by K. Gorman
Still a long way to go.
Stations did not come small. Even the automated ones, which grew fewer and fewer every year as pirates picked them clean on the outer banks, held the capacity to house and support ten thousand in a crisis. Part Alliance protocol, part efficiency—if one was going to build a station in space, it might as well be noticeable.
Soo-jin peeked out of a doorway several levels down, paused, then stepped through.
Space opened up before them—via one of Caishen’s viewing platforms.
Not an impressive display, all told. Without a planet close by, space was little more than a speckled field of black, and the platform’s interior lights, not in viewing mode, turned the thick windows an almost sheer black. Only Aschere, the closest star, made a begrudging, haloed dot to the side. Lokabrenna, the second closest star, twinned to Aschere’s orbit, would be just out of view.
“Camera. Let’s go.” Soo-jin turned right and stalked up the hall.
Like much of the station, it had a worn-out look to it. The floor dipped in a couple of places, and black smudges, as if someone had moved furniture by grinding it against the sides of the room, marked the base of the wall. On several of the windows, a kind of dirt and scratch combo frosted up from the corners on the inside of the double panes. The air had a stale smell.
As they reached the halfway point, the door on the opposite end of the room behind them hissed open. They whirled, meeting the gaze of two station security guards.
Everyone froze. The guards seemed to hesitate, as if surprised to see them.
“Go!” Soo-jin hissed.
Karin yelped and wobbled as she put a step wrong, and Soo-jin hauled her forward. With her shoes slapping hard against the floor, the door bounced back and forth as she sprinted for it, pushing speed into her stiff, leaden legs.
“Hey! Stop!” A blaster cracked.
She flinched. The bolt smashed against the ceiling above them, close enough she heard it crack into the metal. Hot sparks burned down on her head and shoulders. The second one screamed past her side and slammed into the wall next to the door. The floor beneath them rang with the sound of boots pounding down. Another blaster bolt cut into the floor by her feet, and she jumped.
Child, I thought they want us alive.
Soo-jin slammed into the door control. It flashed green, and they piled into it as it opened, squeezing through the gap. Karin lurched into the next room, then spun, lunging for the other control on.
A warning tone sounded. The door paused. Through the gap, the two men raced for them. Sparks flew as another blaster bolt hit frame. The smell of hot metal rose in the air.
Soo-jin shoved the door along its track. Another warning tone beeped, but it began to move. Karin sprang to help, sliding the metal along. Muscles ached on her ribs as she put her weight into it.
The two men slammed into the other side. Before it closed completely, one man got his forearm through the gap, grabbing around for them.
As one, they slammed the door into his arm.
“Shit!” Soo-jin jumped forward, trying to stuff his arm back through and wedge the rest of the door closed.
The panel beeped another warning at them, and a whine of machinery sounded in the wall. Karin gritted her teeth and pushed her weight as it tried to slide back, holding it in place. On the other side, grunts and swears came through the gap as, she assumed, the men attempted something similar. Fortunately, one must have had a bad angle with his arm stuck in the door, because she managed to hold it from closing.
Soo-jin grabbed the crowbar and wedged it in between the lip of the door and its frame. “Here, use this.”
As Karin adjusted her angle to include the bar, Soo-jin stepped out. Taking the blaster out of her pocket, she paused, considering the arm in front of her.
Karin’s eyes widened. “You’re not going to—”
“Fuck me, yes, I am.” She clicked the safety off, pressed it against the meaty part of his arm, where it met the door, and raised her voice. “Hey, buddy, remove your arm before I fucking shoot it.”
“Fuck you, bitch.” The muscles in his forearm tightened, as if he were trying to pull past the wedge they’d made with the crowbar.
Karin leaned into it, keeping the ends steady. His hand felt around in the air, trying to grasp something—but, at that angle, he had miles to go before either of them came in range.
Soo-jin’s lips pursed, watching. Then she pulled the blaster away and took aim.
Karin flinched at the crack.
The man screamed. Sparks exploded in front of them. Raw pain ripped from his throat. When the sparks and light died, the man’s skin had turned black. Blood oozed from the open wound.
Soo-jin folded his fingers into a fist, then shoved it all back through the door. He screamed again as it bumped over the threshold.
Then it was gone. The door hissed shut.
Karin caught the crowbar as it dropped. A second later, Soo-jin had shot the control panel.
“Fuck me,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
They left the windows and moved back into the more familiar metal stairways and crooked plastic hallways as they worked their way through the station. A medium-sized station by system standards, Caishen had enough room for forty ships to dock and 50,000 people to live and work, with a concierge area, vast halls for independent vendors, and auto-shops that populated the lower levels like traffic cones, offering anything from fuel rods to food packets, clothes, medical, and games downloads.
It had never seen that population.
Built when conditions between Fallon and the Alliance had had more amiability, Caishen was supposed to have been installed as a waypoint between Belenus and Tala, the next planet over—but Tala was Fallon’s premiere planet, and the Alliance-driven station project hadn’t sat well with the Fallon elite.
They built their own station, and Caishen moved elsewhere.
It would have been rejected anyway. Even if it weren’t for the politics, Laksmi, the current station between Belenus and Tala, had well over double Caishen’s capacity, and, in Karin’s experience, had still seemed overrun. 50,000 capacity might be a lot for the space between Enlil and Amosi, but the only people who made the trip out were miners, scroungers, settlers, and the occasional vacation types for when their orbits matched up.
Nowhere close to Laksmi’s traffic.
Hopper’s crew of three thousand were more than enough to run Caishen, even if it did prove more difficult to find runaways in the station’s relatively vast walls and corridors.
They kept to the back routes, and they didn’t speak. Only moved. They found another small hallway, along with a panel that Soo-jin’s engineer brain recognized, and slid behind it into a narrow service corridor.
The second they moved out of the public eye, the station’s age became obvious. Although the outer halls must have been remodeled in the last ten years, they had not bothered with the inside. The humidity in the air doubled, along with an increasing stale smell, and a whole new slew of odors that slipped in from all places. The coppery tint of rust rose from most of the paneling, painting the sheet metal that lined the corridors in a seemingly-harmless brown shade, like tanning under the sun, but Karin knew enough about spaceflight to tense at the sight.
Good thing Caishen didn’t need to break atmo. Or fly anywhere. Or do anything more strenuous than float—but still. Terrible upkeep.
It said something about her mood that Soo-jin, the resident engineer, gave the plates nothing more than a passing glance.
Karin pushed back a sudden image of the man’s arm, blackened and burned.
A few side-paths opened up, but they led to engineering panels and walkways, and neither of them had any inclination to get stuck in those. The floor changed to concrete under her feet—another sign of the station’s age. As they came to a stairwell, they leaned to peer over its railing.
Finally, Soo-jin spoke. “So, what all can you do with light? Throw it in places, heal people,
steal it from other sources?”
“That about sums it up. Still haven’t tried that camo stuff you wanted last time.”
“We’ll work on that later.”
“When I take the light from other places, it seems to replenish me.” She flexed her hand. Even though she’d reabsorbed quite a bit of light since her mass healing session, her body still felt strained and tired. Like it was on the edge of getting sick, with odd aches and pains sitting in her joints.
Of course, that could be from running around and throwing herself to the floor several times in increasing ungainly fashions. Whatever the compound labs had worked into her DNA, they must have saved all the athleticism for Nomiki.
“You do look better,” Soo-jin said. “You think you could create darkness, then?”
“Only as it pertains to an absence of light.” She glanced up, studying Soo-jin’s expression. “The Shadows—that kind of darkness is something I cannot do. And, apart from our stints at Songbird and Arcin-17, I have not done any of this for years.”
“Okay, but if we run into anyone else, let’s see if we can mess up their game a bit.”
“All right, but I—”
A clunk sounded through the corridor behind them, the sound instantly cutting her off. They both froze and looked back.
Nothing.
Soo-jin tapped her shoulder and pointed down. Easing herself against the railing, they then descended as silently as they could, attention upward, locked on the hall. No more sounds came from above, but all the hairs had risen on the back of her arms. Heart hammering, she forced her breath to be shallow and quiet.
They didn’t speak again until they had backed out of a door three levels down and put another hallway between them and whatever had made the noise.
“Fuck me,” Soo-jin said again.
It took another ten minutes to find the docks, navigating by the netlink they’d found in the office earlier—the guard’s netlink from outside their cabin had been fried.
Soo-jin led. Ducking down one of the tight, narrow access paths they’d been avoiding earlier, the fit so narrow both her shoulders could brush the sides, Karin kept a hand on the woman’s shoulder as it grew dimmer. The light from her hand gleamed on the metal surfaces centimeters from her face, spots of rust speckling the view like corroded bits of shadow. The netlink cast a glow in Soo-jin’s hand. It outlined her tense features and reflected in her dark eyes. Pipes and wires dropped and hung over their heads, and they had to duck to get through where one set of tethers had broken and turned the overhead into a thick, insulated net.
Soo-jin flicked the netlink off as they reached the end. Karin’s light, more faded than the screen, cast a dim illumination over the hall, just enough for them to see. Two lines of light, broken by the roughness and dirt on the metal access panel, outlined their exit. As they crept closer, she dimmed the glow.
They both held their breaths, straining to listen.
Nothing. By their map, they stood perpendicular to where the Ozark had berthed. There should have been something—footsteps, conversation, the rustle of clothes, anything.
Maybe everyone’s inside because of the balls.
But, even as she thought it, trepidation swirled around her gut.
As Soo-jin glanced back, Karin saw the same emotions reflected in her expression. Soo-jin tilted her head to the door and lifted her eyebrows in a silent question. Karin nodded.
The access panel creaked, the thin metal catching on the top of the frame as it opened, but Soo-jin gave it a shove.
Blinking at the sudden brightness in the hall, they both took a step out, ready to dart back in and run.
Instead, they stopped dead.
Soo-jin sucked in a breath. “Saints.”
More than twenty people lay all across the wide berthing corridor. None of them were moving.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Sol and Clio.” Soo-jin blew out a sharp, shallow breath. It sounded like a breathless laugh, but without the humor. By the way her mouth moved, and the expression in her eyes, she looked like she wanted to say more, but the sight must have stopped her.
Jaws tense, Karin could only agree.
She recognized some of them, both from Caishen and the Ozark, picking out faces where she could. Blood smeared the closest one, but she suspected the oozing cut on his temple had little to do with his current state. A burned smell rose in the air, some of it reminiscent of the hot-metal burns of blaster bolts which matched the smattering of scorch marks on the walls, but the underlying tone of microwaved plastic told her all she needed to know.
“The balls were here,” she said. “I think they’re following me. Not just random.”
That’s how it looked, anyway—she’d walked through the berthing corridor and up into the station, and the balls had found both the cabin and the place she’d been healing Lost—but Soo-jin was shaking her head.
“Not necessarily. You weren’t here for that long. Our shuttle used the dock up there.” Soo-jin pointed up the hall. “We have no idea how many there are.”
“They’re distractable, though. They could be tracking me.”
“They could be,” Soo-jin agreed. “But don’t rule out multiple attacks. If they weren’t on station before, they probably came on through this deck. Lots of ships docked now. Could have been any one of them.”
Up ahead, the berthing corridor curved around, hugging the space station. To the left was only solid wall, with several more access panels cut into it at the bottom, but the right was all berths.
She’d seen the list before. More than eleven ships currently docked at Caishen.
If she got to another terminal, she’d look up who, exactly, they were dealing with.
As Soo-jin knelt next to the closest person and put two fingers against the side of his throat, her expression stern, Karin felt a rumble of her earlier iciness flow through her. Images surfaced to her mind. She felt the memory of the guard’s clammy skin from earlier, the erratic pulse of his heart. She watched Soo-jin, waiting.
“Alive, but not in great health.” Soo-jin straightened, glancing over the rest. “I assume they’re all the same.”
“Hopefully.” Karin frowned, re-assessing the positions of the fallen people. “Hey—does it look like they were running to you?”
Soo-jin’s eyes narrowed once again. The people had fallen largely in one direction, and Karin didn’t try to think too hard about the body language of their fall—clearly, they’d been in pain.
But most of the group were on this side of the corridor. Toward the other side, where the path curved away toward the other docks, only a few people had fallen.
It looked darker down there, too. As if someone had turned off the lights.
Karin swallowed hard.
“Where’s the Ozark?” Soo-jin asked in a low voice, not taking her gaze off the end of the hall. “Close?”
“Right next to us,” she said.
“Good. Let’s find it quickly. And hope someone is friendly to us.”
“Even though they were responsible for our betrayal?”
“We’re kind of running out of options here. And I don’t have anyone’s comms codes on this.” Soo-jin held up the purloined netlink in her hand. “Besides, Charise is right here, along with the rest of her cronies.”
Karin followed the direction of Soo-jin’s nod. A low, heavy sensation dragged at her chest as she found Charise slumped on the floor by the opposite wall, her face half-turned down into the floor.
She swallowed again. She didn’t hate the woman for what she’d done, and she never would have wished this on her.
On some silent cue, she and Soo-jin exchanged a look. Then they made for the closest berthing hall. A look through the narrow window on its side gave her a view of the Ozark’s vast, familiar side, the angles and planes of its construction visible in the station’s outboard security lights.
As they entered the hallway, a faint hiss came from somewhere behind them.
The
y froze.
A door.
A second hiss sounded a few seconds later as it closed again, the sound distant and small.
“Shit.” Soo-jin pulled her back.
They didn’t hear footsteps, but all the hairs on Karin’s arm had lifted. Creeping toward the Ozark’s hatch, they’d almost reached the comms terminal when someone screamed.
“No! No, please, not again! I—”
The words turned into a strangled yell. Light flashed across the hallway, skittering electric blue, and the scream cut off.
And after, silence.
Soo-jin activated the comms panel without a word, planting her face right in front of the camera, and Karin turned her attention back toward the main hallway. She slid the crowbar out from the crook of Soo-jin’s elbow and gripped its end tight like a gravball bat. The comms tone droned behind her, making her muscle tense as it continued on and on, the seconds ticking by. All her focus lay on the end of the hall. She crept toward the corner, hoping to hear something.
A metal ball floated into sight, less than three meters away.
She snatched herself back into cover.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
With a deep pull that gnawed at the bottom of her stomach, she wrested her light back into the air. Shrinking back from the corner, she threw it down the hall, using the metal on the opposite wall to help guide her. It rushed against it, bright white, moving under her command without a whisper of sound. She formed it into a quick human shape and crept back, clutching a shard of white in her hand to help establish the link.
The ball paused as it came back into view. Several blast strikes blackened its surface, turning its metal into a splash of soot. Two shots had even dented it, and a patch of white discoloration marked where someone had hit it dead on.
It pivoted away from her. With its back turned at an angle to her, she caught sight of the light in its back pulsing.
She let out a breath as it moved again—toward the end of the hall. Electricity crackled on its front, but it wasn’t meant for her.