by Nick Webb
“He was never in on it.” Delaney looked floored. “That fight was real—between the two of them. I’ve seen men circling a woman before. They’ve got no love for one another.”
“What? No. It wasn’t like—” She shook her head. “No, Larsen … received orders from Nhean just before I went to meet the Funders. And he was planning to follow them, as near as I can tell.” She looked up at Delaney. “So, tell me. Have you all been managing me this way?”
“No.” Delaney took her shoulder carefully in his wrinkled, work-roughened hand. “Ah, shit, I’m getting engine grease on you.”
“I don’t mind.” She really didn’t. She wanted to lean her head on his shoulder and have him tell her everything was going to be all right.
Only, he wasn’t the type to say it, and she wouldn’t believe it even if he did.
“I trust you,” he told her. “I didn’t agree with shooting down the fleet when you proposed it, but I never doubted you’d see reason. If I disagree with something you say, Laura, you’ll always know it.”
She managed a laugh and went to pull away, but he held her close.
“I know you’ll get Earth back,” he said. “I know you will. Even if I don’t live to see it—”
“Jack, no.” She couldn’t listen to him say these things.
“Yes. I know that at the end of your life, you’ll be staring out at fields of crops, children playing under the open sky. You’ll have walked barefoot on the ground.”
She wanted to shake. I can’t bear this.
“I have never doubted that you would bring us back to Earth,” he told her. His smile was so proud that she felt her heart shatter. “Not once.”
“I won’t.” She broke, and the words came out in a rush. “I’m not bringing us back to Earth. That was never my plan.”
There was a silence. His bushy eyebrows drew together in a frown.
“What do you mean?” he asked her finally.
She should have kept the secret. He would never have had to deal with the knowledge, he would have followed her without question until it was done and then….
But the words tumbled out anyway.
“There isn’t any way to get Earth back.” She looked up at him through a blur of tears. “You know that. You know that, Jack, if you’re being honest with yourself.”
He stepped back, at that. “No.” He shook his head. “No, I followed you because you could get us back there.”
“But I can’t!” She half-screamed the words. “There isn’t any way.”
“We have to get Earth back.” His voice was rising.
“I’m telling you we can’t, it’s impossible.”
“We have to! There is no other option!” He slammed a hand down on one of the chairs.
“There’s FTL.” She said it quietly.
“FTL? Faster than light travel? What, just run? Pull a new technology out of our asses and just run? Leave them with our planet?”
“No.” She looked up at him, clear-eyed now. “I wasn’t going to leave them the planet.”
His face changed slowly as he realized what she meant, and his eyes closed. “No,” he said quietly.
“It is the only way.” She said it quietly. “There is no way to match them. Earth is a siren. A mirage, Jack. We were never going to get it away from them undamaged. But they’ve left their flank open. They’re betting that we’d never attack them on a large scale for fear of the damage we might do to our own planet. They haven’t even planned for this. It’s … the only way to beat them. For good.”
He took two steps back, toward the door, and she knew a moment of pure fear. He was going to have her hanged. He was going to shoot her right here.
He did something worse. She saw his face change.
“You will change your mind,” he told her. “You will.”
“Jack, it’s been decades—”
He spoke over her. “And you will find a way,” he told her. “I can’t do it, Laura, but you can. You will find a way to save it all. I believe that.”
“You shouldn’t believe that.” He was being impossible, and now she was truly angry. “Dammit Jack, think.”
“I have thought. For longer than you’ve been alive.” He shook his head. “And I know you. I know you can do it. I know you won’t let our home be lost, not in the end.” He opened the door. “I’ll summon the rest of the fleet to meet us at Earth.”
He left her with a scream building in her throat and she whirled to batter her fists against the locker. He didn’t believe her, he wouldn’t help her. He’d heard it all and the only thing he could do was deny everything.
When the door opened, she whirled back, ready to give him hell.
But it was Pike, not Delaney.
He stood in the doorway for a moment before slipping inside, and his gaze took in her tear stained cheeks and the blood on her hands.
She drew herself up carefully.
“It’s done.” She said the words she had meant to say to Delaney. They worked just as well for Pike. The comm unit was on her wrist, and there was not a damned thing anyone could do to keep her from giving Larsen the order to activate the bomb as well as drop it. That was the card in her sleeve. No matter what happened, no matter if it all went wrong and she couldn’t find the FTL in their archives and the fleet was lost … she could still make the Telestines pay.
And then make the Funders Circle pay.
Nhean thought he was the puppet master, did he? Well, she’d learned to play the game better than he had.
“You can’t stop me from doing it, it’s already done.” She shook her head. “So the dancing, the telling me that I would love Earth, all of it—it didn’t work.” She threw that at him, determined that she should wound him as much as he had wounded her. Pike paled. “Get off my ship. Go back to Nhean and tell him he failed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Triton
EFS Intrepid
Ready Room
Pike felt himself sway. “You’ve … started it?”
The mountains. The fields. The sky. He could see the wreck of Io, the slag cloud that was Vesta, rocks tumbling over one another, and the thought of Earth reduced to the same rubble was enough to make him slump against the wall. How was she going to do it?
Did it matter?
She looked away from him. “It cannot be undone,” she said finally. “And it has to be done.”
But he knew that tone from her. He knew that meant there was still a chance. He grasped onto that one fact and used it to steady himself.
“If I hadn’t found out, if I hadn’t overheard what you told Nhean right after Vesta exploded, you wouldn’t have told me until it was over,” he accused her.
She looked up at him, surprised, and fury came in a wave. She had never thought that he might feel betrayed by this. She had only thought he might interfere.
“Didn’t you think what we might lose?” His voice was thick. “Earth. Earth!”
She flinched away from the words, but her jaw was set.
“It would have killed me to know I was part of that,” he told her. The words felt too small even as he said them, and he knew immediately that he had miscalculated.
“I told you I could not save every settlement,” she spat back. “I wasn’t doing what I thought you wanted me to do, I was doing what we needed to do to stay alive!”
“Settlement? Earth is just a settlement to you? How does humanity survive without Earth? Tell me that!”
“We’d find a way, we always find a way!”
“Oh, you cannot possibly be so naïve as to—”
“All we need is FTL!” She cut him off with an angry swipe of her hand. “To find a new home. We could do it, Pike. You’ve seen the estates on Venus. We can grow enough food to keep us alive. And the Telestine fleet has FTL, we know they have the technology. That’s how they got here in the first place. One way or another, we’ll have it soon, too.”
He stared at her for a long time. Her face didn’t look
familiar at all anymore. When he had first come back to the fleet after Vesta, he had wondered how she could still look the same to him, still make his heart race with that smile, when he knew what lay behind those eyes. Now, she looked so unfamiliar that he wondered if he had ever seen her before in his life.
“Why?” he asked her. “Why didn’t you tell me? Face to face? That day you called me back to the fleet and said you wanted me to help you get the Dawning. Why didn’t you tell me what you were planning? I shouldn’t have had to learn it by eavesdropping.”
“Look at how you’re reacting.” The words were bitter. She dropped into a chair and shook her head. “You weren’t ever going to accept it. I knew that.”
“Better to have sent me away,” he said quietly, “than to have made me a part of this.” His voice lost its strength and he dropped his face into his hands. “You couldn’t have left me on the Aggy?” he asked her. “I was happy. I might even have agreed with you, before everything we went through since then. Why did I even have to be a part of this?”
He saw impatience flash behind her eyes. “We needed you to have any shot at making that mission a success. You know that.”
“I never wanted to go back to Earth, don’t you see that?” He could hardly breathe for rage. “I never wanted to get mixed up in this again. I had finally managed to forget most of it, and you sent me back. You made me go back there, to fall in love with that planet all over again just so you could take it away!”
“Someone had to go!” Her fists were balled up, and her tiny frame was rigid. “And that’s what Earth is, Pike, it’s something that draws you in and makes you fall in love! I couldn’t go, I seemed to be the only one who knew what had to be done! I could never afford to fall in love with it—no matter how much you tried to make me. That’s why Nhean sent you back, wasn’t it? To make me question my choice?”
“Yes! Of course!”
She drew herself up. “You could have doomed us all.”
“I….” The irony was almost too great for words. “I might have doomed us all?”
“Yes. Betraying me and working with Nhean behind my back. There is no way to get Earth back. None. And if you think I should have told you my plan from the outset, then prove it by accepting the truth or coming up with another plan.” She looked away and blew a breath out noisily. “So. Tell me about the archives.”
The sudden shift in topics was jarring. “What?”
“Nhean told me that you would know what was going on and why we were going back.” She was clearly running out of patience. “Was that a lie?”
“No.” Dawn had told him in a series of hushed whispers and one or two deeply unsettling images of soaring arches and giant servers, shoved into his skull with little regard for his aching brain. Pike shook his head wearily. “Tel’rabim is at some kind of library or repository in Telestine London. He’s worried about Ka’sagra’s bombs—as is Nhean. I should think you’re not,” he added sourly.
“Everyone has bombs,” she muttered. “What Ka’sagra’s waiting for, I have no idea.”
“The answer is in the archives.” He spoke as patiently as he could. “And Tel’rabim is worried enough about her that we have a chance to get into them.”
“And so Nhean is handing our greatest weapon right back to Tel’rabim.” Her look of contempt raked over him. “I’d think you’d want anything but that … and yet you’re on his side for some reason, do I have that correct? You’re willing to just hand the Dawning over to Tel’rabim?”
She still refers to her as an object, he thought.
“He has an escape plan for her,” Pike snapped back. “They’re not letting Tel’rabim just take her back.”
“Oh, of course!” Her voice was too sweet. “How foolish of me. I forgot his plans are always totally foolproof.”
“What do you want from me?” He shook his head at her. “You know Nhean had nothing to do with the fleet being split. You know he risked his life to help you out of there. You know that if it weren’t for him, you’d be dead twice over—not even just from the Funders, but from him losing faith in you. Only, he didn’t lose faith. He believed you’d listen to reason in the end.”
He had hoped that might bring her around, but it seemed to have been exactly the wrong thing to say.
“Get out.” She had sat down at the desk and she didn’t look up at him.
“What?”
“Get out.” She repeated the two words softly. “Because I don’t want to throw you out an airlock, and I swear to God, Pike, that’s what I’ll do if you keep standing there, saying shit like that.”
You’re the one who wants to destroy Earth, and you’re telling me to get out of your face because I’m the one saying infuriating things?
He stared at her for a long moment, and then he left, slamming the door behind him.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Near Earth
EFS Pius
Bridge
“Deceleration complete in one minute.” The computerized voice was perky, pleasant, and had an accent that Captain Melia George could not quite identify. Venetian, most likely. The cringe-inducing mix of various patrician, bourgeoisie accents from dozens of old Earth cultures. Mix the richest of the rich from a hundred nations, and you’d expect the resulting accent to sound like lispy, extremely careful, old-fashioned grandmothers.
Not like a good Jovian drawl. Or even vulgar Martian Creole.
“Thirty seconds,” added the polite voice.
They were here. Finally. Nearly a hundred hours later. She let herself smile as she leaned on the command desk. Walker may have thought that her deception worked, but George, watching from the battle’s outskirts, had expected Walker to try something. The bait and switch between the Santa Maria and the Intrepid had been classic Walker: lies, built on deception, and executed without thought for the danger others faced due to her choices.
It had taken longer than George would have preferred for them to figure out Walker’s most likely trajectory and destination: Earth. George didn’t know why, but her gut told her this was more than a sightseeing trip for Walker. And after four days’ hard pursuit, George would have the Intrepid in her sights, and the admiral would be dealt with.
Just like the Stockholm. She almost chuckled at how easy it was, using that code that Celestine’s man Dorian had provided her with.
The rest would follow easily. Walker’s strange, almost magical grip on the fleet would dissipate after her death and they would be able to protect and serve as they had always been meant to.
Those three other missile frigates they’d stolen would have come in handy right around now, but for some reason, Celestine had ordered them boarded, and then shipped off to some other location. Where, he wouldn’t say.
No matter. Time for action.
The klaxons blared out across the room.
“Proximity alert, ma’am,” one of the navigation officers informed her.
“Yes, I know.” George kept her eyes focused on the hovering battle readout. Soon it would populate, and her first true battle would begin. They’d been caught off-guard at Neptune, but they would not make such a mistake ever again.
“No—ma’am, there are Telestine ships ahead. They’re coming out from behind the planet.”
George’s head swiveled to look at the officer, and the bridge went silent.
“What?” she managed. Not her best moment.
The officer looked like she wanted to throw up with fear. Her eyes looked at the computer screen. “Seventeen destroyers, eight frigates, and a carrier. Ma’am.” Her voice trailed off until she was barely mouthing the words.
There was a pregnant pause. George felt the heads turn toward her, and she experienced a moment of complete paralysis. To her shame, the only thought that came to mind was to wonder what Walker would do.
“Action stations,” she said crisply. “Sound a level one alert, get our pilots in the bays, and send a message to the rest of our fleet to hang back. Let’s see if the Te
lestines take care of Walker for us. If they don’t, we’ll need to be ready to engage.”
She was pleased to see the rest of the bridge crew swing into action with relief. Her own heart was pounding, and her hands were slick with sweat where she gripped them behind her back. She ignored the covert glances from her crew and fixed her eyes on the battle layout as it began to populate.
The image of calm was just as effective as the real thing, apparently.
“Ma’am, we’re being hailed by the St. Thomas,” a communications officer reported. “They’re wondering if we should just retreat.”
“And leave the job unfinished?” George asked him. When he flushed, she reminded herself that this was only the messenger. “Tell Captain Vorkos that we were ordered to bring the admiral down by any means necessary. I, for one, do not intend to leave before fulfilling my duty. And also—” She arched a brow at the crew. “—I want to see this bitch’s ship blown to smithereens.”
That got a laugh.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Near Earth
EFS Intrepid
Bridge
The ship decelerated with a series of creaks and groans, as if the Intrepid was just as reluctant as Walker to follow this part of the plan. The Funders’ stolen ships had been gaining on the Intrepid and what remained of the task force the Santa Maria had led out to Neptune for the better part of a week now. And the remaining ships of the Exile Fleet had not all yet assembled at Earth, so for now, Walker was outgunned by the mutineers.
Hopefully, they’d be cautious enough about Earth to hold back.
Walker joined her team on the bridge with a nod to Delaney—it hurt to meet his eyes now—and another sweeping glance at the bridge crew. Every one of them, apprised of the nature of their mission, was fairly vibrating with tension.