by C. G. Hatton
“We need to get all this on record,” NG said.
“I know,” LC muttered.
“C’mon, let’s go play.”
It hadn’t gone well the last time they tried anything like this but LC nodded.
“Get Hilyer and Badger,” he said. “Might as well get Morgan as well. He should see this.”
They moved out to the controlled environment of a clean room, more techs in there waiting for them. It was chilly. They should have set the temperature higher. He’d shrugged off the cobwebs from the anaesthetic and dressed, arm immobilised completely. Then they’d come here, to be watched, analysed, laid bare.
LC stared at him, tossed back a mouthful of beer and said, “Seven of diamonds.”
NG flipped over the card. Seven of diamonds. And he’d had it shielded, locked down as tight as he could make it.
Badger was sitting back, watching. “Shit. I’m not playing any of you guys at poker again.”
Hil was shuffling another deck, close to laughing.
It was impressive to see the progress in LC.
Leigh leaned forward. He’d kept his promise and shown them the healing, surrounded by a team of techs and monitored from every angle by equipment that was measuring everything possible within the laws of medicine, physics and the universe. It was on record. And now they were observing this. Everyone would know everything. It didn’t matter. Because sooner or later, it really wouldn’t matter at all.
“Seriously?” Leigh said.
Duncan leaned across and took a card, looked at it, switched in his mind’s eye the way he read it and placed it face down on the table.
Clever.
‘Too clever?’ Duncan thought.
‘It would have beaten me not so long ago,’ NG replied, impressed.
They were fooling about. Making light of a crap situation the way you do in the cold darkness of the early hours when you know an attack is coming and all you can do is wait and joke, and check your weapon for the tenth time.
Leigh was calmly working through the implications of all this. “We thought you all just had some kind of hardwired comms that weren’t affected,” she said, meaning on Erica. “And this is from the virus? But you…?”
NG shrugged, non-committal, no need to complicate the matter. He glanced at the techs and said out loud, “You want to take this up a notch?”
The guy in charge was good, previous 2IC in Science, and the chief of Science had been pissed to lose him. “Why not?”
NG reached for a card but this time he tossed it in the air, held it there and made it spin slowly.
Morgan was watching, outwardly as stoic as ever but thinking to himself, ‘My god, the Man told us to expect someone special but all this…?’
Badger leaned on the table, staring at the card. “No way. No freaking way.” He looked around. “Can you all…?”
Duncan shook his head with a firm, “Not me.”
LC squirmed, spinning the beer bottle on its end.
“Try it,” NG said and he threw another card into the air.
It exploded into a shower of burnt ash and burning fragments that drifted down onto the table. LC pulled a face, the headache threatening to return.
“That’s how you killed them,” Badger said and the atmosphere changed. “That’s how you killed the Bhenykhn. Who else knows?”
NG raked up the ashes with his hand. “For the moment, no one.”
They played for another hour. He’d shown them the fire, kept it contained to a neat ball in the palm of his hand, but it had still freaked them all out. The tech guys had been beyond themselves, ranting on about fuel, where’s the fuel and how the hell is he creating that much heat? He didn’t know and didn’t care. When they got word that Quinn was on his way in, he sent them all to the briefing room.
Leigh wasn’t happy. She stopped him at the door.
“You need to get some rest,” she said. She’d been monitoring his vitals in there and was thinking that if he’d been a member of her crew, she would have pulled him off post and assigned him unfit for duty in an instant. She was wondering how he was still standing. “When was the last time you got any sleep?”
Christ, he could hardly remember. Before they went out to Tortuga chasing Gallagher. He’d been unconscious a couple of times, when the Wintrans had kicked the shit out of him and when Ghost crashed. Did that count?
He wanted nothing more than to be able to crawl into a bunk and sleep.
“NG…”
He flashed her a look that said don’t argue and brushed past.
The table was still strewn with boards and files. He sat and looked round at them.
“Pen isn’t going to listen to me,” he admitted. “Give me five minutes with Quinn then brief both of them. Give them everything. It’s all here. Let Quinn persuade Pen.”
“Tell them everything?” LC said, pale, spinning a beer bottle on its end in front of him.
“Everything.” Including the file of data they’d just generated. They were beyond the point of no return. They needed allies and those allies needed to know what was going on.
“Me too?” Hil asked.
“Everything.”
‘Except the fact that you’re alive?’ flashed into LC’s mind.
‘Join me being dead if you want.’
‘Do you know how tempting that is?’ The kid was still feeling bad that Olivia and Sean had been drawn into this mess because of him, that was obvious enough.
“We’re still going after Zang and UM,” he said, out loud. “But let’s not give them the chance to pull a fast one again.” He looked at LC and Hil. “You both stay here. Grounded, you understand? Hil, I want you to figure out what the hell is happening with you. I need you back in action, not flaking out every time you get within two hundred yards of an AI. Work with Quinn.”
He glanced round. “Pull whatever and whoever you need from the Alsatia. I want to know what this virus is doing. Duncan, work with Jameson when he comes round. We need him up to speed. Understand?”
There were nods.
“Okay, give me five minutes.”
It took longer than five minutes, not easy having to own up to faking your own death. Quinn was as contained as always, relieved, furious at him on Evelyn’s behalf and half pissed that he’d been fooled. The big handler had looked at him, thought back to the state NG had been in when they’d picked him up from Erica and wanted to know how much of it had been real. “All of it,” he’d said. The story they’d come up with was that he hadn’t made it through the surgery, which wasn’t totally untrue. They had all the stats, all the evidence they needed right there, they’d just not included the bit where he’d woken up screaming. After that, the big man had been as pragmatic as always and simply asked, “What now?” NG had replied, “Now you get to talk to another dead man. Get Pen on side because we can’t let him know all this and walk away. You understand?”
Then he’d left them to it, skipped out so he didn’t need to see Pen again and walked down to the Man’s chambers. He paused in the anteroom as he passed the Bhenykhn kill token mounted on its display stand. LC’s amulet. The rest of the damn tokens they’d collected on the battlefield had been splattered with mud and blood, not so aesthetically pleasing. He took it with him, resting his hand on the heavy wooden door before pushing his way inside.
He crossed the threshold, entering the warm, humid chamber. If anyone tried to get in touch with him in here, they’d have a hard time, whatever method they were using. He had no idea why or how but whatever was shielding the place, it was beyond Badger and that was saying something. They’d asked Morgan but he didn’t know either.
He lit a couple of candles and sat behind the desk. There was a pile of reports on the desktop, filtered, stuff that would have gone into the matrix of grey files not so long ago to be cross-referenced and analysed for patterns, signs, anything that might hint at the unusual. Now he knew it was the Bhenykhn they were looking for and it was infuriating to think he coul
d have done better if he’d known more about them at the time. He’d never questioned the Man. And he should have done. Probably had, come to think of it, considering what Sebastian had said.
He put the Bhenykhn token to one side and flicked through the reports. Nothing startling. Nothing that gave a sense of when they might be back. He laid it all out and set up a stack of orders for Morgan to send to the Alsatia, for Media and the Chief, weird to work by remote, and nothing that felt terribly cohesive. He got that done then set up a new tab, Elliott’s key fragments from Marathon, Stirling and Kochitek. Christ knows how they were going to manage the last two. He put in as many details as he could, tagged it as a special projects priority and left it for Quinn. The big man could figure out with Badger how they were going to do it.
Then he sat back.
He thought of opening a bottle of wine. The rack on the far wall was still well stocked. But it wouldn’t be anything without the black powder. He opened a drawer in the desk, one that had been locked. He felt a pang of guilt that he’d broken the lock, as if the Man might disapprove of the vandalism. He rifled his hand randomly through the contents, brushing aside archaic notebooks and ink bottles, fountain pens and wax blocks, hoping it might have appeared as if by magic but there was still nothing in there that looked like it might contain that elusive substance.
He shut the drawer, trying to figure out if he felt angry. Sad. Anything. He missed what had been. And he felt resigned to what would be. It wasn’t a good state of mind to be in.
He picked up the token again and held it in his upturned palm. The Man had set this acquisition, a steal from Angmar Rodan’s own private collection, as an open tab. Ludicrous points at stake. He would have chased it himself if he’d still been a field-op.
He stared at the twisted metal. The Man must have known what it was.
He curled his fingers around it and let his eyes close.
The damp chill descended fast, wrapping tight around his senses as if to restrain him. Dark walls closed in, pressure building.
Warm blood was flowing down his neck.
His chest was burning.
Head pounding.
Flashes of pinprick light began to swirl. Hypnotic patterns that were tantalisingly familiar. Enticing glimpses and flickering glances at charts and numbers that spun away as he tried to focus.
It was dizzying.
Distressing.
His heart rate was increasing. Internal temperature spiking.
He couldn’t break free.
They were battle plans.
He couldn’t breathe.
It was sickeningly out of reach, dancing just beyond his grasp.
The scent of leaf mold hung heavy.
The numbers were horrifying. Details flashed across his mind faster than he could think.
It accelerated. Intensified. He dropped to his knees, head bowed, arms shielding his head as if he could fend off the pressure as it became unbearable.
Worse than unbearable.
The darkness became a dense void.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
And snapped them open with a gasp as fingers pressed against his neck. He was slumped across the desk, cheek resting against the warm wood. His heart rate was erratic, breathing ragged, and for a second he felt like he couldn’t control it, couldn’t gather himself enough to get a grip. He was going under again but he thought he could feel a hand pressing gently between his shoulder blades, warm, bringing him back.
Devon.
Except it wasn’t. And it never could be.
He almost lost it.
She wasn’t Devon but her voice was soft. Familiar. “NG…”
He uncurled slowly, sat, blinking away the chill, slowing his breathing. Badger was there. Morgan. And Leigh. They were uncomfortable, like they felt they shouldn’t be in here, except he’d disappeared for so long…
“How long’s it been?” he muttered.
“Sixteen hours,” Morgan said.
The kill token was still in his hand. He let it drop to the desk and scrubbed his hand over his face. It didn’t feel like it had been that long.
Leigh was thinking that he’d scared her, he’d been virtually unresponsive when they found him, that she shouldn’t have been so stupid to have left it so long to realise something was wrong when she couldn’t find him. She wanted to ask if he was okay but she knew he wasn’t, so she said instead, uneasily, “What’s going on?”
He looked up. “I know where they are.”
“What?” Badger said.
He said it again, with more certainty. “I know where they are. And I know what they’re planning.” Sebastian had thrown it at him, on Erica, when he’d conceded control and the bastard was taunting the crew of the Bhenykhn ship. Sebastian had lifted every scrap of intel from their systems and thrown it all at him. “At least, I know I know it. I don’t know how to…” Christ, it was infuriating. “Where’s LC?”
“In the mess,” Morgan said and hesitated. “There’s something you need to know…”
Badger wasn’t so shy. “Angmar Rodan is on Poule,” he said.
Chapter 10
They listened to his story again, prompting for more, questioning when they wanted more detail, looking down at him and thinking he should have acted differently.
She was the only exception. She had been the only exception all that time ago when they had voted the last time they had come together like this. She was thinking that they owed these creatures their help, that Nikolai should not have had to go through all this alone. She looked up and caught his eye, knew he was watching her and knew he was probably reading her mind.
‘You should have told him,’ she thought softly, regretful.
‘I know,’ he thought back, even though she couldn’t hear. None of them could hear. He was the only one who could, the only one so talented in his galaxy as Nikolai had been the only one in this. Now, with the ‘virus’, this organism…? Maybe it would make all the difference…
•
“How the hell did we not see that?”
Badger shook his head, furious that he hadn’t seen it, hands stuck firmly in his pockets as they walked.
NG used the Senson. “LC, get your ass to the briefing room.”
“Elliott’s going to meet us at Poule,” Badger said. “Are we taking…?” He didn’t know what to say. The guild? Were they not still guild themselves? Reinforcements?
“I’ll take anyone who wants to come.” They’d been jerked around and he was done with it. “Get two extraction teams on standby for a special projects op.”
Badger stopped. “NG, wait.”
He turned slowly.
“We’re in the middle of a war, NG. This intel on UM came from Elliott. We have no idea who he is, never mind what side he’s on. Seriously, NG, this could be a trap for all we know.”
“It doesn’t matter if it is, right now it’s all we have to go on.”
Badger was agitated. “From everything we’re seeing, the Order isn’t controlling this war,” he said. “There are hundreds of pressure points that were close to boiling over anyway. This has just given them all an excuse to kick off. We should have guessed the JU would go in for LC like that after what happened to Hil on Abacus.”
NG rubbed his hand over his eyes. “I know.”
“Sanctions and trade embargoes are popping up out of nowhere all over the place,” Badger said. “It’s driving the Merchants insane. Nothing coordinated. Nothing backed by any weight. The Empire is moving to regain colonies they abandoned decades ago. The corporations are talking about pulling together a combined fleet that is bigger than anything Earth could field and they’re using it to intimidate any place that’s trying to stay neutral into backing them.” He stopped, realising that NG was just staring at him with none of the energy that talk like that used to generate. “And none of it matters because the Bhenykhn are coming back.”
It was hard not knowing when. Worse than if they had a deadline. And the instabi
lities made it impossible to think they could announce it to all and sundry without a massive backlash, not when the guild’s position was so precarious.
“UM know about them,” NG said. “So I want to know what UM are doing. Get me everything you have on Poule.”
LC walked in, holding a cold beer bottle to the back of his neck, sat down, looked up at him, and said, “Poule? Seriously?” The kid looked like he needed a week’s sleep.
NG took a sip of his tea. “Yep.”
“Hal was there as well,” LC said, a tad too defensively.
“I know. I’ve already talked to him. He didn’t get to hack into the station’s security system.” He pushed across a board. “I want everything you have.”
To give him credit, the kid didn’t complain. He just nodded vaguely, popped open the beer and pulled over the board. It was already loaded with everything Badger had trawled up on Poule and UM, including the hostile takeover when Zang Enterprises got kicked out.
NG watched as LC flicked through a couple of the screens, frowning and saying, “Didn’t UM take Erica as well?”
“From Aries,” he said. “Same deal by the looks of it. Badger’s trying to find out what else they’ve been acquiring.”
It was another oversight. Something else he should have seen.
“Poule was a shithole,” LC said. “They had prisoner pens all along the dockside.”
And NG saw it as the kid flashed back to dark, cold, gunfire, shouts, violent convicts that Elliott had released running riot around station security. He flashed forward and they were both hit by an intense stabbing pain in the thigh, burning fever, senses scrambled in a whirl of noise and confusion. It switched again in a flash, this time a street scene, Aston, more yells, impacts punching into his arm, shoulder, more, spinning him round until one took him low in the back and he hit the floor.