by Natalie Grey
Dess took a sharp step back and ran into the wall. Hot tea sloshed over the rim of the cup and she fought the urge to hiss in pain. Why she was staying silent, she was not sure—but she had the sense that if she caused a scene, it was going to cost Jim’s life. She’d observed Talon’s crew over the past few weeks. None of them would hesitate to attack if they found her facing down Ghost.
And Ghost, Dess was sure, would kill him. She would kill any of them.
Her aunt was waiting for her to speak.
“Why are you here?” The first step of a negotiation was to find out what the other party wanted.
“To tie up loose ends.” The cyborg face smiled, and Ghost stood. Did she make a clicking noise when she moved, or was that Dess’s imagination?
She turned her mind away from that, and to the process she knew so well. Step one was to find out what someone wanted … and step two was to convince them that having it would not do them any good.
“How will you tie up any loose ends here?” Dess asked. She frowned slightly. “I’m no threat to you anymore. I looked at your votes, I know what you opposed—and I saw that the Advanced Terraforming Initiative passed. It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it? And so any leverage my family had….” She let her mouth twist bitterly. “You have Harry and we have nothing.”
“Ah, but I could have you both, couldn’t I?” The smile was on the same face Dess remembered from her childhood, but it was nothing like Maryam’s smile. She had known how to say volumes with a single glance, either cutting you dead with a look that seemed pleasant but wasn’t … or making you feel like she was truly, unreservedly happy, and she was sharing the moment only with you.
Now it was just a curve of the lips. The cyborg body could do the motions, but it could never recapture the minutiae that had been the core of how she interacted.
And, because there was nothing except the words and the false expressions, Dess could see the lie.
“But that’s not why you’re here. That’s not the loose end.” She considered. “Auntie Gee said you never wanted to see me again.”
Some part of Maryam still remained—that much was clear from the scowl that appeared briefly on the cyborg face before disappearing. “Aunt Gee,” the cyborg said coldly, “failed me with that meeting. As well you know.”
Dess tried to keep her face as flat as she could. It was a common trick to behave as if one knew more than one did, thus tempting the other party to give away information for free—and she would not be so stupid as to do that.
She shrugged her shoulders, instead, and focused on a different part of that negotiation. “I think she had reason to be angry at me, whether or not you agree with her … cutting us off. You wouldn’t really want us back, would you?” She only just caught herself from saying, you wouldn’t really want to bring us with you. She wasn’t supposed to know about the exodus.
“Oh, Dess.” Ghost gave her a tiny smile. “As much fun as it is to watch your quick little mind come up with lies, let us be frank with one another. I know that the Conway was dispatched to retrieve Harry and Rhea. I know exactly what Regina let slip—what you got out her so cleverly. She let her anger get the better of her, didn’t she? When this is over, she and I will have to talk about that.”
Dess found herself hoping that Regina died during this present operation. It would be a far kinder death. She lifted her chin slightly, but found she had nothing to say any longer.
“Yes,” Ghost said quietly, “that’s the question, isn’t it? When you realize there’s no way you can bargain and no lie you can tell that I won’t see through … what’s left, Dess? What is there to you that isn’t lies?”
Dess’s fingers clenched against the mugs that she still, ridiculously, held onto.
“Dess?” Jim called down the corridor. “Where’s that tea?”
“Coming,” Dess called back. She didn’t take her eyes from her aunt’s face, and so she knew that Ghost saw her fear for Jim. “I decided to do some dishes while I was here,” she added, for Jim’s benefit. “It’ll be a few, if you don’t mind.”
“Good distraction.” He sounded approving. “Take your time. Just breathe and you’ll stay sane, I promise.”
“Stay sane?” Ghost asked. “My goodness, do you care for the crew of the Ariane so much on such short acquaintance?”
Don’t think of Tersi, don’t think of Tersi, don’t—
But it was too late. She had thought of him, of his careless smile and the way his lips felt, the way he paused before he kissed her. And she had thought of the rest of them, too: Aegis, who had held her while she cried; Jester, who showed her the navigational controls and let her steer; Nyx and Lesedi and Talon and all of them.
But to her surprise, what she saw in Ghost’s face wasn’t triumph. It was bitterness. “I wouldn’t worry,” the cyborg said crisply. “If you could turn your back on your family so easily, surely you won’t spend too much time mourning these briefer acquaintances.”
Dess saw the opening, and took it. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly you can connect with someone when they share your values?”
Ghost gave her a look that said clearly that Dess had scored a point—and that it wouldn’t matter in the slightest, in terms of the greater fight. From a pocket in her suit jacket, she pulled a small tablet out and laid it on the table. She turned away to tap a few commands on its surface. The gesture, turning her back on Dess, was ostentatious in the extreme. You couldn’t even hope to hurt me.
When she turned back, she was smiling.
“Your brother’s about to die now,” she said pleasantly. “Would you like to watch?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE STATION WAS NOW ENTIRELY, eerily quiet.
“Maple, find us a path—and you lot, stay on your guard.” Nyx waved the team ahead of her, her mind racing even as her body went through all the normal motions of making sure that they were keeping watch and not throwing themselves headlong into a trap. It would be far too easy to let worry make them sloppy, after all, and she did not intend to let that happen.
Maple’s directions were delivered with an admirably level voice.
“Get the Conway close if you can,” Nyx said quietly to her. “I think we might be using Plan E on this one.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Maple’s comm line cut off, but not before Nyx heard her giving quiet orders to Halo, who was flying copilot.
They’d done all they could do on that front. All that remained was to get close to Wraith—and to Nyx’s surprise, they reached her without incident. Her team had clearly taken out a large detachment of guards recently, but none of them were injured, and they’d even had the time to get a med kit out for Harry, who was being tended to by Doc.
“What’s going on?” Nyx asked, her voice pitched for Wraith’s ears only.
“This whole thing is wrong,” Wraith said simply. “Ghost isn’t here, Rhea isn’t here. You want my bet? Ghost realized what her negotiator let slip. Now there’s no telling where they might be, and they’re going to try to kill us on the way out of here.”
Nyx thought this over. She kept thinking even as there was a distant shout and the rest of her team took up positions for the guards that were launching the next wave of the attack. Her body moved automatically; she chose targets and fired, and more often than not, those targets went down with a scream.
When the brief skirmish was over, she knelt and let her mind run, and when Wraith came to her side, Nyx said, “It was the best move, but not one she made lightly. She wanted to see me die—she wanted to kill me personally. She’ll still probably want to, if she can have a chance at it. That’s our advantage. Plan E with Harry—send him alone—and we’ll get the rest of the team to an exit with me as bait, if we need to us that.”
Wraith’s eyes said she was thinking most of this over, but she said only, “Plan E, right.” She went over to Doc and gave a quick order, then helped Harry to his feet. He was tall and lanky compared to Dess’s tiny stature, but
Nyx could see the resemblance in the set of the features and the lopsided smile.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” he said. “Never thought I’d be rescued by Dragons.” He gave a laugh and a cough. Pain went across his features in a spasm, and he gave such a carelessly sweet smile that Nyx’s heart squeezed. “I know you didn’t come for me. I wish … I’d been able to keep her here. But—”
“We know,” Nyx heard Wraith say, with more understanding and patience than Nyx would have expected. “Come on, we have some fun planned for you. Ever been in space before?”
“Few times.” Harry leaned on her as she led him away.
“Good, good. Ever been in space, without a suit, after getting shot out of an airlock?”
It was blunter than Nyx would have been, but Harry laughed—which was clearly what Wraith had been going for.
He probably, Nyx thought, didn’t realize the woman was serious. Well, he’d see soon enough. The airlock was close by, and Chief had the shuttle ready—with Maple and Choop in the Conway as backup.
The airlock was small, and they didn’t have time to get all of the team out that way—which meant they needed to get back to the shuttle bay. Nyx waited until there was the heavy slam of the airlock door and Wraith jogged back to them.
“Next group of guards is coming,” she reported. “Also, Harry Tasper has quite a taste for adventure. He’s still bleeding from that chair, and he’s clearly more excited about going out an airlock than anything else.”
Nyx gave an appreciative shrug. All things being equal, she’d rather Harry was happy about this, than absolutely terrified.
And then they all heard it: the absolute thunder of footsteps, and Ghost’s smooth voice came over the comms.
“Hello again, Nyx.”
“Hey.” Nyx looked over at the comm unit. “Kind of thought we’d see you this time. Have a little reunion.” On the comm unit, she said, “Get to the airlock and defend it until Harry is out.”
“It is a reunion,” Ghost said pleasantly. If she’d heard Nyx’s order, she didn’t say anything about it. “I can see you just fine, after all, and you look just the same as last time. Human. Weak.”
“I beat you to death with my bare hands,” Nyx reminded her. “Metal and computers can do some things, lady, but they are not unbreakable.” She took up position with her team, rifle trained on the nearest bend in the corridor. Soldiers coming around the corner would be moving fast. They would swing wide—and she would have them directly in her sights.
“That body did have some failings, didn’t it?” Ghost sounded pleasantly nostalgic. “This one is better. That’s what metal and computers get you, Nyx—another shot. They get you immortality.”
“We’ll just see about that,” Nyx muttered.
And then the soldiers came around the corner in a wave, and she started shooting, and had no focus for anything else. There had to be hundreds of them, and the benefits of being able to shoot pretty much anywhere and hit someone were going to be outweighed soon by the sheer number of guards to work through.
Nyx gave a feral smile. “Stay sharp, 11. We’ve trained for this and they haven’t. Just remember—we aren’t locked in here with them, they’re locked in here with us.”
“It’ll just be a moment,” said a woman’s calm voice, and Harry braced himself against the back of the airlock and tried to remember how to breathe.
He was excited to go shooting out into space. He knew he wouldn’t die before they caught him, after all. It would be an adventure—something he could tell Dess about, because he would see her again. It was a miracle.
He was still nervous. Space was very big and spectacularly black, which was something he was just realizing now as he stared out the window at it. He was consumed with the nonsensical fear that he was going to miss the shuttle and the ship and then go tumbling into the gravity well of the gas giant nearby.
The fact that the math didn’t work on that did not make him feel any better.
Then he turned his head and saw the control panel, and his eyes narrowed. “Wait. Don’t block the airlock.”
“You’ll be fine, I promise.” The woman sounded like she thought he was having a panic attack.
It was a reasonable worry, but not accurate in this case. Harry scrabbled at the control panel. “If we’re going to be off this station soon, I think I might just want to take care of those ships.”
“We can get them on the way out,” the woman said firmly. “As a hostage, you’re priority one.”
That was awfully nice of her, considering that Harry knew he hadn’t been the primary objective of this mission, but he still couldn’t accept it. “These right here are prototypes,” he said. “The records of them aren’t anywhere else, because they’re building them to see what works and then making schematics to ship to the other yards. We destroy these, we take down a whole chunk of her progress.”
There was a pause, while Harry assumed she was thinking.
“Look, I can’t do it from your ship.” He wasn’t actually sure he could do it from here, either, but he was sure as hell going to try.
“Fine,” she said after a moment, “but I may need to get you out of there on short notice, okay?”
“Roger that.” He began to make his slow way through the systems, overriding the main controls and going for the mainframe. He wasn’t one of Ghost’s mainframe engineers, but he’d needed to learn some of it for his ship building, and had made a point to learn more whenever he could.
And then the panel went dark. He thumped at it, and thumped again. The third thump, however, didn’t quite land. He felt woozy—and, too late, realized that the faint hiss he was hearing must be escaping air. It was awfully cold in here now.
“Did you really think you could go into my systems,” his aunt’s voice asked, “and I wouldn’t know? I am the systems, Harry.”
Get me out of here! But his mouth wouldn’t work, and even the panic he should be feeling seemed awfully distant. Harry stumbled, grabbed for the panel to keep himself upright, and missed. His last moment of consciousness showed the stars wheeling above him out the airlock window, and then he knew no more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
REGINA WAITED in the negotiating room, her back ramrod straight, her expression a carefully cultivated look of boredom. Any minute now, John Hugo would walk through that door, and Regina would have him at her mercy.
Any minute now, and she could not afford a single moment of laxity when he did.
She fought a feeling of disquiet. Since the meeting with Dess, something about Maryam had seemed … off. Or was it truly ‘Ghost’? Regina didn’t want to admit it, but Dess’s simple question, ‘it’s what she names herself, isn’t it?’ had touched off a deep worry.
Regina wasn’t ignorant. She had survived four different heads of the family by knowing when to keep her mouth shut, when to offer an opinion, and when to distance herself from those who had fallen out of favor.
She had also learned to get as much information as she could on the current head of the family.
So, for years, she had been tracking Maryam’s dabbling into cybernetic enhancement. Regina knew the woman was looking into preserving her thoughts and memories, searching for something Regina had thought was a fool’s quest: resurrection.
Now she realized that the quest had been immortality, instead—not quite the same thing. It left Regina wondering just how much she had misunderstood.
When a family ship had arrived last night, ostensibly bearing no message at all for Regina, she’d known enough to be worried by that. She knew the signs that she was falling out of favor. And yet, she had not been commanded to leave the negotiations. There had been no censure.
She had thought she was safe—
There was the sound of gunfire from the hall and her head jerked up. Gunfire meant someone had attacked, and on the side that should have John Hugo.
Several things became clear then, and Regina went into motion at once. She had no time t
o spare, after all. The plan had been changed, and Regina had not been included. She could assume that she was, therefore, expendable to Ghost.
But if she was right about how the plan had changed, she had one bargaining chip that might buy her clemency on the other side of the table:
Rhea Hugo.
Bullets exploded through the corridor and Tersi dove for John Hugo, carrying him down onto the floor and shielding the man with his body. Shouts rang out as the Dragons took up position, and there was the sound of a fist banging on metal, Aegis yelling for the door to the Ariane to open.
The bullets weren’t stopping, and when Aegis gave a yell of frustration, everyone on the team knew why.
“Form up!” Talon’s roar was annoyed—but not surprised. Suspicious by nature, he’d been expecting something like this.
It was why almost the entire team was out here with Hugo instead of on the ship. None of them had argued when Talon ordered it. They had seen enough missions go sideways, after all, and the Head of Alliance Intelligence was someone to over-protect, not under-protect.
Still, all of them had considered it a remote possibility.
But now, something snapped into place in Tersi’s head. “Talon!”
“Yeah? Stabby, Esu, bodyguard it up. Tersi?”
Tersi didn’t have time to answer immediately. A soldier in the uniform of Ghost’s personal guard had come charging along the corridor from behind them. Seeing Stabby and Esu sprinting towards both him and John Hugo, Tersi launched himself up and towards the soldier, calling out a warning to the team.
In combat, he’d always been most comfortable watching and waiting, picking his moment. Talon tended to send Tersi in first, to lay down cover fire with precise, measured shots. He was the team’s designated marksman more often than not. You’ve got ice water in those veins, his boot camp instructor liked to say.
He could fight in a melee if the situation called for it, though, and this soldier was finding that out the hard way. Three blows in close succession, to the sternum, throat, and jaw, left the soldier reeling, wheezing for air. Tersi snapped his neck without a thought, head already up and scanning for the next threat.