It wasn’t the first time she’d seen those ships. They weren’t uncommon around Ada Station—they went where the Keepers went—but they’d never been a threat to her before. She’d never felt, never known, that these weapons were meant for her.
Seeing them now, cutting through the space around the docks, two of them angling down, slicing like guillotine blades toward the shuttles, she knew she’d fucked up.
Fake GC or not, as Nox had said, they had real tactics. Real ships. That was her death coming. That was all their deaths.
“Oh fuck,” Nox whispered under his breath, and she could have sworn he sounded excited.
“Brace,” she said reflexively, even though her comms were dead.
She and Nox put a hand on the guardrail and bent their knees as two GC ships slammed into the shuttle docks, shredding the populace’s best chances for escape. They didn’t bother firing. The bodies of the ships were enough to grind every shuttle into ruin.
“They don’t plan on leaving any witnesses,” Sanda said.
“Let them try.”
The single ship that hadn’t demolished the shuttle docks rammed itself into the docks alongside the Thorn, as close to central holding as it could get. Sanda held her breath as an airlock opened, spilling three GC onto the dock. They didn’t so much as glance at the Thorn. Thank you, Conway.
She waited until they’d stepped away from their ship, so that the black of their armor didn’t blend completely with the same darkness that made up the ship, then picked her target—the tail position—and fired.
The GC’s head exploded, the one in front dropping in the same manner from Nox’s shot. The third swiveled, painting up their position with lasers from their weapon. Nox and Sanda hit the ground, going for cover behind a wall.
The GC had no intention of firing their weapon. A turret bloomed from the side of their ship and the electric hiss and slam of a railgun broke the air. Microseconds later the bolt slammed into the side of the transit center, barreling through the wall a scant few meters from their position.
The whole building rocked and groaned. Foam-laid concrete filled the air with grey, smokelike debris, making Sanda cough. Nox grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled. She got her feet under her and, ears ringing despite the plugs she’d put in before firing, they stumbled together as fast as they dared across the bucking and shaking transit center roof.
The roof cracked, the slab they were on tilted up. Sanda slipped, boots unable to hold purchase, and she landed hard on her ass as Nox rolled onto his side next to her. A chunk of the radio tower groaned, metal bending toward them.
Sanda threw up a prayer to whoever might be listening and rolled, grabbing Nox as she passed over him, tumbling across the avalanche of debris until they slammed into the roof of a train car.
Breath exploded from her with the impact and she sucked in air and dust, hacking and coughing. Nox got his feet under him and hefted her by the armpits, jumping down the side of the train car.
They staggered away as the avalanche hit the train car, pushed it off its rails, and sent it fishtailing toward them. Sanda got her feet under her in time to jump, hitting the ground alongside Nox outside of the growing arc of destruction.
She lay there a breath, stunned, and wiped the blood from her split lips onto the back of her hand.
“Two down,” she said, then coughed up a blob of grey phlegm.
Nox laughed frantically and slapped her back as she coughed.
“Progress!” he shouted.
They helped each other up and did a quick once-over for broken bones or serious wounds. Just a few gashes and deep bruises, nothing life-threatening. Incredibly, her prosthetic was holding. Sanda shook powder from her hair and scowled.
“And this is why we don’t fire from civilian buildings.”
“Killjoy,” he said, but didn’t really mean it.
She half turned, craning her neck to get a better look at the place where Graham and Knuth had hunkered down. Dust thickened the air, making it difficult to see, and worry knotted her stomach.
“He’s fine,” Nox said in a softer tone. “Damn hard man to kill. A trait that seems to run in the family.”
“Right.” Sanda narrowed her eyes, adjusting her plan. “If they want to take buildings out, they’re going to take them out with themselves inside.”
“Got your six.”
Without the high ground to tell them how many GC had disembarked, Sanda was walking in blind, so she took her time, creeping up on a side door to SecureSite holding. She hated the cramped hallways of the building almost as much as she hated not having comms and a map, but at least she knew where she was going. The GC would go for the scientists first, and that meant the cells.
“Please remain in your homes,” a computerized voice said over the station speakers. “This is a guardcore engagement. Shelter in place until further notice.”
“And now we’re the bad guys,” Sanda muttered.
“Good,” Nox said, “I was starting to feel too noble hanging around you.”
This SecureSite building had the same sterile-office feel that Atrux’s had. Potted plants lurked in the corners on stands, and the walls were festooned with 3-D images of the station’s bountiful harvest. This was the type of place you’d go to request a housing license upgrade, or visit a therapist. Not lock up a station’s rule breakers.
Weirdness of SecureSite’s aesthetics aside, the standardization gave her a good idea on where to look for the cells the scientists had been kept in. She held up a fist for Nox to stay silent and waited for his nod.
In sync, they moved down a short flight of stairs and stopped at the end of a hallway sectioned off with a thicker metal door than the others.
Nox took a knee to the side and brought up his rifle, sighting it to the center-mass height of the GC. Sanda pressed her side against the wall and matched his aim, then swiped her hand over the lock. Her wristpad was offline, but the station could read the ident chip embedded in her skin. Gutarra had granted her access to everything before he went to ground. It flashed red and beeped. Locked.
Someone was on the other side.
After a tense second when she was foolishly tempted to swipe again, as if the lock had been a misread mistake, the door slid open, steel disappearing into the wall.
Sanda didn’t have a chance to count the GC on the other side before the firing started. She slammed her back against the wall and returned fire, ignoring the burning rip of a blaster tearing across her forearm, the grunt and shout of Nox.
Fire first, recover later. Fleet rules. GC rules, too.
She lay down fire until her trigger finger ached and the GC shots stopped. When the dust settled and the black armor on the other side was lying down and decidedly not moving, Sanda dared to ease off the wall, shifting to take a center stance.
Blood dripped down her arm and leg from a wound somewhere up on her side or hip, it was hard to tell where that searing throb was coming from without looking, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t fatal. Mostly because she was still standing.
One. There was one GC on the other side, torn apart by enough fire to put down a whole shuttle, their armor punched through in neat little holes dripping blood as if the armor itself could bleed.
“That makes three,” she wheezed.
Nox staggered to his feet, planting one red-stained palm against the wall for stability, and laughed raggedly. “How many are on those ships?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Goddamn.”
Sanda crept forward and nudged the dead GC with her boot, edging the rifle they’d dropped away. Those were armor-locked, useless to her, and all the systems on that armor would fit the dead GC’s biometrics and none other. She sighed heavily and slumped against the plex window that had once held the scientists on the other side.
“They do not go down easy,” she said half to herself.
“Say more obvious things,” Nox called back.
“You’re a bastard.” He was keeping her talking to
keep her moving, to keep her thinking, which was sweet in its own demented way. “Medikit on the wall,” she muttered, and forced herself to push off, to drag herself toward it and rip open the lid, tearing open packages of bandages and drug patches to slap all over herself on the worst offenders.
“Got one here,” Nox called back from the hall, the crunch of packaging the only sound save the soft whine of their guns repowering.
“Easy enough to guess we’d come here,” she said. “Doesn’t mean they’ve discovered where Gutarra took the scientists.”
Nox tried to laugh but ended up coughing. “Nice story to tell yourself, but I got news—they tried to gun us down. If they didn’t know where the scientists were, they would have at least tried asking nicely.”
Sanda closed her eyes and resisted the urge to punch the wall, because even through the drugs the bandages pumped into her system, every little thing hurt.
“Right. And they’re probably halfway there.”
“Knuth and Graham—”
Sanda shook her head. “If they saw our building get hit, then they went to ground and tried to cut off the arteries. It’s what I would have done. It’s what anyone with fleet training would do.”
“So.” Nox stood up fully, twisted his torso from side to side, and grimaced as the bandages stretched over his ribs, side, chest, and upper thigh. She didn’t bother asking how he was. Seemed like a stupid question. “We gotta stop acting like fleeties.”
“We are fleeties.”
“And criminals. Both of us.”
She grinned, tasted iron, and licked the blood from her teeth. “You know what the last thing I got arrested for was?”
“Murder of a Keeper?”
She arched both brows. “No, never got taken in for offing that jackass. Icarion arrested me for spaceship piracy.”
“Yo ho ho,” Nox said.
CHAPTER 48
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
AND A BOTTLE OF RUM
This was almost definitely going to get them killed, but at least those GC fuckers would never see it coming.
“There’s a maintenance shaft near the Thorn that leads to the shuttle docks below,” she said as they picked their way through the deserted hallways of SecureSite holding. “If we can get under that ship, then we might be able to access a secondary airlock without them seeing us coming.”
“You sure about that?” Nox asked, but he was keeping up with her anyway.
“Not at all, but if their plan went the way they expected—I can’t imagine they usually have a problem with that—then they think we’re dead in this building. They won’t expect us anywhere near their ship, especially from below.”
Nox shook his head. “That sounds like pretty bullshit you tell someone to get them to go along with your suicidal plan. They probably know one of their units is dead. Even with the signal jamming, they have a way of communicating.”
“Look, buddy, you’ve been on the suicidal track ever since you decided to stay on this station and face down a legion of hostile GC.”
“Fair point. Have you considered punching a hole in the ship’s side instead of trying to sneak into something that’s almost definitely biometrically locked?”
She paused, resting her weight against the wall by the exit to the docks. “I’m listening.”
“The Thorn.”
“I’m not giving them a reason to fire on my ship until absolutely necessary. Conway is safe for now, there’s no reason to draw attention there.”
“Did you hit your head? They won’t let the Thorn sail through this unscathed. Look, Commander, I know you’re all gung ho for Prime, but these people aren’t real GC and they took out the shuttles. They’re not leaving witnesses. You said so yourself. If they bother pretending to file a report, I’m sure they’ll come up with a nice story to make sure people think you defected.”
She grimaced. “All right. The two below on the shuttle dock will have to maneuver in air, not vacuum, to get a clear shot at the Thorn, which will take some time. So we have the Thorn blow a hole in the one on this level, board it, and pray we can get its guns pointed at the other two all while having Conway get the fuck out of here.”
“That’s… a lot.”
“Got a simpler plan that isn’t guaranteed to kill us?”
“I do not.”
The speakers in the hallway crackled. Sanda flinched, expecting another announcement from the GC, but Arden’s voice—staticky and hesitant—whispered.
“Nox? Commander?”
“We’re here,” Sanda said. “What’s your situation?”
“Safe, for now. I’ve gotten in touch with Gutarra and he thinks the GC are closing in on them.”
“He’s right, they are. Tell him to hold tight. We got a distraction coming.”
“Hold up,” Nox said. “Can you get a message through to the Thorn without giving away that there’s anyone on board?”
They hesitated for so long Sanda feared they’d lost the connection. “I think so. I’ve been scattering messages all over the station, sending false packets everywhere. They’ll eventually triangulate my position, but there’s no way for them to figure out who I’m talking to in real time. They think I’m talking to you in the apartment now, Commander.”
“Doubt it, they think I’m dead or dying in central holding. But if you’ve got them confused, keep it up.”
“Confusion’s the best I can do. I gotta move soon, or they’ll find us.”
“Stay hidden. Tell Conway that we need her to punch a hole in the GC ship nearest her, then get the fuck out of here. Coordinate it for eighty seconds from the end of this conversation.”
“Seriously?”
Sanda glanced over at Nox’s patchwork-bandaged torso. “Seriously. We can’t stand toe-to-toe with them.” She wanted to ask about Graham, but swallowed the question. If he were injured or dead, knowing would be a distraction.
“Understood. I’ll put the message through.” They swallowed. “Good luck.”
“We really doing this?” Nox asked.
“We are now.”
She edged one of the double doors to the docks open. If the GC on the nearest ship noticed the movement, they didn’t react. Nox took up a mirror position with the other door and waited.
Silently, Sanda counted down.
At seventy-nine seconds, the Thorn burst into life. Her primary railgun—Conway was not fucking around—swiveled and locked onto the GC ship, firing once. Sanda couldn’t see the GC ship’s console, but she had bet everything that they wouldn’t detect the Thorn powering up its railgun fast enough to do anything about it. She’d been right.
The ordnance tore a massive channel through the GC ship, rocking it onto its side. Conway engaged the energy weapons, firing down at the two ships in the shuttle dock in tandem, and by the time it was all done, the Thorn’s engines had spooled up and she tore out of there, ripping part of the dock away with her.
“Go,” Sanda ordered, but they were both already moving, sprinting dead-on as hard as they could while keeping their weapons steady forward, pointed at the gaping hole in the side of the GC ship.
There was no chance of innocents on the other side of that hole. She went in laying down fire, even though the smoke blinded her. She painted an arc of rifle fire through the entrance and put her back against the wall near that hole, not bothering to take in the details of the ship interior—more black, more targets—she fired at anything that looked like it could move until nothing in that first room was moving anymore. Nox echoed her every motion, a mirror of death.
Still. The room went still aside from the smoke curling through the gaping wound the railgun had left. They weren’t done, couldn’t pause, couldn’t stop. Sanda had never been in a GC ship, but she’d been in enough gunships to know what kind of layout made sense.
She turned toward the pilot deck and shot her way through the door, found five GC getting their guns out, rising from positions at the controls, and she slaughtered them, too, rif
le fire tearing up chunks in the electronics of the control consoles. Everything in the ship screamed and hissed and broke out loud except the GC themselves. Those died silent, their cries trapped behind the armor of their helmets.
Targeting alarms blared. The other two ships had caught on, knew the third ship was in enemy hands, and would rather blast it to pieces than chase the Thorn.
Sanda relied on Nox to hold the door to the deck, and hold he did, rifle prattling away while she slung hers under her arm and fumbled across the captain’s console, trying to gain control of the ship but failing because everything, naturally, was biometrically locked.
A searing blast tore through the ship. The world shook as the floor jarred under impact, another railgun boring its way through the body of the black scythe. Sanda gritted her teeth and braced herself, reaching back for her rifle because the ship’s guns wouldn’t answer her orders. The ship kicked sideways, clinging to the dock by a single clamp. Metal groaned.
Sanda and Nox were tossed against the wall of the command deck, which was now very much the floor, clumped together in a tangle of aching and burning limbs. They scrambled, dragging themselves to their knees.
Something metal screeched and Sanda grimaced, clutching the edge of a nonresponsive console to yank herself to her feet. Nox grabbed her shoulder and helped her up, one arm under hers, his rifle cradled in his opposite armpit as she mirrored him, rifle pointed toward the broken-open deck door as if that’s where their threat, their death, would come from—not the fire of the other ships.
A woman in mag boots thumped up to the door, helmet tucked under one arm and a blaster in the other. Sanda’s finger twitched in anticipation but she didn’t fire. This woman was wearing Prime grey and cyan, not GC black, her green eyes bright against the space-dark expanse of her cheeks, puckered up under the force of a fierce smile.
“Commander Sanda Greeve?” she asked, as if they’d just bumped into each other in a coffee shop.
“Who the fuck—?”
“Ah, we have not met.” She half turned, squeezed a round off on her blaster and barked an order into her comms, then swiveled back to regard Nox and Sanda.
Chaos Vector Page 32
