Damn you, Athos. Nexus was for emergency situations and for early training, not for everyday use. Dana hated to think what kind of damage it had done to him. Did they have enough medipatches on board to deal with this? What medic training did Grimaud have, or would it be down to Dana?
Assuming they were all still breathing when they hit the ground.
Crash, not land. They didn’t feel like they were crashing now, but Dana had a suspicion that the Parry-Riposte was concealing the worst of his damage. Like ship, like pilot.
-There’s Castellion- Athos said to her, and Dana felt a burn of complex emotions attached to that simple word, the name of a continent.
They weren’t her emotions. Athos was the one who had baggage when it came to this planet. For one horrible moment Dana was tempted to poke into his mind and see what came spilling out.
He’d know. She should be ashamed of herself, but she only held back because she didn’t want to get caught.
-What’s the plan?- she sent to him. -For when we crash-
-Land- Athos corrected, as if he had never put the idea into her head about crashing. -Have faith.-
-Always.- She took control off him and sped ahead, refusing to toss it back to him. -Have a nap, old man. Put your feet up.-
Athos’ mind melted around hers, blurring them together, so his hands and hers worked together in perfect sync. -None of that, pup. I’m not dead yet.-
Dana was overwhelmed by a vision of green grass. She smelled lemons and rain; blinked the grass away onlyto be caught by sight of crisp white sheets in a bright bedroom. She saw the curve of a perfect shoulder blade; a mess of hair that looked silver in the sunlight. She could not see the man’s face, but his presence made her warm all over.
“A hundred and one reasons to hate this planet,” said Athos in the real world.
Dana shook her head, blinking. “That seemed like a good memory.”
“Not from this angle.”
She threw him a memory of her own, of the miserable months she had spent on Freedom, fixing comms equipment for the miners to raise credits for her final flying accreditations. Even the rain was grey on Freedom, grey and opaque like the minerals they dug out of the planet, and the skin of the miners who had worked the surface for too long.
Athos shook his head and smiled. -I’m not playing memory chicken with you.-
-So I win?-
There was a snap inside Dana’s head, hard and sharp. The Parry-Riposte fell from her control, and Athos did not reach out to catch him.
-What the hell?-
-That was our second last power sphere,- Athos told her.
-Damn-
-Going down, D’Artagnan. Any last words?-
-Tell Aramis that you were right. I hate cinquefoil.-
Athos laughed at that, a loud shout of a sound in the silent flight deck, almost buried beneath the terrifying sound of the ship’s vitals disintegrating around them.
Down they went.
Dana’s first thought as she awoke was –empty-. They had lost the final power sphere sometime before the emergency landing which was as close to a crash as made no odds. The Parry-Riposte was silent in her head, and when she reached out to tug the ship back inside herself, her senses thrumming thanks to the nexus in her bloodstream, she felt nothing from him.
-Alone-
She forced herself outside her own head to take stock of her physical state. The harness and the chair had protected her from the worst of the damage, though she was stuck in a coffin of twisted metal.
The roof of a spaceship should not look like a sagging canopy.
Dana released herself from the harness and helm, shaking her scalp free of the connections. Thank goodness Athos had let Aramis cut his hair before getting into a crash like this, or he’d have been…
She couldn’t see Athos. She could not see most of the ship, as his hull had buckled around her. Her feet were jammed up against the remains of the console, which was crumpled into an ugly shape.
Athos should be there, but all she could see was the very edge of his seat, and a sharp-edged wall of metal that had separated them.
Dana’s feet were wet. More than wet. Water sloshed through the ruined ship, up to her ankles. “Missed the continent,” she groaned. “That’s embarrassing – such a big target.”
For a moment she thought one foot was trapped, but it was only her boot caught on a ragged edge of metal. Dana pulled it free, glad she didn’t have to remove the boot, and then paused for a split second to run her fingers inside and check that the stud was still burrowed into her ankle.
It would be disastrous to lose it, after all this.
The Parry-Riposte creaked around her as Dana slid out of her seat and crawled under another piece of wreckage. The water levels dipped higher, wetting one of her legs up to the knee.
Sinking was bad. Sinking a spaceship was up there with falling and crashing. At least nothing had exploded yet.
Dana made her way through the damaged dart. She found the main hatch but it had crumpled inwards and would not respond to her touch. Further on, she found the slashed remains of Grimaud’s seat. The Parry-Riposte lurched under her, flinging her into a hip-deep pocket of water.
What did she have to work with here? No arc-ray. A pearl stunner was only good for use against people, not metal. Her fingers went to the baton that hung on her hip. So there was that.
This situation was exactly what the slice was for. But something about the feel of the hilt against her fingers made Dana check Grimaud’s jumpseat again. Those slashes were too even to be accidental. Someone had already been here with a pilot’s slice.
There was a tilt on the ship – the further back Dana went, the deeper the water got. That was promising – he wasn’t filling up completely which suggested the water wasn’t as deep as she had suspected.
And maybe… yes, there. Dana saw a twisted bunk, the soft silver mattress pulled aside, and beyond it a gouged shape in the wall, mostly submerged in water.
She had located where the water was getting in, at least. The escape route Athos had left for her.
Dana took a deep breath and plunged forward, through the smooth lines of sliced metal, and into the water. She swam down into darkness and then up, to the fluttering pattern of light she could see on the surface.
Up and out, gasping in air that tasted like planet. They had landed in a freshwater lake.
It took her a few strokes to reach the edge and haul herself out into a day that was strangely warm considering how much cloud they had flown through to get here. The sky was blue, an intense shade that Dana had never quite seen before, not on Freedom or Truth, the only planets she had visited. Tufts of cloud swam through the sky above them, some white and some grey.
The grass was so green it hurt the eyes. They were surrounded by picturesque scenery: mountains and trees like something out of a children’s fairy book. Dana didn’t have time to gaze at the pretty. Athos was there on the grass, only a few metres from the edge of the lake and their part-submerged ship, leaning over the body of Grimaud.
He was soaked to the skin, one hand tangled in Grimaud’s wet star-scarf as he applied the medipatch to her neck. Dana approached him, letting her hand brush his arm only slightly to let him know she was there.
“I was coming back for you,” he said in a low voice.
“Didn’t need you.” She glanced back at the ship. He had made the right call. The wreckage was floating in the water, and had only shifted at all once Dana started moving. “How’s she doing?”
“Breathing. Stable. She has a gash in her arm but didn’t lose too much blood.” Athos pushed away from Grimaud and buried his face in his hands. That would be the shock catching up with him.
“Any landing you can walk away from…”
“Don’t. Even.” There was despair in his voice.
Dana gave him a swift hug from behind, her arms wrapping around his shoulders for a moment before she released him. “Breathe. We’re down. We’re in one
piece. All of us.”
It was more than she had expected, during their descent.
“And a brilliant story to tell Aramis and Porthos when we catch up with them,” Athos said, his voice sounding far away.
“That too.” Dana didn’t want to think about Aramis and Porthos.
A light spray of water spattered across the back of her skin. She stared at the droplets for a moment. The heat of the day had given way to a cooler breeze, and the clouds had more grey than white in them. There were more of them. Dana watched, fascinated as blue bleached out of the sky.
“Now it’s raining,” said Athos, sounding sullen about it. “I’ve been on this planet for five minutes, and it’s raining on me.”
Rain. Dana had felt it in virtual simulations, but never in real life. The air had a breathless feel about it, as if the world was about to fly apart into pieces of water. It was lovely.
Dana wanted to laugh. At Athos, at the scenery around them, at the delicious realisation that they were alive when they should have died in a crash like that, surely. “Did you and this planet have a bad break up with each other? Is counselling required?”
“I hate this sodding planet,” he growled. “I hate being rained on. I hate – are you dancing right now?”
“Maybe a little,” Dana said, spinning around on the spot with her fingers and arms flung wide. “I want to see if I can move faster than the raindrops.”
“D’Artagnan,” Athos said, keeping his voice even. “You are enjoying this planet far too much. Should I leave you two alone together?”
“Jealous that I’m getting on so well with your ex?” Dana threw herself to the ground. The grass still felt warm from the sunshine that had disappeared behind the grey clouds. “I’ve never liked a planet before. This is new.”
“It won’t last,” Athos warned, but there was less resentment in his voice now. “Rain might be a novelty now, but wait until it’s been going for seven days, so you can’t go out, can’t walk or ride anywhere…”
“Ride?” Dana said, lifting an eyebrow. “Are we talking about live animals? What kind of fucked up New Aristocrat hijinks did you and this planet get up to together?”
“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that – shut up,” Athos said, turning back to Grimaud as she sucked in a sudden, sounding-awake break of oxygen. “Engie? Still alive?”
Shakily, Grimaud raised one hand and gave him the finger.
“Thank God for that,” Athos said, reclaiming something of his usual poise and snark. “Getting my revenge on this entire planet would have been time-consuming.”
Grimaud was going to need to rest, and she couldn’t be left alone. Athos refused to admit he needed medical attention himself. When Dana finally slapped a diagnostic medipatch on him it took a full fifteen minutes to list all of the recommended treatments.
Dana wanted to stay with them while they mended, but there was the mission. The platinum stud was all but burning a hole through her ankle.
“It’s not even a choice,” Athos insisted. “You need to get to Buckingham and get that bloody stud off your ankle. If you manage to collect the item you came for, you’re heading straight back to Paris without collecting us first.”
That was the worst part.
“But if I –”
“D’Artagnan,” he said sharply. “If the Sabres catch up with Grimaud and me, we won’t offer any resistance. Arrest is a short cut home for us. If our clever ‘ditching in the lake’ plan works, and they don’t find us, the two of us can make our way back by the slow path. Neither of us possess incriminating evidence. We’ll be fine.”
Dana screwed up her face in frustration. She knew he was right. This was her mission. “If you’re not back in Paris before me, I’m coming to get you,” she vowed. “All of you. Aramis and Porthos too.”
Seated beneath a temporary shelter he had rigged from the contents of the ship’s emergency locker, with Grimaud lying on the grass beside him, Athos gave her a salute that was not entirely sarcastic. “We would expect nothing less,” he told her. “Get the hell out of here, D’Artagnan. You’re wasting time.”
And that was how, having already lost two Musketeers, Dana finally abandoned the third. It felt like a terrible mistake even before she was out of his sight.
Dana was really starting to hate this mission.
22
The Making of Alix Charlemagne
It took six hours for Dana to find civilisation – a large enough town to have a bullet train node – with the assistance of Planchet’s clamshell.
From there, it took several hours of travel and changing connections before she reached the duchy of Buckingham. It was surreal, to be surrounded by people and white noise and all the amenities of a heavily populated planet, so soon after ditching into a lake in the middle of nowhere.
Athos had done a good job, getting them this close to the right region before they made planetfall. If Dana thought too much about that, she might cry or hit something and break her hand, so she concentrated instead on what an idiot he was to be taking nexus for every flight. Did Aramis and Porthos knew he had been doing that to himself?
They had to know. The three of them were the inseparables. Dana was the stray puppy they had adopted. She couldn’t let herself wonder too deeply about why these close friends had even bothered to let her into their tight group in the first place.
On this damned bullet train, there was too much time to think. It took no effort at all to locate the Duchess of Buckingham, thanks to Planchet’s app which consolidated all Gossipnode references to the political, sporting, celebrity dynamo that was “Buck.”
Buck had addressed the Elemental Separatist Union earlier in the day, signing autographs outside the Hall of Communications in the largest city in Buckingham, and then returned to her country estate where she had been hosting a house party all week.
Dana was underdressed for the occasion. But there was no going back now.
It rained again, as Dana approached Villiers Manor. A light mist of water descended from the sky in a haze leaving droplets clinging to her eyelashes and stubbled scalp. Villiers Manor was twice the size of the palace on Luna Palais. Obviously it was the way of decadent dirtsiders to sprawl across the planetary surface as if they had all the room in the world.
The gravity felt better to Dana than her previous dirtside experiences, and she put that down to Valour’s history of being terraformed. Perhaps the planet had been designed to appeal to the needs of the spaceborn.
There was nothing else about Valour that felt familiar, for a person who spent most of her life encased in metal. The scenery continued to be fresh and green. For the first time in her life, she thought she could see what the dirtsider fuss was about.
The mountains surrounding Villiers Manor were grey and looming in their rocky formations, which reminded Dana of Freedom except for the green fringing around every peak.
A servant allowed her in through the front door, as Dana claimed to be a messenger. Her plain black flight suit was obviously not a formal Raven uniform, but the servant was polite enough to not point this out. Dana hovered awkwardly in an entrance hall about the size of Marie Antoinette Plaza.
Paris was home. That thought was enough to make Dana smile for a moment. Her face was still holding the expression when a woman dressed like a mermaid hurled herself down the staircase.
Buck trailed copper silk and sequin scales behind her, in a long train that formed a tail. Her impressive bosom was clasped in two bronze seashells, picking up the highlights of her reddish-brown skin and bright golden eyes. Her hair was braided into metallic chains that fell almost to her feet. “You have a message from Alek?” she asked, her voice warm and inviting. Before receiving an answer, she hurled herself into Dana’s arms.
Dana had been unprepared for an armful of duchess, but that wasn’t nearly as off-putting as the other woman’s wide, blown pupils. Georgiana Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham, was high as a kite.
“It�
��s an urgent message,” Dana said firmly, setting Buck on her feet before she felt it was safe to let go. “Do you have a dose of Sobriety handy?”
Something like fear flitted briefly across Buck’s face. “Can’t do that,” she said, and put her finger to her lips. “Ssssh. Worked very hard on this chemical balance. He can’t see me when I’m like this.”
“Do you mean – the Pri –” Dana started to say, but Buck lurched forward and pressed both of her perfumed hands across Dana’s mouth.
“No no, don’t say it, walls have ears. Come on.”
Dana allowed herself to be dragged up a staircase that could have housed about ten Musketeers, and into a room that might a library because the walls were covered with antique books from floor to ceiling.
“I only come in here when I’m flying,” said Buck, her pupils so large that there was no other colour visible in her eyes except for the tiniest streak of brown. “So he doesn’t see. He mustn’t know that I’ve worked out how to –” she paused, unsteady on her feet. “He doesn’t know that I remember him when he’s not here. I forget sometimes, and then – I come here to remember.”
She reached out a hand to a touch-sensitive light on the wall, which illuminated the room more brightly.
“It keeps me from losing all the pieces,” Buck whispered, and there was a tremor of fear in her voice as she looked up.
Dana followed Buck’s gaze, and saw a single word blazing across the ceiling, spelled out in golden light from the wall panel.
WINTER.
“He got into my head,” said Buck. “He sees everything I see. He made me betray–” Tears were bright in her eyes all of a sudden. “I have to remember, or I can’t fight him when he gets inside my head. He’s not here now, though. Be quick. Give me the message.”
Hesitant, not knowing if Buck would even remember this once she had sobered up, Dana reached down to extract the stud from her ankle. It had been burrowed there so long that it felt like part of her.
Musketeer Space Page 21