It seemed like years since she’d set out for a normal day in the pod. Eons.
Ash watched the pilot mutter to himself, clawing shapes in the air like a deranged magician. It was just as well she was being sidelined. With her brain the way it was, she would never be used to the haptic interfaces, she thought; she was all buttons and switches and shoulder-mounted mining lasers, the last breathing remnant of the human world that existed before the Vai. Maybe she had died back there on Bittersweet, beside Christopher. Maybe all of this since had been some sort of sick purgatory. A holding pattern for hell.
Ash coughed, clearing her throat. “Did you know that they didn’t have a concept for war, before they met us?”
“What do you mean?” Len said.
“Cruelty. They learned that from us.”
“Please be quiet during preflight,” said the pilot, his voice muffled.
The engines whirred to life. Ash let the heads-up blur, looking past it for the last time to the planet beyond. The red trees of Tribulation lived on, blithe and oblivious, their leaves shivering in the sulfur wind. The shuttlecraft shook and sputtered through the too-familiar motions—the sound of the grav-drive spinning up, the tight pull on her shoulders and feet as ship’s gravity reasserted itself. The familiar feeling tore at what was left of her composure, and suddenly she was dizzy again, leaning forward in the safety straps, sobbing. The universe tilted on its axis, shaken free of Tribulation’s gravity at last. She felt nausea, stomach-clenching pain, a screaming loneliness.
She felt a hand on her knee.
“Doing okay?” whispered Len.
“Yeah.” She opened her eyes.
“I call bullshit.”
“I’m fine.”
He snorted. “You know what she used to say. Space plus bullshit equals death.”
Ash thought of Keller standing on the bridge of Twenty-Five, bathed in blue and yellow light, her hair half tied up with wisps by her ears, her hip canted to one side, and for a moment she could not breathe. Keller had tried so hard to make her stance look like an executive’s but could never quite manage. There was something provincial there, uncouth and unpolished and utterly fascinating. The vision caused a hard, terrible lump to form in Ash’s throat and stole her words away. She reached into her pocket to hold the comforting warmth of the weapon. It hummed.
“I’ve got six months, Len,” she said.
He blinked, uncomprehending. “Until citizenship?”
“No. Six months tops.”
Len said nothing. His hand left her knee and went up to take hers, lacing through her fingers, holding them tight.
Below them, the settlement spun out like a distracted, drunken top, the city with it, its dead green dreams gasping against the inevitable. She watched the back viewscreen until she could no longer see buildings, and then turned back to the stars. They shook and whirled and cried. She heard whispering. The together. Christopher. Kate. They sounded as real as Len. She needed it to stop before she decided to claw her eyes out.
“Dr. Julien,” she said.
“Mm?” He looked up from a tablet.
“Do you have any trihex shots on you?”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re starting you on a slate of new meds when we get you settled in to molecular development, so just try to hold on until we get to Rio.”
“New meds?” Ash’s breath caught. “A cure?”
Julien looked distracted; he looked back toward the viewscreen, the HUD, the shuttle’s rumbling trajectory out of Tribulation’s stratosphere. The air barreled away; stars began appearing in ones and twos, then hundreds. Here were the constellations that had just begun to become familiar over the last few months—the ones Kate had named the Drunk Executive, the Ration Bar, the Ballerina.
“Well,” he said, still typing. “R&D has had literally three hours to work on it, so no. But we do have some promising antipsychotics, for now, at least.”
The shuttle rumbled beneath Ash’s body. The pilot made minute movements of his fingers, tilted his hands to adjust the shuttle’s path. “The cure’s still on the table, though?”
Julien hesitated, his face falling into an emotion that barely resembled sympathy. “We know what you’re up against. We’re going to do our best.”
Bullshit, Christopher whispered.
“Hey, look outside.” Len had his eyes narrowed, staring past Julien and the pilot to the faraway spinfield. Ash started to make out the familiar curves of the battered hulks, and then of London’s, of the thousand glittering pieces of metal that twirled endlessly in the void in front of the curve of the ship’s hull.
Behind them were new shapes, dark blue against pitch black, catching the Tribulation sun on their familiar curves. They were Auroran warships like Rio, meant to slice through the hulls of Vai vessels, to defend, to protect, to stand against the darkness. She’d never seen so many gathered in one place.
“Holy crap,” Len said. “That’s Hong Kong, Medellin, Cape Town—”
Julien leaned back in his chair. Now that they were out of the atmosphere, he unbuckled his safety straps and stood. He lay his arm on the top of the chair. The motion drew his jacket back, revealing that he carried a personal boltgun.
“This is a big find,” he said. “Tribulation is about to become a popular place. We’ll need to defend it.”
Len gave a nervous chuckle that turned into a rattling cough. “We’re expecting a battle?”
“Mr. Solano is always hopeful that any intercompany dispute can be resolved in a peaceful fashion,” Julien responded. “What’s that thing they teach you in school—that ancient phrase from the Democratic Age? ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’?”
Ash watched the ships approach with a growing sense of dread. The cruisers’ rail guns, their armor, their overpowered spinal lances—none of it would matter a damn if the Vai showed today. Once the Vai learned the secondary and tertiary node were truly dead, along with their portion of together. So many dead. They would come.
And if Ramsay showed too, what would happen then?
There’s no department called molecular development, she thought.
There might not have been three hours ago, Christopher whispered back.
“After the cure is administered, will I be able to control the weapons? Or are you going to do this to someone else once I’m cured?” Or dead?
He looked back to the spinfield. “We’ll talk on Rio.”
Len squared his jaw and shook his head.
Ash’s mouth felt dry. “Dr. Julien, please.”
Julien stared into the viewscreen. His shoulders tightened. “You signed a contract. That contract limits what I can tell you.”
Frustration made her itch. Ash dug her fingernails into her thigh to keep herself from hearing Christopher. “This is my life, Dr. Julien, and you’re a doctor.”
He was quiet for a moment, then he put the tablet aside. “Celestium sickness is one thing. It’s almost prohibitively expensive, but it’s eventually curable, with enough investment. This is celestium-bonded alien nanotech, and it’s…” he said, low, with a tremor in his voice. “Well, it’s so expensive we don’t even have figures for it yet. And I’ve studied Sharma’s work, but I’m not Reva Sharma. All I know is that it’s beautiful and terrible. The power of a thousand suns in your fingers, but such a trade.”
Ash looked down at her hands: dirty, streaked with the alien’s blood, trembling. Calloused. A worker’s hands. A weapon’s.
“A trade. My life.” The words came out crumbled, like boots on bone, like gravel.
“But you’re going to do such wonderful things, Ashlan,” he said. His eyes were wide and earnest. “You’re going to pave the way for a whole new approach of seeing human life in space. You’ll do this. You’re going to be the founder of a brand-new Aurora. We’re going to be able to get so many people off the dole, found so many new colonies, make new lives for hundreds of thousands of people. I’ll fight for that.”
She took a r
agged breath in and held it. Stars exploded in her eyes. Her thinking felt congealed, like she’d dropped a milkshake on the deck and forgotten it for days, like she’d come back two days later expecting to drink it. To distract herself, she examined the haptic interface again. If she hadn’t walked into the Sacrament lab, she might not have recognized that the whole setup stank of Vai power. That every new ship on Aurora had it, and every new ship in every decent Company. She’d thought it was a normal development of Companies collaborating after the war, but now she wasn’t so sure.
The pilot made a few, slight course changes with his left hand; the numbers in the destination field shifted and the nose of the shuttle angled to the side. She felt the pull of the grav-drive at her shoulders. Ash narrowed her eyes, checking the coordinates with the trajectory, imagining the destination as she had whenever she’d been behind the controls.
Their trajectory was not correct.
“Why aren’t we going to Rio?” she asked.
Julien looked up. “Hm? We’re going to Rio.”
“We’re not,” Ash said. “That trajectory is taking us to one of the three ships on the fore-end of the formation.”
The doctor looked over at the pilot, and then checked a few readings on his own interfaces. “You’re right,” he said. The pilot kept on, silent, his left hand tilted, his right hand raised as if conducting an orchestra. Speed and tiller, pitch and yaw, she thought. She’d recognize those motions anywhere, on any haptic or standard interface. The pilot had diverted on purpose.
“Hey,” Julien said, clumsy, stumbling, attempting to tower over the pilot’s seat. He put his hands on his hips, took a breath, and made an attempt at being an executive. He came off like an ill-traced hand drawing in a children’s book. “I think you’re on course for the wrong ship, pilot.”
“Our orders are clear,” the pilot said.
His voice sounded familiar.
Julien pulled up his chin and squared his shoulders. “We’re going to Rio.”
The pilot traced sigils in the air. Autopilot. He slipped off his haptics—first the left hand, then the right, laying them carefully on the console. Then, lightning-fast, he, grabbed Julien’s sidearm, and with a quick flick of his wrist, shot Julien through the head.
Blood spattered the copilot’s side; the doctor’s body spasmed and fell back over the chair, his face frozen in surprise.
Len screamed.
“I’m going exactly where I want to go,” the pilot said.
25
The medbay door shut behind Keller, leaving her standing sick, alone, and confused in the green corridor outside the room. Her fingers pressed against the metal of the doctor’s necklace, lying flat and cool against her breastbone. The doctor’s mission was believable. Admirable. She even meant well.
It didn’t change the fact that she’d betrayed Keller as well.
Move, you stupid asshole, she told herself.
I’d never call you that, you know. Silver-streaked Ash, her ghost-white smile hanging from her lips like a casual afternoon in the mess, slipped in next to her as if summoned by pure anguish.
“Not now, Ash.” Keller’s throat closed in grief.
You have no control over when I appear.
“Obviously.”
Ash laughed—cruel and soft. Move, you stupid asshole, she whispered.
She had to keep her rage under guard out here. She heard human voices down the hall, and she adjusted her hair, slipped the quarantine weave under her shirt, fixed her jacket, and started walking.
Keller thought about going straight for the escape pods without stopping for the weapon. After all, if it hadn’t been for the lies, Keller would have been inclined to trust Sharma. The doctor could have waited for Ramsay to walk in, or opened the morgue drawer, presenting Keller to the enemy captain like a holiday dinner. She hadn’t. That was something.
But there were too many lies. Not just falsehoods—outright lies, wholesale omissions. The reasons Sharma came to work on Twenty-Five in the first place. Sharma knowing about Ash’s illness and doing nothing to ease her suffering, treating her instead like a test subject, an experiment. And Ash was an indenture, sure, and as a citizen, Sharma had been well within her rights.
But rights didn’t always mean right.
She’d do her part to get the weapon away from Ramsay and her cronies, but that didn’t mean she had to bring it to the Sacrament Society. There was still a perfectly good asteroid field outside.
The decision made, Keller adjusted the flimsies on the clipboard she’d grabbed in the medbay, pretending to be entirely engrossed in them as a group of techs appeared from spinward. She winced; she’d apparently picked up the cargo manifest from Twenty-Five, broken down into delivery dates, profit structures, departmental needs, shipyards, colonies, even a line for her whiskey stash. Every line of it cut like a knife to the back.
Keller brought the clipboard to her chest and swung herself into the spine of the ship. The closer she got to the bridge and the gun batteries and Phoenix’s beating heart, the more she’d have to rely on her limited disguise and pure dumb luck. It made her nervous.
The ghost swung in behind her, climbed beside her, as if this were a normal day on Twenty-Five.
“If this used to be WellCel, you can tell me how to behave so I don’t trip any behavioral wires, hmm?”
The ghost hummed. Sorry. I can’t.
“You can’t? You grew up in this culture. Plenty of Wellspring people about. How do they stand? Do they smile? What’s the protocol for meeting an executive? Hell, is there a secret handshake?” Keller pulled herself up another level.
We never talked about it when I was alive. You were scared of bringing up bad memories, remember?
Keller swallowed a tight knot. “I regret that.”
A young, towheaded tech with Wellspring indenture tags swung into the spine from the hatch above. Keller tucked her chin, turned her face away and kept climbing as he passed. He paused, and she grabbed the last few rungs, climbing onto the first deck before he could get a good look.
The bridge deck was decorated with a strange, lavish friendliness, painted with vivacious orange curlicue phrases Keller didn’t stop long enough to read. She stepped toward the forward battery with her chin tucked and her stride long, as if the deck were her own and she belonged there.
The area was full of people of every rank and the buzz of excited conversation. Executives stood in loose groups, chatting, while men and women in heels—not executives, but some other level she couldn’t match to her Auroran experience—walked with clarion purpose from room to room. People in tech jackets like the one she was wearing gathered around open access hatches with tools and frowns, reinforcing plasma conduits for the main battery. Beyond them, just around the bend, was the dark outline of the battery hatch.
Just be yourself. Ash’s ghost appeared from behind, looking a bit out of breath.
“They’re prepping for battle,” Keller whispered.
Ash inclined her head. That makes the most sense, yeah.
It doesn’t make sense at all. If they were here for the weapon, why stay? Why aren’t they on the way back to their HQ?
Don’t you think there might be more where that weapon came from? Isn’t that why Mr. Solano was on the ansible and not one of his VPs? Never underestimate the clarity of corporate greed, Kate.
Keller worked her jaw and put one foot in front of the other, ducking between two groups with her eyes on the door. If there were more weapons to steal, we would have known about it. Or we wouldn’t have been there. One would have, or Two. Ships Solano trusted, with all-citizen crews. It’s not like Twenty-Five was even near the top of the salvager food chain.
Ash shrugged. Selling yourself short, as usual.
Never.
The ghost laughed. It sounded out of place and made Keller feel uncomfortable. And on the most important things, too. You believed your crew could log the entire Christmas list in one deployment, but not that you and I had
a future? Come on, Kate. It’s your own fault I died thinking you hated me.
“That’s not true.” Keller turned and snapped, and Ash vanished in a smoky instant.
Faces—real faces—looked up. Keller’s stomach hit the deck as she realized she’d spoken aloud. The faces examined her jacket, her pants, her armband, her mouth. She flushed, muttered an apology, and turned back to the battery.
“Wait,” she heard.
One of the executives turned, stepping in front of Keller to block her progress down the hall. Her clothing resembled Aurora’s, but her red hair was twisted in tight braids that fell loose around her shoulders, a style that no Auroran executive would have been caught dead wearing. She wore the Baywell version of birthright tags at her wrist, and a set of green tattoos on her neck. An emerald ring flashed as she extended her palm to stop Keller where she was.
“Excuse me. I don’t recognize you. Your name, indenture?”
Keller guessed from the immaculate jacket and high heels that the executive didn’t go belowdecks often, and cleared her throat, hoping words would follow. She looked down at the jacket for the name, trailing her gaze back up to the executive’s face. “Cameron.”
“From the cargo crew, right.” The executive pressed her red lips into a thin line, her disbelief evident. “Your shoes are laced wrong. Your pants are wrinkled and dirty. And you’re speaking out of turn on the battery deck, where you don’t belong. Explain.”
Keller shoved the clipboard at the executive. The flimsies caught the light. “I’m sorry. I—did not have time to prepare. The enemy ship was filthy and…” Some of those weapons were meant for the battery, she remembered. “The gunners need this list of Vai weapons we picked off the Auroran corpse as soon as possible.”
The executive plucked the flimsies from Ash’s hand, scanning them. To her right, the techs had averted their eyes, making themselves as quiet and small as possible.
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