasn’t room for his levitation bubble in this enclosed space.
Halfway up the stairs, we heard shouting from above, and gunfire. A Sixer ran down towards us. Suddenly he stumbled and fell headlong. I jumped out of the way, aiming my rifle up the stairs—
—at Jonathan Burden.
I knew that fucker wouldn’t be far away.
I shot at him. Missed.
Return fire from the Travellers forced us back down the stairs. We sprinted towards the arch in the far wall—
—and came face to face with more Travellers. Wild-haired, wild-eyed, covered with snow, they were too surprised to shoot at us. I dropped one of them as we fell back into the bunker.
Trapped!
“Force field,” Martin bellowed. He yanked me closer to MF. The bot initiated his force field, crushing us together inside the slick, shimmering barrier, just in time. Travellers streamed into the bunker from both directions. They hammered on the force field, shot at it, and spit on it, while begging their fiendish gods at the tops of their voices to destroy us. A madness was on them. Looking at their faces, mere inches away, I felt a touch of otherworldly fear. Their rage seemed more than natural.
At last the bedlam died down. The Travellers fell back as Burden strolled into the bunker.
My fear ebbed. Burden was no berserking maniac. For a Traveller, he was practically a normal guy.
“We really must stop meeting like this.” He was wearing his Traveller coat. He poked the force field with his .45, right in front of my face. “Where’s the TrZam 008?”
He didn’t know I had it in my stomach.
“Gone,” I said, gesturing upwards with my chin. Let him think Pippa took it with her.
“Nice try, Starrunner. Thing is, I don’t have you down as the too stupid to live type. You’re not dumb enough to let it slip through your fingers. And I’m not dumb enough to believe you did. So where is it?”
Any wiseass response I may have thought of died on my lips when I saw who had just been carried into the bunker.
Robbie, still in wolf form. Blood drenched the fur of his chest and side. The Travellers dropped him on the floor like a sack.
Behind them came Rafael Ijiuto, grubby and bloody, but grinning.
53
“That was a ship launch,” Dolph said, zooming in on the radar alert that had just popped up on the bridge of the St. Clare. “It took off from the power plant. Must be the ship Mike mentioned—”
“That’s my ship!” Sophia said.
“Your ship?”
“I didn’t get here from Valdivia on foot,” she snapped. “I stole a ship. Left it here. Burden was supposed to get rid of it.” She swung her feet to the floor, leaning forwards to the screen. “The trouble with him is he’s deeply unserious. He always has been. Life is a joke to him. So he hung onto the ship, looking for a buyer, and while his back was turned, the Sixers lifted it. The question is, who’s flying it now?”
She didn’t think of Zane, because she thought we’d killed him. Dolph had not corrected her. He was a little ashamed that we hadn’t.
“It must be Mike.”
That’s what Dolph hoped. If I’d managed to launch with the TrZam 008, the odds of it falling into Sophia’s hands had just dropped precipitously.
She clearly knew that, too. “Launch,” she commanded him. “Tell that Olthamo creep you’re going to intercept it.”
Olthamo didn’t entirely trust Dolph. He instructed one of the Guardian ships at the spaceport to launch, as well.
The St. Clare got off the ground first. While Dolph worked the controls, Sophia repeatedly pinged the ship that had just launched. Dolph figured that if I answered, Sophia was going to pass the comms to him and make him set up a rendezvous in orbit. It puzzled and worried him that the ship did not respond at all.
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*
That ship, which Sophia had called “her” ship—the one she had stolen on Valdivia, and flown to Mittel Trevoyvox—was quite the special little craft. Its name, I later learned, was the Minotaur. Zane had described it as a passenger cruiser. Martin had thought it might be military. It was both those things, and more. Specifically, the Minotaur had advanced all-aspect stealth. Its arrowhead form factor and majority-composite build gave it a radar cross-section so small that it vanished off Dolph’s screens before he reached orbit. On-board—Sophia told him about this, in agitated fits and starts—the Minotaur had a powerful passive sensor suite that utilized probability theory to find enemies without actively tracking them. It could even hide while burning, by temporarily cooling its heat shields to the temperature of cosmic radiation, and not using its drive. Instead, it used its integrated railgun as a mass driver to push cold gas out the back. Cold, in space, means undetectable. Apply an exhaust field to that, and you can build up a fair bit of acceleration.
So when they got into orbit, Dolph and Sophia couldn’t see the Minotaur anywhere.
The Guardian ship burned into orbit and began to swing its radar all over the heavens. Their orders were simply to let no one escape from Mittel Trevoyvox alive.
*
Was Robbie breathing? I pressed my face to the force field, trying to see past the Travellers who were blocking my line of sight.
“I cannot sustain the field much longer,” MF squeaked. “Oh, why doesn’t Dolph come?”
I made out a faint, familiar crackle of thunder, followed by a sonic boom. Then another one. I identified the noise of ship launches, and prayed that one of them was the St. Clare. Little did I know that it was, but the St. Clare was not coming to save us.
Burden left the bunker, saying there was something going on with the core of the power plant. He took half the Travellers and left the rest to guard us.
Quieter now, they sat, glowered, smoked. Snow blew in through the arch in the exodiamondite wall. The bunker was getting colder. My energy ebbed with every minute of inaction. I rested my fingers on my stomach, pressing on the place where I could feel the TrZam 008, telling myself to stay alert.
“Force fields don’t keep out radiation, you know,” Martin was saying gloomily when the field gave way, spilling us onto our asses.
“Sorry,” MF wailed. “Sorryyyy!” The word ended in a dying squeak. He rolled onto his back and lay there with his grippers in the air like a dead beetle. He had used up a lot of his reserves flying us over the compound wall, and although he had an RTG inside his chassis, he couldn’t store an infinite amount of charge.
I didn’t have time to worry about him. The Travellers fell on us. Martin and I fought back, trying to reach Robbie, but it was hopeless. The Travellers punched and kicked us to the floor. The only silver lining was that in Burden’s absence, they didn’t dare to hurt us too badly.
I wound up face-down on the floor, dribbling blood. I had lost an upper incisor to a Traveller’s brass-knuckled punch, and my whole jaw throbbed with pain. I could hear Martin groaning. If I so much as turned my head to try to assess Robbie’s condition, I got a boot in the ribs.
Vaguely, I wondered where Sophia was. It seemed odd that she hadn’t come to have another go at me. Were she to aim at me now, even she couldn’t miss. Had she been killed in the fighting?
Suddenly, the roar of ship engines tore through the ravaged silence. Closer, this time. Much closer.
The exodiamondite wall lit up. The light of a ship’s plasma jets cast the shadows of Travellers starkly across the floor.
While they were distracted, I crawled to Robbie. Lowering my face to his muzzle, I felt faint warmth brush my cheek.
Alive. Thank God. Alive, but maybe not for much longer. I took his head in my hands and shook it. “Robbie, wake up. Wake up, you dumb wolf. Wake up!”
The ground jumped under us.
Outside, a swag-bellied, hog-nosed silhouette dwarfed the compound wall. It was one of the biggest spaceships I had ever seen land on the surface of a planet.
Ramps hinged down. Armored figures pounded across the ground. Muzzle flash stuttered, and lasers painted phosphorescent smears in the falling snow.
The Travellers in the bunker jammed their guns against our heads, screaming that they’d blow our brains out. It never takes much to make a Traveller carry out that threat. I closed my eyes and tried to picture Lucy on the beach, in the sunshine, sand crusting her arms and legs, laughing up at me. I wanted to be thinking of her when I died, even though she would never know it.
The memory fragmented into unbelievable agony. My skin was on fire. The Travellers who had hold of me let go, screaming. I writhed, clawing at my arms, rolling on the floor, burning in a Babylonian inferno.
The pain vanished. Just like that. Gone.
It had been so intense that its absence felt downright blissful.
Running footsteps.
Shouts.
I pushed myself up into a sitting position.
Fleet Marines in body armor and full-face helmets barrelled into the bunker. They handcuffed the Travellers.
I slowly raised my hands over my head. Martin did the same.
“Take the microwave blaster with you, Lieutenant,” a familiar voice said. “Might be more of them around.”
Major General Smith, in Fleet uniform, with his fake captain’s bars in place, strolled into the bunker.
Beside him—minus his Traveller coat, with a Fleet bulletproof vest buckled over his blacks—walked Jonathan Burden, free and easy as a bird in spring.
*
My mouth hung open. Forgetting about keeping my hands up, I absently wiped a dribble of blood from my chin. A Marine handed me a wad of gauze.
Smith—and Burden?
Burden—and Smith?
Martin hoarsely said what I was thinking: “Which of ‘em’s the traitor?”
Smith overheard, and laughed. “Neither of us.” He threw his arm over Burden’s shoulders and gave him a big old shake, knuckling his scalp. “Jon is one of the Iron Triangle’s top undercover agents. He’s spent years infiltrating the Traveller organization.”
“Such as it is,” Burden said. “Sorry I had to kick you in the face … and shoot at you … and tear-gas you … and whatever else I may have forgotten at the moment. Vital to keep up appearances.” He directed a malicious grin at the Travellers lying on the floor in handcuffs. They looked stunned. They had believed in him. They had followed him into battle. “Fear not,” Brown said almost gently. “The Fleet doesn’t blow people’s brains out. It just dumps them on penal planets to get slaughtered by some other motherfuckers!” On the last words his voice rose to a manic Traveller shout. They cringed—as much out of force of habit, perhaps, as fear.
I said urgently, “Can I attend to my colleague?” The Marines were already giving Robbie first aid, but they hadn’t come prepared to treat a wolf. On my plea, they injected him with something that made him wake up. His eyes opened, pain-clouded. I shook him by the scruff and shouted, “Shift back! Robbie, Shift back! That’s an order!”
He found the energy somewhere. Twist and blur, shiver and bulge. A flailing leg passed through my hand with an electrical tingle. Shifting is spooky shit. Fur melted into pale skin, tail vanished, and there lay a naked man with a bullet wound in the side of his stomach.
The Marines got to work with their portable surgical robots.
I wobbled to my feet. I badly needed a drink. But I didn’t get one. What I got was Smith invading my personal space, breathing his minty breath on me, and curling his nanotech-tipped fingers into the hollow of my collarbone. It was an obscenely intimate touch, and the curl of his lips said he knew it. He kept his razor nails sheathed—for now. “So where’s the TrZam 008?” he breathed. “Where’s Pippa Khratz?”
Behind me, Burden said, “We need to boost. These idiots killed the technicians who were cooling the plant. Not only that, but they damaged the emergency pumps. It’s going to melt
down in a matter of hours.”
“Well, Starrunner? Where is she?”
I stood unmoving, looking anywhere but into Smith’s face. Martin was kneeling over MF, trying to reboot him. Burden stalked around the bunker with a cigarette hanging off his lip, verbally abusing the prisoners. Fear forced me to weigh the possible consequences if I lied about the TrZam 008 and got caught out later. Sheer cussed obstinacy made me roll the dice.
“She’s gone,” I said, meeting Smith’s eyes at last. “Seriously, you didn’t see? They took off in a funky little arrowhead ship that the Sixers stole from the spaceport.”
Smith let go of me. “The Minotaur!” he yelled to Burden. “They took the fucking Minotaur!” He rounded on me again. I took an inadvertent step back. Fury flushed his face and corded the muscles in his neck. “You let her go,” he grated. “You’re going to pay for this.”
“Don’t worry,” Burden said to me. “The worst he can do to you is dump you on a penal planet. Somewhere like, er … here.”
“Fine with me.” The new voice belonged to an Ek. It was Morshti. “I will dismember them and use their skulls for drinking goblets.”
“Thanks,” Burden snapped. “Now he can’t, under the applicable interspecies convention. Clear and present danger to their lives. For a queen, you’re not much of a politician, are you?”
“A queen need not be a politician,” Morshti said indifferently. “Xe need only be a killer.”
Eks milled through the bunker. Morshti boomed at them in the Ek language. Brown licked his lips. “All right, they’re taking over the emergency cooling. They say they can fix the pumps … Try to find some mercy in your heart for the Sixers, won’t you, Morshti?”
“I shall,” Morshti said, “as long as they obey me. That is all I ever wanted, you know.”
More Marines appeared. They hustled us out into the snow, carrying Robbie on a stretcher. Two hulking privates lugged MF. The Fleet troopship Rogozhin loomed over us, its warning lights flashing against the clouds. Robbie, Martin, and I were thrown into the back of the bridge like so much trash, with the TrZam 008 still safely hidden in my stomach.
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