Liao snapped her mouth shut and backed up slowly, bumping into a wall, but Sanda didn’t have time to deal with her shock.
“Arden, maps.”
“Got it,” they said. In the same instant, a layout of Monte bloomed on her wristpad. The station homed vast stretches of aeroponic farm space spread throughout thousands of cubic meters of air.
“Dios,” she muttered, panning around the place that Arden had flagged as SecureSite holding. The maintenance passageways of the station were another world unto themselves, set up to facilitate the farming done here, but incredibly fucking annoying for tracking down a fugitive.
“Arden, priority on maintenance tunnel cameras. Weapons authorized to kill, Nazca are dangerous when cornered, and it’s not like we can trust any intel a goddamn spy gives us. Everyone move the fuck out.”
“Fucking aye,” Nox said with a wolfish grin as he swung his rifle around into a loose, ready grip.
Graham gave her a wary glance, but she didn’t have time to deal with his fears. Novak had to be bagged before he got off station. A Nazca wouldn’t risk exposing themselves in such a dramatic fashion unless it really, really mattered. The ability to spin the gates at will was worth blowing cover over. She didn’t know what the Nazca would do with that, but really-fucking-bad was a safe guess of the outcome.
Sanda moved toward the door and Liao grabbed her arm hard enough to leave a bruise. Her eyes were dark with rage.
“Find him. I need to undo this.”
“Understood,” Sanda said, and shook off the woman’s grip.
She stepped out of the apartment and yellow light filled the station, strobing slowly, as a gentle mechanical voice said, “Monte Station is under lockdown. Environmentals are secure, but please remain in your homes until further notice. Monte Station…”
The apartment building was a half block from the main market street, and so she saw the moment cold realization hit the citizens. Saw them freeze up, a snapshot of denial and fear, then burst apart, fleeing like rats from a sinking ship.
Good. Emergency announcements weren’t to be taken lightly on stations, and these people had few enough encounters with such things that they took it seriously. The more were hiding in their homes, the less likely any of them were to take friendly fire.
And she intended on firing. Novak wouldn’t get another chance to lie to her.
Sorry, Tomas, she thought fleetingly. They might know each other. Maybe they were friends, if there could be friends in such an organization. If the Nazca could even form personal connections—don’t go down that road.
“Talk to me,” she said to Arden.
“Nox is closing on the first batch of pods, G&K on theirs. No sign of disturbance yet.”
“The wall panels are all fucked up here,” Nox said. “Spitting out gibberish.”
“He put a virus in the system,” Arden said with a slight hint of admiration. “Nothing tailored, though, just a general scrambler. I’m on it.”
“Don’t divert attention from those cameras. We can’t let him dictate where our attention goes.”
“Understood,” Arden said. “Gutarra is trying to get me patched into the station’s cam feeds, but even he’s kicked out.”
“Of course he fucking is. Keep working.”
Sanda broke into a run. According to her wristpad, the access door to a maintenance shaft that would lead her down into the shuttle bay, below the docks, was ahead and around a corner.
She pulled out her blaster, thumbed it up to lethal fire, and braced her wrist as she held it ready to take the center-mass of someone Novak’s height. She turned the corner and almost ran chest-first into a wall.
Realization hit her harder than the wall.
“The maps are wrong,” she shouted into the comm. “He’s fed us false data.”
“Goddamn,” Arden said. They were jabbing at their pad so hard she could hear them. “This is… this will take time.”
Time they didn’t have. She put her back against the wall and squeezed her eyes shut, doing everything she could to recall the walk from the docks, through the market, to the apartment. Step-by-step she dragged her memory back down that path.
The shuttles were below the main dock. She’d seen them on the station schematic when they were planning where to park the Thorn. Maintenance pathways varied station by station, but there was usually a way for repair bots like Grippy to move from one level to another without having to use the elevators.
Until Arden fixed the maps, it was the only shot she had.
Cursing under her breath, she took off at a dead sprint. Someone shouted at her as she vaulted over the gate between customs and the docks, maybe one of Gutarra’s people, but she ignored them as she hit the deck and pushed herself, muscles burning, toward the dock that held the Thorn.
Even with access to accurate maps, Novak had only gotten visual on the walk from the Thorn to SecureSite holding. If he wanted a smooth, quick escape, he’d go the way he’d seen.
She hoped.
The Thorn loomed off to her right, a defiant, muscular boulder of black metal and weaponry incongruent with the merchant haulers parked alongside it. She let herself pause, catching her breath as she scanned the immediate area.
There, a shaft down, wide enough for a bot like Grippy and, as she well knew, wide enough for her.
She kicked the hatch open and slid down the ladder with one hand for stability while the other kept the blaster pointed down. The impact shuddered through her feet, jerked her prosthetic, but she held together. After the damage on Janus, she’d rebuilt the joints to last through an apocalypse—not that she wanted to put them through that test.
A maintenance hatch stood between her and the shuttle docks. She flashed her ident over it, got back a scrambled mess, blew the lock out with her blaster, and kicked the door open.
Leo Novak stood at the end of the dock. The hatch of the shuttle next to him was open, he already had one foot in the pilot’s seat.
He turned at the noise of her entrance. The world felt thick, heavy and slow, and although he was far enough away that she could see only the silhouette of him, the whites of his eyes and the wisps of his hair flipped up by the circulated air, something felt intrinsically familiar about him. Safe, somehow.
He raised a hand in farewell, and the world snapped back into place.
She fired.
CHAPTER 45
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
FIRST BLOOD
Center-mass, direct to the chest. Sanda had always been a crack shot. She advanced with her blaster pointed straight on, even though she knew she’d struck a killing blow and Novak was busy bleeding his last into the half-opened cockpit of the shuttle.
“Novak is down in shuttle bay alpha. Medical assistance required,” she said into her comm.
“Let him bleed out,” Nox said.
“That’s not how we do things.”
Arden said, “I’ll get you medis as soon as I can get ahold of them. The guy dies it’s his own fault for fucking up the systems.”
She approached warily, keeping the blaster leveled at his chest in case he had any fight left in him. He’d landed with his back in the pilot’s seat, one leg hanging over the edge of the cockpit and the other crumpled beneath him.
“You so much as twitch, I’ll put another one in your head,” she called out.
“I’m unarmed.” His voice was a low, wavering rasp.
She crept forward, nudged his splayed leg with her toe, and heard him grunt. Careful to maintain a stable stance, she stepped into the cockpit and leaned over, giving his body a brief pat-down. No weapons, but she pulled the flask out of his hip pocket and held it up to his face.
“Was this worth it?”
Blood trickled from the corners of his lips as he cracked a tight smile. “You won’t believe me, but I thought it might be.”
He was fading. Blood darkened the seat below him, pumping through the exit wound, gravity yanking it down and out of his broken, falte
ring veins. Guilt stabbed at her. He had been unarmed.
“Dios,” she whispered, and holstered the blaster, making sure it was well away from his grasp. Shuttles had medikits. She tugged the red box out from under the seat—its top was already slippery with his blood—and popped it open. The wound was through-and-through, impossible to staunch effectively without proper equipment, but she could slow it down.
Fingers slick with blood, she tore a pack open and ripped out the gauze, slapping a coagulate patch onto his chest near the wound before packing gauze into the hole. He winced, hissing as she pressed down.
“Medis are on their way.”
“Bullshit.” His laugh was a thin wheeze. “I know what I did to this station’s systems. Arden’s good, but it’ll take time. Time I don’t have.”
She didn’t want to lie to him, but she didn’t want to agree with him, either. She averted her gaze from his cold, blue stare. Winced herself when his hand came up, trembling like he was freezing cold, and wrapped icy fingers around her wrist.
“Stay. Until it’s over.”
She could scarcely hear him, his voice was so soft. “Don’t be so goddamn dramatic.”
She wanted to tell him he should have gotten in the shuttle and burned off. That it was his own fault for corrupting the systems, for taking a second to wave goodbye. But displacement of blame wouldn’t stop the blood pooling under her feet. Wouldn’t stop the gaping maw of guilt in her chest.
She’d killed before. Not just in simulations, or in ship battles where the only foes you saw were metal and ordnance flying toward you faster than you could think. The fleet didn’t skimp on its training. It wanted all its soldiers able to pull the trigger, and hit, when it counted, so she’d done runs into fringer colonies that were committing atrocities with her cohort. Had put them down, and thrown up over it, and gotten back on the gunship the next morning.
She hadn’t had to talk them through their own death, though.
He whispered, “You’re shaking. That’s my job.”
She hunched up her shoulder to press her earpiece closer, pressing down the gauze with both hands. “Arden, get me those fucking medis. Yesterday.”
“I’m trying.”
“Sanda.” Something small and scared and familiar in his voice made her look, make eye contact. Tears stood high in his eyes but had not fallen, casting a gauzy sheen across them. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“What? For taking the flask? I guess you were doing your job.”
Tension left the corners of his lips, and at first she thought his smile was relaxing, but in truth he’d lost control of those muscles. His fingers stopped shaking, grasp going limp around her wrist.
She froze as gravity finally dragged the tears from his eyes, made them streak down his pale and drawn face, and felt, for the last time, the shuddering thump of his heart, the heave and rattle of his chest. She closed his eyes, probing his face with her fingertips one last time, needing to remind herself, convince herself, that he was only Novak. Still no scar tissue. He was just another Nazca. Just another liar.
“Fuck.” She punched the headrest of the seat, relishing the pain that shot through her arm.
The blood on her hands had a silvery sheen in the bright light of the docks.
She stood there for a moment, eyes closed, just breathing, gathering herself so that the next time she opened her mouth it wouldn’t be to scream.
Sanda opened her eyes and pressed her comms. “He’s gone.”
“Uh, I mean, that really sucks but we might have a bigger problem,” Arden said.
“What is it?”
“Novak’s programs did a number on local systems, but he got a call out before he made a run for it. We’ve got incoming—three ships, I think, fully stealthed, but I’m picking up the shape of them from the dead field of comms they’re leaving in their wake. They’re jamming everything.”
Sanda narrowed her eyes at the dead man. “What kind of ships? Gunners?”
“I can’t say, they’re coming in fast, though, their shape is… well, you won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“Guardcore.”
Sanda felt the urge to grin fiercely. “Your old friends. How long?”
“Maybe twenty minutes.”
She heard a step on the dock and whipped around, blaster out, leveled, and finger on the trigger. Nox held his hands up, eyebrows raised. “I come in peace?”
She rolled her eyes and holstered the weapon, offering him her hand. “Help me out of this.”
He grabbed her wrist and yanked her up, leaning over to get a good look at Novak. He whistled low. “Damn good shot.”
“As you almost discovered. Announce yourself next time.”
“I don’t bother with fleet protocol bullshit anymore.”
“Then enjoy getting shot.” She pressed her comms. “Arden, can you get me Gutarra yet?”
“Putting you through.”
She waited until she heard the crackle of another comm coming online. “Gutarra, this is Greeve. We’ve got three enemy ships incoming. What is your position?”
“Bunkered down in holding with your scientists. What the fuck is happening out there?”
“The Novak situation is contained, but he called some friends before we got him. Three enemy ships, incoming, to collect your scientists.”
She heard his jaw pop. “This is a civilian station.”
“And those are civilian scientists. Is there somewhere else secure you can move them to? Somewhere not obvious to look?”
“We have a lot of food storage.”
“Good. Take them there. Don’t leave any of your people behind. If they’re efficient, they’ll hit holding first and they’re not going to ask your receptionist nicely.”
“We got maybe a hundred SecureSite to manage the eighty thousand people on this station, and none of them—none—have seen real combat.”
Sanda glanced down at the blaster in her hand, and the blood staining her fingers, and stifled an intense longing to have Tomas at her side. Novak had gotten in her head. That was all. “I’ll hold them as long as I can. Now move. You’ve got twelve minutes.”
“More like eighteen,” Nox said, off comms.
“I don’t like tight margins.”
“You understand,” Nox said, “that if these are the GC working with Rainier, the ones who came for us in the Grotta, then we’re fucked. Arden and Jules and me, we survived the last time because we ran. You’re talking about defending a station we don’t even have an accurate map for.”
“You got another suggestion?”
“Yeah. Call that brother of yours. GC respond to Keepers, right? These might be off-script, but it could be they won’t want to tip their hand if challenged by a Keeper directly. Maybe he can call them back.”
“Worth a shot.”
She wiped the blood on her wristpad off on the leg of her jumpsuit and put an emergency call through to Biran. His face came up immediately, but the setting was a punch to the gut. Over his shoulder, the deck of a ship she could have bet her life was the Taso loomed. Bile rose into her throat and she swallowed back an urge to demand what the fuck he was doing on Lavaux’s ship. That man was dead. Biran would have good reasons. She needed help, and shouting about Biran’s current mode of transportation wouldn’t get it to her any faster.
“Hey, B, no time for pleasantries. I got three suspected GC ships burning hard for Monte Station in Ordinal and I need their leashes yanked, if that’s something you can do.”
His eyes narrowed, then relaxed as a slight grin took over. “No questions, I suppose? Don’t bother answering—hold on a second.”
He tapped her line mute but left the visual up, so she could see him talking to someone else through his pad, but she couldn’t see or hear who. Two minutes later he came back, brows furrowed in worry.
“There’s no active GC operation in your area. Are you sure?”
She shared a glance with Nox. “Yeah. Signatures check out. These
are GC ships, we’re sure of it.”
“Then they’re not there on any official—” The line crackled, Biran’s face freezing and stuttering.
“We’re being jammed.”
His mouth moved in slow motion, eyes erased by a stray bar of laggy pixels. “Get—out—”
“I’ll update you once we have comms back,” she said, praying he could hear, then closed the call.
“There’s your confirmation,” she said to Nox, watching the edge of the hab dome circling the docks as if she could see out into space, to the stealthed ships burning toward them. “Fake fleeties, fake GC.” Fake Keepers.
“Maybe they’re fake,” Nox said, “but their tactics are real enough.”
“We can’t hold against the guardcore,” Graham said over comms, voice tight.
He wasn’t wrong. She was standing right by the Thorn, more or less. Just a ladder and a dock away from jumping in that ship and burning for safety. Her people weren’t even that scattered. In fifteen minutes, they could all make it on board if they were pounding dirt hard enough.
Maybe she could even justify fleeing. If she scrammed, the guardcore were likely to follow, thinking she had taken the scientists with her. The diversion couldn’t hurt.
But it wouldn’t be long until they discovered the deception and came back to hammer Monte into dust. Her grip tightened on the blaster.
“Arden. Take Liao and get out of there. GC have a backdoor into damn near any network, and it won’t take them long to figure out where you’re holed up. Move, now, get to cover and don’t tell me where but keep on those maps.”
“Understood.”
“Conway, lie low, make yourself look empty and only shoot if you know you can take a whole ship out without giving them a chance to fire back.”
“Gotcha, boss.”
“Everyone else, if you can shoot, get your guns ready and come to me. We’re not giving ground without soaking it in blood.”
Nox said, “About goddamn time.”
CHAPTER 46
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
RUMORS
The Taso rocked under his feet, nearly pitching Biran sideways hard enough to break his ankle against the grip of the mag boots as he stomped onto the command deck. He swore, swatting at the glitchy screen on his wristpad. Sanda hadn’t seemed frightened, but then, as he’d discussed with Ilan, that wasn’t her scared face. She didn’t get big-eyed and panicky. Sanda Greeve got focused when she was scared straight down to the marrow, and the woman he’d talked to was a woman on a mission.
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