“Incoming from Silky, madam…”
“Wings, change of plans. Big time.”
“What now?” she snapped with irritation. While she knew it wasn’t his fault, she was tired of the constant improvisations. She didn’t like to plan things out down to the finest detail the way Siv and Silky usually did, but the chaos of the last two weeks was tiring.
“Don’t be so put out. This is going to be a lot more fun.”
“Your idea of fun is incredibly dangerous.”
“Safe is boring.”
Mitsuki slowed the bike. “You’d think differently about that if you were made of flesh.”
“Oh, if I were made of flesh, think of the fun I’d be having in brothels right now.”
“‘Nevolence. Get on with it.”
“We’ve been made by the reapers, and we’re cornered.”
“Well, I’m not shocked.”
"We have no choice but to head into wraith space if we can hold out long enough."
“In that case, I’ll return to the city and wait for you.”
“That’s the naughty rub of it. Galen can’t make it that far. Tamzin thinks his sanity is at risk. She’s not wrong. However, I’m more concerned about the increased risk of him suffering a pseudo-aneurysm. And I’m worried about Siv. It’s not going to kill him, but I don’t think he can make it all the way to the city either.”
“So you’re going to travel part of the way?”
“We’ve found a safe place to crash along the way. Sending you the location now…”
Mitsuki checked the map and read Silky’s simple report on it. “That looks like a good place to hold up. But four people on a bike isn’t going to work. I’ll acquire a van then meet you—”
“No bike, Wings. No van. I have something different in mind.”
“I don’t see any vehicles at the station. Are you going to rest there and then go back into wraith space?”
“The sentry station…” Silky sighed, and then his voice deepened like it always did when he was serious. “Wings, we’re going to make a final stand there. I’m putting it all on the line. One big gamble, make it or break it.”
“Are you insane?”
“Quite possibly. But I think it’s our only play. In fact, I’m certain of it. I figured out something that I don’t think leaves us any alternatives.”
“Does Siv agree?”
“I haven’t discussed this with Siv yet. He has enough to worry about, what with the tunnel caving in on him and all.”
“What?! Are they okay?”
“Pinned for the moment between six Tekk Reapers outside and an imminent tunnel collapse. I am seventy-eight percent certain that at least two of them will survive this, though, so don’t sweat it.”
Those were terrible odds, given that Mitsuki only cared about one of those three people. She revved the bike’s engine and left the highway, cutting across the land. She was not going to let Siv die or end up stranded here all on her own.
“I’m coming to—”
“Don’t bother. The reaper ship will make it here before you do. You’re going to have to trust me and follow my plan.”
She swept the bike around and returned to the highway, making it look like her deviation was nothing more than a lazy turn. “What did you figure out?”
“No matter what we do, we’re not going to be able to slip past the Tekk Reapers. They injected Galen with a tracking worm. It’s embedded in his amygdala, and it’s not coming out. From anywhere within two astronomical units, they’ll be able to pinpoint his location within minutes.”
“You can’t jam it or neutralize it?”
“It’s passive, a tracer with no broadcast signal. I can mask it, but with them this close and scanning from their ship, there’s nothing I can do. I mean, sure, I could layer a blunt-force mask over it, but that would be obvious. If we want to escape in secret, we can’t do it with Galen tagging along.”
For a brief moment, Mitsuki considered ditching Galen and escaping with Siv. To hell with Tamzin as well. They’d gotten the information the girls needed. Galen would understand the decision, and he might still make it somewhere safe with Tamzin.
But then her conscience and her sense of duty kicked in. She had promised she would rescue him. She would do what she’d been unable to do for her own father. Her heart would let her do no less, nor would her professional pride as an extraction agent. She would get him and Siv and Silky off this world, or die trying.
“What do you need me to do?”
“You’re not going to ask me how I intend to implement a final stand first?”
Mitsuki considered Silky’s desire for a last stand, their options, and all the players arrayed against them… There was no way they'd survive a battle against a ship full of Tekk Reapers. Even if they could beat them somehow, in doing so, they'd draw the attention of everyone else. Every bad guy here would descend on them and…
Shit. Silky’s favorite movie. He’d made her watch it five times.
“You’re going to set this up like the final scene in Kill Hard 12, aren’t you?”
“But with even more desperation, drama, and thrills!” Silky answered almost maniacally.
“You are certifiably insane.”
“Can you think of a better option?”
She considered the situation again. “No, I can’t.” She sighed. “It’s the right call. Did you ask Kyralla and Oona to rendezvous with us? You know, assuming we survive the last stand and escape.”
“I did not.”
“Really? Then who’s going to recover us from orbit?”
“I have another arrangement prepared.”
“You’ve found a starship for us?”
“With the heightened security at all the starports and military bases and the timeframe we have to work with, a starship is out of the question. I do, however, have a way to get us into orbit. And I do have a rendezvous arranged.”
“But not the Outworld Ranger?”
“Correct. They are going to set a distraction decoy for us then wait one lightyear beyond this system. Consider them the backup option if the primary fails.”
“Who in the galaxy did you convince to pick us up within the system, given all the bad mothers haunting this— Oh. The Hydrogenists. You know where their home planet is, don’t you?”
“I’m more than a one-hit wonder, Batwings. To be fair, I didn’t know until six hours ago. It took me a while to figure it out. I convinced them earlier to wait nearby. Told them I was onto something.”
“Okay, so we have a ride out of the system, and you have a secure place to unleash the hounds of hell. Which means I’ve got to get us the ride into orbit, correct?”
“There’s a tiny, poorly guarded, military reserve outpost twenty kilometers away. I need you to break in and steal a troop transport, a strike-shuttle.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me!”
“I swear on John Crapper’s ghost I’m not.”
Someday she was going to have B figure out who that was. “You do realize that you don’t have to copy the movie beat-by-beat, right?”
“I rather think I do, and it’s a lot more fun that way.”
Mitsuki groaned. “Send me the schematics for the base and—”
“B already has everything you need. Stick to the plot and wait for my—”
Static. Nothing but static came through on audio. “Silky? Are you there?”
“Signal lost, madam. What now?”
“Set course for the reserve outpost and pull up the last thirty minutes of Kill Hard 12 for me.”
38
Mitsuki Reel
The skimmer bike rose high into the night sky. Mitsuki had no doubt that somewhere the air traffic control AI for this region was trying to sort out how a skimmer bike had made it to this altitude. Bless Silky and Siv for their know-how in overriding safety features.
Carefully, she climbed to her feet, balancing herself on the bike’s seat as if it were a surfboard. It was
essential that she do this just right.
The wind slammed into her. She rocked backward, but the maglocks in her boots held.
“Almost there, madam… Cutting power to the bike in three…two…one…”
B set the bike into a nosedive then deactivated its antigrav and propulsion. Mitsuki squatted, both hands on the seat, head angled forward.
She didn’t believe in prayer. She said one anyway. Not for herself but for Siv and Silky, the only friends she had and the best damn ones she could ever hope for.
“Ready, madam?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
“Go!”
As the bike plunged at a forty-five-degree angle, Mitsuki extended her legs and leaped. With her hands at her sides, she sped downward like a missile targeted at the military reserves outpost below.
Damn, she missed her jetpack. Damn, she missed doing this. Behind her, the bike leveled out as its antigrav activated and its engines fired. It began a slow descent that would take it to a barren stretch of land a few kilometers away.
The small military installation grew from a glowing square amidst a dark expanse of grassland outside the city to a proper base with tall, razor wire fencing along the perimeter and guard towers on the corners.
Clustered together in the center stood a barracks, two storage buildings, and a hangar. Six transport skimmers, four tanks, two strike-fighters, and troop transport shuttle capable of reaching orbit were parked within the base but outside the hangar which was used for repairs. Two sentries patrolled the interior, and in each tower, a guard crewed a floodlight and a plasma cannon.
Mitsuki took a deep breath. They didn’t know she was coming. They couldn’t. And if they were tracking anything, it was the bike zooming off into the distance.
“Why are the lights in the base still on?” she asked as she plummeted toward it.
“I sent the signal, madam. Just like Silky—”
All the lights on the base winked out. Aside from a few battery-operated sodium lamps that functioned only in emergencies, the base fell into darkness.
Going much faster than she was used to, Mitsuki maxed her antigrav, braced herself, and then snapped her wings out, hoping she wouldn’t dislocate anything and plummet to her death. Her wing joints popped and creaked but held. Her back muscles and joints burned with the effort. She was going to be sore tomorrow, and for a while after.
“You’re going too fast, madam.”
“Double max the antigrav.”
“You won’t have any energy left in the power pack once you land, madam.”
"As long as I survive the landing, I won't care."
Antigrav and wings strained to slow her descent. She was going to have to hit hard if she wanted to land on target—right between the shuttle and a strike-fighter—but she did need to survive.
Shit! A guy carrying a flashlight walked out of the hangar. She didn’t have time to figure out why he was heading for the nearest aircraft, one of the two strike-fighters, instead of going to the base’s power relay station. Not that going there would have helped. Silky’s virus would keep the power off for several hours even if they forced the system to reboot.
“Adjust my course heading, B. Target that guy.”
“You’ve got it, madam.”
A targeting triangle formed on him. She twisted her body left and whipped her tail inward, angling the winglets on the end. She adjusted once…twice…and then a third time to keep her trajectory lined up on him. She was definitely coming in harder than she wanted. She could feel it.
The skimmer bike exploded in the distance, perfectly timed to draw the attention of the guards on patrol and in the watchtowers. She wrenched her body at the waist and flipped from a chest-first dive to a feet-first plunge. Her wings and tail strained as she continuously angled them so she could stay on target.
She was going to wallop him, and it was going to hurt—him more than her, she hoped. She bent her knees slightly to better absorb the impact and tried to aim her feet so she would hit him in the back. If she struck him in the head at this speed, she might kill him. That was the last thing she wanted. He was just a soldier doing his job. He was not her enemy.
Mitsuki smashed into him, her feet striking him between his shoulder blades. She gathered her wings tight, tucked herself into a ball, and rolled over him. His head slammed into the earth.
She rolled up onto her feet but was moving too fast. She stumbled forward and fell, planting face-first into the earth. She rolled over, gasping and coughing dirt from her mouth.
Every muscle and joint in her body ached, and she would've sworn her ankles were jammed up into her knees except that she was sure those now occupied the space where her hips had been.
She sat up, restraining a groan. “Fractures?”
"None, madam. But you have some strained muscles and joints, a small amount of internal bruising. Nothing your wakyran system can't handle."
“From what I’m feeling, I’d swear I have several fractures and a jellied stomach.”
She crawled over to the soldier, who appeared to be a pilot. He was knocked out but still breathing.
She stood then fell awkwardly as if she were drunk. That was by far the hardest landing she'd ever made. Landing. She'd crashed harder once or twice.
Half standing, she dragged the pilot toward the nearest strike-fighter, a model 2F-42 Buzzard. Underneath the strike-fighter, she leaned over him and unfurled her wings to block the view as she drew her neural disruptor and fired it into his chest point-blank. There, that should keep him out for a long while.
Now the hard part: dragging his ass over to the 31a Moondust strike-shuttle. As soon as she was certain the coast was clear, she tugged him along by his ankles. Either he was heavier than she’d expected or that landing had sapped her strength because it took twice as long and a lot more effort than she planned to cover the fifteen meters to the shuttle. Finally, she collapsed underneath the vessel, heaving for breath and aching all over.
B sent a signal to the strike-shuttle, and its boarding ramp lowered without lighting up the interior systems. Dragging the pilot with her, muscles burning and joints screaming, she half-crawled up the ramp.
She deposited the pilot in the craft’s passenger compartment, which had seats for sixteen people. Then she limped into the six-person cockpit and collapsed onto the floor between the seats, where no one from the guard towers should be able to see her. She’d need to lock him in the cargo compartment, but that could wait until she was better rested.
“Anything, B?”
“They’re investigating the power outage and the explosion.”
“What about this guy? What was he doing?”
“Their military protocol says that during a complete power failure, the shuttle should launch and hover above the base, using its floodlights to provide illumination. I’m sorry we didn’t know that before arriving, madam.”
Mitsuki cursed. “Well, if that’s the case, load up a holographic overlay for the controls on this baby in my HUD and let’s get her airborne before they get suspicious.”
39
Siv Gendin
The white rings of energy from the reaper's neural disruptor struck the hyperphasic bubble from Tamzin's cube and dissipated. Unprepared for this sudden slide into wraith space, Siv felt more disoriented than before. Facing imminent death a moment earlier only made things worse.
He immediately closed his eyes and took deep breaths, trying to prepare himself to face the horrors here.
A distant howl echoed across the landscape, piercing the faint rustling of wind through leaves. He opened his eyes. Dozens of formless specters circled overhead, the lack of a definite appearance making them less terrifying.
The barren terrain he’d come to expect was gone, as were the mists that had draped it. Here, odd scraggly trees with purple, teardrop leaves and clumps of thin, pink grass grew beneath open, twilit skies.
"Things are growing here," Siv remarked.
“It’s an a
lien world with air you can breathe,” Tamzin lifted a disoriented Galen to his feet. “What did you expect?”
“It was barren and draped with mists before.”
She started walking, an arm around Galen’s waist. “That was a particularly rough area, and this isn’t a lush world. Most of the mists you saw were wraith images. They were not real.”
“Do you…see wraiths…at all?” Galen asked.
“Only within the wormhole,” she replied.
“Lucky you,” Galen gasped.
“Are there animals here?” Siv asked, suddenly embarrassed by how little he knew about wraith space.
“Only plants, sir, and few of those. At least, so far as—”
A blip of static then Silky’s voice and the HUD vanished. Siv suppressed the panic that swelled within him. The incident where he’d thought he’d lost Silky had left him scarred. It was going to take a long time to get over that, if ever.
“I thought I saw a rat once.” Tamzin shrugged. “They say animals can’t evolve on wraith planets.”
Five minutes in, Galen fell to his knees crying despondently. Ten minutes in, and it took Siv helping Tamzin to keep Galen upright and moving forward. The one good thing was that assisting Galen gave Siv something to do to keep his mind focused.
After a while, Siv lost track of time as they plodded along at the snail’s pace Galen could manage. “We’re making poor time, aren’t we?”
Tamzin checked the mechanical watch on her wrist. “Very poor. And he’s not doing—”
With a surprising surge of strength, Galen broke free. He sprinted back the way they’d come. “I have to go back! I have to save my girls! I have to save my wife! I can’t leave her, she’s sick. She’s dying.”
Galen tripped over a stone and plowed into gravel, scraping his hands and his left cheek. He fought them as they lifted him to his feet, and it took several minutes to calm him.
“I wish we could get him to sprint forward,” Siv said. “Then he wouldn’t have to suffer so long.”
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