by Sara Creasy
The sirens wail.
Lukas grabs the rad’s ankle, brings him down. But Lukas is already losing consciousness. It’s not much of a struggle.
She watches and does nothing. Bethany is dead. Lukas is down. There’s nothing to do.
The rad races out, his only objective now to get off the ship, but there are milits on board. He won’t evade capture.
She kneels at Lukas’s side, too shocked to speak or cry. She can’t look at Bethany again. Her stomach churns at the smell of burnt flesh. Shouts and footfalls echo down the corridors, and the intermittent crack of gunfire.
The ship’s medic arrives, and others. Someone pulls her away, draws her outside the room, asks if she’s hurt.
Everything hurts.
She passes the eco-rad on her way off the ship. Demasked, lying crumpled against the bulkhead where they brought him down. A teenager, not much older than herself. His eyes follow her and she stops. Does he even care he was caught? The cypherteck is dead—mission accomplished.
A milit jerks his head to tell her to move on, but she takes a step closer.
“You failed,” she says, looking down on his young, hard face. “I’m no op-teck. I’m a cypherteck, her trainee. You should have killed me, too.”
His eyes flare with anger, then turn cold. “Look at what you’ve done,” he whispers. “You’ve destroyed a world.”
Later, they tell her that he died from his wounds. She hopes it’s true.
And Lukas, his shoulders stooped under the weight of his guilt, his uniform still stained with Bethany’s blood, vows to never let it happen again.
Edie splashed her face with water and allowed herself for just a moment to remember Lukas and Bethany. She’d known little of their relationship while it was happening. They were too discreet, and she was very young—naïve and oblivious to many things. But afterward, during the two years Lukas was Edie’s bodyguard, she could see how he changed. No friendly banter, no personal discussions, no careless laughter and no squabbles. With Edie he was professional and dedicated at all times.
Yet somehow he became her friend and mentor along the way.
Staring in the mirror, Edie’s face warmed at the vague memory of her recent behavior with Finn, and she chastised herself. Lukas was the one person she trusted and respected most in her life. She needed to take heed of what she’d learned from him. Pursuing any kind of attachment with Finn was simply too dangerous.
Having staggered down the ramp to the primitive facilities to wash up, Edie now struggled one-handed into her clothes, her skin still damp and soapy. She returned to the cockpit and stuck her wrist back into the sling Finn had fashioned. Her shoulder was purple with bruising but the sharp pain was gone, replaced by a dull nauseous ache.
The sight out the viewscreen didn’t help. She averted her eyes and sat beside Finn. He pored over starcharts, and the look of puzzlement was back. Clearly he didn’t know what to make of them.
“Any idea where we’re headed?” She’d been asleep for several hours. The spike had worn off and the water had woken her up, but she was still groggy.
Finn looked up. “Flight plan says we’re a few minutes off our exit point. I can’t find our position. No idea what’s on the other side.”
“You mean Cat’s sending us through an unmapped exit?”
“Looks that way.”
“That’s crazy. We could be heading into anything.”
“Odds are in our favor that it’s a deserted chunk of backwater space.”
Edie knew the odds, more or less. There were millions of nodes throughout the Reach—known space—nine tenths of them unmapped. Of the mapped ones, most exit points had been found to lead nowhere special. Some of them brought a ship closer to another node that did go somewhere, and so they became important. The most valuable nodes were those with exits within star systems, and, occasionally, near planets—like the one near Talas that prompted its recolonization and the construction of the space station fifty years ago.
It was sheer foolhardiness to enter or exit unmapped nodes. That was the job of mapping crews, who earned hefty hazard bonuses for their troubles. It was insanity to exit a node in a skiff that lacked the mass to traverse nodes of its own volition. She and Finn were about to end up on the other side of a jump node without the means to reenter it and find their way back. They were entirely dependent on the Hoi coming after them, and if CIP impounded the Hoi they’d be stranded.
Despite the lingering dread in the pit of her stomach, Edie reassured herself that—either way—at least they were safe from Natesa and the Crib.
“Is there any way we can control our exit point?”
“No. Autopilot.” Finn sounded unconcerned. “And why would we want to? The Hoi can’t find us if we deviate from the flight plan.”
“So you’ve given up the idea of taking the skiff and running?”
Finn leaned back in his seat. “Just a fantasy, like you said.”
Edie fidgeted with her bandage, chewing her lip. She hated not having any control over their destination. “What if we exit in the middle of a skirmish or an exploding supernova?”
“One in a billion chance.”
“There could still be danger. You hear about mapping crews disappearing all the time.”
“Mostly because their ships get ripped apart on the node horizon, because they’re stupid enough to take risks with their shielding. Those guys are already crazy or they wouldn’t be in that line of work. Listen.” He leaned toward her. “Sometimes you have to let things play out. There’s nothing we can do just now.”
She nodded and turned back to the viewscreen. Tried to make sense of the swirling strings of nodespace outside, as she might decipher a datastream, but no patterns emerged. After a while, she became mesmerized by the display.
“What’s that on your feet?” he said out of nowhere. He was staring at the patterns on her bare feet, propped on the edge of the console.
“Cat did it.”
“She branded you.”
“No, she painted me.”
Her warning tone stopped him commenting further. She wasn’t in the mood to be baited when they were going to be trapped together in close quarters for a couple of days. She much preferred the man who had pulled her into his arms after tending her injury a few hours ago. The man who’d seemed on the verge of opening up. Now that she was in full control of her faculties again, perhaps he would.
“You said you’d tell me the truth about the Saeth.” When he didn’t respond, she tried again. “At least tell me about the chip in your head. I know the Crib set up the boundary trigger and the bomb, but they didn’t put the chip there in the first place.”
“What makes you say that?” His look betrayed nothing.
“I know Crib teck when I hear it. I don’t recognize your chip. Who put it there?”
Finn drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, and she got the feeling he was stalling while he decided whether to answer.
“All the Saeth had them. It’s a comm chip, or was, before the Crib wiped it. We learned to transmit basic signals and instructions to each other. Nothing fancy, but they helped us get the job done in silence.”
“What job?”
Finn shifted awkwardly in his seat.
“Come on, Finn. Don’t you want to set the record straight?”
“Telling you about it won’t change a thing.”
“It will for me.” She smiled, and to her relief he returned it—but it only made him look sad.
Then he settled back and told her.
“The Fringe worlds spend half their time fighting each other over old grievances. They always have. The push for independence, the Liberty War, gave them a common goal but it didn’t always stop the petty disputes. Some of them, the ones that could afford it, put aside their differences long enough to assemble an allied special-ops force—the Saeth. They funded us and we vowed to fight for all Fringers, not just our homeworlds.”
“So you weren’t assassins?�
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“We spent most of our time blowing up Crib munitions factories. Recovering impounded ships and weapons. Escorting refugees. We did anything the rebel factions were too disorganized to do themselves.”
“How did you get caught?”
“I was captured four years ago, right after the ceasefire.”
“After the ceasefire? That makes no sense.”
“The Fringe worlds denied responsibility for us because they didn’t want to risk the terms of their fledgling treaties. They got their independence, such as it is, but they sold us out, handed us to the Crib on a platter. The Crib spun it so well that even the Fringers came to believe we were never on their side. We were on our way home and…” His voice cracked, and when he went on it was with reluctance. “Milits tracked us down. I held them off so my men could get away. Thought I’d be smart enough to escape later. It took longer than I expected.”
“Your men?”
“I was a sergeant.”
“Sergeant Finn.” She tried the name on him.
His lips quirked. “That’s not my real name.”
“Then what is?”
“It’s not important now.”
“Why did you join the Saeth in the first place, instead of fighting for your homeworld like the other rebels?”
He hesitated, smiling grimly at some memory. “Well, there was a woman.”
Edie grinned, but only to mask the unexpected pang of jealousy that lodged in her chest.
A woman. In Finn’s past.
Of course there was a woman.
“Because of her, I took up a cause. And learned my lesson eventually—to take care of my own survival first.”
“That’s why you’re so reluctant to help the Fringers now.”
“Let’s just say I lost comrades fighting for the Fringe worlds. They didn’t do it for the glory, but they wouldn’t have expected to be disowned and abandoned when it was over. My men…there were four of us left. Two with families. We had to find our own way home, through Crib lines and our alleged allies. A few days after my arrest, I heard my men were gunned down, trying to run from a patrol.” Finn drew a deep breath and exhaled unsteadily. “A Fringer patrol.”
As he stared off into the distance, lost in the memories, Edie waited for him to say that he blamed himself. He didn’t say it, didn’t need to. He didn’t need pity from her.
“Why did the Crib let you live?” she asked.
He looked at her as if he’d suddenly remembered someone was listening. “At first no one knew what to do with me. After that…” He shrugged. “Suppose I got lost in the system.”
Edie could see now how his incarceration had affected him. He’d commanded men, accepted responsibility for them, fought for entire worlds, and asked for nothing in return. To have it all stripped away and be rendered helpless, and now the leash…There wasn’t much worse that could be done to any man, but especially a man like him.
She felt the urge to put things right for him, to make it fair. But what could possibly make up for what the Crib and his own people had done to him? The task was too big for her. And beyond their joint survival and cutting the leash, it wasn’t her problem. She pushed those thoughts aside.
Remembering the marks she’d seen on his back, she asked, “Why did they whip you?”
He grimaced. “Took me a while to figure out I should behave myself if I wanted to survive in one piece.”
Absentmindedly, he touched the faint scar on his neck. “I’ve been out here a long time. Seen a lot, heard a lot. I heard the Talasi have a nonvocal language, that they speak in sign. Is that why you took off the snag?”
Pieces of their earlier conversation came back to her. He’d asked her this before, and she’d been unable to coordinate an answer. A week ago she hadn’t thought about why she wanted his voice snag removed—she only knew she hated it. His suggestion made sense.
“I guess so.”
“So the Crib taught you to speak?”
“I learned to speak Linguish from the camp guards.”
“You get into trouble for that?”
“Yes. No. Not me. I wasn’t worth disciplining. Their superstitious nonsense didn’t allow for the existence of a half-breed, so no one took much notice of me. But there were some children…” Edie sighed—she hadn’t intended to open up to him, but it was a fair exchange after what he had given her. “Four of us were caught talking to the guards. The elders were always warning us against it, against any outside influence. But we were curious. Fascinated by their stories.” Her voice faltered as she thought back to that dreadful day. “When the elders found out, they made an example of the others. Me, they just ignored. Most of them were glad to be rid of me when the Crib took me away.”
“What happened to those other kids?”
She swallowed as an old hate boiled to the surface. “The elders cut out their tongues.”
She didn’t meet Finn’s eyes but sensed him freeze in the seat beside her. So he could still be shocked, even after all he’d seen and heard.
“The Talasi were mistreated for thirty years by the new colonists on Talas,” Edie explained. “After they were put into camps, the Crib’s policy was to not interfere with their culture, so they did nothing about it. But culture isn’t sacred just because it’s ancient. Some things…”
“Some things are just wrong.”
She nodded, wondering how he’d managed to get the story out of her. She’d never spoken of it before. Tracing the delicate painted lines on her feet, she felt him studying her.
“Who was that woman?” he asked.
“Natesa? She’s my boss. My patron. She rescued me from poverty and neglect. She came from a deprived world, too, and assumed that gave us a connection—that we shared the same dreams. I’m a disappointment to her.” Edie had never voiced that idea before, but as she said the words she realized they were true.
“You don’t sound like that bothers you.”
Edie’s shoulders heaved in a deep sigh. “Even at the age of ten, I knew she wasn’t choosing me out of benevolence. From that moment, she dictated everything in my life. There were times when she terrified me, because I couldn’t see a way out from her influence. I used to run away, every so often, just for the taste of freedom. She never understood that.” Edie couldn’t look at him as she spoke. Compared to his grievances, hers sounded petty. Even that childish wish for her mother’s return, a yearning that had tarnished her relationship with Natesa from the start, seemed irrelevant.
“You feel like she used you.”
“She did.”
“You’re not a pawn, you know. She needed you—you could’ve taken advantage of that.”
Now Edie looked up in surprise. “Are you saying I should have? Didn’t you just say you behaved yourself in order to survive?”
“No one needs a serf. One man’s as good as the next. Making trouble only makes it worse when you don’t have the upper hand. When I do—if I see the smallest chance of success—I’ll fight.” His attention was drawn to something on the console, and he sat upright in his seat. “Looks like we’re about to exit nodespace.”
He pulled the seat harness over his shoulders and Edie did the same, securing herself tightly this time. For a few seconds the view outside the skiff didn’t look any different, but as she was about to remark on it her seat lurched violently as the grav field stuttered. Her stomach flipped. She heard the equipment in the hold being thrown around again—they should have clamped down the loose stuff, but neither of them cared enough to think of that. Edie gripped the seat arms and closed her eyes, thankful for the harness because this ride was rougher than their entry into the node, hours earlier.
The skiff shuddered again, evened out, and she braved a look. She’d never been so happy to see the still, speckled expanse of starfield. A couple of telltales blinked red on the console. One of them turned amber, then green, even as she watched—whatever was wrong must have self-corrected. The other one remained red and Finn pushed button
s to get a readout on the holoviz.
“External vids and sensors are down,” he reported. “And here’s why we won’t be running anywhere.” He pulled up the fuel gauge, something neither of them had thought to check before. It had been bled dry.
Edie jacked into the comm. “They’ve disabled communications, other than a short-range link to the Hoi. No calling for help.”
“How short-range?”
“I’m not picking up any comm buoys in the area, so the Hoi would have to be right here in the system with us. What now? We just sit and wait?”
Finn unfastened his harness. “I found a couple of memos coded for you. They were flashed over right before we hit the node.”