by Webb, Nick
Pike swallowed. James was still in the med bay. He’d been more than half-dead when they found him, and whatever his memories were of the Telestine flagship over Mercury, they clearly haunted him. He’d tried a dozen times to escape his bed before they put him in an artificial coma, and Gabriela had hardly left his side since. Pike knew Rychenkov would never leave them behind, and would never even mention it if they couldn’t help out, but a ship needed a crew.
Or rather, a crew needed a ship. The Aggy was not just half-dead, but mostly dead. With no chance of a rebuild coming any time soon.
Rychenkov cleared his throat quietly, and then gave a shake of his head, as if dispelling the dark thoughts. He patted his hand on the table in front of the girl. “But if you’re on my crew, I’ll need to know what to call you, da?”
She lifted her shoulders. She didn’t seem particularly bothered by not having a name.
“Lapushka it is.”
She looked at Pike, who shrugged. He’d long since given up trying to learn Russian, but he knew a fond nickname when he heard it. Rychenkov’s eyes went cold when he insulted someone to their face. Now, he was smiling; whatever he was saying, it was a genuine, warm endearment.
The captain leaned forward now, a secretive smile on his face. “Captain, pilot, first mate. We could … borrow a ship.”
“I assume you mean that literally, unless you’ve somehow come into a few million I don’t know about.” Pike settled back in his chair. It was a pleasant dream, enough to make him smile even when he knew it could come to nothing.
“I’ve thought about that.” Rychenkov tapped the base of his glass on the table and gave a meaningful glance at Pike’s glass, still full. He waited until Pike gathered his courage and downed it, spluttering, before he kept talking. “What’s money but ones and zeroes?”
“Not sure I … get your point.” Pike pounded on his chest with one fist.
“I’m saying someone who knows their way around software can get us what we need for a ship. Hell, what’s a registration but ones an’ zeroes?” Rychenkov reached out to pour another splash of alcohol into Pike’s glass.
“Oh god,” Pike managed faintly. He wasn’t sure if he was talking about the alcohol or the ship. Probably both. The girl was trying not to laugh and he rolled his head sideways to look at her. “Yeah, it’s real funny now, huh? What about when I throw up on you?”
She seemed to find that even funnier.
Rychenkov ignored them. “Seems to me we got a hacker at this table.”
Pike frowned. “What?”
Rychenkov nodded his head at the girl with unusual subtlety.
Pike stopped dead. “You want….” He leaned forward to whisper the words fiercely. “You want her to steal us a ship?”
“Why not?” Rychenkov looked at him blankly.
“Well, for starters, what are you planning to do with the crew?”
Rychenkov snorted. “Were you not paying attention when we were last at Mars?”
Pike tried to think back. When had they last been at Mars?
Rychenkov wasn’t intending to wait for him to remember. “You saw the UN docks. They aren’t using half those ships, huh?”
“You want to … you want to steal not just any ship, but a UN ship.” Pike stared his former captain down blankly. “You’re insane.”
“Everyone knows the UN’s got no teeth,” the other man said scornfully. He sipped at his drink. “This stuff’s growing on me.”
“Why not just drink fuel? Look….” Pike sighed. “I want to get out of here as much as you do—”
“Little less than I do. You want to make a wife out of that admiral.”
Pike stopped, his glass halfway to his mouth. “I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing.” Rychenkov held up a palm. “But you do want to go.” He looked over at the girl. “Lapushka, you tell Pike—” He broke off, a frown creasing his face.
Pike looked over, and felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The girl was looking around herself, eyes landing on each bar patron in turn. Most she assessed and moved on in a moment, but every once in a while, her eyes lingered.
“What is it?” He kept his voice low.
She looked back at him, hunching her shoulders like a cornered animal.
“Are they armed?” Pike looked around for her guards. Insulting or not, their presence was suddenly welcome. He had no doubt they’d been instructed to keep the girl in sight … and alive. As soon as Walker was sure of the girl’s motivations, she was going to want to make use of her again.
It was enough to make him wonder why he’d been trying so hard to convince her.
But the girl shook her head.
“What, then?” Pike frowned at her. He opened his mouth and closed it again. The bar was filled with people, not….
But the thought wouldn’t leave him alone.
He leaned close to murmur in her ear. “Drones?”
She nodded.
Pike looked around, as if he might find someone standing directly behind him, but no one seemed to be paying attention to them. He looked back at the girl, who was deep in thought. “Should we get back to headquarters?”
She shook her head, eyes still focused somewhere distant. Then she seemed to come to a conclusion. One hand reached out to keep him in place as she stood. She smiled to both him and Rychenkov, and squeezed Pike’s shoulder with a smile.
“Are you sure—”
She cut Pike off with a nod and a smile. She pointed to the two guards.
Pike began to laugh. She had a sense of humor about her confinement, at least. He watched her walk away, quickly nodding her head at the guards as if she were a diplomat signaling her honor guard that it was time to leave. Her head was held high, and he grinned as the guards fell into place behind her. It was hard to see through the crush, but he almost thought one of them opened the door for her to leave.
“What was that about?” Rychenkov asked, frowning.
“It’s … nothing.” A nothing he was going to have to tell Walker about, but a nothing the girl didn’t seem to think was immediately pressing, and he would go with her instinct.
“All right, then.” Rychenkov leaned back in his chair. “So. The ship.”
“Are you serious?” Pike began to laugh.
“Of course I’m serious. Aggy’s trashed. We need another ship if we want to get out of here. And I don’t know about you, but seems a cargo hauler has the best chance of surviving what’s coming. You want to protect her….” Rychenkov looked at the space where the girl had been sitting. “You’ll come with me.”
Pike considered this. “Walker—”
“Will check the cargo ships first. All the more reason to take one of the UN ones.”
Pike laughed. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m dead serious.” Rychenkov leaned in and topped Pike’s glass off. “So, listen up. I know the way in, I just don’t have the skill to do what needs to be done once I get there. She could, though. Here’s where you start—”
“Yes…?” Pike prompted, when the blond man broke off.
Rychenkov’s face had gone grey. He nodded over the top of Pike’s head as a sudden hush fell over the crowd at the bar.
The girl. Pike jerked around, scanning the crowd for her. But she had indeed left. It took what seemed like an eternity for him to realize that everyone was looking up at the bar’s video screen.
Chunks of rubble floated in the black. IO DESTROYED, the chyron read, and a white-faced reporter was struggling to contain his shock as he stammered out that a bomb had detonated eighteen hours ago, that Io Base was completely gone, and only half of the entire moon remained. The background image panned until the sight of the shattered hulk hung in the background, a smooth curve broken abruptly and surrounded by tumbling rocks which were gradually, imperceptibly falling back down onto the broken moon.
“Mother of god,” Rychenkov whispered.
The bar had gone completely silent. No one drank. No
one even moved.
Pike turned his head stiffly. “But … who has bombs like that? Even a hundred nukes could never have—”
Rychenkov nodded again at the screen.
The reporter was trying to be calm. He read words off the teleprompter, and Pike could see that he was trying desperately to pretend those words meant nothing. “A manifesto was sent directly before the bomb exploded,” he told viewers. “The broadwave message should reach most settlements within the next few days. The Secretary General has already condemned the message as untrue, and we are awaiting a statement from Admiral Walker of the Exile Fleet.”
“Show the message!” someone yelled.
The news station must have had the same idea, for the image of Io and the reporter vanished, replaced by a calm, pleasant-looking man in the standard-issue blue coveralls worn by most humans. His eyes were brown, disconcertingly clear of any madness, and he was being recorded in what looked like the cockpit of a small ship. He folded his hands in front of himself and spoke without preamble. The rustle of the crowd in the bar made it too hard to hear the first part, but they soon settle down.
“… Thorne, but I’m just a common man, like you. And yet, through various acquaintances, I have been made aware of a secret weapons program on Io,” the man said seriously. “It is sanctioned by the United Nations and the Exile Fleet, and is meant to destroy the Telestines.”
Murmurs rose throughout the bar.
“We know that we do not have the technology to defeat them,” the man said fiercely. “We know that our survival depends on their goodwill. The Secretary General and Admiral Walker are gambling with all of our lives in a futile effort to start a war. So I am doing what must be done: I am destroying this weapons program, so that the Telestines can see that not all humans are committed to this violent path. I call upon all of us to speak out and hold the Secretary General and Admiral Walker accountable, and I implore each of you to come forward with any other programs you know about, so that we can purge them from our midst.”
The bar erupted into deafening shouts, people yelling to one another, and though the man’s lips kept moving, Pike could hear no more of the broadcast.
“Did she really do that?” Rychenkov was staring at him. “A secret weapons program?”
“I didn’t know of one,” Pike said, through numb lips. “But … she’s the Admiral of the Exile Fleet, what did you think her goal was?”
Rychenkov paused. He looked down at his glass, and then back at the screen, where the wreck of Io was once again visible.
“What?” Pike asked. “Go on, say it. What?”
He wanted to hear Rychenkov yell at him, tell him that the Rebellion was a foolish dream at best, and likely to cause their deaths. He wanted the man to say what he had always known, on some level: that this was a fight they couldn’t win, that it was suicide.
But when Rychenkov spoke, his voice was quiet. “I told myself I could stand for something,” he said simply. “When I drew them off so you could get the girl to Mercury. I told myself, better to die quickly than slowly.” He looked up, his blue eyes suddenly drained. He looked older than his years. “But they didn’t kill me, did they?” He nodded to the screen. “They killed someone else. That’s what happens when you start wars, isn’t it? Someone else always pays the price.”
Chapter Two
Ganymede
Perseverance Station
Command Center
“I call upon all of us to speak out and hold the Secretary General and Admiral Walker accountable for this atrocity, and I implore each of you to come forward with any other programs you know about, so that we can purge them from our midst.”
Walker struggled to breathe as she watched the broadcast.
“If these programs continue, if we continue to support the Exile Fleet, we doom ourselves to a war we cannot win,” the man said. “I am doing what must be done, to save all of us.”
The screen went black.
“Dear god.” Walker switched off the video comm channel and sank down, head in her hands as she leaned on the rickety table that served as her planning desk.
The tiny makeshift war room was suddenly, blessedly silent. For close to two hours, the reports had been trickling in, officers standing mute as the pictures appeared: the bands of Jupiter stained a sooty black by the fallout from an explosion that was near inconceivable in its violence. The Perseverance station at Ganymede was on lockdown, klaxons still blaring distantly, radiation shielding still being hauled desperately into place as Ganymede and its stations crept toward alignment with Io.
There was nothing to be done, that much was clear. The recovery efforts—already sanctioned, already sent—were wishful thinking. Nothing would have survived on the tumbling hunks of rock. The base at Io had been shielded from radiation at the top, but had relied on the bulk of the planet below to keep out the rest. What did they have to work with now?
The most that could be done was to try to find out what sort of explosive had been used, and try to duplicate it. Lord knew, they could use something like that right about now.
Of course, the Lord also knew that they were screwed, anyway—in the time it would take to reverse engineer such an explosion, the Telestines could destroy every human settlement. It had been a warning, as much in its scope as in their choice of target. Not for the first time, Walker felt a wave of contempt wash through her like acid. She was too unpredictable? She was too rash? What about the Secretary General, giving offers of surrender with one hand and holding secret weapons projects behind his back with the other? He knew that type of research was banned. He knew he was playing with fire.
And all of this after he’d had the gall to accuse her of playing fast and loose with humanity’s future, of pushing too hard against Telestine rule. It was enough to make you thinking that maybe Tel’rabim had a point about humanity being untrustworthy.
Speaking of whom….
Walker sighed. “Show the Telestine broadcast again.”
“Ma’am—” Commander Delaney sounded worried.
“I don’t like it any better than you do,” she said bluntly. It was true. She had no desire to see Tel’rabim’s self-satisfied speech another time, explaining that he commended the actions of the informant, but had no choice but to take swift action himself. “But even more than whatever the hell was going on on Io, what we need to know is what he’s going to do with—”
The door opened and Nhean slid into the room. His suit was rumpled and there was a 5 o’clock shadow on his upper lip, but he hardly seemed to notice that. Whatever one could say of the man, Walker thought, they could never accuse him of not being a hard worker. Since their flight from Mercury, he had barely slept, and she had seen on the monitors that his rooms were streaming every news feed in the past hours.
She raised her eyebrows at him. “So?”
For a moment, it was like he didn’t see her. His eyes were shadowed.
“Mr. Tang.” She had learned long ago that a formal address and an authoritative tone could snap someone out of their mood.
It worked now. “Sorry. What?”
She tried not to sigh. “How did this man get onto Io without anyone noticing? And who the hell snuck a weapons program into my future propulsion research site?” That was the second blow, of course: the loss of the research program for new propulsion systems. The more they learned, the more mobile they became, and the more mobile they became….
She closed her eyes. They had been so close.
She couldn’t think about it.
Nhean, meanwhile, hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “But I have learned one thing: it was a drone. Someone born on Earth and modified by the Telestines—just like we feared.”
She went hot, and then cold. “Are you sure?”
Nhean swallowed as he walked to the table. He laid the printouts down and beckoned her to look, raising his voice as the other officers crowded around.
“Sam Thorne, mid forties, exact age unknown.
He was one of the first group of drones extracted from Earth. He showed—well, they all did—an aptitude for mechanical work.”
Walker closed her eyes briefly.
“It made sense,” Nhean reminded her. “They had been disassembling buildings. Entire cities.”
“And we just scooped them up and put them into our own settlements.”
“What else were we supposed to do?” Nhean looked at her. His voice was gentle, calm. There was a storm behind his eyes. Walker’s head tilted as she tried to make sense of it, but Nhean did not let the storm overtake him. “We had no idea a human could be embedded with latent commands—I’m assuming that’s what it was—and they were human.” His voice took on a pleading note. “They were. It made sense to try to rehabilitate them. They might have known something.”
It sounded almost as if he were pleading his own case. But….
Nhean steadied himself with a deep breath. He picked up a different piece of paper. “Whoever did this—told Sam Thorne to do this—knew what they were doing. He had a UN ID.”
“He would,” Walker pointed out. “All of them were taken under the UN’s protection.”
“Yes, but his had been upgraded to hide his past … and to give him clearance to pilot UN aid missions. That’s how he got onto Io.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure he picked up an aid shipment near Mars or one of the asteroids. I’m sure small colonies don’t let people in for just any reason. I’m sure Io could have kept him from docking if they wanted.” Nhean met her eyes. “He got in. He needed to, to get the equipment to ride out to the drilling site.”
“What the hell was the Old Man thinking? What would they mine on Io?” Her eyes narrowed. “Why not Vesta? Besides Mercury, it’s our most productive mining center.”
Nhean gave her a sharp look, and Walker closed her mouth. She always forgot how much he noticed.
Luckily, he made no mention of it. He slid a few pieces of paper into alignment to make a map and Walker leaned her elbows on the desk to peer at it.
“This is the settlement.” He tapped his fingers on it. “Over here was the drilling site. Most of them were employed by the UN—through several layers of subcontractors. To be honest with you, I’m not sure if they knew what they were doing. It wasn’t like Mercury. The equipment was just sending data. I think they’d been told they were looking to see if there were precious metals on Io. Unfortunately, sending data … is not very secure.”