by Nick Webb
“Pike.” She whispered the word against his lips, and there was a question there.
“Hmm?” She was far, far too short for him, but she seemed to fit against him perfectly anyway. His good arm wrapped around her and he ignored the stab of pain in his collarbone.
“This isn’t … you aren’t … it’s not like the dancing, is it?”
He lifted his head a fraction to stare at her. He couldn’t make any sense of that question. In spite of the death, the destruction, the urgency of Dawn’s mission and the dire consequences for humanity that her failure would entail, the long hours of waiting with Laura had naturally led to him feeling, well, quite horny.
And she thought he wanted to dance. Well, after a fashion, he supposed.
She swallowed and pushed herself away from him, and he saw what it cost her to take her body out of contact with his. He reached for her, but she shook her head.
“You’re trying to change my mind again.”
Like when he had danced with her on the ship, and told her about Earth to distract her from Nhean. He shook his head helplessly. Even that hadn’t been a manipulation. Not really, anyway.
Had it? He wasn’t sure why he did anything when it came to her.
“That wasn’t … what that was.”
But now he understood the personal edge to her betrayal. It hadn’t been just the principle of the thing, no. It had been that she thought his seduction was false.
“I wish to hell I didn’t want you,” he told her honestly. He shook his head when she jerked away from him. “You should be my enemy. You are, in fact, given what you plan to do.”
“I am not—” her voice wasn’t exactly shaking, but it was close. “—your enemy.”
He wanted her skin on his, the thought was making him dizzy. She was always warm, her skin hot to the touch, and the thought of those curves pressed up against him was taking brainpower he needed for other things.
Like, for instance, speaking diplomatically.
“You would kill all of humanity on this planet to give the ones on the stations a slightly better chance. I know you don’t think that’s what you’re doing, but you would. That makes you everyone’s enemy, doesn’t it?” Or maybe that was Ka’sagra. But making that particular comparison would hardly help matters.
“That is not—” She turned away, pressing at her temples.
He watched the lines of her back under the uniform, and shook his head in a desperate attempt to clear it. So he went ahead and made the comparison out loud. “You and Ka’sagra. You’re really not so different. You both want ascension, and you’re willing to sacrifice your own people to do it.”
She was silent at that.
“Is Earth really worth it?” she asked him finally. She looked around at him, and shook her head. “No, don’t tell me what you want to be true, tell me what you believe. Because sometimes what you say … it makes me think that you believe Earth is a trap, too. Am I wrong?” She squeezed her eyes shut. “God, was it all a lie? How long have you been lying to me?”
“I haven’t lied!” He pounded his good fist against his leg. “Do you not get it, I—”
He wished Dawn would come back so he could walk away from all of this. He wasn’t cut out to be a spy. He had no plan for what he was supposed to say. Nhean was….
Who knew where Nhean was. They’d all stayed radio silent for the long, tense journey to Earth. Nhean might be anywhere, and Pike didn’t have the first idea what the man wanted him to say now.
“I came back to you because I wanted to persuade you to change your mind,” he told her. “That wasn’t a lie. None of it was a lie except me not telling you that I knew your plan. That was it.”
She looked over at him. “More lies,” she said quietly.
“It is not—”
Goddammit. He pulled her back to him and his mouth came down on hers, hard. His hand tangled in her hair, her fingers slipped inside his shirt, and he lost the ability to think at all.
“I don’t know why you can’t just let this go.” He pulled her head back to kiss the bare line of her throat.
“I don’t—know why you can’t.” She gave a gasp and her nails dug into his side. She laughed when he hissed. Her fingers were fumbling with the buttons of his shirt. “Earth’s … beautiful, it really is. It feels like home, and I want it as much as you do, but how much are we going to sacrifice to—”
“Stop talking.” He was only barely listening anyway. Uniforms, it turned out, were a bitch to get off with only one hand.
“No, listen to me.” She was panting, but she held his face in her hands, and her grey eyes were fierce. “Listen to me. The fight to get them out of our cities would destroy the very places we want to live. A ground war … is terrible. We would lose so many to get this planet back. Beautiful is one thing, Pike, but how many are we willing to sacrifice for beauty? Is having Earth for a home worth so much that we’re willing to take the chance of not surviving at all if we can’t have it?”
He leaned his forehead against hers. His breath was coming ragged.
He meant to answer her. He really did, even though he wasn’t sure what he was going to say. But their bodies were still moving, and the next moment, his lips found hers again.
“I can’t talk right now.”
And she must have known that was honest, at least, because she gave a low laugh against his mouth and they didn’t talk again for a very long while.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Near Earth
Koh Rong
Bridge
He was waiting in the black, his ship a silent speck of silver in a cloud of debris, when the message reached him.
He’d taken no calls from anyone until now, there had been no contact with anyone so far. The defense satellites were ignoring him, which meant the girl must be alive to protect him—but he hadn’t heard from her, and he didn’t dare contact anyone else. It wasn’t safe, especially when he had only fragments of the Funder program to work with. He could only guess at each mechanism they might use to hack his ship.
And when you had no ship—when you couldn’t run anymore—you were dead. The Funders would never let him survive this.
And so, when his comm coils picked up the faint ping of the message, Nhean did not first respond.
But it was only a message, not a call, only words flung into the black. And he wondered who had sent it. The days were long here, outside the moon’s orbit, waiting for a call from the girl that might never come. He might as well have some distraction.
When he began decryption, he was surprised to find that he had the key to the message already. It was a message for him.
The hair on the back of his neck prickled.
He opened it to see Tel’rabim’s face, and for an eerie moment, Nhean was sure that Tel’rabim could truly see him across all the miles.
Superstition, nothing more. He crossed his arms over his chest and watched the message play out.
“I regret to inform you that the Intrepid crashed on the surface of the planet, not far from London.” Tel’rabim did not sound very regretful at all. His face looked savage. “They had refused to turn over the Dawning in a single shuttle, and during negotiations with my fleet, they were attacked by other human ships. Why, I do not know—nor do I care. You attempted to breach the security of this planet.”
“I did not,” Nhean murmured. What in God’s name had prompted Walker to refuse to turn the girl over? A single shuttle was all she needed to escape. Walker should know that—and she should certainly have known that Tel’rabim would never allow a human carrier to land near a city.
She had wanted the archives. He let his head tip back with a groan. He should never have mentioned that word. He should have told the girl not to mention that word.
Walker wanted the archives. Ka’sagra had fantastically powerful bombs? Well, Walker would want those. She would want FTL and the life support systems used in the Telestine ships—not the cheap knockoffs given to the human stations�
�and everything she could get her hands on.
How better, after all, to be free of Earth?
And in her insistence, she’d gotten the Intrepid shot down.
Panic spiked. Was the girl with her? How was he being protected now?
“You have shown yourself to be no different than the rest of your kind,” Tel’rabim continued coldly. “You have no honor. Your promises mean nothing. Your offers are poison. You attack and kill your own kind. You align my interests as much with Ka’sagra as with you, for at least her actions would rid the universe of humanity. When I defeat her, know that I will not rest until my people are free of your kind. For now, I rejoice that the admiral and her crew are dead, even if they took the Dawning down with them.”
The message clicked off and Nhean stared in silence. Slowly, he unhooked the ear piece and laid it down on the desk. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his helmswoman, Maria Hollywood, turn to look at him, and look away hastily.
Dead. They were all dead, then. It didn’t seem possible, but it was true. He had known there was an engagement, but the Funders’ fleet had fled into the darkness, pursued by the Telestines, and he had seen no transmissions from them to their headquarters. By the time he arrived to silence and a clean orbit around Earth, he had thought Walker had dropped the girl and gone to Mercury with Larsen.
He had assumed….
No, he had hoped. And hope was foolish.
He needed to get to the surface of the planet. That was the only thought in his head for one blessed moment. He’d spent the better part of a decade learning Telestine programming. If the archive was virtual, as it almost certainly was, he could try to hack it. He could find the information he needed to stop Ka’sagra. He needed to go to Earth.
And then grief hit him, unexpected and so all-consuming that he dropped into his chair and struggled even to breathe.
He could not remember feeling like this—ever. The girl was gone, not just her capabilities but the way she smiled, the way she puzzled out the problems of Telestine technology with him. Pike, who had never been easy in his company but who had been a friend of sorts nonetheless, was gone as well. Nhean remembered the laughing back and forth he had seen between Pike and his former captain, the way Pike looked at Walker when he thought no one was watching, the stories shared between Pike and Nhean himself, of their childhoods….
Even Walker. She had been a woman who might be his enemy, more so than any Telestine, and still she had matched him in wit and fire. There had been moments of alliance.
Delaney was gone, too, wasn’t he? Nhean pressed his hand against his side and grit his teeth against the pain. He could feel it like an ache. He had never grieved anyone in his life, not personally. He had been caught up in the larger injustice of the Telestine occupation, and had felt more anger than grief. Now grief gnawed with a pain so sharp that he didn’t know how he could live with it.
Except he was wrong. He had grieved. Parees. Poor, poor, Parees. And he wasn’t even dead.
“Sir?” said Hollywood. “An entire patrol is approaching.”
Anger hit him then, absolute, blazing fury. They had taken everything and they would shoot him down, now, too. He hadn’t evaded the satellites at all, Tel’rabim had simply wanted to break Nhean’s spirit before he took the Koh Rong down.
And there was nothing he could do about it. There wasn’t time to run. They would already have locked on. He stared at the ships and felt the helpless sense of fury that all of it was falling apart so quietly, without any fanfare at all.
Closer they came, and closer. He saw Hollywood lay her hands quietly in her lap and look down.
I am so sorry, he wanted to say. It wasn’t supposed to end this way for you, too. She had deserved better than to get caught up with him. She deserved to return to Mimas, buy her own little apartment in New Ghana City.
She deserved so much more than this.
When the formation glided past without even turning, Nhean stood frozen. He couldn’t seem to breathe.
“Sir.” Hollywood again. Her voice cracked. “There’s a message for you.”
He turned his head to look at her, and she gave a puzzled shrug.
“A human message?” he asked, after a moment.
“It’s … difficult to say. It’s coming from the surface.”
How could it possibly be difficult to say? He slid back into his chair and brought the message up on the screen. He gripped the desk, his jaw dropped, his eyes widened. She pushed herself out of her chair watching his reaction.
“Sir, are you all right?”
“She’s alive.” He shook his head dumbly. “The girl—she’s alive. I don’t know how….” His voice trailed away as he read the message over again.
“Does Tel’rabim have her?” It was an unusually direct question. Usually, she pretended not to know anything about Nhean’s business. She was the epitome of discretion. It was strangely jarring to know that she had heard everything he was saying over the past little while.
“No,” Nhean said slowly. “She found a way into the archives that he doesn’t about. And she’s giving us an uplink.”
Even as he said the words, they didn’t seem real. This wasn’t at all what they had planned.
It was better.
Whatever Ka’sagra was still waiting for, why she hadn’t made her move yet, they would know soon.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Inside Mercury’s Orbit
VSF Arianna King
Captain’s Quarters
Larsen settled back on his bed with a groan.
It was actually a fairly comfortable bed, and therein lay the problem. A hard, uncomfortable cot—the likes of which he’d been sleeping on since he came to the Exile Fleet—was easier to leave at any time, day or night, no matter how much sleep one had gotten.
A comfortable bed, on the other hand, made it difficult to pry oneself out of sleep.
Still, since he could only reliably get a couple of hours’ worth of sleep before some crisis or other arose, he should seize the moment.
The comm, of course, buzzed immediately.
With several choice words about any and all deities that might be listening, Larsen struggled upright and shoved his feet into his shoes.
“What?” He’d been snapping a lot since he left Earth. Nothing seemed important to him, but every little thing was important to everyone else.
“The other ships are gone.” His helmsman was almost crying. “They’re gone.”
Larsen blinked blearily at the empty room. “I’m sorry, what?”
“The other two ships Svalbard and Riker! They were tracking alongside us, perfectly, for hours—nothing wrong, nothing new. And then I just thought, they’d been tracking … too perfectly. Ships drift.”
“Uh-huh.” Larsen headed out of the room, barely remembering to close the door behind him. This didn’t make sense. She must be sleep deprived. She was talking nonsense.
He headed for the lower deck, towards the tiny window that lay one ladder and one airlock away from the bridge. Every once in a while, humans liked to use their eyes—but also, every once in a while, windows liked to fail.
“Keep talking,” he told his helmsman. “Walk me through it.” That would at least let her bleed the tension away until he could verify that the ships were, in fact, right where they were supposed to be.
“There weren’t any course corrections coming off of them.” She was half-babbling. “So I decided to ping them, you know, see how they were doing. Sometimes the helmsmen talk to one another over long watches. It keeps us awake. I know we’re in radio silence, but….”
“I’m not mad at you.” Actually, that was up for debate, but he wanted to know what the hell was going on in her head. “Just tell me what happened.”
“They were pinging me earlier,” she said miserably. “And I didn’t listen, because it was radio silence and their courses weren’t changing and you’d said not to open any channels. I thought they just wanted to talk and I didn�
�t think I should take the risk because I knew you’d be so angry if you found out….”
“You did the right thing.”
“I didn’t!” She gave a sob. “Because they needed us, they must have, they’re gone now. Something went wrong and they’re gone! I even opened a video channel to look!”
Larsen quickened his pace to get to the window and swore slightly under his breath. They’d been doing fine until she made that mistake. The video feeds, filtered as they were through the ship’s main network for object recognition, opened a vulnerability they didn’t need right now. “And?”
“And there’s nothing there.” She said the words bluntly. “I mean, there are two comm buoys flying alongside us, tracking with us, and they’re giving off the same signal the other two ships should, but there’s nothing else there. The Svalbard and the Riker are … gone.”
She was wrong. She was wrong, she was wrong, she was—
Right.
He reached the window at a full run and stared out at the black where the Svalbard should be. It wasn’t there, and the comm buoy was so small that he could barely make it out.
“What in the hell—”
He took the ladder to the bridge so fast and so sloppily that he slipped twice. He jabbed a finger at the helmsman, too angry at the world to care if she thought he was angry at her.
“You figure out when their course got too whatever-it-was—‘perfect.’” He looked over at her. “You said they were pinging you?”
“Yes. Just once at the start, the way we would to open a channel.” She lifted her shoulders miserably. “And then later, maybe an hour or so, over and over and over. I don’t know….”
“Then don’t guess,” he told her flatly. “Don’t waste your energy on guesses.”
He sank into an empty chair, eyes focused on nothing.