“I agree,” she said. “We need to check it out.”
“Aren’t you forgetting the dead part of deadgate?” Nox said.
Arden’s voice shook a little as they said, “I can spin it up.”
All gazes swiveled to them. Sanda was peripherally aware that even Nox looked surprised. “That,” Sanda said, “is Keeper tech. I respect the hell out of you, Arden, but it’s beyond you.”
“Not exactly…” Their fingers twitched as if they were typing. “It’s already built, I won’t mess around with the insides. It just needs to be turned on. A strong enough signal from the outside… I’ve… thought about it. I can do it.”
“You’ve thought about it in the two minutes since we’ve discovered it?”
Their grin was wry. “I’ve figured out tougher things in shorter time.”
“Now that’s true,” Nox said.
“Who the fuck are you?” Conway demanded.
“Their name is Arden,” Sanda cut in, “and you get to sit back and be real grateful they’re on our side.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Nox asked. “We agreed Arden would get you the location of those coordinates on a system detached from surveillance. That’s done. Next move is ours.”
“I agreed to get you on a gunship and take you on a ride to Ordinal,” Sanda shot back. She spread her arms in a welcoming gesture. “Welcome aboard. Promise fulfilled. I’m going through that fucking gate.”
“Don’t make me shoot you, Greeve.”
“That would not go well for you.” Graham stepped up behind Nox, a blaster leveled at the big man’s back in a grip tucked down tight by his hips. Sanda was still having a hard time getting her mind around how natural that weapon looked in her dad’s hands.
Nox turned, slowly, to face Graham, keeping his hands up where Graham could see them. “Come all this way to shoot me again?”
“That’s my daughter. I will reduce you to atoms before I let you harm her.”
“Dad,” Sanda said, channeling the withering force of a child exasperated with their parent. “No one’s shooting anyone on this ship, because I will not have holes in my new bulkheads.”
Knuth giggled, softly. “Sorry,” he said. “Not… not great in tense situations.”
“Remind me to check into why you two aren’t allowed on the front lines later. What, exactly, do you want, Nox?”
“We want Jules back. She’s in Ordinal, on a private station.”
“I feel for you,” Sanda said, “but we got Keepers keeping secrets from Keepers here. Everything could be at stake. Everything.”
“It’s not just Jules,” Nox said.
Arden scowled. “We don’t know—”
“Who else?” Sanda asked.
Nox scratched the side of his chin. “Before he died, Harlan told Jules to find Lolla. Jules didn’t exactly share her plans with us, but we believe she left to find the kid. It’s possible she’s found her and is in a situation that requires her to break contact with us for their safety. We don’t really know.”
“I’ll spin your gate,” Arden said, “if you help us get them back.”
“I don’t need you.”
“If you’re thinking of asking your brother for help, that’s a stupid move. He’d probably help you—I don’t know the guy—but they’d kill him for it. Yank the chip right out of his skull. I’m your best bet, and I want to help, but we need to know Jules is okay first. We need to find her, and hopefully Lolla in the process.”
Sanda winced and touched the back of her head, where her chip was hidden, then jerked her hand away. Arden was right. She couldn’t risk that fate for Biran, not the very fate she was running from herself, and she couldn’t spin the gate on her own.
“What’s the deal with this station?” she asked.
Arden grinned wide enough to swallow a world. “It’s fucking weird, is what it is. Look.” They flicked something up from their wristpad—they kept that data close to hand—and the blackness of Sanda’s coords was replaced with a pyramidal space station. “This is Janus Station, in the Ordinal system. It’s privately held, supposedly they do research in civilian communications tech, but their security is tight. I… I can’t get access to the cameras remotely. I can’t get access to anything remotely. Do you know how weird that is?”
“I’m getting a pretty clear picture.”
“I caught a sighting of Jules moving from a shuttle into a transfer tube on that station. I’ve had every damn camera in the area keeping track of it since then, but she hasn’t stepped off and I can’t get eyes inside. I need to get in. I’ve been working on a Trojan, but I’ve gotta be inside their walls to deploy it. Then we can find her.” Their fingers curled into claws against their wristpad, their mouth smeared into a near snarl as they stared down that station.
It’s killing them, Sanda thought. Not being able to know. Arden was not the kind of person used to lacking information.
“You want me to use a gunship to force your way into a private, civilian research station? Dios, Anford would send every damned gun in the system after us, you know that. We’d go from tolerable nuisance to rogue to be put down in a heartbeat.”
“Yeah,” Nox said, “about that. It’s not really the gunship we wanted. I mean, it lends you some legitimacy, but. Uh…”
Arden picked up the thread. “This station’s research continues on the forbearance of the Keepers. They have a charter and everything, which is why their security is so tight. But being on the Keepers’ leash means they’re subject to fleet inspection.”
Sanda blinked. “You didn’t want the gunship. You wanted a major.”
INTERLUDE
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 0002
BEGINNING OF THE CORP WARS
Alexandra Halston killed the first assassin who came for her with her own hands, and that blood fertilized the ground upon which a war would grow.
The warning had come early in the morning. Lex had been awake for three hours before a simulated dawn painted the windows of her office in hab alpha with rosy light. The blush of morning had brought with it a ripple in her information network, an uptick in the threat level.
Though Lex lived on a station in orbit around Tau Ceti-F—named simply Prime Station, for it was the first—she was not deaf to the murmurings of Earth. Threats came in daily, and her security team handled them with the same aplomb they had done back in that old gravity well, but this threat did not come to her team. It came to her, for she was the only one who would recognize the inherent deadliness.
Braxton Hues, CEO of Micromatics, has filed a proposal to build a space elevator near the northern coast of Australia.
Banal, boring. The frustrated CEO of another private space corporation flexing his muscles, trying to claim some piece of the stars. One could even claim it was a waste of resources, as Prime Inventive charged so little to make use of their elevators.
But Braxton was no fool, and there was one thing Lex would not allow her elevators to lift into the black—weapons.
Prime Inventive had their own means of defense. They employed nearly a full fleet stationed on both the Earth and Tau Ceti sides of the gate, and a private army of bodyguards to keep the chipped Keepers safe. But their weapons were developed and built off-planet, in the very station Lex lived on now. The secrets of their construction were held almost as closely as that of the gates.
Lex had found early on that fear of the unknown was often enough to keep humanity in check.
She could think of only one reason Braxton Hues would build another elevator, and that was to make a deal with the governments of Earth to send their weapons after Prime Inventive. But Lex had told the powers of Earth two very, very good reasons not to bother coming after her.
The first: They knew nothing of the gate. Accidental destruction of gate technology during a dragged-out battle could cause eradication of all life in the solar system.
The second: Alexandra Halston held a deadman’s switch over the construction data. If she
were to die, or believe a Keeper compromised, she could send out a signal through an elaborate relay system, frying the chips and the minds of the Keepers who carried them.
And so, when Lex read the implicit threat in Braxton’s actions, she considered these facts, and wondered: Did her would-be assassin have a way to take her down without triggering the deadman’s switch? Or did, as she suspected, the assassin know her final secret? The self-destruct switch on Keeper chips was not tied to her life, for she would not risk the accidental destruction of her data. For the chips to fry, Lex herself must initialize the process.
She removed a knife from the top drawer of her desk. She would wait and ask the would-be assassin herself.
CHAPTER 20
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
STILL DON’T WANT TO BE A MAJOR
You asshole,” Graham hissed, low and soft, to Nox.
“Back atcha,” Nox said without bothering to look his way. “You have the authority to make that inspection, Major Greeve.”
The station filled the screen, a languidly spinning top, its class designation and various vital statistics spooling by alongside. She should drop them at the nearest station and burn hard for the deadgate.
“That,” she said, pointing at the station, “is a trap. You know that, don’t you? If what you’re saying is true, and Arden’s bag of tricks couldn’t get inside, then this piece of footage you found of Jules boarding a shuttle to Janus is a thread you’re meant to pull on.”
“It ain’t the only bait we’ve taken,” Nox said, “but the trap hasn’t closed on us yet.”
Sanda’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You got a good look at Laguna’s files, but you didn’t ask us about the arsons,” Nox said.
Sanda shared a wary glance with Graham, who only shrugged in response. Knuth and Conway looked like their eyes were about to get stuck wide open. She couldn’t blame them—she’d asked them to come along for the ride with her against Anford’s orders on, apparently, incomplete information.
“You two want my help, I need all your cards on the table.”
“Show her,” Nox said.
Arden began typing. “We don’t know for sure if she has anything to do with this.”
“Who’s ‘she’?” Sanda asked.
“Show her,” Nox said.
“Harlan, our old boss, got killed after Jules, Nox, and Lolla stole a crate of wraith from a warehouse out in the Grotta,” Arden explained while they typed, for the benefit of Conway and Knuth.
“It wasn’t just wraith,” Nox cut in.
“I’m getting to that. When they got into the warehouse, they stumbled across a lab. They tripped an alarm, but there was no one around and SecureSite doesn’t haul ass to get out to the Grotta, especially the fringes. So Jules took a look around while Lolla worked over the door—correct me if any of this is wrong, Nox?”
He shook his head.
Arden continued, “Okay. We’re uncertain what happened next. Jules went off on her own, but we know she stole three tablets. Harlan took two, she kept one and brought it to me to break the encryption. That night, while she’s with me and Nox is out… doing Nox things…”
Nox cleared his throat and looked down.
“Somebody hit the hideout, killed Harlan, and took Lolla. Nox and Jules came to get me once they realized, and we were all ambushed by guardcore.”
“Excuse me,” Sanda said, “fucking guardcore? Are you sure about that? The armor can be faked.”
“Their tactics can’t,” Nox said.
Conway was watching them, pale-faced. Graham kept his gaze on Nox, searching for something Sanda couldn’t quite put her finger on.
She wondered what it would be like for him, listening to this. Wondered what he must feel, knowing he hadn’t been there to help his old crew when death came calling.
“We’re sure,” Arden said, breathing deeply, “because of what happened next. We got out, but there was this woman over the speakers in the apartments taunting us the whole time. I’d…” They shook their head and rubbed their cheeks hard with both palms.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Nox said.
Arden cut him a glare and gathered themself. “I’d told Jules, before shit went down, that I had a buyer for the data on her tablet. Someone by the name Silverfang had been trolling particular channels, looking for shit on the Keepers. See, the tablet Jules brought me was secured to a degree I only see tied up with Keeper tech.”
Sanda squeezed the arms of her chair hard to keep from scratching the back of her head. “Bold thing to be trolling in the open for.”
“That’s what I thought. Most of the usual sellers thought she was too forward, either a fake or a plant, but in the context of the guardcore coming for us I thought maybe she was legit, or at least knew something.”
“Keeper Nakata,” Sanda said.
Arden nodded. “Yes. Silverfang was Nakata. She wasted no time in attacking once Jules proved reluctant to hand over the data.”
“So Jules killed the Keeper.”
“In self-defense,” Arden said.
Sanda gave them a halfhearted smile. “I can relate.”
“Right. Right. We went into hiding, but I think we all knew it wouldn’t last, I mean… You don’t fuck with the Keepers. The next morning Jules was gone, wiped off the grid in a way I couldn’t track, and the warehouse where we found the lab had burned down.”
“So the woman over the speakers was Nakata?”
“No.” They hesitated with a finger poised above their wristpad. “A couple months ago, we found another warehouse exactly like the first. High-tech lab hidden in the shell of a rotted-out husk. We watched it for a while. I had every damn camera and mic in a five-kilometer radius jumping to my command, but we only got this.” They flicked up the image.
Sanda leaned forward, as if getting closer would somehow add clarity. The image was dark, taken at night when the streetlights were out. She’d never been on a street at night with no lighting. The camera had been pointed at a loading door, a half-crumbled road leading the way up to a sheet of rusting metal.
A figure walked down the road. The person wore a long, white gown, their equally pale hair curled into ringlets so dramatic Sanda had only ever seen their like in CamCasts. They were wire-thin and wore sandals with spiked heels so sharp she wondered how they didn’t drop through every crack in the road. Something about them was just… wrong. Then she noticed the lack of wristpad.
“Who are they?” she asked.
Arden shook their head. “Keep watching. You might recognize her, but it took me a long time to track her down.” They typed, and the woman began to walk in stuttering fits that didn’t completely mask the sway to her back and hips. “There was a huge amount of interference with all surveillance systems when she appeared. That’s all we got. We waited weeks for her to come back, scoped out other warehouses like this one in the meantime, but she never did.”
“The arsons were you sending up a signal flare.”
Nox nodded. “We couldn’t contact her directly, but we wanted her to know we knew. We were watching. When we got footage of Jules boarding a shuttle for Janus, we ramped up our efforts because we knew we weren’t getting on that station without help. We were trying to piss her off by hitting her warehouses, draw her out.”
“You wanted to be taken?”
Arden sighed. “If that was the only way, yes.”
Something tickled at the back of Sanda’s memory. “Play that again for me, please. Loop it.”
Arden did as she asked.
She leaned forward, staring, burning the lines of that woman into her mind, the easy way she moved—despite the distortion—as if all the world were her plaything. She reminded her of Lavaux, in a way. That practiced manner of insouciance, but that wasn’t the right memory. It was close, but… The woman’s head turned enough to see the outline of her nose and lips, and a jolt of recognition shot through Sanda.
“I know her,�
�� she said. “That’s Rainier Lavaux. Keeper Lavaux’s widow.”
The deck fell silent as, over and over again, the crew watched Rainier Lavaux approach the warehouse in glitching, stuttering frames.
“Turn it off,” Sanda said.
Arden wiped the screen clear.
“A Keeper’s wife,” Conway said, and shook her head. “You all are in it up to your necks.”
Sanda snort-laughed. “So are you, though you’re welcome to hop off at the next station and pretend we’ve never met.”
“Not a chance. Just because they won’t let me on the front lines doesn’t mean I don’t want to be in the mess.”
Sanda closed her eyes, considering, but couldn’t shake the phantom image of Rainier from behind her eyelids. Two dead Keepers, and Rainier somehow the bridge between them. That she had married Lavaux made her his ally, more than likely, but Nakata, and the warehouses? What was she doing on Atrux?
“Anford will eventually find out if I throw my weight around at Janus,” Sanda said, almost to herself. “She’s humoring me with the coordinates, but she won’t stand for me bullying my way onto a civilian research station.”
Nox said, his voice soft, “We can’t force you to do this, Major. But we can’t get them back without you, either.”
It wasn’t the pain Sanda remembered, just then. Wasn’t the air boiling its way out of her body as the vacuum had closed around her, wasn’t the sting of Lavaux’s knife on the back of her neck—wasn’t even that first strike, when her leg had gone out from under her and the stunner had wracked her body.
What Sanda remembered then was how smug Lavaux had looked. How sure of himself that things would shake out in his favor. He had been a Keeper. A Keeper’s word was inviolable, no matter how many people he destroyed to achieve his goals. And now two women were in the clutches of that man’s wife.
Sanda recalled Rainier’s party-perfect smile, the too-bright laugh of the woman who’d pretended at being a harmless socialite dangling from Lavaux’s arm. Stupid of Sanda to assume Rainier wasn’t playing her own game. Even stupider of her to walk away now, dog-headedly pushing for the coordinates, when she had a chance to hold Rainier Lavaux’s feet to the fire.
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