“Bero.”
She flicked her gaze up from the tapping, met Sanda’s for a beat. “Bero,” she repeated, then went back to sending out her orders. “I can’t give you a full crew, and if you’re simply visiting a location, then you won’t need one. I’ll give you a weapons master should the guns need maintenance, an engineer for the ship itself, and I assume you don’t need a comms specialist?”
Sanda did not want to tell her general she’d lost track of the spy she’d dragged with her through the most sensitive areas of Ada Prime security. “No, I don’t.”
“Two, then. That’s all you’re getting. No boarding party, no firing specialists—aside from yourself, I suppose—no navigator aside from the onboard AI. You reach the location Lavaux was trying to take Bero, and you report in immediately. Do not, under any circumstances, engage with what you find there until I allow you to do so. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. Gunship-B612 is picking up its crew from Atrux Station as we speak. Where are you?”
“Near the city side of the space elevator here in Atrux.”
She arched a brow but didn’t ask. “The ship will ping you when it docks. It will be accompanied by a civilian transport shuttle. I expect your father Graham to board that shuttle for return to Ada.”
“He won’t go.”
“He’s a civilian. Despite your escapades, we have rules, Major. You’d do yourself a service to learn them.”
Sanda sighed raggedly. “I know the fucking rules. Knew them better than anyone else before I got canned and left behind. My original crew is dead, General, and while that’s years old to you, it’s only months to me. The wounds of loss are raw, for me and my family. You make Graham go, he’ll find a way to get back to me. I know him. It’s been two years. He won’t let me out of his sight until Ilan’s there to take up the slack.”
“If he requires counseling—”
“He requires his daughter. And he’s more useful to me than you know.”
“I cannot put a civilian at risk.”
“We’re just going to get eyes on a location. You said yourself those guns will never fire.”
She pursed her lips. “Very well. But only because I believe Graham Greeve will make my headache worse if I attempt to drag him home.”
Sanda grinned. “You’re not wrong.”
“You have a ship incoming in three hours, Major. Prepare for mission. Anford out.”
The screen blacked out. A fugue state gripped Sanda. Now that she had what she’d wanted, all of Anford’s protests piled up in the back of her mind, threatened to run down and crush her confidence in an avalanche of fact.
Casual as Anford was, Sanda knew damn well that you didn’t make general by rolling over for the petty demands of your subordinates. If Anford had given her what she wanted, it’d been only because she wanted it, too.
Sanda pushed to her feet, yanked the prosthetic strap tight, and stepped into the derelict ship’s tiny cargo hold. Arden, Nox, and Graham had convened around a rickety table, playing a local card game she didn’t recognize. All of them, it seemed, had been pretending very hard that they weren’t eavesdropping on her conversation. At least the Point ship would have better sound baffling than this bucket.
“Anford has placed a Point-Class ship under my command, Gunship-B612, with a skeleton crew—an engineer and a weapons master, AI piloted. It arrives in three hours.”
Arden nodded excitedly. “I honestly wasn’t sure you could do it. I’ll start locating your coords right away.”
“No,” she said, bracing herself against the doorframe with one hand. She was so damned tired. “Save it for the ship. Right now I need you working on a way to kick all fleet surveillance systems off that gunner.”
Nox coughed sharply. “I got a soft spot for a pirate, but you think it’s a good idea to steal a ship that’s been given to you free and clear?”
“I think a free spaceship’s a fucking trap.” She looked up at the ceiling of the derelict ship, but she was imagining the halls of a different spaceship altogether.
CHAPTER 17
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
HELLO, GOOD NIGHT
The seventeen lives of Rainier Lavaux spun in random sequence across Tomas’s wristpad. He’d spent the time riding up Atrux’s space elevator into low planet orbit diving into Nazca archives, ripping them apart for even the tiniest mention of the woman, or any woman at all who could have been her.
He’d barely seen the Nazca shuttle that took him from Atrux, veering away from that hunk of rock for the Casimir Gate that would punch him through to the Ordinal system. He hadn’t even checked to see what his new face would be before he got into the MetBath. He’d just made sure his net goggles were tight so he could get on doing his research even as the bath tweaked the small features of his body.
Nose a little broader. Chin narrower. Cheeks sharper. Dimples: gone. Hair: black and short.
Cosmetic tweaks, but enough that he could pass by any who had gotten a good look at Tomas Cepko without turning heads.
By the time he emerged from the MetBath, he had every public detail of Rainier’s life committed to memory, and some details that weren’t so public. All of them made sense in isolation, tailored to the world in which she lived, a microcosm of a life. The socialite on Ada, the recluse on Rusani, the scientist of Ordinal. And in each system, the common thread: Lavaux’s wife, no known associates.
Because someone as variable as Rainier Lavaux could not stand up to the scrutiny of friendship.
“Approaching the station,” the shuttle’s AI said. “Please prepare for capture.”
Glimpsing himself in the shine off a screen made him shiver. The prep for insertion to Icarion’s war front had taken years, and his reassignment into collecting Sanda hadn’t required a MetBath. The last time he’d looked at a face that wasn’t Tomas Cepko’s was… Shit. That was math he didn’t want to do.
A glance at his wristpad revealed not the lives of Rainier staring back at him, but a blank message box, no ident number typed into the send field.
This wasn’t his wristpad. Well, it was, in that he was wearing it and all the trappings of his new identity—name: Leo Novak; age: 38; profession: interstellar communications specialist—were dialed into it, along with his usual vault of Nazca programs obscured behind a lot of security. But it wasn’t Cepko’s. It didn’t have Sanda’s ident preprogrammed into its banks.
But he knew it by heart.
Tomas tapped the message box closed. Bad idea. The Nazca were done with Sanda. To keep her safe, he needed things to stay that way.
“Capture,” the AI said.
Tomas stumbled as the shuttle shook, snapped up in the clumsy claws of a docking arm. He should have listened to the ship the first time and strapped in. Something about his time with Bero had made him distrust all electronic voices. He had to get over that.
Bracing himself against the wall with one hand, Tomas shuffled along, mag boots clunking, to a jump seat and pulled it down, strapping himself in not entirely too late.
“Shuttle,” he said, because this ship didn’t have a name outside of a string of letters and numbers used by automated systems, “present local view on the screen, please.”
Nazca ships were all distressingly bare-bones, as if the tiniest hint of personality might tip their hand as to their purpose. Tomas had always thought that proclivity was paranoid and, if anything, made their ships more suspicious. Once it dropped him at Janus Station, it would turn back around to take some other spy into or out of a mission.
This shuttle was outfitted with sleeping quarters for four, a single MetBath that could be passed off as a NutriBath upon cursory inspection, a cargo hold, a bathroom, and a kitchen with no actual cooking utensils or ingredients, just cabinets of ready meals. No pilot’s deck, no engine room big enough to fit anything larger than repair bots like Grippy. If something broke, and the automatic systems couldn’t fix it, he’d have to sit and wait until
a pickup caught his distress beacon.
Tomas hated this style of shuttle. They were little more than Ping-Pong balls served back and forth between stations. Teeth-grindingly slow, it’d taken the shuttle a full week to plod along its course to Janus. How the Nazca had gotten the permits to allow such a small ship to pass through the gate into Ordinal, he didn’t want to know, because he sincerely doubted there’d been any proper safety checks along the way.
The local feed on the viewscreen helped. Reminded him he’d spent the dicey part of the journey in the MetBath, and he was on his way to landing now.
From this vantage, the primary systems of Prime’s seat of power were little more than specks against the black, shaded various temperatures of ambient light. Tomas could ask the ship to show him zoomed-in views, the impressive vistas tourists always wanted when they came to Ordinal for the first time. But he’d seen it all before, and he had grown wary of AIs showing him anything but real views.
But the gate could be viewed in whole, without losing perspective. As the shuttle swung around, Tomas got a good, long look at the silver-black rings. He knew, logically, that the rings were spinning so fast that he couldn’t make out their details, that the color and light his eyes registered were already old, a blurred-together mess of positionals always in flux.
But the lights and the metal left the impression of weight behind, of heft. A thick frame outlining the way into the infinite darkness of the paths between the worlds. Tomas watched the spin of the gates, because looking into that empty, light-absorbing blackness in their center made his skin crawl.
An incoming call flashed across the screen. Tomas accepted from his wristpad. A strong-jawed woman in a Prime jumpsuit with a mass of thick brown curls squinted at him. That hair was impractical for space travel, but impressive in its shine. This woman was meticulous, but accustomed to gravity.
“Shuttle, Janus Station is a privately held enclave, and you are unexpected.”
Time to be Leo Novak. “Maybe I’m early?”
“We are not expecting any arrivals within the next seventy-two hours.”
“Shit. I guess those chuckleheads in HR failed to put the docs through. My name’s Leo Novak, I’m from Relay Inc., you see. I work in interstellar communications. Well, I dunno if work is the right word. I pretty much am interstellar comms at Relay, and a whole lotta other places, too. Flashing my ident to you now.”
She accepted the flash without question, such a common mistake, and let Leo Novak’s history fill her screen while Tomas Cepko’s Trojan horse went to work carving out a backdoor into the station’s systems for him. Bero had been clever enough not to accept any data packets he’d tried to send the ship. Tomas almost missed having an equally footed opponent. Almost.
“I see. Impressive CV, Novak, but we weren’t expecting you. If you require resupply, a bot will bring out all the provisions you need before we send you off station, but you will not leave that shuttle.”
He sucked his teeth and sighed raggedly. “I dunno, ma’am. I know you got to do your job, but so do I, ya know? And I was hired to take a look at some systems your boss there, Lavaux, is trying to get online. Sent me a hefty advance payment for my trouble, too.”
Her narrowed eyes widened a touch. It was not public knowledge that the name Lavaux had anything at all to do with Janus Station.
“Lavaux?” she asked, feigning innocent confusion while below the edge of the camera view her fingers tapped away on another screen. The slight movement of her shoulders the only sign she was frantically trying to figure out what the fuck was going on here.
“Yuh. Keeper Lavaux. Don’t get a lot of Keepers calling me up, you understand. Memorable guy. I got the work contract here, if you want to see it?”
“Keeper Lavaux?” At least she wasn’t rattled enough to ask if he wasn’t sure he meant Rainier.
“That’s the one.”
“I… Yes. Send the work order, and please hold on a moment.”
The screen went black. Tomas leaned back and closed his eyes, waiting for the panic in Janus Station to run its inevitable course. A message got lost in the chaos after Lavaux’s death.
The station was having trouble developing some sort of antenna, his intel was certain of that, and the good Keeper had gone ahead and secured the best man for the job who was privately employable, and therefore unlikely to leak anything back home to Prime. There’d be chunks of money removed from Lavaux’s usual clandestine accounts, shuttled into Novak’s, and a financial trail was the closest thing to truth the worlds of Prime offered.
Tomas folded his hands across his chest and waited for the story of Leo Novak to sell itself.
“Mr. Novak.” The screen flashed back on, and the woman’s face was pressed into its neutral mold. “I apologize for making you wait, it seems our communications broke down, but we found you in the system. I’ve alerted the research staff, and their head of HR is preparing a room for you now. Is there anything you’ll need upon docking?”
She meant anti-nausea meds. They weren’t something Tomas needed, but a civilian like Novak would. “What’s your grav like?”
“Seventy-five percent Earth standard.” A model of Janus flashed onto the screen, wiping the woman away. The station was an ice cream cone of habitat rings, the smallest larger than Ada Station had been. This was Ordinal, Tomas reminded himself. Things were not done on small scales here. The top ring lit up.
“You will disembark here, then travel to your quarters on the seventh level.” It lit up. “All habitats maintain seventy-five percent Earth standard, except those below the seventh ring. Those will be off-limits to you, anyway.”
“Seventy-five’s not so bad,” he said, wondering what level of gravity he’d need to expect once he reached the lower levels. There’d be specs in the station system, surely. At the very least he’d be able to figure it out from the approximate mass of the hab rings and the speed of their spin. “You got any idea what they’re going to have me poking at? Only told me it’s an antenna, don’t know nothing else.”
That quirked a half smile. “No idea, Mr. Novak. That’s not my department—which is a phrase you’ll have to get used to saying yourself. Everything here is separated by steel walls of nondisclosures. We’ve got a charter from Prime to go about our work, but it comes with tight lips. Stick to your lane, and you’ll be all right.”
“Thanks, Miss…?”
“Page. Don’t bother remembering it. We won’t meet again.”
The ship juddered as it was sucked into dock, a flame spectrum of red and orange lights indicating systems cycling to the all clear. “Why’s that?”
“Separations, Mr. Novak. I’m not the one handling the scientists.”
The airlock flashed green and the door dilated; the viewscreen went blank. Framed in the airlock, a stocky woman in body armor more suited to the front lines than a research station waited. Tomas could see only half her face under the clutter of HUD glasses and the communicator wrapped around her ear. A design bulky enough to mean it wasn’t consumer grade, but military, because only soldiers would put up with extra weight for extra security.
“Leo Novak?” she asked in the staccato tones of a woman used to giving orders.
“Most days.” He pulled the harness off and stood, stretching as if he’d spent the past few hours cramped up in the jump seat, not getting his face rearranged in a MetBath.
“Better hope you are today,” she said, and shot him with a tranq dart.
CHAPTER 18
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
YOUR SHIP, MY SHIP
Three hours wasn’t enough time to heal wounds months deep, but Sanda was a soldier at heart, and soldiers were used to putting on a brave face while their bodies and minds were quietly giving up the ghost. She showered as best she could on the hauler, closed the slit in her leg with some FitFoam, and tried to hide the hungry, angular protrusions of her bones under the seamlessness of a jumpsuit. At least her hair was long enough now to cover the scar on th
e back of her neck. Relying on makeup was nerve-wracking.
Her wristpad flashed with a message from dock authority: Point-Class Gunship-B612 had arrived on the fleet-controlled side of Atrux’s dock and was waiting for her pickup. Sanda licked her lips, checked herself in the mirror.
Majors were almost rarer than generals in the Prime fleet and were certainly less visible. While generals like Anford made public appearances, stood alongside Keeper Protectorates during meetings, and were the face of the fleet to the people, all the majors she’d ever come across had been secretive creatures, moving the cogs of Prime’s military with precision and control born out of long years of service. She’d never seen one who didn’t let their greys come in, let their wrinkles dig valleys named Responsibility and Experience across their cheeks and forehead. Serious People, the majors of the fleet.
Sanda looked nothing like them. She didn’t even look much like a gunnery sergeant these days.
The wristpad flashed at her again. A ship was here without a captain, and the systems that be didn’t like that. She swiped to accept the responsibility, then poked her head out the door.
“Ride’s here,” she shouted.
“I’m—just—hold on a sec!” Arden shouted back. They sat at the card table but had their goggles tugged down, and their fingers were twitching on the arm of the chair with subtle, insistent movements.
Nox appeared out of a side door with a duffel over his shoulder. It clanked. “Ready.”
“Got it,” Arden said, and pushed the goggles up on their forehead, blinking owlishly.
“I packed your shit.” Nox dropped a hand on Arden’s shoulder and helped them up.
“Ready,” Graham’s voice echoed from the pilot’s deck, and he ducked down, squeezing through the narrow door with two duffels—Sanda’s and his—on his back. Grippy trundled along by his side with the wheelchair strapped to his back. Sanda’s chest tightened to see the bot moving under its own power again. She gave it a pat on the head, swept her makeshift crew over with a critical eye, noted about a hundred things that could be changed to make them more convincing, then shrugged. She was Major Greeve. That’d have to be enough.
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