by K. B. Wagers
Chae’s mind wiped itself clean.
And this time they bolted.
She’d been waiting for it, so Max wasn’t surprised when Chae turned and tried to run down the hallway. She caught the Neo around the waist. In retrospect, she should have spun them away from Luis, who’d followed them from the room.
A cat trapped in a corner is going to try to claw its way out.
Chae kicked Luis in the stomach before he could move out of range and the man staggered into the nurse’s desk behind him.
“Chae, damn it, don’t.” It was a futile plea, she already knew it. The spacer was in a full-blown panic, wriggling like a goddamned eel, trying to escape her grip.
Max braced herself and took the flung elbow to her cheek, riding out the stars that blurred her vision. She wrapped one arm up under Chae’s, locking her other around their waist and free arm and lifting them off their feet. “Come on, Chae. You’ve got no leverage here. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to know who’s pulling your strings. I don’t believe for a second you’re capable of hurting people on your own. But you have, and it has to stop. Who’s making you do this?”
She was angry at Chae, she couldn’t deny it, but that voice in the back of her head was equally certain the kid hadn’t had any choice but survival. The betrayal stung, even more so because Max knew it was her failure to push her suspicions that had led them to this point in the first place.
“It’s going to be okay, Chae,” Max whispered. “I promise I’ll help you however I can.”
Chae abruptly slumped in her grip and their sobbing echoed loud in the silence of the hallway.
“You can’t. You can’t fix this. No one can. They killed my best friend. They’re going to kill everyone I care about, even all of you.”
“Who, Chae? Who’s doing this?”
“Max,” Stephan said from behind her. “Put your Neo down.”
Nineteen
Max leaned against the wall back at base, arms crossed over her chest. The feeling she’d been fighting with for the last few months was about to boil over. Jenks was on her right, D’Arcy on her left. Tamago had stayed at the hospital with Sapphi and three members of ST-1.
Nika was across the conference room, talking to Stephan and Scott in a low voice. Luis and Tivo were sitting at the table in the center of the room. Chae sat on the opposite side, head buried in their cuffed hands.
“All right, fuck this,” Jenks muttered. She pushed off the wall, grabbed a chair, and sat down next to Chae. All other conversation stopped.
“Look at me, Neo,” Jenks ordered, and Chae’s head snapped up. “You’ve got one chance at this so I suggest you don’t fuck it up. I owe you, because even if you were saving your own ass, you kept us all from dying. So I promise I will do whatever I can to help you out of this mess. You have to tell me the truth and do it now.”
The story spilled out of Chae in a rush. Jenks listened without a word, her jaw tightening when Chae sobbed out the news of their best friend’s death, the beating on the Laika, and how they’d sabotaged Zuma.
“I’m sorry, Chief. I’m so sorry.” They buried their head in their hands again.
“I checked the ship again after you did your inspection and I still missed it,” Jenks muttered, dragging a hand through her hair, the guilt and frustration etched onto her face. “You know what I didn’t mention about crossing those cables, Chae? That the charge could have killed any of us. It could have killed you. Did you think about that for one second? No. You thought you’d just slap a few wires together and it would stop my damn ship from running?”
“I wanted to keep us on the ground without hurting anyone. I didn’t think we’d even lift off.”
“You obviously didn’t think it through at all.” Jenks huffed. “Learn how to sabotage things better.”
Stephan rubbed a hand over his face. “Jenks.”
“I’m serious. If they’re going to do shit like that, at least do it right. Who’s making you do this, Chae?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. I want names.”
“They’re telling the truth, Jenks.”
Max watched as Jenks curled her right hand into a fist at Stephan’s words. “And you know this because you knew the whole time that someone had Chae under their thumb.”
Stephan nodded.
“You son of a—”
“Chief.” Max’s command wasn’t loud, but Jenks snapped her mouth shut and shoved to her feet.
She paused and laid a hand on the back of Chae’s head. “We all fuck up, kid. I get it, I really do,” she murmured in a surprisingly gentle whisper. “I forgive you.”
Max waited for Jenks to cross back to her before she spoke. “You all knew.” Her words were the equivalent of dropping a grenade in the middle of the room, but she couldn’t keep them in any longer. “Nika; my own brother; you, Stephan.” The truth of it was suddenly, painfully clear to her. “The smuggling story you fed us is bullshit. What is going on?”
“It’s not bullshit, Max. It’s just bigger than I told you,” Stephan replied.
“Wait, what?” Jenks demanded. “You knew that Chae had fucked with the ship? Did you seriously let us go up knowing we could come down in a pile of rubble?”
Jenks was looking at Stephan when she asked the question, and she missed the way Luis flinched and closed his eyes. Tivo looked at the tabletop, his jaw tight. Max could feel D’Arcy coiled like a spring next to her and reached a hand out, laying it gently on his forearm.
“Chief, that’s enough.” She very deliberately used Jenks’s rank a second time, and even though it earned her a dirty look, it was enough to get the woman to cross her arms and lean back against the wall.
Max looked at Stephan. “Tell me what is going on or I’m putting a com in to Admiral Chen right now.”
It wasn’t bad as bluffs went and would at least serve to distract Jenks from putting all the pieces of this together. Her exploding on Luis and Tivo when she realized they’d been working together was the last thing they needed.
And Max knew the admiral would likely take her call, not only because the woman had shown more than a little interest in her career but also because the Carmichael name did mean something. As much as she hated it, Max wasn’t above trading in on the influence.
But she was still only a lieutenant demanding access to information they all knew she damn well didn’t have clearance for—injured ensign or not.
Chen would, in the end, shut her down. But the entire thing would be on record and Max suspected that was something Stephan didn’t want happening.
Stephan stared at her, silently assessing, and Max stared right back, waiting for him to call her bluff. She should have confronted him sooner, shouldn’t have let Nika convince her she was wrong. Stephan would have told them the whole truth or moved them out of the task force.
Either way, her crew would have been safe.
Except you know that’s not true. Chae would still be in danger.
“Don’t try to threaten me, Lieutenant. Not only am I your superior officer, but my purview is also complete right now. If I ordered something, then I ordered it, and if you don’t believe Admiral Chen is going to back my decisions here, then you don’t know her as well as you think.”
The Intel commander looked down for a moment and then up at the assembled group. “But maybe you don’t know me as well as you think, either, Max,” he said, using her name instead of rank now. “That’s all right—if anything, that’s one of my biggest mistakes. You want in all the way, so that’s what we’ll do.
“What I’m about to tell you is highly classified. This room is shielded from all outgoing and incoming transmissions, and recording is impossible. If you share any of this information outside of this room without my express permission you will be court-martialed. Is that understood?”
There were murmurs of assent.
“Sir?”
Stephan looked over to Chae, whose eyes were down. “Yes?”
“Should . . . should I be here for this?”
“Are you part of the Interceptor crew of Zuma’s Ghost?”
“Yes. At least, I want to be. But am I not in trouble for what I did?”
Max was surprised Stephan looked her way again and even more so that she felt herself shaking her head. She wasn’t angry at Chae. Much like Jenks, she understood the trap they’d been in.
Her mind flipped back to how determined Chae had been trying to keep Zuma in the air. Someone more cynical might have insisted that it was simple self-preservation, but whatever else had happened, Max still trusted herself enough when it came to reading people.
Most of the time, anyway.
She couldn’t stop herself from looking at Nika. His face was blank, but he couldn’t keep the pain out of his blue eyes.
“You’re part of our crew, Chae,” she said. “Unless you want out.”
“No.” Chae sat up straighter. “No, I want to help. I want to make this right.”
“Then you stay,” Stephan said.
Nika exhaled quietly as Stephan crossed the room and took the cuffs off Chae.
“Welcome to Project Tartarus, people,” Stephan said, moving to the front of the room. He gestured at the wall behind him and the images of Senator Tieg and a man named Vincent Grant came up, along with a blacked-out silhouette.
“The data you’ll be looking at soon is from a two-year investigation into a smuggling operation that has been targeting the Trappist habitats for the better part of a decade. We believe the corruption extends all the way to the higher levels of the Coalition of Human Nations government.” Stephan clasped his hands behind his back. “Senator Rubio Tieg has been our major suspect since the beginning. Pictured next to him is Vincent Grant, who we believe is responsible for any wet work Tieg wants done. There’s a third individual we haven’t been able to identify, but we believe they’re involved in the transportation end of things.”
“You said this was bigger than the smuggling. What are they doing?” Max asked.
“At its most basic, this group has been stealing supplies for the habitats and then reselling them to those same habitats on the black market for an outrageous markup,” Stephan replied. “But the reality is far more dangerous, especially recently. We believe they’re responsible for the resurgence of tensions between Earth and Mars and would be happy if the conflict exploded to distract the CHN from what’s going on with Trappist. This is a joint-service operation with the TLF and the Navy. Commodore Carmichael’s team was brought on to assist.”
Nika was watching his sister and could pinpoint the exact moment the information clicked in Jenks’s head. She hadn’t quite figured it out that when Max had said, “You all knew,” she’d really meant everyone and not just Intel. And Nika suspected that Max’s confrontation with Stephan had been as much to distract Jenks as it had been to get the Intel officer to read them into the operation.
“You—” Jenks looked from Tivo to Luis, her mouth open in shock, and both Max and D’Arcy tensed as they waited for her to throw a punch.
Then she did something surprising. She snapped her mouth closed and didn’t say a word, but her walls went up. Impenetrable barriers he hadn’t seen since the early days of their relationship, when a street kid still didn’t believe her life had changed. Didn’t trust anyone around her.
His heart suddenly ached for his sister.
“The TLF willingly involved themselves in this?” D’Arcy asked, and Stephan nodded.
“Yes. Chae’s fathers were the ones who contacted us. They were concerned by some newcomers to the TLF who’d brought with them a lot of weapons. They were also concerned about the safety of their newly arrested child.”
“My fathers knew?”
“Not who was threatening you,” Stephan replied to Chae’s question. “They didn’t trust the government to hold up its end of the deal, and then someone—likely Grant—contacted them with a warning.” Stephan pointed to the photo next to Senator Tieg’s. “Cooperate with the newcomers or their kid would suffer the consequences.”
D’Arcy’s curse was loud in the silence. “There were half a dozen ways you could have handled this better, Stephan.”
For the first time Nika saw a crack in Stephan’s normally unshakable composure.
“I told Max, and I’ll tell you: I don’t need you critiquing my op on the back end.”
“Well, I’m fucking doing it anyway. You put our lives in danger. You put this kid’s life in danger. Now we’ve got people from the habitat dead, we’re down two Interceptors, and we are no fucking closer to catching these people than we were three months ago when you PR’d this bullshit task force scenario!” D’Arcy pushed away from the wall and threw his hands up in the air. “This is the same shit that caused the situation on Mars to spiral out of control—”
“Do not bring up Mars, D’Arcy, not now.” Stephan’s jaw was tight, and judging from the confused looks around the room Nika guessed everyone else was just as much in the dark about whatever had happened there between the two men as he was.
D’Arcy’s dark eyes glittered with anger. “Why not? It’s obvious you haven’t learned a goddamned thing since then. But hey, it’s only habitat population—what does it fucking matter?”
“You bast—”
“All right, that’s enough.” Scott stepped up between the men. “It’s been a long day, and it’s pretty obvious no one is going to listen with a clear head. I’m calling this done. Let’s get some sleep and we’ll regroup tomorrow.”
For a moment Nika thought D’Arcy was going to ignore the order and take a swing at Stephan, but he nodded sharply, turned on his heel, and left the room.
“Well, my head hurts so I’m on board with this plan. Chae, come on,” Jenks said, patting Doge on the head and following D’Arcy without looking at either Luis or Tivo. The two men remained slumped in their chairs and Nika thought it was for the best they didn’t try to go after his sister right now.
Max stayed where she was, staring at the images on the far wall with a hand on her lips. “You don’t know who’s handling the shipping,” she said suddenly.
Stephan looked away from the door. “We don’t. Max—”
She waved a hand, cutting him off, and Nika saw Scott mouth I told you so in Stephan’s direction. “What was in the shipment? Something that would implicate Tieg? Or something that would reveal his accomplice?” She circled the table and touched a hand to the swirling data, picking through the photos until she found what she was looking for. It was a surveillance photo from the drainage project and Nika frowned at the choice.
“Most likely both.”
“But you were really interested in whatever could point you at the shipping contact, weren’t you?” Max tapped a finger on the photo. “What was it?”
“Less about the item,” Stephan replied. “More about who would come after it.”
“Were you expecting them to hit the trucks? Did you sacrifice those drivers the same way you did us?”
“I was expecting them to take the trucks, not destroy them. They were automated, Max, I’m not a monster.”
Nika couldn’t stop the instinctive step backward when Max swung around and faced Stephan, fury in her brown eyes. “Given that Sapphi almost died. That Chae’s friend Bean is dead. That Jeanie might be dead because I put her in harm’s way. I am not entirely sure the term ‘monster’ even comes close, Stephan.” Grief broke through her cold anger. “All of this was preventable if you’d stopped trying to control everything and put some trust in us to do the job. Both of you.” She turned that wounded gaze on Nika and he forced himself to meet it. “You treated us like assets instead of your crew.”
She spun back to Stephan. “You sent us into this without backup. Worse, you sent us in with deliberately bad intel. You already knew Chae was feeding them information, but you missed the sabotage. Why? Because you don’t realize what lengths people will go to when they’re desperate to keep their loved ones sa
fe. You don’t understand how love works, Stephan, but rather than admit it you just discarded it as unimportant.
“And I’ll tell you right now, if this is your idea of how Intel is going to work on Trappist, you can find yourself new personnel. Interceptor crews work because we trust each other with our lives. I’m not putting my people at risk without being able to tell them exactly why.”
“You’re not in charge of the Interceptor crews, Lieutenant. Or of Zuma, for that matter.”
“No, I am,” Nika said. “And she’s right, Stephan. We put Neos in danger when we could have been working together. I let you do it, but I won’t anymore.”
It was easier than he’d imagined, taking a stand. Finally deciding to be an Interceptor commander rather than an Intel officer. The surprise Max couldn’t hide hit Nika hard and he knew he was a long way from making up for this mess, but he hoped it was a start.
Max lifted her chin and tapped the photo one more time. “I realized who this was on the way to the mission. I didn’t say anything because I let all of you convince me that my gut wasn’t worth listening to. If you want to know who your mystery person is,” Max continued as she turned and headed for the door, “I suggest you start with Julia Draven and follow the trail back. Someone hired her, someone who specifically wanted to keep an eye on Chae and on what the NeoG was up to. It’s not a coincidence that she was there at that drainage project two years ago. Right around the same time Chae got the idea to try to rob a NeoG warehouse for medical supplies.” Max stopped at the doorway and shrugged. “But what do I know, I’m just a lieutenant.”
Stephan muttered a curse and shoved a hand in his hair.
“Don’t look at me,” Scott said. “I told you that you should have brought her on from the beginning.”
Nika didn’t hear Stephan’s reply as he slipped out the door. “Max?”
She stopped in the hallway, but didn’t turn around. “I don’t want to talk to you right now, Nika.”