I glance back and Mookie is still standing near the broken window. “Mookie!” I call out.
His hand shifts from his chest to his head, and he pitches forward. I grab him before he falls over the edge and pull him back from the opening.
I cross the room and Mookie drops to the floor. He sits with both hands on his head, rocking slightly.
“What is it?” I ask, but I already know.
“They’re in my head,” he says in a slow, low-pitched drone.
The Legion is coming.
“We need to get moving,” I say; “we need to stick to the plan.”
I help Mookie to his feet and his arm shakes and spasms in my grip as I steer him out of the suite.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We reach the hotel’s hangar just as the Nova’s shuttle comes in to dock, landing gears resting on the ground with a soft thud.
The side hatch opens and Trix emerges, broad frame blocking the doorway, lasrifle in her hands and Ocho perched on her shoulder.
Trix walks down the steps and Mookie breaks away from me, stumbling forward, one hand on his head, the other reaching for Trix. He puts an arm around her as Ocho jumps clear and trots over to me.
“What’s wrong with him?” Trix says, holding Mookie tight.
“It’s started: his mind’s being joined up to the rest of the Legion.”
Ocho trills as she approaches then stands at my feet staring up at me. I get down on my haunches and she maows, rubbing her chin on my knee.
“I know, little one; I’m sorry.” She jumps on my lap and I grab her, hold her to my shoulder, and stand. I scratch the back of her head and she purrs. “I missed you too, jerkface.”
“How do we stop it?” Trix asks. She seems pained, with fine wrinkles gathered around her eyes and her lips drawn down.
“I don’t know, Trix. I don’t know how they communicate, I don’t—I don’t even know if we can.”
They break off the hug, but Mookie stands holding Trix, head resting on her shoulder. He groans loudly then stops.
“You said you’d fix him,” she spits.
“I will,” I say. “But right now we’re wasting time.”
* * *
I let Waren fly, but join him in the shuttle’s cockpit, leaning forward in the seat because Ocho’s asleep in the hood of my cloak.
“Can this thing go any faster?” I ask Waren.
“It’s only a shuttle,” the AI says, voice right inside my head. “Perhaps if you hadn’t crashed my ship, we’d be able to get there sooner.”
“You missed me, I can tell,” I say, teasing.
“I miss my ship,” he says.
“Yeah, well, I’ll find you another one; I promise.”
In daylight, I can see that the spire of light in the center of New Tangier is actually the communications tower atop the Homan Security Command Center. The pylon is snaked with cables and dotted with box antennae, relay dishes, and optic data ports. Waren says it’s the link between the security command center and Homan Sphere: it’s how they ride the envoys and control the powershields; it’s how they torture, beat, kill, or transform the prisoners they hold indefinitely.
Waren is sure I can tear the tower down and sever their connection with the Sphere, but I can’t take the chance that they have backup systems in place.
He says it’s time we can’t afford to waste, but I need to deal with Rathnam personally. I’m going into the command center to rip it apart from the inside.
We dodge through the heavy traffic that careens across the sky as people rush to evacuate, plumes of debris rolling down city streets like waves. Military units converge near the fallen cannons, but if they’re looking for what did this, they aren’t expecting to find it riding shotgun in a nondescript shuttle.
Waren brings us in low, and we land on the eastern side of the Security Center rooftop, next to the comms tower. Sunlight falls through the metal structure in shafts, shadows crisscrossing the roof and wrapping around the shuttle.
“I’m going back to see the others,” I tell Waren, then I unclip myself from the pilot’s seat.
I hit the button beside the cockpit door and Waren says, “Things do tend to be less boring when you’re around.”
I smile. “See? You missed me.”
Trix and Mookie are in the passenger hold, strapped in tight. Mookie is doubled over and Trix rests her hand on his back.
I crouch down in front of him. “Are you alright?”
He makes a sound like a low howl and the hairs on my neck stand up. “So many voices,” he says. “So many . . . people . . . in my head.” He snaps back, sitting straight up, hands going to the buckles of his seat belt. “I need to go. They need me. We need me.”
“Strap him down, Trix, quickly.” I reach for the storage container beneath the seats and toss her a length of polyplastic tether.
She works quickly, restraining his arms by his sides, while I bind his legs together.
“I’m going into the Command Center. Stay here with Mookie,” I tell Trix. “Waren—if things get dicey, take off, but keep close.”
“I’m coming with you,” Trix says, taking her lasrifle from the overhead rack.
“The Legion will be here soon,” I say. “You need to stay and keep Mookie safe.”
“He’s not going anywhere, and I have to kill the bastards that did this to him,” she says.
I know she feels guilty, I know that violence is the only solution she understands—fuck, if anyone gets that, it’s me—but I shake my head. “If we lose him now, we might never get him back.”
I hit the controls to open the shuttle door, and the ramp whines as it extends.
“We should have let you die in that ship,” she says. “If Squid listened to me, we would have.”
Her barb is a sharp pain in my chest; the truth of it hurts the most—they should have left me to die, their lives would be so much easier if they had.
I don’t respond, I can’t.
Trix stands, and before I can tell her again to stay, she says, “I’ll take a defensive position on the roof, stop them getting near him.”
“Fine,” I say, because there’s no arguing with her. We step out onto the rooftop. Surveying the skyline, the city looks still, but emergency service sirens drift in the distance. The noise brings Ocho out of my hood, to perch on my shoulder and take in the scene. She makes a curious-sounding trill and disappears back into the relative safety of my cloak.
“Waren, have you picked up the Legion fleet yet?”
The AI’s voice sounds in my head: “Scanners onboard the Nova have detected a large fleet approaching Seward.”
“They’re coming here, not heading for Homan?”
“Correct.”
“Good. Okay. Make sure Squid knows they don’t have to free every single prisoner, not if it means putting themself at risk.”
“You could open a link to Squid and tell them yourself,” Waren says, “but no, don’t bother; I’m an unnaturally intelligent being, surely I won’t mind acting as a messenger daemon.”
I ignore Waren and focus my attention on the skies overhead. I jack up the zoom on my ocular lens and scan across that expansive blue, cluttered with the distant shapes of MEPHISTO ships. At first they’re just gray shadows, then the vessels disappear behind a burning glow as they hit the atmosphere.
The only ship that doesn’t start to burn is the largest—Hamid’s flagship, waiting in orbit.
The quickest ships—the fighters and corvettes—have already stopped burning, and their contrails dissipate into the air. I raise my hands and grab them one at a time, crushing the craft and dropping each mangled wreck as I reach for the next. I destroy twenty, thirty, more maybe, but still the sky is filled with MEPHISTO vessels.
“Go, Mars! I’ll guard the ship.”
I glance over at Trix. She’s standing by the shuttle, lasrifle aimed at all that approaching doom, plugged into the shuttle’s power for overcharge.
I rake the air with
my thoughts one more time, catching a score of ships so they tumble, plunging out of sight and into buildings. They explode as they hit, distant booms echoing across the city, dopplering off the faces of skyscrapers.
I reach the rooftop access door and glance back at Trix one last time.
I hope you find whatever peace you need from this fight, Trix. Fuck knows it’s going to be a big one.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The building thrums with agitated energy, workers rushing down hallways, in and out of offices seemingly at random. In the commotion no one notices a space witch stalking the halls. Normally this would be a good thing, but I’ve got a whole building to explore and little time to do it.
I snake my thoughts out and grab someone at random. He yells in surprise as I drag him toward me, but he falls silent when we’re face-to-face. He’s a skinny, long-haired admin drone with the MEPHISTO insignia tattooed beneath his left eye.
“Where are the prison staff?”
“They’re on the twelfth floor,” he shrieks.
* * *
I take the stairs, and my calves are burning when I reach the twelfth floor lobby. The Homan staff must all still be working despite the chaos outside, because it’s quiet down here—serene, if you ignore the noise from the omnipresent siren.
A security desk sits abandoned beside a reinforced entry marked with twelve in Roman numerals. I twist the blast door open slowly, metal creaking as I wrench it away, then drop it to the floor as quietly as I can. I walk through, taking in the space before me. I’m on a walkway about ten meters off the floor, overlooking a crowded pit lined with holo-rigs. They’re clumped together in groups of four with thin access corridors between. Dozens of staff are illuminated by the soft green glow coming from their holo-consoles. I can’t see their faces, hidden inside the shiny black rings of the apparatus, but I see their shoulders, watch their hands moving smoothly across the controls.
I’m finally here, in the detached heart of the prison, and it’s so fucking mundane. All the pain of Homan Sphere originates in a dull room filled with the low hum of electronics and the artificial smell of filtered air. On Homan these people are abusers, torturers, and murderers, but down here? They’re just boring fucking assholes, with a job, maybe a family, and either no conscience or a convenient series of lies they tell themselves to get through the day. I didn’t want to think that evil could be so boring, so normal, but here it is, laid out in front of me.
They think just because the prisoners are a couple of hundred kilometers away, their hands are clean. They think just because these people are criminals they can treat them like they’re less than human.
“Silence that alarm.” Rathnam. His voice amplified over the blare of the sirens, just as digitized as I remember.
Hearing him speak, my heart beats faster, and my body must go tense, because Ocho climbs out of my hood and onto my shoulder. Her eyes are wide open, with her pupils in slits sharp as her claws.
Ocho lets out a low growl. “Soon, little face,” I whisper.
I can’t see Rathnam past the mass of cables hanging from the ceiling, so I creep farther along the platform. I get him in sight just as the alarm goes quiet. It keeps wailing in the distance, filling the rest of the building, but in here the only sound is Rathnam’s yelling.
“You will remain at your posts and carry out your assigned tasks. Whatever is happening outside is none of our concern.”
Don’t be so sure, doc.
“But what about our families?” a voice asks.
Rathnam continues ranting at his staff, but I tune it out.
“Think we should kill him?” I ask Ocho.
She lets out a long mraow. I smirk, but my mouth goes flat when she leaps from my shoulder. She clears the walkway’s safety rail then extends her glide membrane.
“What are you—” I hiss, but stop before anyone hears. I move toward the stairs at the far end of the walkway, keeping an eye on Ocho as I go. She glides clean through the air, around the tangle of cables, and lands on the ring of a holo-rig. “Fuck,” I say, under my breath, watching her jump from one rig to the next, tracking the sound of Rathnam’s voice.
I sneak ahead as fast as I can without letting my footfalls clang on the metal platform. I hit the stairs right as I hear Ocho yelling and hissing. I rush down around the tight U of the stairwell to reach the ground floor.
“Whose animal is this?” Rathnam’s voice booms, still amplified. He’s on a raised platform, holding Ocho by the scruff of her neck. She keeps hissing, clawing at the air, trying to add to the bloody scratches she already put across his face. Good girl.
At first, only some of the staff raise their holo-rigs to see what’s happening, but more of them lift the bulky equipment from their heads as a murmur ripples through the clusters: “It’s her.”
“She’s mine,” I say. Rathnam sees me now, and his mouth falls open.
One of the workers gets up from her seat and moves to intercept me as I stalk the aisle toward Rathnam. I toss her aside, high enough that she hits the upper catwalk with a clang and then tumbles to the ground, setting off a chorus of cries from the room.
Rathnam drops Ocho, and she meets me at the base of his platform. As I mount the steps, she climbs up to my shoulder and stands rigid, ready to keep fighting.
“Why are you here?” he asks. “You’ve been freed.”
“Freedom’s a funny thing,” I say. “It’s hard to enjoy when the people who hurt you are still out there.”
He says something, but I can’t understand it through his blubbering. Not so fierce and commanding now, are you, doc?
“Where’s Stockton?”
“I’m here,” a voice responds, defiant. I can’t see his eyes in the shadow of his cap’s visor, but I recognize the set of his jaw, twisted off-center in contemplation or anger.
I reach out and wrap my mind around Stockton’s head; when I clench my fist his skull disappears with a sharp crack. Blood squirts into the air then falls, splashing Stockton’s coworkers. And you thought you could keep the blood off your hands.
There are a few seconds of stunned silence before the screaming starts. Some bolt for the stairs, others stay at their consoles, too shocked or scared to move.
“What are you going to do,” Rathnam says, “kill everyone here?” He says it quietly, but his mic picks it up and relays it to the whole room, amplifying chaos.
Seeing the staff panicked, screaming and crying—evil rendered impotent—I should probably feel sorry for them. But even if most of them never touched me, they’re all someone else’s abuser—someone’s Stockton, someone’s Rathnam.
“You know what? That sounds like a great idea.” I ball my hands as I bring them up beside my head, then make a guttural sound as I punch out. I carve through each row of staff, tearing apart guards and doctors, blood and body parts flung into the air. Lights flicker and equipment sparks, and the curtain of cables hangs loose from the ceiling, disconnected, swaying above the carnage.
Ocho jumps from my shoulder as I turn to face Rathnam—face pale as he surveys the display of gore. “You should have listened, doc: you should have left him out of it.”
Rathnam holds my gaze for a moment, then keels over and vomits on the floor, spattering his expensive-looking brogues with congealed yellowish muck. He collapses, his knees landing in the puddle of sick. “What was I meant to do? He was my prisoner.”
“Prisoners don’t deserve to be treated like people?”
He shakes his head, but he isn’t arguing, he’s giving up.
“I won’t let you die on your knees, doc.”
He sobs when I lift him but stays silent for the rest. I carry him over to the dangling cables and wrap one around his neck. I let him fall, and he chokes as he kicks and struggles, his death throes booming from the speakers hidden in the ceiling.
I sit down at his command console. I find the turret controls and disable the weapons, then send Squid a burst to let them know. Next I find the controls fo
r the powershields and switch all of them off. I hit a panel and bring the ring of the holo-rig down around my head. It takes me a few goes to trigger the mass broadcast, then suddenly my full field of vision splits into hundreds of tiny windows—each one showing a different envoy’s POV.
“Listen up,” I say, watching the images of all the prisoners turn to face the envoys I’m riding. “You’re free to go. Head to the docks, there’s a ship waiting.”
I loop the message then start evacuation procedures, selecting the option to have the envoys remove collars as they shuffle prisoners toward the dock. When I get up from the console, Rathnam has stopped fighting, but his body still sways.
I make a kiss sound and Ocho rushes to me, the fur of her paws soaked in blood.
She runs up my cloak and deposits herself on my shoulder. “You are disgusting,” I say, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She just starts cleaning herself as I head for the exit.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Where the hell are you?” Trix’s yell cuts across my comms. In the background I hear ship engines streaking past and the whine of her lasrifle. “It’s all gone to—”
Trix gets cut off, but I say, “I’m coming,” in case she can still hear me. I try the elevator, and the building must have emptied out while I was busy with Rathnam, because it arrives within a few seconds. I hit the button for the rooftop, and once the elevator doors have closed I open a line to Squid. “How’s the evac going?”
“The quarters and mess hall are packed tight; cargo hold is about half-full. I don’t think they’ll all fit, Mars.”
“Just get as many as you can. How’s Pale?”
“Sedated,” Squid says.
“Good. No telling how he’d respond to all those people. I’m almost back at the shuttle, so we’ll be with you in a few minutes.” The elevator dings and the doors open. “Fuck,” I say.
“Mars, what’s—”
I cut Squid off and step out onto the rooftop. A MEPHISTO personnel frigate sits beside the Nova’s shuttle, with a line of thirty Legionnaires standing before both ships. The air overhead buzzes with countless craft.
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