She popped open the cover of the console, exposing the circuits within. This was an old design, optical circuits inside glowing as it chattered to itself. She plucked cables from the base of her rig, slotting them inside the console. If you couldn’t get in through the airlock, there was always a side port someone had forgotten to seal up tight.
“Ah,” said Hope.
“What?” said Kohl.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said, and was rewarded with a grumble. But she was right, he wouldn’t understand. The code on this ship was old, rusty by modern standards, and there were a few exploits available based on what humans had learned in the twenty or more years this thing had been decaying out here in the hard black. Not that ships rusted in space, but whatever. She tapped on her rig’s console. “Open sesame.”
“What?” said Kohl, again.
“Sorry,” she said. “Just, doing … this.” The holo stage flickered, cleared, and then displayed WELCOME, ENGINEER BAEDEKER.
“It knows your name?” said Kohl.
“Hey, cute,” she said. “I didn’t know you could read.”
“I have killed people for less than that,” warned Kohl.
“Could they read too? Anyway. No, it didn’t know my name. But it knows it now.”
“Good,” said Kohl. “How close are we to the battle net?”
“We’re in,” said Hope, disconnecting the rig’s cables from the inside of the console. She then sat in the console’s acceleration couch, and got to work. “Let’s see. Okay, yes, we’ve got … hmmm. Seven hundred and fifty-six ships on the battle net are still responding.”
“How many are there?”
“Looks like … well, over a thousand ships,” said Hope.
“The Old Empire sent over a thousand ships out here?” said Kohl. “And they all got fucked?”
“I’m not sure that’s the technical term for it, but yes,” said Hope. “Bear in mind they’re not all the size of the Ark. We’ve got this command ship,” and the holo pinged their location at the edge of the debris cloud, “and, let’s see, ten carriers.”
“Ten!”
“There are forty destroyers.”
“The Republic doesn’t even have forty destroyers,” said Kohl. “Do they?”
“If they ask nicely, I might let them keep mine,” said Hope. “Now, there’s a few things we need to do.”
“Like what?”
“First things, we bring the Tyche into the conversation.” Hope tapped the comm. “El?”
“Helm here.”
“I’m patching you in,” said Hope. “Let me know what you see.”
There was a pause. “It’s like Christmas over here,” said El. “On account of all the red and yellow lights.”
Hope winced. “Yes. There’s a lot of damaged ships out there. But you’re in?”
“I’m in.”
“Okay, start your scan.” She clicked the comm off. “Next on the list is power.”
“Power? We’ve got power,” said Kohl waving an armored hand at the room around them, as if saying, see? “What about getting Gracie?”
“Not for us. For them.” Hope jerked her head outside the bridge’s windows at the floating cloud of ships.
“Why?”
“Do you like guns?”
“Love guns,” said Kohl. “Guns are kind of my thing.”
“All those ships have guns,” said Hope. “We might need more guns.”
“We might,” allowed Kohl.
The comm chirped. “Hey, I’ve found her,” said El. “Or, I think so. I’ve got a human transponder out there. The Tyche’s painting it. It looks like a shuttle, same kind as we saw on Echo 9. Weird thing is it’s bolted to an asteroid.”
Hope watched Nate walk onto the bridge from the direction of the ejection pods. His movements were purposeful as he came to stand by Hope. “Tell me it’s good news.”
“It’s … sure, it’s good news,” said Hope. Her face screwed up at what she was seeing on the console. “That can’t be right.”
“What?” said Nate.
“The asteroid. The shuttle. Whatever. It’s hailing the battle net.”
Nate’s face broke into a smile. “Put her on.” He turned to the holo stage as it flickered into life, showing Grace’s face. From Hope’s angle of view, she could see Grace, and she could see Nate’s face fall as he saw Grace. Because she didn’t seem like Grace anymore.
Oh, sure. She still looked like Grace, but the way she stared at them? That was all different. Totally different. And the ugly tear running around the top of her skull? That didn’t look like it was comfortable. Maybe she was concussed? She’d had an accident? Hope’s mind went through the options, and landed at the least comfortable but most likely: the bugs got to her.
“Nathan,” said Grace.
Nate’s metal fingers reached for the holo, and Hope wanted to grab him and make him look away, her heart going out to him. “My Grace,” he said.
“Not yours,” she said. “Mine.”
“Gracie,” said Kohl. “What’s going on?”
Grace’s head cocked sideways on the holo. “Can’t you hear? Don’t you see?”
“Grace,” said Hope. “Please come home.”
“I am home,” she said. “You can come home with me. Down there.” The holo stage blanked out.
“Where did she go?” said Nate, his voice lost. “What have they done?”
El’s voice came over the comm. “The asteroid is, uh, making a burn for the planet. Except, you know, it’s not burning, because it’s some Ezeroc tech.”
The holo blinked back into life, EMERGENCY MULTIPLE INBOUND TARGETS EMERGENCY appearing on the display. The text cleared, the star field pulling back as new ships appeared on the holodeck. “Uh,” said Hope.
“That looks like a lot of Republic ships,” said Kohl. “A lot. Maybe they don’t want their new emperor taking a dirt nap.”
“No,” said Hope. “It looks like a lot of human sock puppets.”
“She’s right,” said Nate.
Of course I’m right, thought Hope. It’s what I do. But the cap hadn’t finished talking. It looked like he was building himself up for some big heroic thing, which would get him killed, and Hope just wanted him to get to the point so she could tell him what a bad idea it was. “What we’ve got here is an interesting problem. The Ezeroc on the planet below will realize there are a lot of humans here who weren’t here before. If we hail them? They’ll know we’re here.”
“They know we’re here because Grace just talked to us,” said Hope.
“That wasn’t Gracie,” said Kohl.
“Don’t say that,” snapped Nate, and Hope watched his fingers, metal and flesh alike, clench then unclench. “Sorry.”
“You’re good,” said Kohl. “We’ll get her back. We got the magic sauce, right?”
“Right,” said Hope. “But Grace still talked to us.”
“To be fair, she talked to the battle net,” said El, over the comm. “She didn’t talk to this ship. She didn’t talk to us.”
There was silence on the bridge for a moment, then Nate said, “The fuckers don’t know where we are. That’s why they want to lure us to the planet.”
“The fuckers,” agreed Kohl.
“Um,” said Hope. “How does this help us?”
“Initially, not at all,” said Nate. “But I’ve got a plan.”
“Oh, no,” said Hope.
“Relax,” said Nate. “It’s a good plan. But we need to do a couple things first.”
• • •
Hope agreed that it was a good plan, right up to the last bit.
Step one: do not answer any hails. The battle net was up, seven hundred and fifty-six ships online. Their reactors were cold and dark, and it was time to change that. Hope initiated a reboot boot on all ships. This had a series of interesting reactions. Forty-three of the ships, some of them small fighters, exploded in spectacular fashion as nuclear fireballs consumed them, faulty reacto
rs in dire need of maintenance firing up. A few more just didn’t respond, staying dark, and a handful of the rest came online, but leaking radiation like caustic rain. It wouldn’t do to be on one of those ships, not that it would be an option with what was coming.
Step two: power down the Tyche. Her reactor had been installed by the Torrington, and its fingerprints were well known to the Engineers on that ship. She had to be black and silent, coupled to the side of the Ark Royal. Just another piece of old, forgotten junk. Safe shutdown, ready to go online at a moment’s notice, because the cap wanted her ready when he called.
Step three: engage all the automated defenses on the remaining seven hundred and thirteen ships. Or a little under six hundred and fifty ships, once you removed the ones without functioning from the mix. Six hundred, once you factored in those out of PDC rounds. Dammit. Hope wiped sweat from her forehead as she worked — the bridge of the Ark Royal heating a little too much now that power was back. Okay, okay. Focus. The count of available ships was more like five hundred, when you selected out the ones that had compromised LIDAR or RADAR tracking systems. Five hundred brave ships from the Old Empire, scattered around the ugly planet below them.
Step four: another dose of the nanites. Hope gave the hypo to Nate along with two protein bars. He’d looked at her with a blank expression, and she’d said, she needs to eat. One for Harlow too. Two doses, two bars. And he, because he was overcompensating, grabbed another handful of protein bars, securing them in the pockets of his ship suit.
Step five: hail the fleet. The cap took care of it, signaling the Torrington. He’d been talking some sense into Karkoski right until the bugs had taken over the woman’s mind. It had to be tried — they had to get them to jump away. It hadn’t worked, but the effort had been made.
Step six: use the battle net to track the Republic ships. The automated defenses weren’t for them. Nate had said they were for the Ezeroc, and the Ezeroc alone. Which made sense; when the bugs came for them, they needed to be kept busy, so Hope had coded in the battle net to ignore anything with a transponder. It seemed the quickest solve for a nasty problem.
Step seven, the last step: the ugly step. Nate said he needed a trip down to the planet. To go get Grace. El had said no, that’s crazy, and Kohl had said I’m coming with. Hope had watched the cap listen, his face hard, and he’d said to El over the comm, When we call, you need to come, and you need to come with fire, Elspeth. He never called her Elspeth. He’d clapped Kohl on the shoulder, then stopped, and given Kohl a hug, but like men did. He’d said something to Kohl Hope hadn’t heard, and Kohl had looked at Hope, and nodded. Step seven was Nate stepping into an escape pod occupied by the corpse of his dead sister Annemarie, to go down to an alien planet full of bugs that wanted to kill him, after a woman who he loved but was already dead.
Hope knew all about doing things for the people you loved even though it made no sense, so she hadn’t said anything at all. She met Nate at the door to the escape pod. “Hi,” she said.
“Hope, I’m going. You can’t talk me out of it.”
“Of course not,” she said. “I want you to go.”
He did a double-take. “You do?”
“Grace is my friend. But so are you. So. So. I need you to do one thing.” She bit her lip.
“What’s that?” Nate walked closer. “Hope, are you okay?”
“No,” she said. She realized she would possibly cry and didn’t want to do that, so she talked instead. “You are the only family I’ve got, Nate. The thing you need to do is to come back. Come back alive. Don’t die down there. Don’t die alone. Come back to all of us. We need you.” And she gave him a quick hug, and a peck on his cheek — stubble and man smell — before heading back towards the bridge.
“I’ll come back,” said Nate from behind her. “Hope, it’ll be okay.”
She paused, not turning. “I don’t think so, Cap. We can’t always be lucky. But we can be careful. There’s a difference. So be careful. For all of us.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE ESCAPE POD was old, and it might kill him on the way down, but it was the fastest way he knew of to get to where he needed to be without the Republic fleet turning him to ash.
Old it might be, but there was no need to entomb his sister on a shitty bug world, so Nate removed her from the inside of the pod with all the care he could muster. Her body was light, as light as rain, and he left her propped in the corridor outside the pod. He thought of what Hope had said. Careful. Not lucky. Which was funny. He’d never thought he was lucky. His whole family? Dead, as it turned out. The Empire? Gone. His journey through that life had cost him his one good hand. The woman of his dreams? On a dead planet, her mind taken over by the enemy. An entire fleet stacked against them out there in the hard black, insect intelligence using their human puppets to be watchful for Nate’s crew. Hell, his own ship, his wonderful Tyche, had a thumbprint you could see from across space. There’d be no running. Not anymore. Not like before. And even if he got away, the military might of the Republic was here. They’d get taken over by the bugs, and sent back to human space, and his entire race would fall.
No, not lucky at all. But Hope might have been right: a little care might see them out the other side of this day. He checked the hypo in his pocket, then slung his sword inside the escape pod. Nate gave another glance at Annemarie’s body, offering her a salute, then pulled the big red lever on the door of the pod. It stuck the first time he pulled, then groaned down with the second tug. The door slid closed in front of him, sealing with a hiss. Not that he trusted it, securing his helmet with a twist of the collar. That was him: Captain Nathan Chevell ne Fergelic, going to an entire planet filled with bugs, armed with nothing but a sword, a blaster, and an old space suit. He pulled the acceleration bars down around his shoulders, because it wouldn’t do to get tossed around in here. If there was turbulence on the way down, the pod would just deliver his battered corpse to the waiting hordes below.
The space suit was part of a uniform, and it still fitted well enough. It was made for one of the Emperor’s Black, and was made to last.
The pod shook around him as the clamps holding it in place rattled free, then he felt the huge slam of the explosive launch as the Ark Royal spat the captain’s escape pod towards the planet below. There was a brief pattering of debris against the hull, then silence for a second as the pod fell. The old holo display flickered once, twice, three times before sparking into life, marking his position. At five seconds from launch, the rocket mounted to the top fired, pushing down with a 5G force towards the planet. Nate gritted his teeth, holding on to the acceleration harness.
Could be worse. At least the rocket still works.
It could be a lot worse. The rocket was a simple chemical candle, designed for a massive burst. No fusion reactor in a pod this small, just a nudge and he was off into the void. Heading for the planet below. They’d watched Grace’s asteroid — weird thinking of it like that — descend, marked the landing spot, and configured the pod to aim right there. Whether it made it was a combination of factors; Nate knew he was relying on aged navigation equipment. Nothing in this capsule had been maintained for twenty years. The chemical rocket could have just blown apart — admittedly, worse case — or not fired at all, leaving him to drift until the Torrington or other vessel claimed him. But he was away now. The only thing remaining was whether the braking thruster would fire, or he’d impact Ezeroc HQ with enough force to spread him around a square klick of the surface, or turn him into component atoms, or—
Enough of that. You’re on your way.
The holo continued to flicker, showing small vanes extending from the top of the pod, four in total. These had tiny thrusters on them, designed to help the pod turn in a vacuum, and the vane design helped it turn if there was atmosphere. Smarter people than him had designed it, and he was in their care now. The holo continued to update as he got closer to the planet, a slight shudder to the craft showing he was going through very th
in atmosphere. The world might be a wasteland, but it was a wasteland with a thin coating of something on the top. The pod said it was nudging quarter of an atmosphere, nothing out there but a chemical soup, and encouraged him to leave his helmet on.
The braking thruster fired, and Nate felt the force of it through the acceleration couch. He felt like he weighed five, six, maybe seven hundred kilos. The pod shook and roared as it slowed him down. The impact, when it came, knocked the breath out of him — but it didn’t kill him. He was alive.
Downside? He was on an alien homeworld.
The pod’s door blew off as the bolts fired, spinning out across an expanse of sand. The air was clear. There was no movement. He’d made it, and if they hadn’t seen his descent he might have the upper hand. Nate snared his sword, clambering out of the pod. He was three steps away when the pod fired a stream of bright flares into the air, each one shrieking in the thin air. They were homing beacons, emitting a radio transponder (something the Ezeroc wouldn’t notice) but also a lot of noise and light (which they might). So much for the element of surprise.
Fuck it. Nate checked his suit’s HUD, Grace’s landing sight marked ahead. He was getting enough positioning data from the orbiting Old Empire fleet to find it with ease, a ready-made global positioning network. He set out across the sand, his boots sinking into the surface. It was the kind of surface where six legs would be an advantage. Best to not think about that.
It was a short walk to Grace’s asteroid, and he was confused about what he saw until he worked it out. There was the shuttle, and it had … docked with the rock. The Ezeroc had put a human-style airlock into their floating boulder. There was another hatch nearby, this one open. Footsteps led across the sand, but only a single pair. Grace had been here with Harlow. Whose footsteps were those? She might still be inside the asteroid. He stepped inside, suit lights on to guide his way.
The interior of the rock was red, a bioluminescence that his suit’s lights banished away with clear white. There were few choices in direction to make; a passage led to the shuttle, and another passage led up. He went up, boots crunching on the rocky surface.
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