by K. Gorman
She froze as his face came into view.
Commander Baik.
Up close, he was immaculate in his Alliance High Command whites, with a frame and body that belonged solidly in the upper discs of Nova’s capital cities—people who had both the money and time for casual genetic and bodily enhancement. His face wouldn’t have looked out of place in the city’s higher-rated soap opera feeds.
He was also, as it happened, a Novan prince. Except he’d chosen a military career, and the Novan monarchy had been out of official power for more than two hundred years.
He was the one responsible for her imprisonment after she and Marc had been teleported to Nova Earth. The one who had been a royal pain in her ass for the past few weeks.
Her lip curled. Definitely not the person she wanted to run into.
He hadn’t noticed her yet—hardly anyone had. It wasn’t like she was waving her light talents around and shouting ‘look at me!’—and she didn’t want him to. She was barely over her treatment hangover, and most definitely didn’t want to be noticed, talked to, or otherwise engaged. Unless that engagement came from a friendly pilot who was showing her the ropes of the Manila’s super awesome navigation dashboards. She was mostly over her imprisonment with Baik, and he had been nice about it. As far as prison guards went, he had been more accommodating to her than most—Sol’s child, how the hell had she managed to be imprisoned enough times that she could compare?—and had even been outright nice to her over the past two days of freedom.
Plus, Nomiki had skewered him with a very long knife. In full view of Karin.
That didn’t erase the panic and anxiety of her prison memories, but it did help replace the image of him as her captor. And she bet her sister would do it again, if she asked.
She began to backtrack—comically, literally taking several steps backward.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to go far.
“It’s quite the sight, isn’t it?” asked a familiar voice.
Sergeant Tian Adan Reeve was a friendly face. Although she jumped in surprise at his voice, since her entire focus had been on Baik, she realized that she’d seen him coming in her peripheral vision. Like usual, he was dressed from head to toe in the imperial blue and gray of the Empire’s colors, his combat boots, belt, and the hard brim of his hat all gleaming in the subdued underlighting of this part of the bridge. He’d trimmed his beard since she’d last seen him—it had been getting scruffy over the past few days—and it shadowed the edge of his jaw well. The rest of his hair poked out from under his cap in a way that suggested that he’d tried and failed to tame it.
From what she gathered, he might be allowed a bit of scruff. He had just been undercover with Nomiki in the mission to extract Karin for the past few weeks, and she suspected he’d really only had time to rest during the time they’d been on board.
So, twelve hours, give or take a few.
“Is this your first time seeing it?” she asked.
“Yes. Never really been down this way.” He smiled. “I suppose I have you to thank for that.”
“Or the Shadows, anyway,” she agreed. “Though, by how everything is playing out, I suspect we would have ended up going to Earth sooner or later. Even if we didn’t know about the Cradle, the ruins are there. And the lab.”
“Yes.” He stopped when he reached her side, folding his hands behind him and facing the window. The light from the gate, and the screens below, hit his face, reflecting in his eyes. If she relaxed, she could feel the energy of its surface pulse. As if, somehow, some part of her had connected into that.
Unbidden, that second set of energy, the one that seemed to underlay her powers, slid into her senses.
Shit. No, let’s not have that happen right now.
She shoved it back with a clench of her hand and forced herself to look away from the gate’s silvery surface, instead focusing on Reeve’s face.
“So, what’s Baik doing here?”
“Liaising.” Reeve’s eyes narrowed, and his nose wrinkled up slightly. “Alliance figured he was the best person for it since he knew you so well. Plus, he had the right military and political credentials for the job.”
Right. He was, technically, both part of High Command and part of the literal Novan royalty.
Damnit.
She blew out a breath. “I’m surprised Fallon let them, considering…”
“Considering they abducted you? Yeah, me, too. But there was talk about sharing transporter technology, and Fallon’s wanting to play nice.”
“So, here he is.”
“Yes, here he is.”
“Does Nomiki know?”
“Yes. And she’s already threatened him with a second kebabbing.”
Karin’s lips parted in a smile. “I approve. So, what’s the deal here? We go through the gate and head to Earth? I assume we’ve been talking to Earth?”
“Ah. Well, there’s a problem.” Reeve cleared his throat, rocking back on his heels. “Earth’s not really answering our Gate calls. At all.”
“What? Have they blown themselves up already?” When she’d left, Earth had already been through a world-wide nuclear war, but the damage had been contained largely to Brazil, China, and the southern half of the United States, and the entire situation had been cold for at least twenty years. Had they finally finished the job? Or…
A sourness hit her gut as a new thought came to her.
Had the Shadows attacked Earth, too?
Once Dr. Sasha’s involvement had come to light, she’d assumed that the Shadow attack had been contained to the Sirius system—since that’s where Dr. Sasha kept herself—but she had no means of knowing if it were true or not.
“Yeah, we don’t know,” Reeve continued. “They were answering up until a few months ago, but there’s been nothing since.”
Great. Right around the time of the Shadow attacks. It was becoming more and more likely that the attacks weren’t as system-localized as she’d thought. “What about Alpha Centauri? Any word from them?”
“Without a direct gate linking us, they’d have to go through the Sol system communication lines.”
“So, Earth, basically.” Mars, despite being a decently-sized colony, was too far from the gate to have any hand in its comms lines. “Which means that they could be alive and kicking, but unable to get a call through.”
“Yep. We’re going to send a drone through, test the other side.”
“Cool. Can we send Baik on it?”
“Now, now.” Reeve chided her, but his mouth turned up at the corners. “I expect you’ll be able to avoid him for the time to come. He should be up here, anyway. Liaising.”
“What does ‘liaising’ even entail? Sounds like a bullshit job to me.”
“From what I’ve seen, it involves arguing with Generals Ramesh and Guerriera and getting hit by some choice words in return. He has absolutely no power here, and zero say in what goes on.”
On the tail end of his words, General Ramesh stepped up to the front of the command square, a frown on his face as he surveyed the desks below. A beep notification sounded on the one just below herself and Reeve. When the tech, a young woman with dark hair pulled into a long ponytail down her back, looked up, waiting for an order, Ramesh nodded once.
The tech input a command, and a new screen popped out, tracking something. Several seconds later, a small, car-sized ship zoomed past the front window, heading straight for the gate.
“That’ll be the drone,” Reeve murmured. “It’s just a basic one, to check what things are like on the other side.”
It flew toward the gate like a ball, lost itself briefly on the backdrop of gray metal that made the gate siding, and re-emerged as a darker color against the glowing surface. The gate flashed, and a communication query appeared on the technician’s screen. At another nod, the technician sent the command sequence.
Karin’s grip tightened on the railing as the gate’s surface began to fluctuate. That slivery feeling in her stomach returned,
crawling up through her gut like wet seaweed.
She forced it down.
She only had one memory of gate travel, and it hadn’t been pleasant. Wormholes were, in her opinion, pushing beyond the limits of what a human body could endure.
Of course, if they could find out how Tylanus’ and Dr. Sasha’s powers worked, then maybe they could improve on that experience.
With a point bending inward at its middle, the gate’s surface shone blank for a second, like a fisheye lens on a stretched window. The small ball of the drone, looking like less than a pinprick in comparison to the gate, which had been built to move ships as large as the Manila, reflected in its surface.
The gate rippled, light fluttering. Feedback from its stabilizers spiked.
The entire bridge held its collective breath.
Then, they were through.
With a sigh that only she might have heard, General Ramesh turned away from the front of the command square and walked back to his main desk.
“Now we wait?” she guessed.
“Now we wait.” Reeve glanced at the netband on his wrist. “Roughly a two-minute delay for messages. Not quite enough for coffee, but…” he trailed off, his gaze slipping up from her to just past her shoulder. “Ah. Hello, Commander.”
Karin didn’t stiffen, but she did grit her teeth together. She hadn’t turned to see who it was, but by the flatness of Reeve’s tone and the false cheer on his face, she could guess.
Baik.
She turned to find him only a few paces away, striding in their direction. In her direction, more like, since she doubted he gave a shit who Reeve was.
“Karin Makos, we meet again.”
“Yes, it seems I just can’t be rid of you.”
He’d offered a hand out for her to shake, but she gave it a pointed look and folded her own arms across her chest. Unlike Reeve, she wasn’t a member of the military. She didn’t have to be polite.
And, in the next few seconds, she was even less alone.
“I thought I told you to stay away from my sister.” Nomiki’s words cut across the space like a whip crack.
Baik didn’t flinch, but Karin thought she saw him stiffen. And, when she looked around, her eyebrows rose.
Like her, Nomiki had changed clothes. Unlike her, Nomiki had opted for what looked like a full, custom-built battle-suit. Tough, heat-immune klemptas fiber, developed by the Fallon military’s civilian contractors, covered her arms, chest, abdomen, and legs, hard and form-fitting, with top-of-the-line flexible joints, seams, and indicator lights—all of which Karin suspected Nomiki could turn off if she wanted to—that made her think that at least part of the suit had enhanced hydraulics and more-than-advanced environmental controls. An empty blaster holster hung from her thigh. Farther along, she’d managed to strap her knife sheaths to her leg in such a way that they didn’t interfere with her movement.
She looked precisely like the super soldier she had been engineered to be.
Behind her, Marc, Soo-jin, and Jon brought up her flanks like some kind of street-gang posse.
Baik folded his arms in front of his chest, much like Karin had. “I’m not bothering her. I just came to say hello.”
“Pretty sure your mere presence bothers her,” Soo-jin commented, giving him a cool gaze.
“I’m not here to make trouble,” Baik said.
“Then I suggest you don’t.” Nomiki made to move past him, and he stepped aside to let her go.
A beep from the desk behind them took Karin’s attention away from the crowd and toward the lower floor. She peered back over the railing with a frown and was surprised when General Ramesh strode past.
Although he could have spoken to the terminal through a comm on the command square, he’d chosen to come in person to speak with the technician.
“Scans are all clean, sir.” The tech slid over to make room as the general joined him, his left arm giving a few gestures to the screen in front of him. “Earth’s still about the same as three months ago. Southern Hemisphere shows summer. No more radiation than normal. Picking up about eighty ships within range, twenty of them coding back as Alpha Centauri war class.”
“That’s… fairly normal for them,” the general rumbled. “Any fire?”
“No. Neither active, nor residue.”
Karin nodded. That made sense. Residue was a term that referred to residual readings, which meant the tech had compared local space energy levels with those that had been taken when the gate was last operational—or some other time. If a firefight had happened in recent history, there’d still be traces of it within the system.
“The Alpha Centauri Cooperative is allied with both Alliance and Fallon governments,” Reeve said, keeping his voice low so that it didn’t carry too far. “And, I think, the Independents, as well.”
The Independents were a small, ragtag group that lived within hard-to-reach pockets of the system, mostly in the asteroid belt past Amosi. Although technically they were a third governing force in the system, no one really gave them more than a glance. Too small to do anything major, and they bought most of their resources from either Alliance or Fallon—whoever happened to be closer. Both governments kept a line on them, since they were responsible for the major mining operations in the outer asteroid belt.
Soo-jin poked her head past her shoulder, squinting down at the screen below. “What, did they just check off boxes when making alliances?”
“Probably,” Karin said. “Wasn’t there a Centauri spy that was caught recently?”
“No, that one turned out to be false,” Reeve said. “Some nightclub owner from Liber Pater’s third tier.”
“So, basically, they might not be able to point out Nova on a map?” Soo-jin said.
“Now, now, be nice. They’re likely more informed than we think. They are advanced, and they are responsible for our advancements,” Reeve said.
“Yeah, five hundred years ago.” Soo-jin ticked her head up. “Hey, aren’t they big into cybernetics?”
“Something like that.”
Down below, General Ramesh had turned to a comms unit on his wrist, speaking into it. They paused as he straightened, directing his gaze above the short set of stairs and across the upper floor to where General Crane stood in the command square.
The other general gave a curt nod.
A second later, General Ramesh’s voice rang out over the bridge’s—and likely the entire ship’s, judging by the echo—internal comms.
“All right, people. Prepare for transverse. Alpha Centauri’s on the other side, but they are allied. Don’t get jumpy.”
“What happens if they get jumpy?” Soo-jin questioned.
Karin elbowed her in the arm. “Shh. Don’t jinx it.”
But, down below, the words had apparently carried to the general. He glanced up, took all of them in—pausing only once when he came to Karin—and gave them a grim smile.
“Then things get a bit more exciting.”
“Don’t worry,” Reeve told her. “We have plans for that, too.”
Yes, they seemed to have plans for everything. Which was a relief. True, well-thought-out plans had, alas, not been part of her routine for a while.
Still, a niggle of worry laid next to the pit of her stomach.
Things never seemed to go that well for them.
With a nudge that had her clasp the railing in front of her, the ship moved forward.
Chapter Eight
The gate drew closer much faster than it felt like they were moving. That was a trick to space travel. Unlike with atmospheric or even ground travel, there was no resistance or turbulence—no bumps or nudges or even sounds to give an indication of just how fast they were moving. It was all about acceleration and relative speeds. Nothing, after all, was precisely still. Not like it was on planet.
Add into that the Manila’s military-class artificial gravity and movement dampeners, which allowed the cruiser to maneuver hundreds of Gs at a time without slaughtering its crew, and the
initial burst of acceleration was castrated into a nudge no larger than she might use to launch a model boat into a public pond.
It played hell on a body’s senses.
But, as a pilot, she was used to the weird gap between what her eyes were telling her and what the rest of her body was saying.
It was the gate itself that took her attention. Silvery and active, contained in its field—and coming straight for her.
She held fast to the top of the railing, breaths shallow, the muscles in her arms rigid, staring at it.
Marc gave her a frown. “Are you okay? Do you…” The frown deepened. “Do you need to lie down?”
She let out a slow breath, half laugh and half hiss. “I’m guessing you’ve never been through a gate before?”
“No.”
“Suns,” Soo-jin gave her a glance-over. “Is it that bad?”
“It’s… unnatural.” She swallowed, her throat dry, a hesitant weakness in her limbs. “But not completely awful.”
“It’s like pulling the ass of a frog out through its mouth,” Nomiki remarked.
Marc and Soo-jin gave her an alarmed look.
“Not that I’ve ever done that,” Nomiki added.
Baik had stepped away, she noticed, but not far. A glance back caught him halted between them and the command square, his attention on the approaching gate.
Well, at least, he was going to experience this joy, too.
The floor gave a shudder—an adjustment in the engine, most likely. She redoubled her grip on the railing.
Marc studied her expression. “You sure you don’t want to lie down? Get some rest?”
“No. It’s better if I see it coming.”
A flash from the ship’s shields illuminated across the window. The mercurial surface of the gate appeared to bend and resist. Karin felt the pull of its weight, and the telltale kick of the Manila’s thrusters. Another shudder rumbled through, bow to stern, hard enough to make the railing shake below her.
Then, the ERL bridge connected, and the ship began to push through.