Quick check: that opening was a lot larger than it used to be. It had been a door of sorts, a nice defendable aperture he could have held with a blaster for a while at least. Now it was an opening the entire pyramid wide. He figured that was on account of needing to get the Tyche in here. He didn’t know why the Tyche needed to be here, then he remembered the conversation with Hope (no rope) and falling through the air (Endless field). It was good thinking, officer material from whoever came up with it, and he’d be sure to have a congratulatory word if he made it out of this alive.
Something reared its head up and he let off a blast of plasma, hitting nothing but air and sand. Those fuckers were quick, that was for sure.
Get the crew inside. Get the hell out of here. Good thinking, Chevell.
He jogged over to Grace, grabbing the front of her ship suit, never taking his eyes off the pyramid’s open wall. He held on to her with one hand, the other with the blaster pointed at where the danger was. It was difficult getting her back to the ship, because the floor was littered with pieces of pyramid. He made it, her feet scribing two lines through the sand drifts. The lock opened in front of him, revealing El in her suit. Nate dropped Grace on the sill of the lock, then went to get Hope. She was lying, her visor pointed up, the mechanical limbs of the suit splayed around her fallen form like the bones of wings. He jogged towards her, sucking hard on the air canister. There was movement again from the pyramid’s opening, and he let off another shot. He hit nothing — again — but he swore that a couple of shadows had made it inside. That made at least two Ezeroc in here with him and his crew.
You fuckers will not get me and mine today.
Hand on Hope’s rig, he dragged her back towards the ship. The lock opened again, and he dropped Hope off into El’s care. One left, Chevell. Just one more, and you can go. He moved towards Kohl, then stopped as he saw an Ezeroc rearing above the big man’s unconscious form. Nate’s blaster bucked as he fired, plasma scorching against the Ezeroc, and it tumbled away in a smoking pile. Nate ran to Kohl, kneeling down. Armor. That armor is too heavy. You’ll never drag him with two hands, let alone one. Nate felt around the controls of the armor, finding the emergency controls. He keyed in the passcode — Kohl’s was always 1234 — and stepped back as the armor fired the release bolts. Pieces of armor flew, smoking trails gobbled up by the wind.
Nate crouched down again, took two lungfuls of air, then pressed the air canister against Kohl’s face. Not enough arms, too many things to do. Nate hesitated for just a moment, then holstered his blaster. He hefted the big man up — you’re going on half rations after this is over, that’s for sure — hooked his metal arm under Kohl, and dragged him back toward the ship, making sure the emergency air mask was against Kohl’s face. Kohl might have been dead, Kohl might have been alive, but he’d be one hundred percent dead for sure if he sucked poison air.
Speaking of air … dragging a hundred-kilo man through rocky rubble wasn’t easy. Nate wanted to breathe. He did. Nate wanted to open his mouth and suck in a lungful. He knew it was crazy, it’d be like an old-time mariner drinking salt water to slake a thirst. Fast road to a horrible death. But there was all this beautiful cold air pressing against his face.
The back of his boot hit the ramp of the Tyche and he almost cried with joy. Almost, because if he had, that was air he didn’t have to spare. He dropped Kohl, then turned around. Right in time to see an Ezeroc rearing above him. He pulled his blaster in one clean motion and fired, the plasma tearing off a limb. The Ezeroc lunged forward, slamming Nate back. He tumbled back into the airlock door of the Tyche, and all the breath left his lungs.
And then he gasped in a lungful of poison.
His chest spasmed. It felt like he was trying to breathe floor cleaner. He coughed, sucked in another lungful on autopilot, and then doubled over. The Ezeroc reared above him, ready.
Then the front of it disintegrated into fragments of chitin and gore. Nate looked up through streaming eyes at Elspeth Roussel, Helm of the Tyche, her sidearm in one hand. She handed him an air canister without comment, then opened the breach of her gun, the cartridge spinning away. Nate pried himself up, the dragged Kohl over the lip of the airlock. He reached out a hand, slamming it on the airlock’s CLOSE controls. The door slid shut, sealing out the poison and cold and nightmare that was the surface of this barren world.
Clean, sweet air cycled into the airlock. Nate coughed, then he laughed. He took in the expression on El’s face — a cross between terror and confusion — and it made him laugh harder. He waved a hand at her. “Go on. Get us out of here.”
“You sure? You not been hit too hard on the head?” Her voice was shaking, false bravado pushing the words out.
“I been hit hard enough,” said Nate, “but I figure on us getting off this fucking rock.”
“Copy that,” she said, walking away through the hold. Nate got up, moving into the Tyche, sealing the inner door of the lock behind him. He leaned forward, a hand against the wall, breathing hard. Breathing clean. He felt terrible. He felt alive.
“Helm to Tyche,” said El over the comm. “Thrust in five. Four. Three. Two. One. Mark.”
The fusion drives grumbled, the grumble turning into a roar. Thrust pressed against Nate, his crew sliding a little on the metal floor of the hold. Not too hard, not too much: just enough for nuclear fire to scour away the Ezeroc from outside, and leave a memory on the face of this world. We came, and we did not die in your trap. We brought a Goddess of Luck with us; next time pray we don’t bring the God of War.
• • •
Nate sagged into the acceleration couch next to El. “Well, that was a shit sandwich.”
“Yeah,” she said, meaning, is he going to be okay.
“He’ll be fine,” said Nate. “Kohl’s big and dumb but he’s made of rock. I mean, he’ll need work, but … eventually.”
“Shit,” she said.
“Still. We’re off the rock, and no one’s dead.” They were looking out at the stars, the planet rotating underneath them, the muddy browns and grays a reminder of the poison they’d left behind. “Those assholes, though.”
“The snails?” El had watched the recordings from their suits while Nate had plugged Kohl into the ship’s medbay machine. He’d left Hope to sleep it off — really sleep, this time. For a long time. Grace was resting in their cabin — which made him smile, thinking of it as theirs. The smile left his face as he remembered her look, the sad and tired face of someone who’d almost died. On his watch. Again.
“Yeah, the snails,” said Nate. “Fucking roaches. Fucking snails. Why can’t we have aliens that look like nice, normal mammals?”
“Universe loves wondrous variation,” said El. “Maybe they think we look ugly with all that creepy fur.” She ran a hand through her hair.
“I don’t think anything was left down there to think anything,” said Nate. “Just an ancient recording from a long-gone bunch of people.”
“You figure it was a trap? Or experiments?”
“I figure it was both,” said Nate. “I’ve taken down an IOU. They’re on the list. After we deal with the Ezeroc.”
“What I figure is that you’ll be late to that party,” she said. “I think the Ezeroc already solved that problem for you.”
“I thought the same thing,” said Nate. “But you know? I like to plan for the worst, but keep hoping for the best.”
“You’re hoping we’ll run into another group of alien sociopaths?”
“It doesn’t sound quite right when you say it like that,” offered Nate, after a moment’s pause.
There was a ripple in space, and a massive ship jumped in. Nate sat up on his acceleration couch, the Tyche already handshaking. Data sped over the holo stage, then the ship was marked: the Torrington. He breathed a sigh of relief, then clicked on the comm. “Torrington, this is Tyche actual. We see you.”
“Tyche, this is Torrington actual. We see you too. That planet looks like a spinning asshole, doesn’t it?” K
arkoski’s voice was harsher than usual, more tired, and Nate guessed he could get behind that. It’d been a rough time of late, and she had to be feeling the punches back in human space.
“There’s a mental image,” he said. “What can I do you for? We weren’t expecting to see you out here.”
“We weren’t expecting to be out here,” she said. The holo stage flickered and then her projection appeared there. Still in uniform, shoulders back. Used to command in a way that Nate never had been. “We’ve got a message for you. Much as it pains me to be your errand girl, this one struck me as important enough to take a break from my usual job of trying to hold the Republic together to relay it to you.”
“Huh,” said Nate, a sinking feeling arriving in his gut.
“Before that, let’s talk about this wonderful cat’s toilet you’ve discovered,” she said. “We’ve never been out here. It’s not on the charts.”
“A hundred light years straight out from Absalom,” agreed Nate. “I’m pretty sure it’s uncharted waters. I’ll send a data package to you with what we found.”
“Much obliged,” she said.
“Just a word of caution,” said Nate. “If you go down to the … trap … we found, be careful. We left the back door open. There’s a main pyramid entrance—”
“A pyramid?”
“We knocked a wall down but you can’t miss it,” said Nate. “Anyway, the structure has another location with an opening to the sky. A radio transmitter. Powered down now, not a lot of juice left in it. I figure we’d be well cooked if that weren’t the case, but there you have it. Anyhow. The roof’s open, and the bugs got out.”
“The Ezeroc?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s Ezeroc here?”
“Yeah.”
“And they built the pyramid?”
“That was the snails.”
Nate watched her rub a hand over her face. “Perhaps you should just send over the data packet, Captain.”
“Will do,” he said, working the console in front of him. “There you go. Now, what’s this message?”
“Transmitting,” she said, and the holo stage cleared. Her figure was replaced by Harlow, his face drawn.
“Nate, they’ve got us,” said the recording of Harlow. “You know who I mean by they and you know who I mean by us. But in case you’re dumber than usual, I mean me and Amedea have been locked up. And we’ve been locked up by, well, a coalition of the Ezeroc and the Republic. It’s grim. They wanted me to send this to you. They wanted you to know they’ll peel apart our minds to find out what’s going on with the Resistance. They say you need to come, and they’ll trade us, no questions asked, for Grace. I told ‘em you wouldn’t come, and they said to send this anyway. So, don’t be a dick. Stay the hell away.”
The recording clicked off to be replaced by Karkoski again. “You can see why we came.”
Nate realized he was leaning forward, then leaned back into his chair. Relaxed wasn’t the right word: he slumped. “I can see. Is this authentic?”
“Near as we can tell. They left a trash fire on Enia Alpha. Scooped up a couple of the Resistance. Not all. Not even most of ‘em. Your deckhand’s recruiting helped some.”
“Where are they?” said Grace, startling Nate and El both. Nate turned to look at her. She’d slipped up on them on whisper-quiet feet.
“I thought you were resting.” He reached a hand for her.
She took it in her own. “Hard to rest when all you can hear from the flight deck is emotional screaming in your mind.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“Grace Gushiken,” said Karkoski. “A pleasure.”
“Likewise,” said Grace. She leaned forward. “Tell us where they are.”
“Okay,” said Karkoski. “You’re not going to like it though.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE JUMPS WERE wearing thin. Grace knew why they had to do it. You couldn’t just tell the Tyche you wanted to go ‘over there’ and hope for the best. Long experience of humans charting the stars meant they knew the basic steps: jump to a location. Sit in space for a while, looking at the stars. Their light would be years, decades, even millennia old, but they would give you a better idea of the state of things where you were headed. Use what you could see to build a more up to date map of where you were going. And then jump again. Repeat.
It was risky. It’s why the Guild made so much damn coin. They charged for use of their Bridges. Safe. Reliable. The Guild sent drones to construct Bridges, and then ships could step through those Bridges just like walking through a door. A wormhole was far safer; the only real problem with those was if one endpoint failed while you were half-way. That rarely happened.
Rarely.
It made the wild rodeo of Endless travel seem insane. Grace knew better, though: space was big. It was huge. The odds of jumping to a location and finding yourself inside a star or planet were low. And they were made lower by doing the work — traveling to a place, looking for the next stop, charting the course, and away you went. Like the mariners of old, the Tyche used the light of the stars to guide her way.
It still sucked though. While the sheer rush of the jump was exhilarating, it took longer than traversing a Bridge. Sure, you didn’t need an endpoint, which in this particular instance was necessary, but it wasn’t instant. The tech made it possible for it to be instant, but humans lost their minds if they pushed the buffer limits too much. The crew of the Ravana had discovered that the hard way. Linear time was too much a part of human existence to be defied like the mere laws of physics.
“I live for this,” said Nate. “The open stars, the unknown. Going where nobody’s gone before.”
Grace snorted. “I was thinking the exact opposite. Not just a little different, but the exact opposite.”
Nate reached for her under the sheets, the crinkle of the synth weave like the sound of unwrapping a present. Grace felt his hand on her belly — a nice, warm, Nathan touch. He’d survived the death planet. They both had. And they’d wasted no time celebrating. El was piloting the ship. Hope was in Engineering, making sure that the ‘ship doesn’t explode.’ What was left of Kohl was connected to the machine in the sickbay, keeping him alive. There’d been no question of handing him off to the Torrington; Kohl wouldn’t appreciate it when he woke up. For one thing, there wouldn’t be enough liquor on the destroyer to keep him drunk enough to put up with all those Marines.
Which left Nate and Grace with a little time. She moved closer to him, turning so their noses were almost touching. She felt his hand working its way up her side, stroking her back. It was warm. It was perfect. “Mind you,” she said, “this part isn’t all bad.”
“No,” said Nate. “It’s not all bad.” He kissed her neck, and she shivered, reaching for him, feeling the muscles in his back. She pulled him close, skin to skin.
The comm in the cabin chirped. “Helm to the Captain.”
Nate made an exasperated noise. “Sweet Christ,” he said. “Like five more minutes.”
“It’d be more than five,” said Grace, not letting go. “What’s the worst that could happen if you didn’t answer?”
“We could all die,” said Nate. He reached a hand up and clicked the comm. “El, this is Nate. What’s up?”
“Destination in one jump, Cap,” she said. “I figured we could hold out here. Before. You know. The jump. To make sure the stars are okay.”
“Right,” said Nate. “How are those stars looking?”
“Bright and shiny,” she said. “We could hold off jumping for a little bit longer though. Just to be sure.”
“Copy that,” said Nate, clicking the comm off. “Where were we?”
Grace gave an appreciative look at him. Nate was lean, not a lot of wasted mass on his frame. She reached a hand over, tracing her fingers down his chest, across his stomach. She leaned in for a deep kiss, then hoisted herself on top of him. “About to get here,” she said. She rocked
her hips against him.
“About here,” he agreed, voice husky. He touched one of her breasts, and she couldn’t suppress the shiver that ran through her. They’d need a few more minutes. Just to make sure the stars were okay.
• • •
She’d grabbed herself a shower, kissing Nate as she left his cabin. He was off to do very important captain things, and she was off to do very important Assessor things. Those Assessor things weren’t the usual things someone holding that position on a starship would do. Assessors spent their time looking at things that free traders found and determining their worth, where they might be sold, and where — when free trading turned closer to privateering and flirted with piracy — items of value and questionable providence might be sold. Grace could do all those things, no problem: she’d spent a lot of time running and hiding and assessing the value of people. It made working out who wanted to buy a mystery trinket from an edge system a matter of joining the dots.
Since she’d conned her way on to the Tyche, she hadn’t done any Assessing at all. The manifest still noted that as her formal position, despite her history of lying to the crew and pulling the might of an alien empire down on them all. She’d done more work with her sword than ever before, and that was okay. Grace was comfortable with a blade in her hand; what she’d learned was that she was more comfortable with a blade in her hand and a friend at her back. She’d never had that before.
Speaking of friends … She had reached her destination. Engineering’s airlock was sealed during the natural running of the Tyche in case of a breach from one of the volatile systems in there, but it wasn’t locked. Hope never locked the door, because she didn’t seem to believe in locks. Mind you, locks weren’t very effective against her. Grace keyed the controls, the big vaulted door hissing open in front of her. Engineering was well-lit, the new reactor humming in the center, the readouts on the fusion drives a comforting green. Hope was in her acceleration couch, a set of documents up on the holo. Grace had glimpsed a picture, swapped away from view as the door opened. A picture of Reiko, which was why Grace had come here.
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