The view screen had changed from the pale orange sky of the planet to the darkness of space. He looked at the navigation and sensor displays. They were heading straight for the Pleasant Journey, with maybe fifteen minutes until they arrived.
That wasn’t much time for brilliant inspirations.
• • • • •
Mick sat cross-legged behind the cockpit, holding one of the skulls in her lap. She ought to have left it in its sack with the others, but she’d taken it out, in part as a silent challenge, a defiance toward the heavens. She was determined that looking at it wouldn’t cause another hallucination. More than a hallucination. A walking nightmare. She’d heard of such things but had never experienced one.
More than that, she felt that the skulls might be key to understanding what was going on with the planet—with her. She had to find a way to conquer her problems, or she risked being a liability for Ariston, more than she’d already been.
She knew their two pilots had been gifted time to conspire and perhaps warn their ship when Ariston had been forced to come looking for her. She also knew a battle waited for them. The captain of that salvage ship wouldn’t give her a converter just because he was a nice person.
“Any idea what this chip does?” Mick asked.
Ariston had put all his armor back on, and he stood behind the pilots, his arms folded over his chest as he gazed at the distant ship on the view screen. A bulky rectangle with protrusions, it reminded Mick of a giant Lego.
He turned at her question. “No idea. I don’t think anyone knew about them until recently.”
The pilots glanced back, but if they had ideas, they didn’t share them.
“Presumably, the Wanderer who removed humans from Earth and used them to seed planets around the galaxy would have created the chips and placed them there for good reasons,” Ariston added. “The story goes that he was traveling the gate system of wormholes that his people had created when he found Gaia. While exploring the planet, he fell in love with a human woman there, and they had twenty offspring together. The rest of his kind were leaving this galaxy, traveling to another one, or perhaps another plane of existence altogether, and he chose to follow them after his lover passed away. But he worried that catastrophe could come to Gaia one day, thus risking the lives of his descendants as well as all the other people of the world. He spread his offspring, and enough humans to ensure the species could thrive, across habitable planets all over the system. He wanted them to survive. We know of only two planets, including this one, where humans died off and didn’t make it. It was a virus on the other one, I believe, and a volcano here.”
“But it wasn’t a volcano. Or so my scientists say.” Mick rubbed at the chip, aware of the Lego ship growing larger on the view screen. She worried the mystery wouldn’t be solved in time for the solution to be useful. “When you first mentioned chips, I imagined animals being chipped before being released into the wilds, so they could be tracked, but if this wasn’t done anywhere else…” She waved to the black chip and lifted her eyebrows.
Ariston shook his head. “On none of the other planets. We believe we’ve found all of them or close to all of them.”
“Then maybe it was for their protection.”
He gazed down at the skull. “An interesting idea. Protection from whatever has caused us problems?”
“Why not?” Mick wished she had Dev with her. A doctor would be better, but she would take anyone with a scientific background. “But then something happened, and the chips stopped working. And that’s when everyone died off.”
“I can see some problems with that hypothesis. For one thing, the chips would have to be installed every time a baby was born. Where would the people have gotten them? How would a primitive society have put them in? We can chip people now, of course, but a chip that went into the skull would require a surgery rather than simply implanting something under the skin.”
“Dr. Lee said he got some pictures of ‘interesting’ rituals on the ruins. Maybe they’ll explain things.” Mick understood Ariston’s objections, but was reluctant to give up her ideas.
“Unfortunately, that can’t help us now.” Ariston turned back to the view screen, to the ship looming ahead of them. He touched the man on the shoulder. “Comm them, tell them you’ve captured me and destroyed the other ship, and that you’re ready to board.”
The pilots exchanged looks again, leaving Mick positive they’d already commed with the truth. But the woman complied, tapping a button on the comm, relaying the words, and saying they were on their way in.
Nobody responded, but maybe that wasn’t necessary. She touched a button on the console, and soon after, huge bay doors on the hull started slowly opening.
Mick scraped at the chip on the skull. She didn’t have any tools, but with the armor’s strength enhancements, could she pry it off? If she did, would it be a crime? Would it give Ariston another reason to arrest her? Maybe she could say it fell off.
He wasn’t looking. She tried to get it off without damaging the skull. The gauntlets didn’t have anything quite like fingernails. Maybe she would do better without them on.
Did she have time? The shuttle was maneuvering into position to fly straight into that bay, but it would take a few more minutes to land inside.
Mick removed one gauntlet and unfastened her helmet so she could peer extra close. She scraped at the chip again, trying to get her nail under it. But it was so small and so tightly embedded that she could barely feel an edge.
“There should be a magnifying element built into your faceplate,” Ariston said.
Mick jerked her head up, blushing because he was watching her. She expected him to berate her for messing with a precious artifact from his protected planet, but he merely looked curious.
But his attention didn’t linger on the skull or her. He turned back toward the view screen. Mick’s guts clenched up. The shuttle bay doors were fully open now. Come into our trap, they said.
How large a crew had Ariston said manned the salvage ship? Fifty? Too many for the two of them to take on if they all came down at once and all wore armor. Even a tenth of that many would be too many. When she and Mick had taken over the shuttle, they’d had the element of surprise on their side. That wouldn’t be the case this time.
Not bothering to put her helmet back on and fiddle with the magnifying lens, she bent low, peering at the chip. She needed to pry it out, not scrape it out.
“Anyone have a knife?” she asked.
The pilots, showing no inclination toward helping her, didn’t even look back. Ariston flicked open one of the small compartments in the hip of his armor and tossed her a multitool.
“You’ll need to get your helmet back on in a few seconds,” he murmured, eyeing the expansive shuttle bay they were flying into.
Its sheer size surprised Mick. It was like flying into a football stadium. Then she remembered that this was a salvage vessel. Maybe they pulled numerous smaller ships at a time into this bay so they could tear them apart for the pieces. Or maybe they sometimes sold ships whole.
Two shuttles identical to the one they were in rested on the far side of the bay. Mick didn’t see anyone in armor out there, but they were probably waiting outside of one of the hatches, prepared to storm in as soon as the bay was pressurized.
Abruptly, Ariston turned and jogged past her and into the lav. She almost laughed. Pre-battle pee?
Teia guided the shuttle toward a landing area outlined on the deck with a white rectangle. Mick bent low over the skull, trying to wedge the tip of Ariston’s knife under the chip. She wasn’t sure why she was trying so hard. It wasn’t as if getting it free would do anything or give them some super weapon. One didn’t typically implant super weapons into people’s skulls.
Not that someone wouldn’t try if it were possible. The memory of the boy and the bomb flashed into Mick’s mind again, and she closed her eyes, willing the image away. Focusing on the skull.
A super weapon wasn’t wh
at she needed. She just needed to know she wouldn’t hallucinate while out there, while Ariston was depending on her.
He jogged back out of the lav, coming up behind the pilots as the shuttle settled onto its skids. He pressed something against the man’s neck.
The man swore and tried to lunge to his feet. Ariston stopped him with a hand to the shoulder. Teia spun toward him as the man slumped, his chin drooping to his chest.
“What are you—” she started to say, but he leaned forward with the item. A jet injector.
She jerked an arm up to block him, but he caught it easily and pressed the injector to her neck. She had time to call him some choice swear words—Mick’s ear chip didn’t translate them all—before she, too, slumped forward.
“You have a new plan?” Mick asked, still fiddling with the knife.
“Nothing brilliant, but maybe it’ll confuse them for a moment when their plan doesn’t go exactly as anticipated.”
Ariston left the pilots slumped in their chairs and fished in one of the skull sacks. He withdrew two of them and placed them on the console, facing the seats, the eye hollows seeming to stare in accusation.
“Is this idea inspired by your theatrical background?”
“Perhaps in part,” he said. “Come on. You and I are hiding in the storage area up there. I’m sure they’ll think to search it, but they’ll have a hard time taking us out if we’re behind crates and in a small space, and I’m going to assume they won’t blow up their own shuttle to get to us.”
Mick hadn’t been paying that much attention to the chip as she continued to wiggle the knife under it, and gasped with surprise when it gave way. She lurched down, afraid it would fly off somewhere and she would never find it.
It flew straight up into the air. At first, she thought the leverage from the knife had done that, but then it hovered in front of her eyes. She gaped at it and lifted a hand to… capture it?
It zipped to the side, then toward her. She jerked back, but too late. A sharp pain erupted at her temple. Was it biting her?
She slapped her hand to the spot, as if it were some mosquito she might scare away or kill. But the pain only intensified, and she cried out, rolling to the deck, her fingers pressed to her temple. She scraped at the spot, but there was nothing to scrape away except blood.
Horrified, she realized it had burrowed through her skin and muscle. Into her skull.
Hands gripped her armored shoulders. Ariston crouched in front of her and pulled her upright, enough so he could alternate peering into her eyes and peering at the new hole in the side of her temple. Warm blood trickled down the side of her face.
“That was really stupid, wasn’t it?” Mick whispered.
The pain was subsiding, but not the horror. Utter fear at what had just happened—what she’d done to herself—coursed through her veins.
“Would you prefer I lie to make you feel better or nod in agreement?” Ariston smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes, didn’t replace the concern there.
“We both know how good of a liar you are. Stick with the truth.”
“Then, yes.”
A clang came from somewhere outside the shuttle. That meant the bay had been pressurized. Armored men could walk in at any moment.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t do anything evil.” Ariston handed her helmet to her. “Wanderer technology is generally helpful.”
“Generally? Meaning there are exceptions?”
He gave her a bleak smile, picked up his bolt bow, and nodded to the back of the shuttle.
Feeling wobbly, Mick put on her gauntlet and helmet, grabbed her own bolt bow, and followed him. As she headed into the engine compartment, she glimpsed armed and armored men on the view screen. They walked into the bay and headed straight for the shuttle.
Ariston already had the trapdoor in the ceiling open, and he disappeared through it. Mick pulled herself up after him and closed it. They found positions between crates and across a tight aisle from each other. Ariston turned off his lamp. After hesitating a moment, and giving the forward section where she’d found the skulls a wary look, Mick followed suit.
“Do you have night vision?” he asked softly.
“No.”
“Ah.”
“That means you can make a move on me,” Mick said, “and I wouldn’t see it coming.”
“I prefer women to see me coming. So they can admire my fine manly attributes.”
“It’s hard to admire much when everything is hidden under armor. We’ll have to play some more Kapti later. With stakes involving nudity.”
“I might be amenable to that. Providing we stack the deck so I have a chance at winning.”
A clunk drifted up from below, and Mick swallowed her response. She knelt in her alcove, finding a position where she could lean out and fire. Bolt bows weren’t the most compact weapons, and in the tight space, she found herself wishing for Woodruff’s handgun. She couldn’t even stand up. But maybe they would get lucky, and the salvage crew wouldn’t think to look for them up here.
Doubtful. Even if their armor successfully camouflaged Mick and Ariston from their sensors, this was the enemy’s shuttle. They would know all about the secret cubbies.
More clunks drifted upward, along with muffled voices. Mick couldn’t make out what they were saying. Maybe the crew would be disturbed by the skulls. It would have been more disturbing, she imagined, if the men had found the skulls presiding over dead pilots, but she was glad Ariston wasn’t the kind of person to entertain something like that. Even with enemies.
“The crew is all over the ship,” Ariston murmured, sounding faintly puzzled.
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“I can’t get a good reading on the armored men below, but a lot of the rest of the crew isn’t in armor, and I’m reading knots of them in pockets around the ship, but not in expected places. There’s a trio in the big lav on Deck 3. Others are in their quarters. A group is in the armory. There’s only one person on the bridge, and nobody is in engineering.”
Mick’s own sensors weren’t so precise that she could see where on the ship people were, but she trusted his word. He might be wearing patchwork armor that looked old, but she suspected that was a ruse, and that everything was state-of-the-art.
Shouts drifted up from below, and someone yelled—almost a scream. Mick thought she heard weapons firing, though the bolt bows and similar energy-based weapons didn’t have the noisy report of firearms.
It grew silent, oddly so. Mick resisted the urge to shift her weight lest some creak might sound below.
“How are you feeling?” Ariston asked softly.
“Fine.”
“No difference since you installed that chip?”
“I didn’t install it. It jumped into my head of its own accord.”
“After you pried it out of a skull,” he said wryly, his tone seeming to suggest that one should let resting skulls lie.
“You’re not trying to come up with another crime to convict me of, are you? I was just trying to figure out what—”
“I know. I’d prefer not to convict you of anything. That’s not my job, anyway. I just gather evidence and bring people in to face the courts if they’re known criminals or if the evidence suggests they’ve become criminals.”
Mick didn’t respond. She didn’t want to argue with him about her criminal status. He might think she was trying too hard to sway him. Besides, they had to get her converter before any of it mattered.
“You said there’s nobody in engineering?” she asked.
“Not at the moment.”
“Is that where the converter would be?”
“In one of the adjacent storage areas. They’re large spaces, since Eryx keeps so many of the parts he salvages. Finding a converter could take a while.”
“Still, if nobody comes looking for us, maybe we can sneak out and—”
A soft scrape sounded from the direction of the trapdoor. Light slashed up into the attic space,
and Mick shut her mouth.
She wiggled back farther, ensuring she wouldn’t be visible from the trapdoor. She would let Ariston take the lead and choose the moment of their attack. Her finger rested on the trigger of her bolt bow. She would be ready. She definitely wouldn’t be distracted by some walking nightmare or hallucination.
To her surprise, her mind seemed to agree. Even though they were near the spot where she’d had the waking dream, she didn’t truly believe that it would happen again. She didn’t feel worried about that at all. She was ready for a battle.
Had the chip affected her in some way?
A grunt sounded as a man pulled himself up. Other noises followed, scrapes, thuds, and whispers. Mick massaged the trigger.
“We can hide up here,” someone said.
Mick blinked. What?
It was still dim enough that she couldn’t see Ariston’s face or more than a vague, shadowy shape between the crates across from her.
“They could be up here too,” someone else said.
Mick’s curiosity got the best of her. She peeked and peered down the aisle.
Three armored men crouched around the open trapdoor. Light shining up from below gleamed against their faceplates and the dark metal frames of their bolt bows.
Should she fire? While they weren’t paying attention? Or wait and hope they left her hiding spot without ever noticing her and Ariston?
Ariston must have also been curious, because he also leaned out, just enough to peek down the aisle. None of the three men seemed to notice them.
Abruptly, one whirled toward them and fired.
Mick lurched back into her alcove as orange en-bolts streaked past, slamming into the front of the compartment. She hadn’t moved, and she was sure Ariston hadn’t moved, so what had made that man fire? Had his sensors detected them?
“They’re back there!”
“They’re all around us!”
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