“Technically, it’s the captain’s ship,” said Kohl.
“It’s more mine and El’s than Nate’s,” said Hope from behind them. “We make her fly.”
“I don’t have a horse in this race,” said Kohl. “All I know is I had to shoot a lot of fools who were crawling all over it.”
“Great,” said El. “We’ll ditch the car.” The machine’s controls responded under her fingertips like it was born and bred for her, agile like a bird, urgent like a stallion. The heads-up display gave altitude, velocity, and an angry image of a Republic officer trying to raise her on the comm. She answered the call. “Heya.”
“Unidentified pilot, you are in possession of a Republic vehicle. Stealing Republic property is an offense against—”
El clicked the comm off. “Okay, we’re definitely ditching the car. Hope?”
“Already working on it.” The Engineer was deep in her rig, visor accessing schematics and controls only she could see. Or at least that’s what El hoped she was doing, otherwise her fingers moving through the air were the actions of a crazy person. “Okay, yeah. See, they’re trying to make the car fall from the sky.”
“Sounds bad,” suggested Kohl.
“Very,” said Hope, her voice distracted. “I won’t let them do that.”
“Great,” said El. “Kohl?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you try and sell out Grace?” El’s hands gripped the controls. “For money?”
“It was two hundred thousand coins, El. C’mon—”
“Kohl?”
“Yeah.”
“You owe her,” said El. Meaning, you owe her for fucking everything up, but also, for not killing you before.
“I know,” he said, sounding pissed off, but not with her. “I know, okay!”
“So why’d you do it?”
“Not sure,” said Kohl, speaking a little slower. “It seemed like the right thing to do?” His voice was distracted, like he was trying to remember what had happened. Trying to straighten it out, create a new narrative in his head.
“Guys,” said Hope. “Two things. First, now’s not the time. Second, if there are Ezeroc, well, can’t they make you do things?”
“No one makes October Kohl do something he doesn’t want to do,” said Kohl.
“Yeah,” said El. “That’s the problem. You wanted to do it, Kohl. They found that inside you, and twisted it out, like gutting a rabbit.”
“You’re saying I’m a rabbit?”
“I’m saying you’ve got the self-control of a root vegetable,” said El. Her head still hurt, and one of her eyes was blurry, but she didn’t need both eyes to fly this car. Hell, it flew itself. It wanted to claw the sky and burn bright, which worked just fine for El.
“Root vegetable?” said Hope.
“I’m still hungry for Earth food,” said El. “That pizza…” Her voice trailed off as she realized what she’d said. “I’m, uh, sorry, Hope. Not thinking.”
“It’s okay,” said Hope, in a voice that suggested it was far from okay. That it was the least okay thing of all time.
“I figure we can resolve everything by killing a few more people,” said Kohl.
“I suspect that’s in our schedule for later on tonight,” said El. “There’s a bar near the space port. Or used to be.”
“Used to be?” said Kohl.
“I met a guy there,” said El. She rubbed her face, then did a double take at the car’s radar. A couple of blips were closing on their position. Or she had double vision and it was a single blip. Could be both. “That’s not the important part. The important part is the bar blew up.”
“Uh,” said Kohl.
“So we’re ditching the car there and setting it on fire,” said El, “because it won’t be as suspicious as a new fire starting somewhere else. Hope?”
“You’ve got Hope,” said Hope. “I’m here.”
“We got two pursuit vehicles closing in on our six,” said El. “I’m getting RADAR and LIDAR backscatter from them. Any chance you could shut ’em down?”
“Are you serious?” said Hope. “How do you think technology works?”
“We might die, is all,” said El.
“Let me see what I can do,” said Hope.
“Who was this guy?” said Kohl.
“What?” said El and Hope together.
“At the bar,” said Kohl.
“Dunno,” said El. “Bought him a drink. He sent me after Altman Razor.”
“Oh,” said Hope. “Altman. He’s a funny little man.”
The HUD in front of El lit up like it was Christmas, red and yellow warning lights blazing out. The pursuit vehicles had a lock on them. “This is good,” said Hope. “I can work with this.”
“This isn’t good!” said El, twisting the controls. The air car yawed through the night sky, engines screaming as El poured on more joules. The air car climbed, gaining some precious height, alarms in front of El blaring harsh and loud. None of it helped her headache.
“Give me a second!” said Hope.
“We don’t have a second!” said El, kicking the drive harder. The air car shuddered as she twisted the yoke, pulling it up and around and then down in a rush of acceleration. Buildings around them streamed by in flashes of light and color, the machine’s controls shaking under her hands like a scared horse.
“One more second,” said Hope, but sounding sick now.
One of the pursuit vehicles launched a missile. The air car’s warnings grew louder, and El wished she was in the Tyche, PDCs at her command. The Tyche might not have full leather, but she was built for war and could toss out chaff and RADAR ghosts like they were candy at Halloween. This air car, marvel of engineering it was, had a couple of forward-facing launchers and that was that.
“Got it,” said Hope.
“Got what?” said El, keeping the car pointed at the ground. Their speed was climbing, the rush of descent all about them. The alarms on the dash went silent, readouts dropping to baselines. RADAR still showed dots in the air around them, but … no alarms. The air car’s engines still shrieked, which was a distracting noise, so El leveled them out, buildings slipping past at a staider pace. She took a couple breaths, looked at Kohl — the man’s eyes wide, confused — and then checked on Hope behind them. “What did you do, Hope?”
“I told the missiles we weren’t the problem.” Hope paused. “They killed Reiko.”
A Republic air car pulled up next to them, holding level as they sped across the city. The comm chattered again, so El clicked it on. A masked face, Republic black visor, Republic black uniform. “Unidentified pilot,” said the soldier. “Land your vehicle now.”
“Yeah, that’ll be a negative copy on that,” said El. “Say, you fellas lose a couple missiles?”
A bright blossom of fire erupted off their side as the Republic air car exploded, a missile striking it from the sky like a bad mistake. The comm channel closed by itself, the other end no longer there. No static, no screams, just no more connection. “Huh,” said Kohl. “There’s a thing. Say, Hope. Can you do that with their guns?”
“Don’t be stupid,” said Hope, her visor looking out the window. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Worth a shot,” said Kohl.
“Let’s not get too relaxed,” said El. “We’ve got one more bogey on our six. He’s still there, like a damn dog with a bone.”
“Can you shake ’em?” said Kohl. “You should try and shake ’em off.”
El sighed. “That’s great advice, Kohl. Really. It is. What do you think I’ve been doing?” She took the air car lower, their Republic shadow following them down to the deck.
“I dunno, but they’re still there,” said Kohl. “When the cap tells me to shoot someone, I make sure they’re dead. When you’re flying, well, you’re not doing it right or something.”
El gritted her teeth. Not doing it right. He might have a point. She was treating this whole thing like she was flying a ship with weapons, ordnance
at her command, drives and reactors and PDCs all at her fingertips, and that wasn’t the case. This thing was a car. A vehicle ordered for light crowd control. Hell, that they had missiles at all was a stroke of luck; it’d be more usual for policing vehicles to be outfitted with stun gear for suppressing an angry citizenry. Not that any of the Republic’s fine citizens were ever angry. “You got any grenades left?” she said.
“Sure,” said Kohl. “I kept one for luck.” He held it up.
“Great,” said El. “We’re ditching. Here’s the way it’ll happen. Hope, I’m gonna need your rig.”
“My rig?” said Hope. “What for?”
• • •
Two air cars screamed over the streets, engines burning hard. Citizens would have been looking up, wondering what was going on. What would cause a disturbance like this in their boring, safe lives in the heart of the Republic? The lead car would have wobbled a little, the trained eye picking up a disturbance in the port thruster. Just a little noise in the burn, a bubble in the feed. Nothing serious under normal situations; a little thing like that might be rectified with ten minutes’ maintenance from a skilled Engineer.
The situation wasn’t normal, and there was no time for maintenance. The pilot of the lead car — crazed or terrified, impossible to tell — poured on more joules, asking more from an engine already wheezing with the load. The engine coughed, cut out, and the pursing car overshot in a roar of noise and light and heat. The vehicle in trouble, engine out like a blown lamp, entered a slow circle toward the ground. What happened next was hard to get straight, some witnesses reported an explosion before it hit, others said no, you idiot, it was after. But they all agreed: the lazy turn became a death spiral, the machine giving up as it approached the ceramicrete below.
The car that had overshot completed a braking turn, engines roaring to return to its prey. The prey had turned off the straight and narrow, banked towards a street on the right in its fall from grace. A partially-finished megaplex where it ended up. It would be a landmark building for the city, pulling eyes and dollars like filings to a magnet. The troubled air car drifted into the construction lot, that damaged engine coughing fire at last. The pursuit vehicle rounded the turn after its prey in time to see the troubled car explode into a roil of flame, smoke, and flying machinery. The explosion touched a piece of heavy construction equipment, causing an energy canister inside to rupture. Stored energy spilled in bright flashes around it, great arcs of light that seemed thick and solid. They licked out, carving through the half-built substructure.
That would have been the end of it if it weren’t for a construction crew that had finished early the previous shift. Even in the heart of the Republic, where people were happiest, there was still the desire to finish early every day. And if early meant not tidying away your tools, well, that was because they weren’t good Guild members, accustomed to good Engineer practice. There wouldn’t have been a Shingle among them.
Tools in this situation were large machines capable of lifting whole floors into place. Devices designed to superheat the raw material substrate of ceramicrete to thousands of degrees, hotter than the sun’s surface, hotter than the core of the star that warmed the world. These machines had their own reactors because simple energy canisters were insufficient for the loads asked of them. Good building practice called for reactors to be buried, cores deep below. At the end of a shift, these reactors were to be shut down. After the building was complete the reactors would be repurposed into auxiliary power for the finished structure. Buried they were, but shut down they weren’t. The reaching fingers of the energy discharge found them. A single stray arc, traveling down conductive metal, ruptured the wall of a reactor. It went into safe shutdown, microseconds passing before the internal reactions were reduced to zero.
Microseconds were a long time in nuclear energy terms.
The street seemed to shrug for a moment, a gentle giant sighing up and down. Ripples of the underground explosion reached out in a circle four blocks in every direction. The ground underneath the city was exposed to an intense blast, the shockwave descending and moving out. Soil, clay, and rock were disrupted; closer to the blast, they were rendered into magma. The lot caved inward, girders and beams and ceramicrete falling into a hole forming at the base, liquefaction of the ground dragging material, machinery, and the smoking remains of the air car into oblivion.
Disaster crews were called by the pursuit team, but by then it was too late for the air car they were following. They’d get nothing from them, the remains of its crew rendered to component atoms.
• • •
“Fuck me,” said Kohl. “If you were trying to impress me, it worked.”
El peeled the rig’s visor off her face, the HUD controls inside — what she’d been using to pilot the air car into the abandoned lot — already silent at the loss of connection from the vehicle. “Kohl, impressing you is not on my list of to-dos for today.”
“Still,” said Kohl, smile still stuck to his face.
“We should leave,” said Hope, taking the rig back from El. It walked around Hope’s small frame like a sloth clinging to a tree, hugging her, encasing her. “Reactors mean radiation. There’s a lot of ceramicrete between it and us, but I could use a little distance too.”
They’d used a quick turn from the air car a street back to ditch, hidden from the eyes of their pursuers. The car’s controls were slaved to Hope’s rig, El piloting it on remote. It’d buy them some time, but they were still aways away from the spaceport. El ran a hand through her hair, wincing as she touched the back of her head where Reiko had hit her. The wound had crusted over, but a sizable egg was forming there, and she still didn’t feel a hundred. Hell, she didn’t even feel at ten. She wanted to be back on the Tyche, the small medical bay looking her over. And then, real flight sticks under her fingers. “We need another ride,” she said.
“On it,” said Kohl.
“Kohl, wait—” started El, but it was like trying to hold back the tide.
The big man was already walking into the street proper, the normal flow of traffic halted as people stopped to look at the spectacle of a falling titan. Passengers were out of their vehicles, eyes wide, mouths agape. Kohl fixed himself on a nondescript cargo van, charted a course towards the driver, gave the man a quick smile and an, “Excuse me,” and pushed the man out of the way.
“Hey!” said the driver, surprise turning to anger.
“How do you think this will go?” said Kohl.
“Uh,” said the driver, anger turning to uncertainty touched with a shade of fear.
“Good call,” said Kohl. He turned back to El and Hope. “Get in. This time, I’m driving.”
“Two dimensions you can cope with,” said El. She hurried towards the van, pulling Hope behind her, because Hope was still unfocused, on account of having just lost her wife. “Let’s get to the Tyche.”
• • •
The Tyche was right where they’d left her, drives cool and dark, the hull huddled against the earth like a wounded falcon. El winced at the sight, but it had been her who’d shut the ship down. A few systems were back online, a hiss of escaping steam from underneath the Tyche evidence of Kohl turning the crank in his attempts to contact them. There was no one about the dock. No sign of hostile life. No Republic soldiers waiting for them. No dock crew lookalikes trying to muscle or hustle them. Just her girl, the Tyche, the smiling, winking face painted on her hull welcoming them home.
Oh, and some thick cables, chaining the Tyche to the dock. I guess you don’t need troops when spun nanowire will tie her down better than Jupiter’s gravity.
“They cut her,” said Hope, pointing at the hole in the cargo bay door.
“Yeah,” said Kohl, “so I cut ’em right back.”
“Can you fix her?” said El to the Engineer.
“Course,” said Hope. She pointed to the cables tethering the Tyche to the deck. “Those will need a little attention too.”
“They’re n
ew,” rumbled Kohl. “Weren’t here last time.”
“Okay,” said El. “Here’s the plan. Hope?”
“I fix the door,” said Hope. “Make it air tight, ship shape. Ready to hold against the hard black.”
“Kohl?”
“Those cables look heavy,” he said. “I’ll find me a cutter and get to work.”
El gave a tight smile. “Great. Get to it.”
“What are you going to do?” said Hope, the arms of her rig already flexing out, eager to be working. To be doing what they were made for — less of the fighting and running and crying and hurting, and more of the making-things-right.
“Me?” said El. “I thought I might go patch myself up. Get the med bay to give me a once-over. Make sure I’m good to fly.”
“And if you’re not?” said Kohl.
“I’ll get the Tyche to make me a little cocktail,” said El. “Cap needs us. No way I’m sitting this one out.” And she was surprised to find it true. Right there in her heart was a bright ember, a spark she’d never felt before. They’d tried to take her Engineer. They’d tried to ground her ship. Tried to kill them all, and then they’d tried again. They’d fired missiles at her, and someone had knocked her out with a bottle. That spark? It was anger. Not courage, but something harder and stronger.
• • •
The Tyche’s interior was much how she’d left it except for the blood stains, wreckage, and scorching.
El stopped by the med bay, the autodoc looking her over. It complained a lot, told her things about minor concussion and rest that she didn’t have time for, and gave her a couple of pills. She dry-swallowed them, then spent time in her cabin, righting a few things that were wrong. El put belongings back in boxes, looking at the wreckage of her tiny life, and fanned that spark a little brighter. The Republic had done this. To her. She’d paid her taxes, been a good little Helm on a good little starship. Wrong side of the war, but she’d left it all honorably enough, because at the end there’d been less fighting and more surrendering. The Republic had given amnesty for mistakes made. It was all clean. That easy break from an old life gave El this easy job on an easy ship hauling easy things between worlds that weren’t served by Guild Bridges. It was supposed to be the right thing to do. If you do nothing wrong, nothing bad happens to you. Right?
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