by Tammy Salyer
“Just going through the works, making sure things are all good to go. I don’t exactly trust Thompson, so I thought a systems check wouldn’t hurt.” He runs a finger along the com console control bar to shut it down.
“That’s probably a good idea.”
“What’s up? Have we heard back from anyone?”
“No, not yet.” I pause and take a deep breath, as if I’m about to jump in over my head, then let the words tumble out. “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about, about buying myself a new identity and becoming a citizen, and I want to do it.”
The look of relief that springs to his face is oddly surprising. “I’m really happy to hear you say that, Aly. Really happy. I think it’s the best choice you could possibly make.”
“Yeah. That is, if we live through this.”
“We will. I know we will. This deal with T’Kai is insane, and to be honest, I don’t know what Vitruzzi thinks will happen. I want to help the Beachers, but I mean it when I say that I’m not going to die for this mission.” The laugh lines that groove the edges of his mouth pull down sternly, stretching his lips to thin, bloodless stripes. I’m not sure how to respond. If T’Kai comes after us, dying is the best thing that could happen. Rob must know that.
“Hey,” David says, leaning into the fuselage door, out of breath. “We just got word back from Brady. Come on.”
We can’t get back to the com room fast enough. It’s been less than an hour since Vitruzzi sent the transmission to the Sphynx. For them to be able to respond so quickly means they must be close, probably in the same quadrant, and able to make use of the higher density of uncontrolled citizen satellites. Nearly shaking with impatience, Vitruzzi waits for everyone to settle, then plays the message.
Patrick is seated at the console in the Sphynx’s communication room. He looks tired and worn, with dark circles embedded in the skin under his eyes, but he’s smiling. “Your message just came in, and I can’t tell you how happy we all are to hear that you’re safe. Everyone here is fine. Here’s the rundown on what’s been going on.
“When we left R’Kadia, we set a direct course to KL with bypasses around Corps security substations between here and there. It worked; we haven’t been in contact with any of their ships so far, and we arrived in KL orbit three days ago. There’s no security outside of the moon’s atmosphere, so we went down for a better look. The only patrols we’ve seen are done by remote sentries, all below atmo, and only around the penal colony. They don’t seem concerned about anyone showing up here, and Venus has been able to maneuver around all of the drones.
“We were able to do a planet-wide sweep. It’s mostly water with five land masses big enough to support a colony or more. The prison island was covered by fog and low clouds when we were in range, so we couldn’t get a good look at anything. The climate sensors picked up some weak signs of civilization, but there aren’t a lot of people there, that’s for sure. The other islands were completely devoid of infrastructure.
“There’s an Admin structure, some kind of oceanic command station, with a good-sized landing platform about six klicks from the prisoner’s island. From what we saw, it’s the only place a ship as big as the Sphynx will be able to set down, at least to get access to the prison compound. From what we could pick up from the scanners, the island is just a jungle, either tree-covered or marshy, with no clearings. If it’s anything like the other islands we flew over, it’ll be a nightmare trying to get in there. Rajcik says it’s all changed from when he was a prisoner here, says the place use to be mostly tundra with no forest or jungle, but Venus assures us the scanners are right. So, the Admin platform is the chokepoint. I’ll send you the digitals we took after this message so you can see for yourself.
“Nothing we saw could help us confirm the Beachers’ status, or if they’re even there, but it started getting too risky to stay in KL’s airspace. More Corps ships arrived yesterday, flying live patrols over the penal colony. I don’t know if there’s something going on down there, but we boogied. It’s gotten too busy up here for our taste. We’re en route to your quadrant now and will wait for word from you there. I don’t know what, but we’re going to have to come up with a diversion if we’re going to get access to that landing platform. We’re putting our heads together on it, you do the same. And don’t wait long to send word.” Brady reaches out toward the screen and gently touches it. “I love you, Eleanor. Sphynx out.”
The barometer of collective anticipation and anxiety drops for everyone in the room. I draw my first almost-relaxed breath in days, yet we’re all still feeling strung out on fear, worry, grief, and fury, the mixture creating a volatile explosive that could ignite at any trigger. Looking around at their faces, I realize the haggardness I saw in Brady’s is no different than the rest of us. Rob’s the only one who’s still cool thanks to the emotional distance he has from the stakes—no one else has that luxury. Quantum and Hirota are the freshest of all of us, still vying for an angle that will bring them out on top. Even so, Quantum has basically claimed that their ultimate goal is something akin to a sparking civil war, and nobody can look forward to something like that without feeling the weight of future destruction trampling them down into their own version of hell.
“T’Kai has under three hours left to reply. Eleanor, we need to make ready to rendezvous with the Sphynx if he doesn’t. I don’t like saying it, but this mission could end right here.” Rob’s voice is calm, and though no one else likes what he’s saying either, we’ve all been thinking it.
“You seem in a hurry to give up,” Quantum replies.
Animosity between the two men sparks like flint and stone. Rob’s jaw tightens for a minute as he tries to bite back his words, but it doesn’t work. “What do you think is going to happen here? All of you? T’Kai’s just going to bend over and take this? He’s already shown you how far he’ll go to shut up anyone who crosses him. He was willing to blow up an entire goddamn space station. And he’s well-enough protected that he got away with it.”
Quantum looks him over, derision turning his features stony. Thompson stiffens beside me, and I glance down to see that he’s drawn his sidearm, letting it dangle by his thigh. Alarm floods my nerves.
Thompson says, “Quantum’s right, Cross. You’re pretty eager to give up, and you seem to know a lot about T’Kai.”
Rob’s seen enough combat to know when things are verging on the edge of chaos, and his face stretches into a sneer as he responds, “Any moron can tell you exactly the same thing I just did.” He looks around at the rest of us. “And if you’re implying what I think you are, let me ask this: Can someone tell me what the hell he’s doing here anyway? If memory serves, he and his boss already made a deal with T’Kai once. If anyone should know what kind of man T’Kai is, Thompson, it’s you.”
“Fuck you—” Thompson begins to rise from his seat, bringing his pistol up, but stops with a jerk when he feels the barrel of my Sinbad pressed into his rib cage.
“I think everyone should calm down,” I say.
Vitruzzi’s face has gone the color of a corpse, but she’s not looking at us, her eyes are on the com console, fixed on a green indicator that blinks languidly. A transmission is coming in, and it’s live.
“Quantum.” Her voice is hushed, almost reverent. She wants something to go down with T’Kai, and realizing that makes my arms dimple with goose bumps.
The wire-rat moves toward a selector on the console to play the transmission, but Vitruzzi stops him. “No, open up a video link. I want to see him.”
He sets it up and Vitruzzi, still standing, stares into the transmitter’s feed and clicks it on. The com monitor is almost as long as my torso and mounted on the wall. T’Kai’s face fills the oversized screen.
TWENTY-NINE
“Ah, Dr. Vitruzzi. A pleasure.” The image is much better resolution than Rajcik’s makeshift recording, and my attention is instantly captured by the man’s eyes—one a limpid brown and the other an unsettling, almost c
ataract blue. He’s sitting cross-legged behind a table made of unusual wood that glints with an oily burnish. The room he’s in is devoid of any furnishings except a giant warrior mask taking up most of the wall behind him. His business-class suit and the carpet are both a crisp and impeccable white. “We’ve been keeping an eye on you for a long time. No, don’t look so surprised—a mind as talented as yours is not an easy loss for the Administration. There was that…unfortunate situation with your family, so we of course understood your decision to leave the Medical Directorate. But don’t think that your whereabouts and your activities have gone unnoticed.” He smiles a perfect smile, his teeth even and as white as his flawless suit. He speaks to her as if they’ve known each other for years, maybe shared formal meals at posh restaurants or drank cognac together in a mutual friend’s living room. “We did hope you would find your way back to the Administration, but we never expected it to be in this manner.”
Vitruzzi stands motionlessly, her face still drained of blood. She opens her mouth to say something, but T’Kai cuts her off. “No, no need to respond. We are quite aware of the accouterments of the lifestyle you and your fellow, ah, villagers have collected. You should know that you have nothing that the Admin would miss overmuch. There are the weapons, of course, but the fact is you could do very little damage with what you’ve managed to appropriate.” He sits rigidly behind the desk, never moving. His hands lie placidly on his knees, and only his gleaming eyes and his mouth give any indication he’s not some type of robot or statue. “Despite your Protean personality, Eleanor—if I may—your brilliance in your field has remained almost unmatched. We consider the things you’ve stolen to be a small severance for your contributions to the advancement of biomedics and engineering. Your husband was a good scientist, not the greatest, but good. Still, his abilities could never compare to yours. It was a blow when you left us. Unfortunately, it’s now too late to reconsider.”
The rest of us sit at an angle that inhibits T’Kai from seeing us and I’m oddly relieved. There’s something so inhuman and cold in his mismatched eyes that I don’t want them on me. I can’t tell if he’s trying to ingratiate himself with Vitruzzi or piss her off. Men like him are so used to speaking obliquely, you wonder if they even know what they’re trying to express. In any case, it’s clear he’s done his research and his patronizing speech is having an effect on Vitruzzi. I haven’t seen that look on her face since she asked Karl to kill the captain of the MCACS we’d stolen to break into the Fortress. There’s no mercy in that look, no hesitation; it’s as stern and set as a tribal chieftain ordering a sacrifice to the slaughter. If T’Kai were here, I’d recommend he start writing his own obituary.
“You know why we contacted you, T’Kai.”
“On the contrary. You’ve placed demands, ones that are so completely outside the realm of reasonable that, if you were still at your post in the Ministry, I would have no choice but to initiate a formal inquiry into your judgment.”
“But you’re responding, which means you must have found the Bellerophon. And you know we’ve been to the Fortress. You can guess what we brought back with us.”
Like a shape-shifting necromancer, his friendly smile suddenly morphs into the toothy sneer of a barracuda. “Already I tire of your facile and indirect threats. They annoy me. Tell me something interesting before I regret having let my admiration for the work you’ve done expose me to petty extortion. If there’s anything that I find more pathetic than a shining star that’s lost its luster, it’s seeing that same star forget its place in the univer—”
“Shut the fuck up and listen, T’Kai. We have proof of what was happening on the Fortress. We could bring you and the entire Ministry of S&E to its knees if we wanted to.” Vitruzzi matches his ferocity with icy determination and cold, cold words. “But that’s not what we want. My terms were clear in the first transmission you received. Free the Agate Beach settlers, let them return to Spectra 6, and keep the Corps off their backs for good. If you do, Rajcik’s footage of your discussion of the Nova and destroying the Fortress, and the data of the biowarf testing being done on non-citizens andsoldiers will be returned to you. Otherwise, we’ll wavecast it to every human being in the system. Your choice.”
T’Kai’s face has gone the same color as Vitruzzi’s and his words are like short, brutal jabs thrown in a bar fight. “János Rajcik was killed during his terrorist activities that resulted in the destruction of that space station. I have never been in contact with that criminal—”
“Shut up,” she cuts him off again, her patience for bullshit snuffed. She leans forward and places her hands on the com console, her face centimeters from the monitor. If T’Kai were actually here, she’d be in range to kiss him. “Listen to me, T’Kai, I’m not playing games here. You think you know me? Then you know how determined I am. You know that I’m not going to quit just because you flatter or threaten me. This is how it’s going to be. You either do what I ask, set the Beachers free, or I will bring you and every minister in the Cabinet down. Think it over. You have an hour.”
She severs the link and the monitor fades into a dull gray that mixes with the green overhead lights, leaving the room as dim as a subterranean tomb.
David says, “What do you think he’ll do?”
She’s hunched over the console, the ends of her long, curly hair brushing against the controls. She stays there for a minute before answering. “He isn’t going to negotiate. I didn’t think he would, but I had to see him to find out.” She goes silent, not looking at anyone. Finally, she turns around and says, “Quantum, do you have the equipment here to make copies of everything? I’m leaving it with you. The rest of us will rendezvous with the Sphynx to try and free the settlers on our own.”
“Whoa—hold on,” Thompson says. “What are you talking about? You can’t leave the footage here with this wire-rat. The deal was to bring T’Kai down.”
She ignores him, still speaking to Quantum. “You’re our insurance. Give us seven days and then you do whatever you want with that footage. Tell the whole system, I don’t care. We’re done here.”
Thompson jumps up and grabs Vitruzzi by one wrist, towering over her by more than a head, and spins her around to force her to look at him. She’s quicker than he expects and faces him with the barrel of one of her pistols pointing into his teeth. “You don’t call it, Thompson. I call it. You’re here because I made a deal with Rajcik—now that deal involves him.”
Thompson barely breathes, wincing at her like a snake about to strike. Unwilling to carry the confrontation further, she backs away and lowers her weapon. He isn’t stupid. He knows the second his hand goes for his gun he’ll be target practice for the rest of us. Rage makes his jaw clench and his hollow cheeks flush, but he says nothing.
Vitruzzi looks back at Quantum. “You’re prepared to do what you said you’d do?”
He nods.
She looks at Thompson. “Then T’Kai is handled. Now, everyone get out. Take a break. It may be a while before any of us sleep again. I’m calling the Sphynx.”
“V,” I start, but don’t get far.
“I’m not arguing. This is not a negotiation. This is done.” Her eyes blaze with something that isn’t quite anger and isn’t quite fear, and I see how close to the edge she is. Something in T’Kai’s transmission has hit her deep in the soul, like a pry bar wrenching on the lid of a coffin, and it’s hard to say what might be underneath.
* * *
Thompson skulks away into the far corner of the warehouse and throws a crate against the floor, making a lot of harmless noise. Watching him from the corner of my eye, I wait just outside the com room for Vitruzzi and Quantum, who’s stayed with her presumably to copy the footage and data. Hirota sits a few meters away on a crate by himself, and La Mer and David keep me company while Rob heads back toward the hop.
David leans against the wall next to the com room door. “What do you think, little sis? Is she going off the deep end?”
I think ab
out it for a minute before answering. “She’s definitely closer than I’ve ever seen her.”
“Yeah.” He slides down the wall until he’s seated and looks out into the dark warehouse. Outside, it’s daytime, but the walls block any light from shining in, reinforcing the feeling that we’re trapped in a cave. The sound of a distant track vehicle trundling through the area is the only thing breaking the stillness. “You know the chances of us saving the Beachers is just about zero.”
Out of the two of us, David is the optimist. It’s rare for him to lose heart, and seeing it happening now triggers a primeval fear that tremors up my spine like the aftershocks of an earthquake. “Hey, you forget that we’re the same people that destroyed the Admin’s most heavily armed space station. If we can do that, saving a few prisoners from a rock that’s guarded by nothing but drones won’t be hard.”
That gets a grin out of him, but it’s halfhearted. La Mer and I both sit down beside him and I lean back and close my eyes. It’s a futile effort, I know, but there’s nothing else I can do for now. No one is talking, and I hear a soft whisper coming from the walls to our left, probably rats or mice looking for nest-building material. After a few minutes, Quantum and Vitruzzi emerge from the com room.
The three of us are on our feet immediately. She looks at us flatly. “Let’s get going.”
THIRTY
Rob trades off the pilot seat with Thompson and takes a seat next to me on the rear bench. A heavy frown furrows its way down his brow while he stares at the floor distractedly.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“What?”
“You look like something’s wrong.” I raise my voice against the engine noise.
“Oh. It’s probably not a big deal. There’s something wrong with the communication system. I can’t transmit. Maybe just a loose circuit board or something.”
“Who were you trying to transmit to?”