“Yeah, Prayer. I’m okay.”
He could tell by her facial expression that she was sceptical, but she knew better than to ask him any more questions. He pointed briefly towards Castigon, and her eyes told him that she understood.
Captain Borreto would wait until their passenger was off the ship. Only then would it be safe for them to talk.
• • •
Brant and Tirrano pored over reports in the flight cabin of the borrowed transport vessel Spring Eternal. Just before she had headed out the door to join Brant in one of Fort Laeara’s many hangars, Tirrano had dumped three days’ worth of data onto her holo.
She had not stopped at her own work station either; she had taken information from a number of other operators’ holos. When Brant had asked her about it, she had rolled her eyes and said they were already going to be up on desertion charges, so why not espionage charges as well?
Having only just got over that deeply worrying thought, Brant now sounded as though he wanted to be sick.
“Becchari, Ophriam, Lophrit, Ankhar’s Star, Naruth, Guathelia, Umri Major… this is terrible.”
“How many, total?”
“Thirteen systems. Seven facilities. At least twenty-six ships Command knew about as of the start of today.”
“Thirteen systems,” Tirrano repeated. “The gates are not responding in thirteen systems, and they have managed to keep a lid on it?”
Brant had paled. “I doubt they’ll keep a lid on it for much longer. I mean, we found them out. It’s only a matter of time before others do too. How long can you tell people a gate is down for repair, before someone gets fed up with waiting and makes an unbound jump?”
Tirrano muscled in on the holo he was working from, and swiped data tiles over each other. He leaned away to give her room to work.
“What are you doing?”
“Cross-referencing ships with systems.”
“Why?”
“Look. The Vehement was recorded as going off the network during a training exercise. It’s annotated as being due to re-appear some time in the next week. Only we know it won’t, because—”
“Because its last known way-point was Guathelia, which has gone dark.”
“Exactly.”
“Worlds, Peras. This is just wrong. Someone needs to do something about this.”
“I know what you’re going to say, and I think you should not say it.”
“What am I going to say?”
“That ‘someone’ should be us.”
“What are we going to do about it? Why in the many worlds would I say that?”
“Because you’re Mister Do-The-Right-Fucking-Thing.”
“I am not.”
“You bloody are. That’s why your new boyfriend chose you for this suicide run.”
An alert from the navigation holo interrupted them before Brant could come up with a suitable retort, and Tirrano tapped an icon to open the message.
“We’re up next,” she said. “Both ships ahead of us in the queue are going the same way.”
“Four gates,” Brant said. “Four! I really hate jumps.”
“Well then; you should have found us a ship that could survive doing it in one, instead of this shitty hauler.”
“It was very short notice,” he said. “Worlds, do I hate jumps.”
She watched him while he gazed out of the view port, and saw the light of the forming wormhole dancing in his eyes. He looked as though he were facing his own mortality.
“Man up, Brant,” she said.
• • •
Castigon listened to the sound of his own breath inside his helmet, and the rush of blood pumping around his veins.
Aside from the small vibrations that travelled through the suit each time he shifted his feet on the Leo‘s hull, all else was quiet.
The silence was liberating. Others found it unnerving, he had heard. But not him; Castigon loved it.
“We’re bang on. Direct line between us and their rock. Nothing big will come between us for a few minutes yet.”
The pilot had assured him of this before Castigon had entered the airlock. He really hoped Sayad’s sensors were properly calibrated.
He looked up, arching his whole spine against the constraints of the EVA suit, and surveyed his target.
The asteroid that hosted Altakanti turned slowly in the black, one side of it ablaze in the reflected light of the local star. The other side, the side facing away from the star, was so dark that he struggled to make out where it ended.
He brought up his arm and looked down to check the wrist display. Both the air and the propellant gauges looked good.
“Here goes nothing,” he said.
He unclipped the tether from his waist, and pushed off.
His body sailed away from the Leo Fortune, weightless and free of drag. It was better than flying; there was nothing to hold him back.
He tried to judge the distance, the trajectory. It was difficult, but he could not afford to miss. More than that: he could not afford making too many adjustments. As old as it was, the Leo had its stealth plates. His body had no such advantage. Any nearby object making multiple course corrections would trigger alarms on the station, even something as small as he was.
He drifted on, a tiny meat-filled bag in a vast, indifferent universe.
He watched with fascination as a tiny piece of asteroid zipped by, tumbling around its own centre of gravity. It was smaller than one of his fists.
Cute you might be, he thought, but a rock like you could crack my visor. Maybe I didn’t think this through.
He checked again and judged his course to be off by a couple of degrees. A short burst from his EVA pack, and the asteroid was centred again in his view.
It loomed larger and larger, and again he found himself reconsidering his plan.
He left it until the last possible minute before he fired off the bursts that flipped him head over heels, and the smaller bursts that stopped his spin from carrying on forever.
He switched to the lower thrusters, and started to decelerate.
The asteroid grew larger with every passing second, its surface becoming the ground he was falling towards. He began to perceive a horizon, one that receded from him faster and faster.
“Come on,” he said.
The thrusters did their job despite his misgivings. By the time his feet hit the ground, he had only to bend his knees to absorb the last of his momentum. The sudden drag of rotation nearly threw him backwards.
He tried to stand, and succeeded only in pushing himself back off into space. Between the thrusters and the weak gravity of the asteroid he managed to sink back down gently until his boots touched the rock again, and he took a few rapid steps to match the turn of the ground beneath his feet.
He walked slowly, carefully, and laboriously, towards the terminator line that separated the darkness and the light.
It took nearly half an hour before he saw the hull of the station rise over the horizon, and another twenty minutes to actually reach it. His air monitor warned him that he had passed the halfway mark, and he hoped that he would find either spare tanks or a charging point somewhere inside the station.
Of course there will be something, he told himself. They’re not that stupid.
He found the hatch to the auxiliary airlock, right where he expected it to be, and set to work on the control panel. By the time he had managed to switch off the safeguards and alarms, his air reading was flashing one quarter.
The outer hatch opened, and he stepped inside and closed it behind him. He got to work on the panel inside the airlock. It would not help him to re-pressurise the compartment if everyone on the station knew about it immediately.
By the time the air was pumping back into the small chamber, his tank was just above the red line.
He pulled off his helmet and gasped for clean, dry air.
Castigon gave himself a few minutes before venturing deeper into the station. The automatic systems he could reprog
ram with relative ease; he could not reprogram a person to ignore him if he opened a hatch right into their path. If there was going to be fighting, he needed to be ready for it.
After a while, he grasped the metal wheel on the inside of the inner hatch, and turned it slowly.
The hatch opened into a quiet, still passageway.
He stepped through the aperture cautiously, checking in both directions. There were no signs of life, and he could hear only the gentle thrum of the life support systems.
He pulled his right glove off, clipped it to his belt, and slid his holo out of a storage slot in the suit. A few taps later, and he had recovered the standard layout for listening posts from its memory.
He headed towards the comms exchange centre, as stealthily as he knew how.
As he moved, the profound silence of the station began to weigh on his mind. Something was not right; a station this size would normally have a staff of twelve. Even if they had a station-wide sleep period — which listening crews never did, because they worked in four shifts — there ought to be someone moving around and making the noises associated with life.
He stopped to sniff the air. There was no pungency, no taint of putrefaction. So he was probably not walking around an automated tomb. That was reassuring.
He carried on, and after a while he reached the exchange centre unopposed. He placed his helmet down on one of the control desks, and looked around. The holos and servers arrayed along the wall were all in standby mode.
He resumed one of them.
“—cycle interrupted. Repeater now automatic,” the holo blared.
Castigon leapt backwards, then slapped at the holo hurriedly, dropping the volume. Words appeared on the display.
Dumping buffer prior to databurst.
The words vanished and a woman appeared in their place. She stared at the camera, her face sad. She began to whisper, and he raised the volume by a few points.
“—I don’t know how long I have left, or if this will even reach you. They’ve taken Jaesia. They’ve taken your father. Worlds, they’re taking everybody. It’s… it’s like a nightmare. The sky, oh my son, they tore the sky.”
He heard what sounded like a muffled explosion, from somewhere far away outside whatever building the woman was in. She looked behind her, and turned back to the camera with tears in her eyes.
“Don’t come here looking for us, you hear? Do not come here. Ophriam is a fallen world. By the time you arrive there will be nothing left.”
A burst of static washed her out of the image, then she resolved again.
“I love you son. We all do. I hope wherever you are, this message reaches you. I hope that it’s safe there. I love you.”
The sound of another explosion began, and then the recording cut to black. More words appeared.
Dataset truncated unexpectedly.
Buffer empty.
Commencing emergency databurst.
Gate 20-308: Ophriam.
“What the fuck was that?”
He resumed the next holo along. This one too had a recording waiting on it; the last dataset for whoever had been working at this terminal before they upped and left.
Databurst received.
Relay point signature confirmed:
Destroyer ICS Gladius.
Corrupted blocks detected.
Attempting recovery…
“They’ve taken the town. Took it from us like we weren’t even here.”
It was a soldier, wearing a MAGA uniform with a corporal’s rank insignia. His face was streaked with grime and dried blood.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. People fighting each other in the streets. Friends, neighbours! Falling on each other like animals. I’ve seen humans fighting alongside Viskr, against their own kind—“
This recording too was interrupted by an explosion, only the sound was closer and more defined. Dust dropped in front of the camera. The soldier flinched, ducked down for a second.
“But there’s something else here. Something in the darkness and the shadows. I can… hear it in my mind. He won’t stop, and… and I don’t want Him to—“
A roaring, thundering crash in the distance, like the heavens falling from on high.
“What in the Deep… Oh my worlds… the song! The song is beginning again—“
Static, then a black screen.
No further recoverable data.
Databurst has been archived.
– Relay: ICS Gladius –
Position: Unknown. Status: Unknown.
Castigon stood in front of the holo and stared at the words until they were burned into his mind. He had no idea what he had just watched.
After a moment, he made a decision. He docked his own holo with each of them in turn, and duplicated the recordings before moving on to find what he had come for.
• • •
Borreto, Sayad, and Prayer floated close to each other in the main crew compartment of the Leo Fortune. Nobody had spoken for what seemed like an age.
“I’m not saying we should leave him behind,” Borreto said at last.
“I should hope not,” said Sayad. “The amount of money he’s offered to pay will see us in parts and fuel for the next couple of Solars at least.”
“If we get fuckin’ paid,” said Prayer.
“Exactly.” Borreto stroked his chin. “I’m not convinced he’s on the level.”
“That’s one hell of an understatement, Boss.”
“So it’s not just me then, Prayer. You see it too.”
“To be honest, I was wondering why you agreed to carry him the moment he first stepped on that ramp.”
“We can’t just leave him here though,” said Sayad. “You both know that. We won’t ever find another fare in the Backwaters if we do.”
“Therein lies the problem,” said Borreto. “But I don’t even want to know where he’s going next. The guy is trouble, plain and simple.”
“What if we just tell him his next destination is where we part ways?”
“It might come to that, Sayad.”
“It fuckin’ ought to.”
“Yeah, well I’m not happy with him directing my actions either. We should have called in that situation on Lophrit, no matter what he said.”
“You gonna do it Boss?”
“Not yet. The last thing we want to do is to start transmitting right next to a listening post. The minute we drop at the next gate, I’m going to let the network know.”
• • •
Castigon was still working at the holos, searching out the last of the messages and command dispatches he needed, when he sensed danger. There was a minute shift in the air, or maybe it was the faintest possible sound. Whatever it was, it was enough.
He raised his pistol to the doorway, quick as a flash, and his head turned after it.
“Hello again,” said the woman.
He stared at her for a moment, not recognising her face. She was only small, slightly built and very short. Her features were delicate, her blonde hair immaculate, her clothing neat and clean. She seemed diminutive, non-threatening. But something about her triggered the alarms in his head, and he had always found those alarms to be reliable.
“Who might you be?”
“You don’t recognise me, of course.”
“Should I?” He kept his sights trained on the centre of her chest.
“It wasn’t long ago, Mister Castigon. The last time you saw me, I was Herik Pammon.”
His mouth opened, but no sound came out. It took him a moment to even think up possible meanings for her words.
“What are you talking about?”
“I am most grateful for your help on Serrofus Major. I had already tried to convince several locals to assist, to no avail.”
Castigon’s holo bleeped, alerting him that it had finished its copy. He picked it up with his free hand, keeping his eyes on the woman, and slotted it back into his suit.
“Again, who are you?”
&nbs
p; “Why, me of course. I am.”
“That doesn’t answer my question at all.”
She smiled sweetly, and he looked her up and down again. Her clothing was all wrong; she was not supposed to be here either.
“Where is the station’s crew?”
“They had to go,” she said.
“Go as in leave, or go as in their bodies are stuffed in a closet somewhere?”
“Just ‘go’.”
“What are you doing here?”
“The same as you.”
“And what do you know about that?”
“This is a listening post of the First Unified Imperial Combine of Earth. There are very few reasons for people like us to come here.”
He had to give her that one.
“I’m done here. I’m going to leave. Is that going to cause a problem for us?”
“Oh no, not at all. You’re taking Shards out of the game. If anything you are saving me some time.”
He eyed her up suspiciously, trusting her less the more she disclosed to him. She continued to smile, and stepped aside with a flourish of her arms as if urging him to carry on.
Castigon took the opportunity to leave the exchange centre, keeping his weapon trained on her. As benign as she looked, the more primitive part of his brain screamed out that she was one of the most dangerous people he had ever met.
He backed off down the passageway, and she ambled after him, her hands clasped in front of her. She hummed a tune of gentle sorrow.
“What do you mean, you were Herik Pammon?”
“Exactly that, and I still am. I’m sorry; it was a bit misleading. You don’t seem to have a usable, conversational tense for simultaneity.”
“Simultaneity?”
“Synchronicity, if you prefer?”
“What in the many worlds are you talking about?”
“You asked, so I told you.”
“You’re saying you are both here and on Serrofus Major?”
Her smile stretched wider than it ought to have done across that small, delicate face. “At the very least.”
“Herik Pammon was a man. You aren’t.”
Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars) Page 52