“Hey, Hope.”
Hope’s face crinkled into a smile. “Hey yourself.” That smile, though: tired, strained, like a mask. Underneath it was exhaustion/fear/pain/sadness. That smile had about two percent genuine Hope in it, and ninety-eight percent manufactured what-Hope-thought-other-people-wanted-to-see in it. Hope was an Engineer, and unlike Grace, she sucked at understanding people.
Grace knew all about masks. She’d worn them in one shape or another for as long as she could remember. First, in front of her father: the strong mask. Or for her mother: the forgiving mask. On the streets of life, her masks took all kinds of shapes and sizes. The vulnerable mask for a particular mark. The fearless mask for another. Sometimes she wore a mask with no expression, because people would read what they wanted in that; it was a useful tactic. She’d come on board the Tyche with a mask made of half-lies, half-truths, the Republic on her heels howling for blood. It’d been the right mask at the time, but she hadn’t been able to hold it on her face at the end. She hadn’t needed to, because the crew of the Tyche was special. They weren’t interested in selling Grace out for a percentage. They knew the boot of the Republic on their necks.
“How you doing, Hope?” said Grace.
“Good,” said Hope. “Great.” Lie/uncertain/avoidance. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” said Grace, walking around the inside of Engineering. She bent to look at the reactor. Good Republic technology. Manufactured somewhere in Sol space, maybe the core yards near Titan. It’d been fitted to the Tyche in the ship bay of the Torrington. It seemed to work well, more power than they needed, and without the angry memories that came with carrying the Ravana’s heart with them. “It’s just, you know. You know I can read minds.”
Hope’s smile stayed on her face, but looked more like a fixture, a piece of metal bolted on to hold good atmosphere inside the hull. “Just emotions,” said Hope. “Feelings. Only that.”
“Yes,” said Grace, turning to face Hope. “Only that.”
“That’s a relief,” said Hope. Relief/relief. “I mean, I was worried for a second.”
“You were worried I might look inside your mind,” said Grace. “That I might see your pain, and your loss, and the fear of living. That I’d see you wanted to die, but you weren’t brave enough to kill yourself.” She walked towards Hope. “You were worried we wouldn’t understand what you were going through. You felt sick sometimes because you loved Reiko, but we told you she’d betrayed you, and you couldn’t make sense of that inside. You’re worried someone might see how tangled up inside you’ve become, because you feel you should be dead, and she should be alive, and you’d do anything to trade places with her.”
“You said,” said Hope, her voice cracking for a second, “that it was only feelings.”
“Yes,” said Grace. “Only that.”
“How … did you know all that, then?” Hope’s eyes flicked around Engineering, an animal looking for an escape. “How?”
Grace crouched down by Hope’s acceleration couch. “I had a hunch,” she said.
“I don’t know how to stop it,” blurted Hope. “I know it doesn’t make sense. But all these things keep going around, and around, and around inside my head.”
Grace nodded, not getting up. Keeping herself lower than Hope’s eye line, unthreatening. Relaxed. She was being buffeted by Hope’s anger/confusion/loss/pain. Grace wanted to close her eyes and make her mind small, to not take it in, but it wasn’t the time and place for that. “You want a solution.”
“Yes,” said Hope. “There’s got to be one.”
“Well,” said Grace. “I might be able to help with that.”
“How?”
“Sleep,” said Grace. “People will tell you all kinds of shit about pain. They’ll tell you time makes it all okay. That’s a lie. It doesn’t ever go away, but you get better at dealing with it. Ignoring it. Making it smaller. Until one day you can, just sometimes, wake up without it being the first thing you think about.”
“I can’t sleep,” said Hope, like Grace had said nothing at all. “I’ve tried.”
“You’ve tried,” said Grace, her eyes going to the pile of empty stims scattered on Hope’s console, “real hard.”
Hope followed her glance. “Oh. Those. If I try and sleep, my brain just works harder. It’s … easier if I don’t try. So, I take the stims. At least I can do my job, until I work it out.”
“What if I could help you sleep?” said Grace.
“I’ve tried drugs,” said Hope. “I took some from Kohl. They make me pass out, right? But I have bad nightmares. And I can’t wake up.”
“I said sleep. Not a coma.”
Hope cocked her head sideways. “How?”
“I’ve been learning a few new tricks,” said Grace. “I … don’t know if it will work.”
“You’ll go into my mind,” said Hope. Not a question. A statement accompanied by fear/curiosity/fear/fear.
“Eh,” said Grace, standing up and turning away from Hope. She walked back towards the reactor — give her space now. She needs to be free. “It doesn’t work that way. I don’t even know … I don’t know if I can do it.” She shrugged, not turning around. “But I won’t try. Not if you don’t want me to.”
“Why do you care?” said Hope. Grace said nothing, just kept looking at the reactor. Not like the reactor had changed, the lights still the comforting green of you’re not going to die, but Grace needed somewhere to look that wasn’t at Hope, and Engineering wasn’t that large. “Would it hurt?” said Hope, at last.
“No,” said Grace. Not you, anyway. “But you need to tell me it’s okay. People’s minds are their own. That’s what the Intelligencers never understood. What my father never … it doesn’t matter. You tell me it’s okay, and we’ll try.”
“Okay,” said Hope. “After we get to the station.”
“I might be dead after the station,” said Grace. “How about now?”
“I need to make sure the ship doesn’t explode,” said Hope.
“No, you don’t,” said Grace. “The ship’s fine.”
“Okay then,” said Hope.
• • •
Hope’s cabin was just like it had been last time Grace had been here. Empty, because Hope’s real cabin was Engineering. Hope sat on the edge of her bunk. “What now?”
“Lie back,” said Grace.
“Like … lie down?” said Hope, her voice nervous.
“Like,” agreed Grace. “It won’t hurt, Hope. It will be the … absence of hurting.”
“I don’t think I remember what that’s like,” said Hope, but she lay down, pink hair splaying out on her pillow. Grace sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at the wall. “Do I have to clear my mind?”
“Why?” said Grace.
“I dunno. It’s what they seem to say on the meditation holos.”
“If it makes you feel better. It won’t make a difference.” Grace closed her eyes, reaching out with her mind. At the cloud — the storm — of emotions coming off Hope. She felt the mind underneath it all, that beautiful, bright, brilliant consciousness she could barely understand. The Intelligencers could peek inside that, but Grace felt the emotions that came off the sides. Chad had said to her it might all be the same thing and she hadn’t understood. But he’d also said you can transmit and receive, Grace — it goes both ways. And that she’d understood just fine.
First: acceptance. She felt the fear/pain/loss/pain coming from Hope. Grace figured at the moment Hope was trying to clear her mind but all she was getting back from her tired, taxed mind was just more Reiko. Probably things like Reiko at the beach or Reiko in a bathrobe making breakfast or Reiko’s lips, or Grace’s hot pick, Reiko dying as the Republic gunned her down. All of those things would be mangled together, confusion and loss threading though love and happiness.
Second: absolution. Loss and pain were normal. Regular. Just like happiness or the feeling of warmth when the sun touched your face. Grace made herself a well o
f calm, a spring from which she let calm/soothe/calm/relax come out of her. She felt the buffeting of the tall, monstrous waves of Hope’s pain, but that was okay. She’d already accepted Hope’s pain. Now she was telling Hope — in a way that no one else who had ever lived could do — that it was okay. Calm. Soothe. Calm. Relax.
Finally: sleep. The end of the process. Grace pushed the fingers of her mind against Hope’s, tangling them through the fear and the pain. Grace pulled those pieces away, feeling sick and unsteady as she accepted them into her. She would keep them for now, until someone else needed them. She replaced them with calm. With soothe. And with Relax. Grace’s head bent over with the strain of it, because the pain of losing someone was immense. It was a rock you could never climb. Or, so said the conventional wisdom. Grace climbed, each foot settling on someone else’s pain. As she climbed, she let flowers grow in her footsteps.
• • •
“Hey,” said Nate, then, “Hey.” He moved across the ready room to grab her, and Grace slumped into his arms. “Grace? Are you okay? Grace?”
“I’m … fine,” said Grace. Her voice sounded weak, making a lie of the words.
“You look like shit,” he said. “I mean. Beautiful shit. I mean—”
She gave him a tired smile, putting her finger against his lips. “I feel like it too,” she said, “but I’m fine. I’m … better than fine.” She let him guide her towards a couch in the ready room. Grace caught El’s face craning around to look at them from the flight deck.
“You good, Grace?” El frowned. “I mean, it sounds half-assed to be asking like this, but I’m kind of in the middle of the flying-the-spacecraft thing.”
Grace waved a hand at her. “I’m good. Better than good. Have you ever found you could do something for someone that no one else could do?”
“Sure,” said El. “No one flies a starship like me.”
“Right,” nodded Grace. “Well, I flew my first figurative starship.”
“Good to know,” said El, turning back to her console. “Let me know how it turns out.”
“It’ll turn out fine,” said Grace. She felt a wetness on her upper lip, and touched at it. Her fingers came away red.
“Hell,” said Nate, handing her a cup. “You’re gushing blood.”
“Bleeding nose,” said Grace, pinching her nose to help stop the flow. “Hardly gushing.” She lifted the cup. “What’s in this?”
“Coffee,” said Nate.
“Good,” said Grace. “I expect I’ll need my wits about me.”
“Well, hang on,” said Nate.
Grace held up a hand. “In about five minutes, El will jump the Tyche.”
“Four,” said El. “That’s the flight plan.”
“Four minutes,” said Grace, “is all the time we’ve got until we board an enemy space station.”
“You’re staying here,” said Nate.
“If you like,” said Grace.
“What?” said Nate, the confusion/suspicion coming from him suggesting he’d expected a harder fight.
“But if I stay here, you’re going on to an enemy station alone, which means you’ll die,” she said. “It’s just math, Nate. There is an entire space station of assholes who are holding your friends hostage. What do you think the likely outcome of that is?”
He looked at the deck. “Huh,” he said. “I hadn’t got that far.”
“You saw blood and thought, ‘I know, I’ll keep the second-best fighter on the Tyche away from all the action.’ It’s just a bloody nose.”
“Second-best?” said Nate.
“Well, there’s Kohl,” said Grace. She heard a snort from El on the flight deck. “But Kohl’s not coming along, is he?”
“Kohl is barely alive,” said Nate.
“So, do you want me to stay on the Tyche?” said Grace.
“No,” said Nate, but in a way that suggested he wanted to say yes, but my ass is out of options.
“Helm to the captain,” said El, from the flight deck.
“I’m right here, El,” said Nate.
“Good. We’re jumping. Get strapped in.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
KARKOSKI WAS RIGHT. Nate didn’t like it.
She’d called the place Station Echo 9, like it was supposed to mean something to him. It didn’t, excepting it implied at least another eight were made. The ‘Echo’ part was interesting, as it wasn’t as sinister as Station Shadow 9, or The Gateway to Hell 9. But it was Republic spook-speak, which made it a little more ominous than the usual use of language would imply. All that aside, it wasn’t the name that bothered him. What bothered him was that the station was deep, deep inside Ezeroc space. It was well past the demarcation of any human-inhabited worlds, leastways worlds on the charts.
Karkoski had agreed with that. She said even her charts didn’t put anything out here except stars, space dust, and radiation. They’d stared at each other across the holo like they were daring each other to speak first. Karkoski had broken the silence, saying you know this means we’ve known about the Ezeroc for a long time and Nate had said Republic assholes. She’d shaken her head and said space stations can take a long time to build, Captain.
The implication was clear. There was a shadow operation at play here. One that had been doing things for a while — possibly since before the Republic existed. Hard to know for sure whether it had been around when Dom sat atop the throne of his Empire, and if he’d even known. The Intelligencers had fingers in a lot of pies.
Nate didn’t like it.
El brought the Tyche on approach to the station, lights on, beacon hot. No surprises, because if it was a black ops installation, there would be weapons, and surprising folks with itchy fingers on triggers was a great way to end up dead. The steady rumble of thrust was comforting. Nate clicked the comm. “Station Echo 9, this is the Tyche. Please respond.” The holo stage between him and El blinked on as the ship negotiated with the station. Transponder codes, docking bays, all advertised in the clear like there was nothing to hide. Which, Nate guessed, was true: if you made it all the way out here to this particular spot in the hard black, hiding wouldn’t do a lot of good. You were already made.
The holo stage showed a couple of interesting things. First up, the station was a disc, rather than a ring; it would have a positive mass field to generate gravity in there somewhere. That would also make El happy because she hated docking with a station that used spin. Spin was old school but some assholes always wanted to save a little coin on something. Second, and also related to the station, was that it was a double-decker design; docking hubs sprouted from the circumference of the top deck, with a bottom deck accessible only from the inside. Third, still related to the station, was an escape vessel docked against the under deck. It wasn’t a big lifeboat, and Nate figured — after some quick internal math — it’d hold ten souls, maybe fifteen if they were really good friends. Escape vessels like that had numbers, not names, and came outfitted with a fixed destination, a single Endless jump and they’d get to where they were going. Not the best option for getting across the galaxy, but better than dying in many scenarios that played through the spacefaring mind.
The fourth thing wasn’t a hundred percent related to the station: another ship was docked on the top disc. The transponder codes said she was the Gemini, registered as a free trader. Now there was a thing: what were the odds of another member of the Greek pantheon coming to hang for a beer and a bite at the Republic’s evil black ops space station? Still, you needed something to jump the hell out here with your prisoner cargo. The Tyche chatted happily to herself for a couple more moments while the back-and-forth between the station and docked ship happened at the tedious speed of light, then presented a brief report: the Gemini was powered down. Reactor cold, stored power only. Which meant she was here to stay; whomever had come with her had no immediate plans to jet off into the hard black to start a new career. In Nate’s experience, that identified the captain of that vessel — and, likely, the crew — as
willing accomplices of whatever was going on out here. If you docked at a station with your unlawful cargo, you would vacate soonest if it wasn’t your usual sort of work.
No response to Nate’s comm, and he hated to be kept waiting, so he keyed it again. “This is the free trader Tyche, hailing Station Echo 9. Y’all asleep down there?” The hiss of static was his only reply. He tapped on the console, directing comms to the Gemini. “Gemini, this is the Tyche. Sorry to bother, but we’re having trouble raising station control. Are you aware of any problems down there?”
Hiss. Nothing else. The comm was online, the Tyche reporting a successful handshake to both his comms to Echo 9 and the Gemini. He clicked the comm off, turning to El. “Let’s recap.”
“We haven’t capped in the first place,” said El.
“Right,” said Nate. “What I mean is, it’s a trap.”
“Of course,” she said. “Which particular docking bay did you want me to choose on the trap?”
“Buyer’s choice,” said Nate. “Just, I don’t know. Not too close to the Gemini.”
“There are four docking collars,” said El. “I’m either going to be next to it, or not. They’re evenly spaced around the disc, so at worst we’ll be a quarter turn from the Gemini. Any particular reason you don’t want to be near that ship?”
“Never trust anyone who’d name a ship after two different people. It’s like they can’t choose which side they’re on.”
“Quarter turn,” said El. “It’ll be fine. Hang up, let’s slow down so we don’t crash into it and all die screaming.” He watched as she worked her console, spinning the Tyche around so her main drives pointed at the station. She initiated a deceleration burn, bringing them into a nice easy drift about eight hundred meters out. She turned the ship again, playing the Tyche’s lights over the station exterior. “It’s got power. There are windows, see? Lights on.”
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