Give up, baby, give up. Just lie down. Mother will take care of you. Go to sleep. Can I sing you a song?
It was agony, and the Foxfire did little to numb the pain. He climbed up onto his knees and then to his feet, ignoring the surge of needle pricks through his joints. All this carnage, all this chaos couldn’t be for nothing. This was his ship. He was the captain. In the hall, just before watching Rosalyn go to sleep, he had promised her he would do whatever he could to fight the Foxfire. Her AR marker blinked at the top of his vision and he followed, dragging his feet with every impossible step. Voices bled in from the corridor. He passed the broken Servitor, and Misato on the floor, and the blood-spattered cables hanging loose from the wall.
The corridor yawned before him, glittering blue, the voices getting louder and louder, Rosalyn’s AR indicator becoming a more solid triangle as he stumbled along.
Edison fell against the rounded wall, shoving along it, eyes trained forward, determination the only thing putting one foot in front of the other. Now the voices were audible, clear even, and he slid around the corner, sagging with exhaustion, both hands on his knees as he caught sight of Rosalyn, hands up in surrender, her back to the rover bay doors.
Two of them. One of him. But he couldn’t leave her like that, couldn’t give up now. Piero closed in on her, his shredded arm swinging loose, a macabre pendulum marking out the last seconds of her freedom. Rayan was at his side. They seemed to be waiting for some signal, or else Foxfire, in its growing hostility, was enjoying this sick chase.
Rosalyn flattened herself against the door. Edison saw her hand run up along the wall, her knuckles brushing the little LED touch panel at shoulder height. Her head turned and she saw him, eyes fuzzy behind the dirty visor of her suit. One knuckle tapped against the panel, then another, and Edison caught the faintest, saddest smile on her lips. He shook his head, but braced anyway, throwing himself across the hall and grabbing the handrail there.
He saw that strange smile one last time before the bay doors opened behind her with a force that shook the entire ship, the outer seal disengaging, sucking all three of them into the cold vacuum of space.
31
Whiplash. Tumbling. Tumbling, burning, turning . . . agony. It felt like Rayan’s spine had cracked in half from the force of the sudden gust that pulled him out the doors and into the rover bay. What was once an orderly garage with rows of well-kept vehicles and drones was now caught up in a funnel, as if the entire ship were being drained out and into space.
Space. He had one fast glimpse of it and then he was somersaulting, reaching out for anything and everything. His hands found purchase on a rubbery stump, no, a leg. Rosalyn’s leg. He was holding her by the ankles, feet kicked out behind him as the doors beyond her closed. No more of the glowing blue matter was sucked out the vortex behind them, but the rovers and drones banged hard against the sealed locks keeping them in place. A few stray crates that hadn’t been secured disappeared so quickly it was like they simply ceased to exist. It wasn’t wind pulling on them but the terrible inward breath of a hundred gods, sucking them away, ripping at them as a burning iciness crept over his body.
His body. Rayan felt the insurrection inside as he held on with all his strength, the Foxfire not quiet, not at all. It rioted. He closed his eyes against the howling windy gusts and cried out, dry, frozen and feeling his fingers slip. He imagined a million little seeds inside him scattering, or a thousand spiders scuttling for shadowy holes. A place to hide. Respite. But there was no respite. The outer ship doors were open, and space would vacuum them up unless someone pulled the lock.
A shape tumbled by, big and unwieldy, and then he felt a painful jerk on his left calf and glanced down in a panic, his hair whipping, his vision growing duller as everything in the rover bay was swept away. He was being pulled apart. Loose, grainy crumbles came free from the wound on his head, one boot going with them.
Piero. Piero had fallen out of the Brigantine in the tumult, latching onto his leg but only just, his mangled arm and its hand the only connection to Rayan, to life. To salvation.
Why did he have to come back into his body now? Coward, he thought, wishing he could summon the Foxfire back to shame it. Cowards. Cowards. Abandoned at the moment of greatest peril, of death.
No, he heard a soft, drowning voice say, I saved you once, dear one. Mother resurrected you from certain death. Here is a human’s ungrateful heart laid bare.
“Go!” he screamed. Tears dried and froze and crackled instantly on his cheeks.
Rosalyn glanced down at him. She felt him struggling and must have thought his one screamed word was for her. In a way it was. Time slowed. He looked up at her, beautiful but afraid, clinging to the safety rail just inside the rover bay. She had looped one arm around it and then the other, finding a strong grip, but not strong enough. Space would pull them out, destroy them, turn them to icy dust.
Time slowed.
He was in the galley just outside the cockpit. Piero was kicking all of their asses at crazy eights. I hate this game, he had said, throwing down his terrible hand. Why can’t we play tarneeb?
Misato had offered to switch games but Piero wanted to keep fleecing them. It was just a big show, a way to one-up them all. Piero was like that. He was being confrontational because Rayan had found something shady on his tablet. The Italian had been drinking grappa, and it smelled so foul coming out of his mouth that Rayan thought it must be paint thinner. Piero left his tablet open, and Rayan saw one of the banking tabs. How could he have that much money and still work exploratory jobs for Merchantia? Who would bother? Well, besides Misato, but she was weird that way. Piero was a mercenary; mercenaries didn’t do charity.
What’s this? Rayan had thought it funny. Piero, you’re loaded. When we get back you’re taking me somewhere nice on Tokyo Bliss Station.
Don’t look at that. Why would you look at that? What are you, a spook? Mind your own business.
It was such a harsh response. So defensive.
I didn’t mean anything by it. Relax.
Shut up, you relax. Hand me the bottle, cazzo.
The voices got bad during crazy eights. Not just bad, intolerable. Every time he tried to play a card, a small voice inside him suggested something else. It was like he was going mad, like he could suddenly read minds. The voice would tell him what card Edison was about to play, and then it would happen. Again and again he was right. This isn’t real. This isn’t possible.
The round ended and Piero won, then stood, doing a ridiculous dance, pretending to hump Edison’s head out of his sight.
He’s going to go get his bottle of wine. He wants to celebrate.
Who’s up for a drink, eh? Piero had done just as the voice predicted. It didn’t make sense. It was maddening, as maddening as the headaches and the strange dreams. Every night he dreamed of a lady all in blue, tentacles reaching out for him, strangling him until he shrieked and flew awake.
He slammed his own forehead on the table once, then did it again. At first it felt sort of good, or at least, it was a distraction from the voices and the headaches. Then he stood and did it more, harder, leaning back and throwing himself against a low support beam. The rest of the crew tried to stop him, but it was too late; he was going to get the voices out by any means necessary . . .
On the contrary, it only made things worse. The voices grew louder, more persuasive, until he couldn’t sort out his thoughts from the stranger’s. He thought maybe it was the blue lady’s voice inside him, but no, nothing so beautiful could hurt this much.
He had let it in, sped it all up, given himself that wound, and when he woke up, numb with drugs, he saw it on all their faces: You were not supposed to wake up.
In Wazir Khan Mosque there was a pale red archway, tapered, with stones worn by time and cruel winds. Leafy plants grew in the corridor beyond, leaning into the pathway to find the sun. A gate lay at the en
d of the passage, an open walkway above with three embellished arches. The walls there were yellow swirled with crimson, like a droplet of blood dropped into tea. He pictured his brothers in those arches, waving to him, beckoning him. They weren’t smiling, they didn’t look happy to see him, but even their sober greeting felt like going home. He wondered where they were just then. Io, probably, or Tokyo Bliss Station. Ehsan had taken a job on an orbital cruise off Mars. Hamid wanted to go back to school for colonial horticulture. Behram just drifted. Typical youngest. Free and unconcerned, always certain to land safely after a fall.
He moved toward the gate, toward his brothers. There was pressure on his leg, but he barely felt it. His skin and sinew felt stiff, as if he were becoming stone.
So verily, with the hardship, there is relief, verily with the hardship there is relief.
When he tried to open his eyes they were crusted and cold, as if held in front of an open refrigerator. He tried to blink but nothing happened. A kind of jagged cork wedged in his throat. Rosalyn held on still above him, safe in her suit.
But Piero. Piero pulled and pulled, trying to swing himself up even as space performed its horrible transformations. Crystals grew all along his half-naked body, frosting the silver-white eyes, the torn chest, the threadbare muscles in his destroyed arm. While he still could, Rayan looked down, then kicked weakly at the other man’s hand. Again. Again. The toe of his boot nudged at the hand curved around his ankle, and to his horror he realized Piero could not let go; his fingers had frozen into place, hard and brittle as rock salt.
Go, Rayan thought. Let go. Let go now. I’ll go, too, but not with you. Not with you.
Piero didn’t give up, trying to force his way up Rayan’s leg. But space moved against him. There was no fighting its inexorable pull. No sound, no sound, but in his mind he heard the crack, the shivery snap as the exposed bone and strained sinews of his elbow gave, and Piero flew away, spinning and spinning as the stars claimed another soul.
It was time to be charitable. To forgive.
Whatever you were, whoever you became, for a little while you were beautiful. We were beautiful together. Forget Mother. Forget her. Remember yourself.
Rayan couldn’t see. He didn’t know what Rosalyn looked like as he nudged his fingers free of her boot. He didn’t know if she looked relieved or sad, or if she reached for him. He had already said goodbye, made preparations. His work was in the lab, his memories and his mementos, too. Somehow it didn’t scare him so much, because at least he had chosen to let go.
It didn’t feel at all like he expected. It didn’t feel like anything at all.
32
“No! Hang on! Shit, shit. HEAR ME!”
Her ears rang in her helmet. She had been screaming at Rayan for what felt like an eternity. In reality, it had been thirty, maybe forty-five seconds. Her arms were about to give out, but even so, if she reached—if she just reached—maybe she could save him. She had to try to save him, because in those last seconds, when Piero’s arm snapped and he was ripped out of the Brigantine, Rayan had glanced her way and his eyes were his own.
Rayan had spun free of the bay doors when she saw them slowly start to close. She gasped, losing strength in one arm, reduced to clinging to the railing with one precarious hand. The force was too much, and the doors were closing too slowly. By the time they met and the bay pressurized, she would be long gone.
Oh God, oh God, not like this.
Only one more minute. Thirty seconds. Anything. But it had been hard enough holding on for that long, especially with the weight of two men dragging behind her, pulling as inescapably as space. Pain shot through her elbow, a sprain maybe, or just her muscles failing on her at the last possible second. She screamed, yanked, going boots over helmet as she careened toward the sliver of stars between the doors. Worse than floating forever in a void, she was going to be extruded into paste.
Rosalyn put her hands out in front of her, desperate, wishing there was something feasible to grab, but the rovers locked to the walls were just out of reach, and the little opening in the doors was coming fast. She spun once, twice, watching in mute horror as her death approached. Just an inch of space light, half an inch, then . . . nothing.
Floating, she bumped gently into the closed doors. Listened with sobs of hysterical relief as the seal engaged, the lock pressurized, and the gravity stabilizers kicked in. She fell with a thump to the ground, laughing and crying so hard she could barely breathe. On all fours she hiccupped and gasped, hiccupped and gasped, trying to chase down the lump of certain doom in her throat.
“Rosalyn! Holy shit, it worked. Rosalyn!”
Edison limped toward her, then managed to pick up the pace and reach her, falling to his knees and taking her shoulders as the magnitude of what she had just survived hit full force and she vomited into her helmet, slumping into an unconscious bundle at his knees.
* * *
—
She didn’t know how long she had slept or how she had gotten to cold storage, but she woke slowly in the fetal position, the right side of her face soaked, lying an inch deep in cold, sour vomit.
“We tossed a fresh suit in with you. Can you hear me? How’s your oxygen? You should check the filters.”
Rosalyn sloshed herself upright. She was almost sick again from the smell, but managed to swallow it down instead. The shield held, a tiny fissure down the middle, but it was otherwise intact. Edison stood on the other side. He had changed into a fresh crew uniform, a tight, collared thermal tee and baggy cargo pants.
Her eyes filled with tears at the sight of him.
“What? No! No, don’t cry. Hey . . .”
“It’s going to happen,” she wheezed. “The crying. A lot. Hasn’t . . . hasn’t happened in so long. Just let it be. Christ, are we really alive?”
Edison gave a dark laugh, nodding. “Apparently.” Then he pointed to the clean, white hazmat suit next to her. “You can run it through the decontam chamber. Misato is pumping the vents extra hard in here so you might feel a little light-headed. She just wanted to make sure all the junk on your suit was killed off.”
The diffuser was on, too, the herbal, sharp scent of melaleuca oil and oregano flooding the room, tingeing the oxygen coming in through her helmet.
“Can you give me a minute?” Rosalyn asked. He throat was hoarse from being sick and screaming so much. “I should . . . I’d like to clean up.”
“Take all the time you need,” Edison said softly. He tapped his temple. “You know where to find me.”
She would. Her AR indicator for him was full and blinking, showing him right there on the other side of the shield.
“Wait!” she cried, lurching unsteadily to her feet. Oof. She was intensely dizzy, stumbling to the door and catching herself on the frame. “The comms. The signal. Can you—”
His face fell, and Edison shook his head slowly, glancing away. “They’re fried. Piero did a number on the long-range hub.”
“No,” she whispered, leaning her helmet against the wall. All that chaos, and for what? “Then we need to get moving. He didn’t find a way to sabotage the thrusters, did he?”
“Nope.”
Rosalyn puffed out a breath. That was something, at least. “I’ll sync with your display. You can have my credentials, all right? Just get us moving out of here. The last thing I want is more casualties.”
“You sure? We hold out long enough, maybe we could explain it all, right? Once they dock with us, once they—”
“No.” She hadn’t intended to sound so vicious, but she was exhausted and her stomach was already turning again from the stench in her visor. “Listen, I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but we can’t risk it. We’re a baited trap. Look at what happened to Piero and Rayan. It could happen to you, too.”
Edison didn’t respond, but she saw his brows knit together over his glasses with hurt as
she turned away. It was simple, sending the linkup request to his display. Once he accepted it, Rosalyn could freely send information and vice versa. She composed the message and attached her credentials, then shuffled toward the decontam chamber and the shower. When she looked over her shoulder to make sure she was alone, Edison was gone.
It was a relief to peel herself out of the suit. She was never going to get the smell out of that helmet, she thought with a sigh. Her chest felt like someone had cracked it with a power hammer. Every muscle in her body protested as she carefully stripped and hauled herself into the decontam chamber. A shower would feel nicer, but that would have to wait. Keeping herself free of Foxfire was priority one, even if she was desperate to soak in scalding hot water for a few hours or days.
That reminded her . . . She glanced up at her AR task bar. Eight hours had passed while she slept. As much as she needed that sleep, she worried about what might have transpired in the interim. She couldn’t imagine what Misato and Edison were thinking. They had lost two of their crew and probably JAX, too. Rosalyn had no idea what to feel. In the moment it had all felt right, necessary, but she would never forgive herself for not trying harder to boost Rayan up. Piero was a lost cause, a killer, but something in the younger man’s face told her there was still something in there to salvage. In the end, it looked to her like he had let go on purpose. She ached to think of him turning endless circles in space. Nobody deserved that. Maybe if she somehow survived this disaster, MSC could send out recovery probes. But no. Her heart sank. They couldn’t send out recovery probes, couldn’t risk bringing his remains back to the campus and contaminating the whole place. If his body was found, they would need to incinerate it.
Rosalyn leaned against the well of the chamber and pulled the protective mask over her mouth and nose, closing her eyes. The cool puffs of air drifted over her shoulders, and she shivered, clenching her gut to keep from crying. More and more, she knew survival was nothing to expect. Nothing to even hope for. They were on a suicide mission now, with a one-way trip to CDAS and nothing beyond. She hardly cared what they found there. What did it matter? Foxfire had to be eliminated. Merchantia and GATE had to be warned. Her only realistic goal was making sure nobody else went through this hell.
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