Heaven's Queen

by Rachel Bach

  By this point, we’d nearly reached the place where the plastic tube hooked into the station. Just past the boarding tube’s edge, I could see the heavy casing of what was clearly meant to be a plasma shielded door. Now, with no power, there was no shield, and though I spotted no fewer than four cameras pointed at the entry gate, every one of them was dark and motionless.

  The boarding tunnel let out into an entry room that had clearly once been part of a much larger docking area but had since been renovated into something smaller and easier to defend. The initial entry point was wide enough to fit the large tunnel I’d just come out of, but after that the room quickly shrank, funneling into a long hallway lined with inconspicuous turret drops. I froze when I saw them, remembering Maat’s warning that this place was a fortress, but without power, the security measures had no teeth, and I relaxed a little, starting down the hall as I opened up my density scanner to get a glimpse of what I was walking into.

  A lot of metal seemed to be the answer. I was about to ask Maat if she could give me another map when I realized I didn’t need one. Now that I was actually in the hall, it felt deeply familiar. This whole place did, like I’d been here a hundred times before. For a second, I worried Maat was bleeding into my mind again, but the truth turned out to be much simpler. I knew this place because Rupert knew it. Even with the lights out, the entry hall triggered his memories, filling my head with his calm, orderly assessment of the station that had been his headquarters for four decades. He’d hated this place with a cold, dark menace, but he knew it like the back of his hand, and that gave me an idea.

  When I reached the end of the hall, I paused, sorting through Rupert’s well-ordered memories of the station for the one I wanted. When I found it, I turned and starting following one of the hallways that ringed the station’s center toward the turn that would take me out one of the station’s arms, the rays of the star. This also meant I was going the exact wrong direction to reach the area Rupert thought of as “Maat’s containment.” Maat clearly saw this as well, and she appeared in front of me, her face set in a snarl.

  Where are you going?

  “You can’t expect me to pull off a job like this without help, can you?” I asked, jogging faster as my suit’s sensors filled in the gaps in Rupert’s recollections, drawing me a detailed map in the process.

  Who here is going to help you? Maat snarled. Eyes never help.

  “He’s not an Eye anymore,” I said simply. “He’s mine.”

  I could feel Maat’s bafflement like a fog in my head, but I just grinned and kept going, kicking open the door to the dead elevator so I could jump down the shaft.

  I’d noted before that Dark Star Station was set up like a pointed cross with four rays extending from a central mass. From the outside, the shape had looked simplistic, but by the time I’d climbed all the way down to the cramped hallway that ran up the spine of the ray farthest from Maat’s prison, I was thanking the king for every single one of the memories Rupert had left in my head. Without his intimate knowledge of this place bubbling up like carbonation anytime I saw anything remotely familiar, I would have been lost for days.

  The station’s interior was every bit the labyrinth Maat had described, a warren of identical metal hallways whose sole purpose seemed to be finding new ways to dead end. The only good part was that the station was big enough for solid-state gravity generation. I might feel like a rat in a maze, but so long as the air pressure stayed normal, at least I wouldn’t have to do it flying around.

  I had more than enough to process already, especially since even with Rupert’s mental map at my fingertips, it was still easy to get turned around when every corner looked exactly the same. There were no directional signs, no emergency exits; there weren’t even numbers on the doors, nothing to help me get my bearings. There were, however, a lot of traps.

  I lost count of how many automatic turrets I passed. Even the elevator shaft had had them at regular intervals, along with shield generators, gas vents, electrified fields, others I didn’t even recognize. If I hadn’t been trying to break in, I would have been impressed. Whoever had designed this place was a master of redundant fail-safes. Every trap had overlapping fields of fire and multiple power sources to make sure they kept firing even if you managed to cut the line. Too bad all that didn’t do shit against a phantom’s field, but then, considering who the Dark Star was built to hold, I bet they’d never thought they’d be in this situation.

  “Keep it up, Maat,” I said as I stepped over the discolored stripe on the floor marking where a shield normally stood. “Keep it up.”

  Maat didn’t respond. She’d been getting quieter over the last few minutes, floating along silently behind me like a ghost in truth, her eyes flat and overly dilated. Considering what she’d said about their plans to drug her, I was pretty sure that was exactly what was going on, but though the station lights flickered occasionally, they didn’t come back on. Drugged or not, she was still holding back her aura and keeping her end of the bargain. For now, anyway.

  My destination was the door at the very end of the hall, the tip of the star’s ray. The Dark Star’s brig was just as guarded as everything else, the entry flanked by auto-fire turrets and overlapping shields. But even with all of those down, I still had to deal with the actual prison door.

  My density scanner couldn’t even penetrate the solid steel mass, which meant shooting or burning my way through was out. I considered asking Maat for a repeat of the trick she’d used to open the blast door on the battleship, but she was nearly catatonic now, her head lolling, so I decided to try another approach. I flipped my visor back down and turned to the wall beside the door, peering through the much thinner metal to see if I could spot a weak point, and got a flash of good luck.

  The prison door was made of two interlocked heavy metal halves on a track, but the pressure that kept them pressed together and locked the interior latches down came from a hydraulic pump, which was buried in the wall. Naturally, the door had locked in place when the main power went out, which meant the pump was still extended, using the pressure from the liquid inside to keep the doors pressed tight together, and that gave me an idea.

  I flexed my wrist, popping Elsie from her sheath. Another thought had my thermite blade flaring to life, filling the dark hall with blinding light. Fortunately, I only needed it for a second. I wrenched back, letting my targeting system line up my punch before I slammed my blade through the wall and into the pump inside. My Elsie might not have been able to cut through the prison door, but she cut through this just fine. Once I was sure I was where I needed to be, I braced my legs and pushed her up, slicing the pump, the hydraulics, and reservoir hose clean through. Liquid starting pouring out into the wall immediately, and the prison doors sagged with a clunk as the pressure forcing them closed vanished.

  I extinguished my thermite to save the rest of my blade and pulled Elsie back before pressing my shoulder against the door. Normally, there was no way my speed combat suit could lift something this heavy, but without the pressure locking it shut, the enormous door was just a big weight on tracks. I didn’t have to lift it; I just had to slide it. Even so, I almost burned out my suit’s motor shoving the halves the two feet apart I needed to slip through.

  With my visor down, I couldn’t see the phantom’s light, and the inside of the prison was surprisingly dark. Even darker than the hallways, where a few battery-operated emergency lights still barely glowed, giving my night vision something to work with. In here, though, I didn’t have squat, but since I didn’t want to raise my visor if I could avoid it and I’d already made enough noise to wake the dead cutting my way in, I took the easy solution and turned on my suit’s floodlights, filling the room with light.

  There wasn’t much to fill. Unlike the rest of the station, Rupert hadn’t been to the brig before, so I didn’t actually have a clear picture of the area until I saw it for myself. The door opened into a narrow hall lined with glass-fronted cells, though only two looke
d to be currently occupied. When I saw who by, I nearly cracked up.

  “Well, well,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “Fancy running into you folks.”

  In the cell next to me, the girl who’d been shielding her eyes against the sudden light dropped her hands with a jerk, and my grin widened as Nova’s pale face came into view. “Deviana?”

  Her startled voice roused the other prisoner, who’d looked like he’d been trying to pull himself into a ball of feathers before he raised his head. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “Hello, Nova,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Hello, Basil.”

  “What are you doing here?” Nova said, pale eyes wide. “Is the captain here, too?”

  “What’s going on outside?” Basil spoke over her, hopping to the front of his cell with a flap to tap his beak against the thick glass. “What were those explosions? Are we under attack?”

  We were, but I didn’t think it would be helpful to let them know the details right now. “The captain’s not here,” I said, walking up to Nova’s cell. The glass was bulletproof and shatterproof, but it didn’t look nearly as bad as the box the xith’cal had put me in. Elsie should be able to slice it with a little leverage. “But it’s a long story and I’m short on time. Stand back and I’ll get you out.”

  Nova and Basil exchanged a look. “I don’t want to project ingratitude for your generous offer, Deviana,” Nova said. “But I don’t think a prison break is a good idea right now.”

  I gave her a funny look. Prison breaks were always a good idea in my book, but Basil was nodding furiously. “You’re in huge trouble, monkey,” he said, eying me up and down. “I don’t know what’s going on exactly, but you’re bad news.”

  “Worse than being locked up?”

  Seeing Basil fluff his feathers in a huff was as nostalgic as it was annoying. “The captain said we were here for our protection, and I believe him,” he snipped. “If we go with you, we’ll be accomplices to your criminal activities.”

  I rolled my eyes and turned back to Nova, who gave me a plaintive look. “We appreciate your efforts,” she said. “But while Basil and I would like to assist you along your trajectory, unless you need a jump calculated or light plasmex services, we would probably be more of a hindrance than a help. So thank you for the offer, but we’ll remain in this space for the current present, if that’s all right.”

  Personally, I would have taken the out anyway, but then, I wasn’t Nova. She was a civilian with no combat experience or armor. That prison wall probably looked more like a shield than a blockade to her.

  “Suit yourself,” I said with a shrug. “But maybe you can help me anyway. Did you see Rupert come through here?”

  Nova nodded rapidly. “Oh yes, they brought him in a while ago. He’s at the end of the hall.” She pointed down the line of glass-fronted cells toward the back of the prison my lights hadn’t reached yet.

  I took a deep breath to keep my hopes in check. “How did he look? Did you see what they’re using to hold him?”

  It didn’t seem possible, but Nova’s paper-white skin went even paler under the glare of my floodlights. “I couldn’t say for sure,” she whispered, her voice almost too low for me to hear through the thick glass. “I’ve never seen anything like that, but it looked very bad.” She bit her lip. “What did he do?”

  Sided with me, I thought with a scowl. “Nothing,” I told her. “One last question. Do you know what deck the hyperdrive-capable ships are being stored on?” Because Rupert remembered this place having functional two docks, but only one was kept operational at a time for security reasons, and I didn’t want to waste precious minutes going to the wrong one. “Like, did you see any when Caldswell brought you in?”

  “The dock we put in at had several hyperdrive-capable ships,” Basil chirped, his big yellow bird eyes shining like lamps in my light. “But they were all on lockdown. You’ll never get in.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said, starting down the hall. “Was it the top dock or the bottom?”

  “There is no up or down in space,” Nova reminded me. “But it was the one closest to the observation deck.”

  Top, then. “Thanks,” I said, pushing up my visor so she could see my smile. “You’re the best, Nova.”

  She blushed scarlet in the floodlight before I turned it away.

  “Deviana!”

  I looked back at my name to see Nova pressed against the glass. “Be careful,” she said softly.

  I smiled wide. “Careful as I’m able,” I promised.

  Basil made a sound that was part squawk, part snort, and completely disbelieving. I didn’t feel the need to dignify it with a response as I picked up the pace, following the hallway toward the back of the brig.

  I’d noted before that the brig wasn’t large, and it wasn’t. The cells were shallow and the hallway was narrow, barely wide enough for my armor to fit comfortably. But while the prison wasn’t wide or spacious, it was surprisingly long. By the time I’d left the lower security area with glass-fronted cells and reached the much more serious rooms at the back, I couldn’t even see Nova or Basil anymore.

  The cells here were smaller and completely closed in, no glass fronts, though I could see from the vents on the walls that the doors were meant to be covered in shields, all of which were down thanks to the power outage Maat was still holding strong for me. With my visor up and my lights on, though, I could see just fine. The phantoms were thick as tar here, opening up only to let me through. Maat, however, was nowhere to be seen. I was pretty sure that meant they’d finally drugged her into oblivion, which meant I needed to get a move on before the power came back on and I ended up being the prisoner who’d broken herself into jail.

  Unfortunately, every cell I checked was empty. By the tenth one, I was starting to get really worried. What if Caldswell was wrong? What if they’d just killed Rupert once they got him back here? What if I was too late? But before I could get too worked up, the hallway came to an abrupt end, and I found myself face-to-face with a final pair of cells.

  They were both squeezed in at the end of the hall, which didn’t make much sense to me. Considering the already claustrophobic width, there was no way either cell could be bigger than a closet. Both doorways had the usual discolorations that showed there was supposed to be a shield over them, but unlike the ones I’d passed on my way back, these cells didn’t have actual doors. Instead, they were blocked off from the hallway by thin metal mesh not much thicker than a bug net with yellow caution tape and rubber rollers on the sides.

  My eyebrows shot up. Apparently, this netting was supposed to be electrified. Very electrified if the grounding wires were anything to go by. With the power off, though, the fancy electric mesh was nothing but a very expensive metal curtain, and I shoved it aside without a second thought to see if I’d found Rupert at last.

  When I shone my light in, however, I still wasn’t sure, mostly because I couldn’t make sense of what I saw. I’d been right about the size of the cell; it was little bigger than a closet, barely wide enough for my armor and maybe two feet deep. And in this tiny space was a man, though he was so bound up I wasn’t actually sure about that last bit. His body had been wrapped like a corpse in heavy plastic weave straps, the crazy tough kind they used to secure exterior starship cargo, and his feet were anchored to the floor with an inert plasma weight so large I didn’t think I could lift it with my suit. But worse than all of this by miles was the mask that engulfed his head.

  Aside from the incident in the mines, I’d never thought of myself as claustrophobic, but seeing that horrible, faceless, smooth metal prison wrapped all the way around the prisoner’s skull almost gave me a panic attack. It also looked horribly familiar, like I’d seen it before in memories I didn’t want to remember. Or maybe Rupert didn’t want to remember them? It was getting hard to tell. Wherever I’d seen this mask before, though, it hadn’t been good, and I didn’t like the look of it now either. There was something unspe
akably wrong about the way it covered his entire head with no openings at all, not even air vents, just metal clamped down so hard it cut into the skin of his neck.

  And that was where I got my clue. Though the heavy straps covered him everywhere else, a strip of the man’s neck right below the helmet was bare, showing enough skin for me to make out the pale color I knew so well. It was Rupert, I’d found him, and I had to get him out of that thing right this second.

  “Rupert,” I called, ducking under the supposed-to-be-electrified mesh to stand as far inside the cell as I could get. “Rupert!”

  He didn’t stir at the noise of my entrance or his name, and I cursed. They must have drugged him. I hadn’t planned on that. But symbionts recovered quickly from everything. Maybe I just had to get him out?

  I reached out to do just that, hooking my hand under the closest of his straps so I could slice him free, but the moment I touched him, Rupert lurched forward, swinging on his tiny bit of slack to slam me into the wall.

  “Oof,” I grunted, stepping back. He’d hit me hard enough to knock my wind out even in my suit—no small feat considering his limited range of movement. But rather than being mad at him for body slamming me, pride filled my chest. He might be soft spoken, but my love was a fighter, and apparently not drugged at all. He’d pulled back quick as a switchblade when the blow was done, pressing himself flat against the back wall, no doubt waiting for me to make another move.

  “It’s me, Rupert,” I called, but though my voice was offensively loud in the small cell, Rupert didn’t even flinch … and that was when I realized he couldn’t hear me. The mask must be a sensory-deprivation device. He probably couldn’t make out a thing. I grimaced, a prison indeed, and I was more determined than ever to free him. If the mask was that horrid to look at, I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to wear.

  I reached for him again, gently this time, my fingers landing lightly on his chest, letting him feel it was me since I had no other way of telling him. He tensed when I touched him, but he didn’t try to slam me into the wall again. I smiled and squeezed my fingers against his chest in a way I hoped he’d recognize as friendly. Then, after a quick look around to make sure I wasn’t about to be unspeakably stupid, I snatched my hands back and pulled off my helmet.