by Elsa Jade
He nodded once sharply, as if filing away her report.
They moved ahead, Fenn with pistol in hand, Jashanna with her spanner. The unmapped tunnel plunged at a steep angle deep into the mountainside. Too straight and determined to be following any natural vein of ore. The small hairs at her nape prickled with an alarm she never felt merely at being underground. “Something’s not right,” she muttered.
“If everything was right, you wouldn’t need me.”
Her faint laugh echoed back to her off the smooth walls.
The corridor ended in another steel door. They stopped.
Jashanna bounced on her toes. “Last time we found a QueCorp surprise, it was an unmarked stash of weapons-grade Q,” she told him. “It’s how we paid for your security force. If Scraff was hiding another treasure…”
“No wonder they’ve been lurking.” Fenn shook his head. “It might not be worth their while to repossess the mines when they’d have to pay for armed forces and for new labor, but to salvage their stash of ready-to-sell Q would be irresistible and easy enough to get in and get out.”
She nodded. “Another great find for us too, when we take it from them.” She jacked her pad into the access panel. “Same signature as the master codes, so definitely QueCorp.” She frowned. “But it doesn’t match any of the known inputs. They were definitely keeping this off the books.”
“Your backdoor codes don’t work?”
She shook her head. “I never knew this existed. And none of the work I did above changed this.”
“How do we get in?”
She stood back. “My favorite way. Force.” She delved into the deepest pockets of her work pants and brought out a small pouch. She flicked it between her fingers at Fenn.
He blanched. “You’ve been strutting around next to me with a pocket full of explosives?”
She scoffed. “What else do you have in your pockets that I don’t know about? Besides, it’s not explosive until I add this.” She reached into her other pocket and extracted another pouch.
He winced. “Too close. Anyway, that composite is too hard for that amount of blow. If we go too hard, we could destroy whatever is on the other side.”
She lifted one eyebrow. “You know a lot about explosives. Right, can’t blow the door. But the rock around it…” She traced her finger along the seam in the rock. “Here.” She followed the line around. “And here.”
“I don’t see anything.” He frowned. “It looks like just rock to me.”
“It’s never just rock. I don’t have enhanced vision like Gavyn, where I can see the electrical, chemical, and structural characteristics of stone. Makes it seem like he instinctively knows where to drill.” Rubbing her fingertips together, she considered the seemingly blank surface in front of her. “But I’ve been doing this as long as he has, and I know what to look for.”
“Weaknesses,” Fenn murmured. “Flaws.”
She pursed her lips. “Openings,” she countered. “Opportunities. Places where the rock wants to part and share its treasures with us.”
Fenn snorted. “Just as I said before. You have poetry in your heart.”
“Fine. We’ll call it my one dirty secret, just between you and me.” With studious care, she opened the pouch and spread the paste along the seam she’d chosen. Tearing open the second pouch, she squeezed another line of paste alongside the first. The bright red line almost glowed a warning. Even from a distance, anyone who saw the line would know it was dangerous.
As she uncoiled the thin silver cord to join the two-part explosive, Fenn touched her elbow. “Presumably whoever sealed this door knows they did so on a planet full of miners who walk with explosives in their pockets. Likely they left sensors to warn them of any breach.”
She cranked her jaw to one side thoughtfully. “I don’t have a quiet way in,” she admitted. “We could just leave it…”
The faint wrinkle of Fenn’s nose made it clear he wasn’t interested in retreating either.
She gave one short nod. “Let’s blow it then.”
She laid the silver cord between the two lines of det paste and fitted a small diode into the end of the cord. Setting the timer, she grabbed his hand and tugged him away.
“Normally we’d have a blast shield,” she told him as she hustled him down the corridor. “Or at least a corner to duck behind.”
“So what’s going to shield us here?” Fenn cast a wary gaze around the too straight, too smooth hall.
“Me.” She grabbed him and tucked him in front of her, hunching her shoulders as the countdown closed toward zero her head.
“Jash—”
His mumbled protest was lost in the thunderous blast behind them.
She’d angled the blow properly, but it was still a lot of blast in a small, tight space. But she’d been taught to take the punishment that the stone meted out in return for the treasure it shared, and the trembling shock that passed through the stone and air around them was partially deflected by the sturdy fibers woven into her miner coveralls. Nothing could shield human flesh against the crushing force of a cave-in or a direct blast, of course, but she’d taken much, much worse.
With the dust still billowing, she turned and headed back toward the door.
Behind her, Fenn coughed, though she knew it was more a response to the pressure on his lungs, not any dust making it through the air filter.
He joined her in front of the door. “It didn’t work,” he said, surprise warring with disappointment in his voice.
Without answering, she reached out and grabbed the edge of the composite exposed by the detonation. She gave it a tug—and yeah, maybe she flexed a little harder than she needed to—and ripped the doorframe free. The rest of the rock stayed in place, and she gave herself a little nod of satisfaction.
Fenn blinked. “Nice work.”
“It is,” she said with a coy tilt to her head.
“I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
“That’s true,” she said again with more sincerity.
No lights had come on this time, leaving only the void. With one more glance at each other, they plunged in.
Chapter 8
Fenn had grown up with the wide-open skies and the gently controlled weather of a successful ag planet, and though he’d been on many more planets with their tunnels and warrens and interconnected high-rises, he’d never been so aware of a world’s deadliness. The darkness, the weight of stone, the silence aside from their footsteps. They were intruders here, Ydro-Down whispered; one misstep and they’d be dead.
That part at least felt familiar.
His body still tensed and tingled from the memory of Jashanna’s long limbs wrapped protectively around him. Part of him seethed. Had she protected him because she saw him now as smaller and weaker, to be coddled and ignored? She’d been willing enough to throw him into the teeth of the storm before she saw him naked.
But even as those old grievances writhed inside him, he rejected them. She’d sheltered him not because of who he was back home but because of who he was to her here and now—a partner in this justifiable crime of breaking and entering into an evil corporation’s stolen treasure trove.
And on a more practical level, that blast would’ve knocked him on his ass. The big mining woman was eminently practical.
She had her lume stick in one hand and the bone-breaking wrench in the other. In the stark light, mostly swallowed by the matte varnished walls, her brown eyes were dark and determined. A pulse rifle would feel good in his hands right about now, but this was supposed to have been just a routine repair trip. He shook his head. Of all people, he should know that things were rarely as they seemed.
As their lume sticks struggled to light up the huge cavern, he’d half expected to catch the mellow gleam of precious gems. Or maybe the vicious glare of a deadly firefight. See, and this is what came of watching too many entertainment vids as a child. Instead, their lights shone on the sullen opacity of industrial plasteel set into the stone. A long
row of panels stuck out a few centimeters from the smooth rock wall. Certainly not deep enough to contain treasure nor fighters lying in wait.
“The chamber is sealed with a molecular-weight layer of lead, reflective plasteel, and some qubition isotope I’ve never seen,” Jashanna reported. “Basically, a sensor dead spot. We never would’ve found it.” She turned a slow circle, her tab extended. “Nobody here but us.” She ignited one of the brighter work lights.
It didn’t quite reach the end of the chamber, but in the clearer illumination, Fenn’s gaze locked on the closest panel. “I don’t think so,” he murmured.
She glanced up from her tab, her dark gaze sharp. “Don’t think what?”
“That we’re alone.”
She didn’t question, just hefted her wrench higher as she backed toward him, instinctively partnering up. How long had it taken him to learn to do that, even with Kemet’s scolding? And it still didn’t come easily.
But Jash’s presence was almost as comforting as a pulse rifle. And if the rush in his blood was as hot and focused as a laser…
But they didn’t have time for that.
He angled toward the nearest panel. Down the row, several panels held small displays of indicators. The diodes were muted, but they pulsed with a rhythm he knew too well. He’d watched it as the surgeon had dug into his brain.
“Life-support monitors,” Jashanna whispered. Despite her caution, the sibilants in her words hissed in the oppressive silence. “What’s inside?”
Hefting the pistol into position, he touched the controls. Nothing was locked down, because no one was supposed to come this far. The door slid smoothly out of the wall.
The panel was just a front for a deeper drawer. On the slide, the translucent lid of the casket nestled within revealed the hypnotic swirl of superfluid gases, delivering a cold so perfectly calibrated that ice crystals couldn’t form. The fog pulsed with the same slow beat as the heart monitor. Through the subzero eddies, an occasional glimpse showed a shoulder, a hip, the exposed curve of a nape, bristling with leads not that different from his own procedure. People put to sleep, stashed away.
“Cryo-stasis?” Jashanna glanced down the row. “But who are they?”
“Didn’t QueCorp hold some of the miners’ children and loved ones hostage via cryo-sleep?”
“We found and freed all of them.” She frowned. “At least the ones we knew about.” She ran a shaking hand over her head, her normally buoyant expression hardening. “By the light of the shining stars, how many did we miss?”
He eased the drawer closed again, unwilling to interfere with the stasis without more context. “Why would QueCorp keep hostages that they didn’t tell you about?” He shook his head. “I don’t think these are your people.”
She growled low under her breath, like a distant earthquake. “The first settlers here, who bought the original terraforming contract, were murdered by QueCorp. We found their bodies not long ago and laid them to rest. And all QueCorp staff and sympathizers were exiled off world when we took possession. There shouldn’t be anyone left but us.”
Fenn glanced down the row of drawers. “Assuming the active lights indicate someone in cryo, looks like you have just a handful of stowaways on your world.”
She blew out a breath. “Still, Martika is going to be horrified. Since she inherited Ydro-Down, she’s made it her mission to catalog all of QueCorp’s crimes, from the first ones against her original colony right up until we kicked them out. She’ll be devastated to know she missed even one.”
“But we wouldn’t have found them except for the glitch in the signal. So it’s not her fault.”
Jashanna shrugged. “She was trapped in cryo herself, long enough to make her wormy, so of course she’d smack her own head if she left anyone behind. Me, I know you can’t always bash your way out of a problem. But nobody listens to me.”
“Maybe you just need to say it louder.”
She laughed. “You think I haven’t tried that? Feeling guilty is just the scrap rock around doing the hard work. Maybe we gotta dig through it, but it ain’t worth keeping.”
As they checked the readings on the other drawers—Jashanna connecting her tab to each panel just long enough to pull her reading—Fenn considered her philosophy.
How many of his decisions since joining Nazra had just been building the scrap rock of guilt higher around himself? He’d told himself it was the hard work of redemption, but when would he be done digging through the deadweight of worthless shame? It had seemed there was no bottom, which was why he’d had the procedure, relinquishing his questionable moral code to Boss Kemet, who wielded him with a conscience that he’d once doubted he possessed. But maybe doing the right thing in a tricky galaxy was just the same hard work as growing food or mining Q. Not a mystery, just more like the menial labor he’d rejected in search of adventure.
Yeah, maybe that shame was well earned.
Jashanna finished her scans, and he stepped back to reassess. Six drawers were occupied and another half-dozen were empty. Based on the biomarkers in the stasis unit data, it was clear that the sleepers were a range of ages with different metabolic needs, and they’d been interred at different times. Though each cryo unit had basic biological information needed to maintain life-support for each individual, the personal identifiers had been removed. They wouldn’t be able to identify the people without reversing stasis. And without knowing the conditions under which the occupants had been preserved, it was a risky proposition.
“These units are better than anything the overseer used on our hostages,” Jashanna informed him.. “But still, this looks like a prison.”
“At least two of these are children.” His voice cracked, but even as he spoke he knew the dismay was without value.
To her credit, she didn’t scoff at such naïveté. “Children, like refined Q, represent low volume and high value. But if QueCorp was keeping prisoners or hostages here, you can be sure they are valuable to someone at any size.”
He drew in another shaky breath. It was one thing to walk away from his family on his own, no matter how many bad choices he made. The idea of being ripped from them against his will…
Rage steadied his voice. “Stashes of qubition, no matter how vast, are treasure Ming Waller could reclaim whenever he had the time and inclination. And the ability to fight us. But if these really are hostages in QueCorp’s schemes, undoubtedly they have deadlines. Maybe literally.”
“You think this is what Waller wants, not the Q itself.”
He nodded. “Ydro-Down might be the world to you, but to QueCorp, it’s one asset in a larger, questionable portfolio.”
She growled under her breath. “These are people, not a portfolio.”
“To you and me. But to people like Ming Waller, they are just another line item. In his control, they are leverage against his opponents. But now that you have possession of Ydro-Down—and these people too—he’s going to see them as a liability. Whatever schemes are built on the sleepers will come crashing down if they are reunited with their people.”
“We need to wake them and let them go.” Jashanna took a step toward the nearest drawer.
He grabbed her elbow. “To Ydro-Down,” he continued as if she hadn’t interrupted, “they are a weapon against QueCorp.”
She froze. “People aren’t weapons any more than they are assets or liabilities.”
“You know that’s not true.”
Her glare was brighter than the det cord warning. “All right then. They shouldn’t be anything besides who they are.”
A tangled surge of frustration and admiration made him tighten his grip, pulling her toward him. “You know that’s not true either. You’re not that innocent or idealistic. Or idiotic.”
She wrenched her arm out of his grip, her scowl more furious yet. “I am not dumb,” she seethed.
“I specifically said you aren’t,” he said impatiently. “Which is why you aren’t going to rouse a bunch of sleepers who will likel
y be stasis sick and confused, maybe even wormy. We’ll take these readings back to your almighty Grey and Boss Kemet, and they’ll make sure you have the resources and the right plan for waking the sleepers.”
Her jaw flexed as if she was grinding down all the harsh things she wanted to say. “I would hate to be trapped like that,” she said at last, each word seemingly wrenched from somewhere deep inside her. “Anything could happen to them, and they’d never have a chance to fight back.”
That had been her. Imprisoned, vulnerable. And now that she was free, she wanted that for everyone. She might not be an innocent or an idealist or idiot, but she was inspiring, at least to him.
His hands fisted of their own accord, wanting to reach for her again. But she’d made it clear that her emancipation eclipsed all other desires.
“The Nazra has a few stasis units for medical emergencies and the support therapies to bring sleepers in and out safely. When we get back someplace where we can send a signal, we can summon a shuttle from the ship to bring at least the children out.”
She put her hands on her hips, spreading her elbows as if she wanted wings to shelter all the sleepers. “We can’t leave them here, not any of them.”
“The safest place on Ydro-Down right now is probably this cavern,” he reminded her.
She blew out a hard huff. “You could’ve said that about your pretty little ag home world too. But you didn’t stay there.”
Although the jibe stabbed him, he understood her frustration. Even when his obsession with thrillseeking had led him into a spiral of terrible choices, he’d known not everyone had the same urges. Just his luck to find someone who demanded freedom and responsibility. “We can’t save them right now,” he said gently. “No matter how much we want to.”
“We can,” she said stubbornly. “I’ll start hauling the stasis units up. They have the onboard batteries to hold power until your ship’s shuttle gets here.”
Her vow had more passion than planning, and he steeled himself against the pure emotion seething off of her.
Boss Kemet had been similarly furious when she’d discovered he’d undergone the procedure. She’d dragged him into her office and asked, “You think it’ll be easier not to feel?”