She could tell herself she was doing this to be noble, to save the young women and put to rights a crime that had been done against them, but she didn’t bother. She’d made a choice when she landed Graham’s hauler on Atrux. Made a choice to find answers for what had happened to her, for what had happened to Bero, and she had a sinking suspicion that Rainier Lavaux was uniquely positioned to give her answers.
And if a part of her maybe wanted a chance for revenge against a Lavaux, well then… The desire wasn’t inconvenient at the moment.
“Let’s go get your friends back,” she said.
CHAPTER 21
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
WELCOME TO THE TEAM. DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING.
Novak,” a woman said.
Consciousness ebbed and flowed, tugging against Tomas’s mind. Somewhere deep in the neural circuitry of his brain, a war was being waged against the sedative. He was aware, in a vague way, that he should be able to help his brain out. His brain was him, after all, and if he could just… if he just…
“Novak.” The woman again, this time irritated. Insistent.
Pain flashed through him, a hot spot of activity somewhere near his face.
“Push the upper.” Words filtered through the haze, dribbled down to him in the dark of nothingness. He wanted to tell them not to bother, that he was fine here. In the dark of his mind, no one wanted anything from him. There was no guillotine blade of failure hanging above his neck.
Fire raced up his arm and set his neurons alight.
Tomas jerked upright, slammed his chest into a leather strap, and coughed violently, spitting blood from—from what? A busted lip? He dropped back, the hard bed of a hospital gurney knocking the air out of him all over again. Cough, jerk, repeat.
“I thought this shit was safe?” the woman asked.
“It is, it is. Every so often there’s an outlier—”
Someone snapped their fingers in front of his eyes. “Novak. Can you hear me?”
Blearily, he nodded.
“See? He’s back now.”
Tomas blinked shadows from his eyes, struggled to focus through blurred masses of color. One of those masses tickled the back of his memory, which was bad because he wasn’t supposed to recognize anyone on this mission aside from Rainier. The thought pumped adrenaline through him, flight or fight kicking in, but for Tomas that biological divide was multifaceted and he usually fell into the not-as-catchy category of wait-and-see.
The woman was hauntingly familiar. He knew her, he knew her… Oh. Oh shit. Valentine.
“Mr. Novak, my name is Jules Valentine. Do you remember where you are right now?”
He pretended to rasp on air to give himself time to think, letting his hand tremble when she passed him a thin paper cup topped up with ice and water. He drank, slowly, letting his body shudder and his voice crack.
This was the woman last seen with a dead Keeper at her feet. Nothing in his research had indicated she’d have anything to do with Rainier Lavaux, but here she was, and that wasn’t going to be a coincidence, was it? He could almost hear Caid telling him: Priorities have shifted, auxiliary mission activated; discover the reason this Grotta kid killed a Keeper.
But she didn’t look like a Grotta kid, not now. Her face was younger than the eyes it held, though that wasn’t unusual in the worlds of Prime Inventive, but the experience hidden there was the only clue she’d had some other life before the neatly tailored slacks that tapered to her ankles, and the too-expensive synth leather jacket. When she moved, the faint scent of tea tinged the air, not the usual bouquet of the Grotta.
“Sorry,” he said, rubbing his throat with an embarrassed smile. Contrition got people to like you faster than kindness. Especially people like Jules. It’d worked on Sanda, too. The thought tripped him. He cleared his throat and pressed on. “Don’t know what hit me.”
“Her name is Lt. Davis, and she was doing her job.” Jules said the “doing-her-job” bit like she said it often, like it’d become a kind of mantra. “Outsiders don’t get to see how the entry systems work.”
“I’m an insider now, though, aren’t I?”
Her smile was wry. “We’ll see. There are some questions about how you washed up on our doorstep.”
“Keeper Lavaux—”
She arched an eyebrow. “Specifics.”
He coughed and waggled his head, taking another sip of water. “Keeper Lavaux, ’fraid I don’t know his first and middle—never cared much for Keeper business, you understand—hired me on to work on some kind of antenna relay. Said his people were having trouble, and I thought that was odd because, well…” He waved an abstract hand and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Keepers, you know? Don’t hire civvies, got their own talent pool and we’re the muck on the bottom of that pond. Begging your pardon.”
“An antenna,” she mused, crossing her arms over her chest, high and tight. The clothes may say station elite, but Grotta body language was hard to shake.
“That’s not right?”
“It’s not wrong,” she said. Tomas considered that the Nazca may have missed out in failing to locate and hire Jules Valentine. She deflected as easily as breathing. “This is a civilian research station, existing under the forbearance of a charter from Prime.”
“Okay,” he said. She trotted out those words like they were new additions to her vocabulary, and he didn’t want to rub her the wrong way by forcing her to elaborate on a system she might not understand. “So whatcha all doing out here? Is there something for me to fix, or what?”
Her hands went to her hips, skimmed off them as if she’d expected something else to be there—a weapon?—and found their way into her pockets. “Yeah. We’re working on amping up the signals that get pushed through the gates.”
She watched him very, very carefully as that sank in. The relays on the gates were not civilian science. Though their construction wasn’t secret enough to hide in Keeper chips, they were Keeper made and that was that. Anything touching the Casimir Gates was strictly off-limits. The Nazca had gleaned that this station was working on communications equipment based on the supplies it had ordered in, which was good enough for Tomas to work with. He was a comms man at heart, variations on that cover story always came easily to him. They’d missed that it had to do with the gates.
He licked his lips, and used this identity’s filler word, hoping she’d draw in the blanks. “Okay…”
“They’ve had some trouble getting the relays on the gates to talk to their amplifiers.”
“Okay.”
She scowled. “Didn’t Lavaux tell you any of this?”
He lifted his hands in a helpless shrug. “Sorry, Ms. Valentine. I don’t ask questions much when Keepers tell me to do things.”
That got a smirk out of her. “Fair. Look, are you stable enough to go for a stroll?”
He undid the strap across his chest and sat up, grimacing as the sedative lurking in his system made his gorge start to rise. He swallowed the bile down and nodded. “Good enough.”
She offered him a cold, dry hand and he took it, leaning on it harder than he’d meant to as he shuffled to his feet. They were in a small, grey room with storage panels and offline screens set in the walls. Not exactly a medical facility, save for the stretcher he’d woken up on. He patted his pockets down real quick, checking to be sure everything was there—not that any of it was sensitive, it was just the kind of move expected of a man like Leo Novak—then followed her into the hall.
“We’re pretty bare-bones on the staffing here,” she explained as she walked at a pace fast enough to make his drug-addled body breathe harder. “The security measures Prime asks of us are intense, and we don’t dare fuck with them. I’m surprised Lavaux got you through so quickly.”
Tomas shrugged. “Keeper privileges, I’m sure.”
His mind raced as she led him through the halls of the station. It was a twisty place, mazelike in its layout, and unusual for that. Most of the stations Tom
as had spent any significant amount of time on were massive, airy things, with high ceilings and vaulted atriums designed to mimic the skies and light of old Earth, insomuch as the people of Prime remembered what that ruined planet was like.
No matter how far humanity ventured from its cradle, they craved light in the sun’s range, air that moved on atmospheric currents, and green leaves to soak up the light as surely as they did. A lot of experiments had been done to the contrary. They were in space, after all, and with the endless supply of building materials Prime Inventive commanded, any structure was possible in a vacuum. But the people hadn’t liked those—had rejected moonlike spheres and Escher-esque tunnels. The species liked its light, even if it was simulated and the viewscreen windows didn’t show anywhere real.
He got the distinct feeling that this station, with its low ceilings and tight halls and dim light, had not been made with humanity’s comfort in mind.
“We pulled your stuff off the shuttle and put it in a room not far from here. Your wristpad will guide you, we already synced it to the station. You cannot control the climate in your room, the whole station is controlled at once, so I hope you packed some sweaters.”
“Who built this place?” he asked, dancing too close to the line, possibly, but it was an honest enough question for anyone. Obscuring curiosity about perfectly normal things could tip your hand. Caid had taught him that, and it was a lesson he put to good use on Bero.
Jules stopped with her hand hovering over an entry pad. “One of Lavaux’s companies retrofitted it to our purposes. This is a private enterprise, but we have the Keepers’ blessing.”
She could not stop emphasizing that everything they were doing here was under the watchful eye of Prime. That, even though messing with gate tech was decidedly Keeper territory, they had permission, so it was all right. Tomas didn’t buy that for a second. Leo Novak wouldn’t have, either.
“Begging your pardon,” he said, letting her hear his reluctance. “But why would the Keepers approve something like this? Don’t seem… usual.”
“What we are trying to do here is not usual.” She pressed her palm against the pad and it flashed green, the door dilating.
Tomas swallowed a lump. A mirror image of Bero’s lab waited beyond that door, minus the pillar in the center where Sanda had found Kenwick’s head. There weren’t a lot of ways to lay out a lab, but this symmetry, this proclivity to place Velcro strips on the edges of the tables just so to receive and hold tablets in case of low-g. This kind of synchronicity wasn’t a coincidence.
Bero was an Icarion ship.
Janus was a Prime station.
Tomas knew what Prime labs looked like. Knew what most civilian labs looked like, too. This wasn’t it. Wasn’t either. But he hadn’t gotten close enough to Icarion to say for sure if this lab—and by extension Bero’s—had been Icarion, or something else.
“You all right, Novak?”
Jules waited inside the door, her hands shoved in her pockets and a fluffy eyebrow rucked up high. None of this was right.
It should have terrified him. Instead, he had to suppress a smile as his heart rate kicked up with excitement. Whatever was going on here was new. To him, and to the Nazca. Such a thing hadn’t happened in… Jules squinted at him.
“Fine,” he said, and let out a nervous laugh as he dragged a hand through his hair. “Got a little woozy from the… I don’t know, to be honest. The size-differential, I suppose. Maybe the drugs. Probably both.”
“Probably,” she said, and pursed her lips in annoyance as she glared up at the ceiling, toward a corner. Tomas had seen Sanda make a similar face at Bero. “I’ll make sure you get proper rest after you learn where to grab food and approved supplies. But right now, I want you to meet the team you’ll be assisting.”
“Sure,” he said, easy as could be, while his excitement shifted to skin-freezing dread.
Tomas followed along, matching her pace with an easy stroll, shaking hands and matching names to faces with his retinal implant, shoving that information into his wristpad to dig up and study later.
Jules hadn’t just mirrored an old memory of his when she’d cast her eyes to the corner of the room. That memory had bubbled up because it was damn near exact. The same posture, the same stubborn head tilt, the same… knowing, as she’d stared into the corner of the room. Jules had been checking in with the station’s cameras, the same way Sanda always had on Bero. As if there was more than a security system monitoring the station.
It’d just been him and Jules in that room, when he’d woken up from the sedative. So who had she been talking to?
CHAPTER 22
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
A DEAD FRIEND’S SWITCH
One of Rainier was coming to Janus Station. Jules saw her less and less in person, contacting her only through her wristpad or the station cameras and audio, but it had been two weeks since Liao’s insertion, and Rainier wanted to collect the latest amplifier prototypes. Jules told herself that was the only reason.
But Jules hadn’t seen Marya in the days since their argument, and Rainier’s only communications had been vague assurances that they were on schedule. She hadn’t even responded clearly to the notice of Leo Novak’s strange arrival. She’d messaged only to say no new researchers would need to be captured. Maybe the fact that Novak had been recruited by her dead husband stung, but somehow Jules doubted that.
She wasn’t sure if Rainier thought Jules was stupid, or didn’t care that Jules knew she was lying. This wasn’t an inspection. It was going to be a punishment.
Rainier’s guardcore hadn’t stepped foot on the station. Rainier liked to keep them close, so watching the GC ship slip toward the dock through Janus’s cameras gave Jules a small jolt of fear. It was one thing to walk into a battle knowing those people were on your side, and quite another to face them down.
Sometimes she wanted to ask which one had taken those shots at her outside Udon-Voodun two years ago. She never did. Despite everything, she needed to stay alive for Lolla’s sake. Marya was an asshole, but she had been right. Jules was disposable.
She had to move Lolla. Marya’s intrusion was one thing—annoying but not insurmountable. The station AI had gone over the details of Marya’s break-in and determined she’d used a trumped-up excuse having to do with the scientists to gain temporary privileges. Permissions Jules immediately reset.
It would have been enough to soothe her nerves, until Rainier announced she was coming for an in-person visit. If Rainier was here to destroy Jules, Lolla wouldn’t last long, either.
She checked the security feeds to be certain Marya was nowhere nearby, then unlocked the wheels on the table that held Lolla’s coffin and backed her into the hall. On her wristpad, the distance between Rainier’s ship and the docks ticked down toward zero.
The wheels hissed against the smooth composite floor. If Rainier was watching—and Jules could never be sure when that woman was peeking through the station’s cameras—she didn’t react. Maybe Lolla was too far beneath her notice. Maybe, probably, this was exactly what she’d expected Jules to do. To second-guess was to fail, Jules told herself. That road led to paralysis.
Two minutes to touchdown. Jules didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about being in space aside from the fact she hated every miserable second of it. But like the Grotta, space stations had their own rhythms. They didn’t grow and shift in the same way, nothing that nebulous could survive in a vacuum. Stations required hard borders. Rules. Jules chafed every time she had to run a checklist.
But the Grotta taught you how to survive. When you were born on fire, you grew an instinct for where the water was. Rainier hadn’t given her a rundown on Janus and its operations, but one of the first things Jules had done upon arriving was locate the evac pods and the shuttles. She couldn’t fly for shit, but then, that’s what the AI was for. So long as Rainier didn’t get into the system.
The coffin took up most of the elevator. Jules had to press her back against th
e wall, the gurney digging into the tops of her thighs. As it swished down the levels, her stomach lurched. All the medications in the ’verse couldn’t get her used to spin-grav. Rainier, in her flippant way, had claimed that Jules’s status as an ascended meant that something as trivial as nausea shouldn’t bother her. But the longer Jules spent with Rainier, the more she suspected the woman didn’t know—or care—how the ascension-agent worked on humanity.
The lower levels of the station narrowed, so that Jules had to be careful not to scrape the sides of the coffin against the walls as she pushed it along. Rainier had purchased this station from a failed settlement, a bunch of fringers who had gotten together to build some utopia or another. Whether they’d left on their own or Rainier had burned them out, Jules didn’t know, and didn’t ask.
What she did know, and the reason Rainier liked this station, was that the lower levels were tubed up with pipelines that could provide deep, deep cold. Rainier had offered, once, to let Jules store Lolla down here, but Jules had wanted her closer. Coffins, narrow mirrors of Lolla’s, lined the walls on these chilly levels.
Their surfaces were opaque, but inside each, a new instance of Rainier Lavaux grew.
Jules put her head down and pushed. A line of four-seater shuttles appeared to her left, curving with the station’s wall. When deployed, they’d drop into the empty column of space in the middle of the station and fly out through the bottom.
They needed maintenance, but Jules figured as long as they were sealed against the vacuum, she and Lolla would be all right. She picked the shuttle that, according to the station data, had been flown last—well over four years ago—and swiped her ident, holding her breath. It opened.
She wrapped her arms around the coffin and grunted out of habit, lifting it off the rolling gurney. All its electronics were self-contained, the battery designed to last decades, but her heart lurched as she shoved it into the shuttle, bumping the sides on the way in.
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