“Of course I’m worried, my dear; I know what we did to you.” He smiles, the hologram showing his wide mouth filled with too many teeth that are too straight, too white. “But this time, no, I’m afraid I’m not nearby; I have some pressing business to attend to elsewhere. I’m taking up the bandwidth of the nearest five planets just so I can talk to you in real time.”
Which explains why no one at the settlement got my burst.
“Where are you, Briggs? Are you on your way here? Because I’d rather not wait for you on this sporeball of a planet.”
“Wait for me? How delightful.”
“You won’t be saying that when I’m choking the life out of you.”
“Oh, my prodigal daughter, how badly you must think I’ve wronged you.”
“Can we hurry this up?” I say.
Another pause, so my words can travel the Trystero network and his words can come back. “Right to business, then. I thought I would need to give you more incentive to bring you home. I have your friends, Mariam, and they really wish you were here.”
The hologram coming from the robot’s neck changes—instead of the lifelike form of Briggs’s fat head, it turns into a projection, wide and flat: Squid, Mookie, and Trix, strapped into dull steel chairs, lengths of leather holding them in place.
“How much luck do you think we would have trying to unlock latent psychic talent in three adults, Mariam? I’m afraid our techniques aren’t much better than you remember. In fact, in some ways we’ve had to revert to more basic, dare I say, barbaric means. You can blame your friend Sera for that.”
Briggs’s face comes back.
“She was alive, you know, up until a few hours ago.”
“We knew she was alive—thoroughly lost, thoroughly self-destructive, and not much use to us. She was powerful, yes, but you were always her better. You know that’s why she stole you away from us, don’t you? Not out of love, but because she wanted to hurt us.”
“You really believe that, don’t you?” I say. “That’s sad, Briggs. Before now, I never knew she was my sister, but I never doubted that she loved me. And I’ve always known that she risked her life to give me my own.”
“And what sort of life is that? Living out of a corvette, limping along the edges of imperial space, waiting to be found.”
“It’s better than being your weapon. It’s a life I can call my own.”
He smiles, and it’s an ugly smile, a smile that is somehow disappointed and angry. “If you cooperate, perhaps I’ll give you a life with true purpose, Mariam.”
“Let them go first, and then I’ll come to you.”
Briggs laughs. “When have you ever demonstrated that you deserve such trust? No, I need them here until you’re under our control. Once you come here, they will be freed. And then you will learn that following the rules is binding oneself without rope.”
I hear his words for what they are now—hypnotic suggestion, designed to make me follow orders. I smile, and after a pause so does his holographic face. He must take it as obedience, instead of anamnesis.
“Where will I find you?”
“You must return to where it all began.”
Briggs’s face flickers a moment, then disappears. The android’s default head takes its place, and the machine’s own intelligence must come into play, because it says, “What a beautiful day, citizen!” and wanders off through the murk, its maroon uniform fading into that ever-present green.
I climb into the small air lock of my still-unnamed ship—the Mouse?—and get Waren to run decontamination twice to try to clean the mold spores out of the air.
Picking Seven up from the floor of the living area, I say, “Run a thorough diagnostic, Waren—make sure nothing’s been tampered with.”
“I assure you I was vigilant the entire time you were gone.”
I scratch Seven under the chin, and she leans into it but refuses to purr. “With root access they could convince you—”
“You allowed me to go untethered, remember?”
“You’re tamperproof?”
“More or less. It would take more processing power than what’s contained inside an android envoy to damage me.”
It takes a few solid minutes of petting Seven for her to forgive me for leaving her behind. I take her through to the cockpit and leave her on my lap.
“If you don’t mind, Waren, I want to do some flying.”
“Of course, Mars,” he says, but I note a sliver of dissatisfaction in his tone. I feel for the guy—shit, digital entity; try not to anthropomorphize, Mars—but flying helps me think, and I’ve got to work out my next steps.
Now that Briggs isn’t choking the comms, I get a burst from Miguel as soon as we clear Ergot’s gravity well. He says almost half the rioters on Aylett were arrested and hauled away, so he’s checking up on me, making sure I haven’t died or been captured. I burst him the rough location of my childhood “home” and ask him to find the exact coordinates, then get eyes on scene. He’s so glad to hear from me after days of silence he doesn’t even bring up his fees right away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It’s time to talk about wormholes. You can open a wormhole anywhere you want, but you’ve got to remember it’s a two-way street. Say you put a massive drill onto the front of a ship, burrow into the center of a planet, and then hole out into space. You do that, and the vacuum at your destination is going to leak through to the core of the planet. Where you had a crappy old planet, now you’ve got yourself a nice new asteroid field. You could skip the drilling and wormhole from space into the planet’s core, if you were feeling suicidal or if you had loyal troops. It’s against every space-faring treaty ever drafted, but it’s possible. Hell, it’s been done. Remember Carmen-7? Largest terrorist strike in eighty years.
To prevent all that, there are minimum safe distances, or MSD. In any decently busy system, MSD with all that compounded traffic pushes you out to the edges. You can safely hole from the outer edge of one system to the outer edge of another, thousands of light-years away, near instantaneously . . . but, you’ve still got to get from that edge to anywhere worth a damn, and that’s what takes time.
All of this is to say that just because Briggs told me to meet him where it all began, it doesn’t mean he’s there already.
It takes Miguel a day to find the coordinates for the old facility. It hung at the Lagrange point between the two moons of a gas giant in the Sixen system, given extra protection by an asteroid belt that orbits beyond the second of the two moons. It takes him another day to get a drone there.
A few days later, I’m still heading out from Ergot, well past minimum safe distance but gliding along without a plan, when Miguel’s drone autobursts me. MEPHISTO ships have arrived. In the images it sends I spot Briggs’s flagship, two Ellis cruisers, and three frigates that are too small and blurry to make out.
I pace around the cargo area of the Mouse with Seven asleep in my hood. I pull her out and hold her up in front of my face. She looks at me like she’d rather be sleeping.
“I’ve got a corvette, an AI, a weird cat-thing, and no weapons,” I say to Seven, using a problem-solving trick that engineers have relied on for hundreds of year. “I’ve got to go up against six ships to rescue three friends. All right, three people, but they’re people who wouldn’t be in this shit if it wasn’t for me.”
Seven maows.
“I don’t think so.”
She maows again, louder this time.
I sigh and think for a second. “Holy shit; that might work.”
I drop Seven to the floor and she rushes off, heading toward her food. I go in the opposite direction, to the cockpit.
“Waren, what’s the densest mass we can get to in under three days?”
* * *
The ship shudders violently as I check the drone feed one last time to make sure nothing has changed. The six ships float there, asteroids occasionally drifting into frame, blocking the view from the drone’s hiding place.
&nb
sp; The hull of the Mouse creaks and strains, and a proximity warning blares through the cockpit audio.
“I thought I told you to silence that fucking noise.”
The sound dies, and I just hope the fucking headache it gave me is temporary.
“Sorry.”
I exhale. “You’re untethered, Waren, and I trust you. So just keep us out of harm’s way and keep that siren quiet. Are the wormhole coordinates locked in?”
“Yes, the coordinates are still locked in. They have remained locked in since the first time I told you they were ready.”
My stomach is churning, and some part in the back of my head is telling me You hardly know these people; you don’t owe them anything, but I know it’s not true. The very least I owe them is to keep them out of my bullshit, not to get them killed.
I try not to think about how they could already be dead, murdered the moment Briggs cut the connection. But I feel like I know him well enough; he might not be planning on letting them go, but he’ll keep them alive until he’s had a chance to torture me with them.
“All right, punch it.”
I feel the hum of the ship vibrate my bones as the stars beyond the viewscreen split open and blossom like stellar flowers, then wink out of existence. Or, rather, we do.
I exhale. “This is fucking stupid, Mars,” I say. “Waren, keep us in the wormhole until I give the signal, just like we discussed.”
“Affirmative.”
“You stay here, Seven.” I spin my cloak around, then hold on to the hood. With Seven inside I lift the whole thing over my head and put it on the still-warm pilot’s seat.
I walk slowly through to the air lock, put on the space suit that smells like someone else’s sweat, and cycle through the doors.
Spacewalking in a wormhole isn’t the same sensation as when you go out into regular space. In regular space you know that if something happens to your grav boots or your tether, you’ll be left drifting out there, and if someone in the ship isn’t quick on their feet, you’ll be about to experience one of the most horrifyingly alone deaths you can imagine. In worm space, there’s not really any “there” there. There’s no place for you to drift out into and become lost in. There’s no time, there’s no space. I don’t know what would actually happen if you drifted off. Could you come back and intersect regular space at some unknown place? At some unknown time? It’d take brains smarter than mine to figure that out . . . or one reckless moment of experimentation.
I swing out into the nonspace and climb up the handholds until I’m on Mouse’s roof. I connect two tethers to the handholds behind my ass, and I watch. I stare out into the abyss, and, like always, I feel it staring back at me.
“All right, abyss, is it time? Am I ready?”
I’ll never be ready.
“Waren, ready when you are.”
It doesn’t reply, but suddenly we snap back into real space and my vision is blocked out in large swathes of black and gray and blue, with a smattering of brown streaking across the black. The colors solidify, gain resolution, become stars, asteroids, and moons drifting off in the distance—and around us, the ships.
We come through into regular space right in the middle of Briggs’s fleet, bringing with us the fury and crushing power of Brindock-13, the densest black hole in the ’Riph. We’d been kiting its edge, thrusters on full just to keep us free. We got so close it would have been impossible to escape its gravity without the wormhole to take us thousands of light-years away.
The black hole’s gravity seeps out behind us, its immense power barely registering for us because we’ve been in it so long, but instantly taking hold of the three smaller frigates. One of them crumbles in on itself, engines and ammunition exploding, gases and flames hissing out into the void. The second lists hard to the side, then spins on a wide flat axis, suddenly lost to the gravity of the nearest moon. The third frigate tries to pull away, but its thrusters aren’t strong enough; it’s shoved backwards, then flips instantly and plows forward—pushed by its engines and pulled by the new alien gravity into one of the cruisers, enveloping both in silent destruction as debris spills into space.
As gravity settles the second cruiser and Briggs’s flagship begin to turn toward me. The Mouse is too small to take a hit from one of their railguns without being vaporized, but luckily they want me alive. Short-range fighters scuttle from their hangar bays like wrathful bees, ready to engage. I reach out toward the asteroid belt, feel the spinning rocks in my grasp stop their orbit around the distant star, and pull.
The asteroids come streaking toward us, and I guide them one by one, my eyes flashing across the expanse to track them. I send a dozen hurtling into the cruiser, and they punch through from one side to the other, sending blood and bodies into space. I fling more asteroids into the swarm of fighters, and the nimble ships dodge and weave before shattering in the hail of space rocks, taking their pilots with them.
More fighters blast through the impromptu asteroid storm, heading right for me and the Mouse. I reach out, grab, and crush them. The ships implode, condense, become metal asteroids with human souls at their cores.
I’m yelling and I don’t even know when I started. But I’m not tired; no headache builds behind my eyes. No, the only things behind my eyes are images of Sera, of the mice, of the girls—all dead because men must have their weapons.
I turn the next wave of fighters inside out, metal hulls cracking open and pilots lost to the vacuum, spinning wildly on untrackable trajectories. I leave them. I want them to suffer out there in space.
Emergency escape pods jettison from the cruiser as it leaks atmosphere in whitish plumes. I yell some horrifying glossolalia from deep in the pit of my self and reach out to crush the listing remains of the ship, catching some of the fleeing pods in the psychic maelstrom. Explosions glow orange through its crumbling hull as I compact it into a near-perfect sphere. Squid would be proud.
With the view ahead of me clear of everything but debris and the dead, I grab more asteroids as the flagship turns slowly to face me. I see the hangar bays along its side, shimmering with the subtle glow of powershields, and I send the asteroids against the hull just above these openings. The shield mechanisms fail, and the atmosphere inside starts to vent. I send the next bombardment into the hangar and feel it splitting and shattering as it cripples fighters and turns countless pilots and engineers into mince.
I’m a spacewitch, I’m a goddess of death and destruction, and I start to laugh thinking of the look on Briggs’s face. You think you know what you did to me? You don’t know the half of it.
“Waren, take us in, leech it. Make sure we hurt them when we leave.”
“Yes, Mars. I’ve found schematics for the Mastodon-class ultraheavy capital ship. Assuming MEPHISTO has not made too many alterations to the default design, I will be able to guide you to the brig.”
Briggs’s brig. Of course that’s where I’ll find the crew of the Nova.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I leave the space suit in the Mouse and put my cloak back on. If I had to explain myself I’d say that the flowing fabric makes it easy for soldiers to miss when they shoot at me. The truth is it reminds me of Sera, reminds me of the one time someone gave a fuck about my life.
I try to take Seven out of the hood so I can leave her on the Mouse, but she refuses to let me go without her, making this vicious howl and digging her claws deep into my back. If she knows what could happen, she’s not scared. Fuck, I’m scared, but I guess a lack of metacognition is good for something.
“We’re approaching the flagship now,” Waren tells me. “Counterintrusion defenses are military-intelligence level and well beyond my ability to influence. I’m afraid I will be unable to provide anything more than verbal assistance once you’re on board.”
“That’s fine, Waren. You just give me directions to the brig, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
A hollow metallic thud echoes through the Mouse, and I hear the cutters go to work, sparking loudl
y on the other side of the air lock. When you can’t use an existing hangar or dock, you can always make your own.
I wait in the air lock, wearing a lightweight breathing apparatus in case my impromptu asteroid-flinging display did more damage than I wanted. I brace myself, and the air lock door parts like the lens of an ocular implant, but there’s no hiss of atmosphere escaping, no loss of gravity.
“Oxygen levels appear stable, but I would still advise you to take the breather with you,” Waren says, as if I’m not already wearing it.
“Yes, Mom,” I say, then stow the breather in my satchel as I step out of the Mouse and into the MEPHISTO flagship.
Waren must understand sarcasm, because he ignores that comment and continues, saying, “I’m adding a navigational overlay to your HUD. If the ship differs from the schematics, I’ll do my best to make educated guesses on your behalf.”
I don’t respond; I’m too busy waiting for an ambush. I half expected a welcoming party waiting for me, but the corridor is empty—another benefit of making your own dock. The only light is the faint orange glow coming from panels in the corner of the floor and the spinning red of the emergency lights.
The ship is so silent that I wonder for one stupid second if it’s actually in vacuum, and I force myself to inhale deeply just to be sure. I hear air whistling in through my nostrils, sharp and loud. I stomp my foot, but the floor is covered in a spongy, polyrubber matting and doesn’t have the clanging resonance of most ships.
Waren’s overlay paints a line along the floor, drawn in turquoise to stand out against the orange and red lighting. It pulses to show me the direction I should be heading, so after one more glance around, I move off and follow it.
The brig is located on the upper levels of the ship, the hangars on the lower. As I creep through the corridors looking for a vertilator, I’m trying to convince myself that the reason I’m not coming up against any opposition is because they’re all down in the hangars, helping the wounded, putting out fires, that sort of thing. But my gut is telling me to worry, and I always listen to my gut.
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