Local Star

by Aimee Ogden

On a sharp edge in Metal Reclamation.

  Where electrobacteria chewed up anything metallic in sight.

  She shined the light in his face; he put his arm up to shield his eyes. She wanted to see his face. “Your hand isn’t working,” she echoed. Because it’s made of metal. Like a Ceebee.

  Chapter Eight

  “I’m still spaceworthy,” Kalo said, as if she’d somehow done something to offend him. A deep breath cooled the fire of Triz’s outrage. She didn’t have time to be angry right now, or to unpack his hurt feelings, real or feigned. Casne didn’t have time. She found the access panel and punched her way through. It screeched on its hinges as it swung down into the wrenchworks. Triz followed it, boots first.

  It took Kalo another moment to land behind her in the dark wrenchworks. The emergency lighting gleamed eerie blue here, too, turning the stranded Swarmers into pale ghosts of their former glory. Other systems had come online, though: This far at the end of the Hab from the primary ambient generators, the ‘works had a few systems important enough to warrant redundant emergency power sources of their own. A faint dry breeze wafted down from the air vents, and the amber operation light shone beside the huge airlocks at the center of the ‘works. That loosened the tight set of Triz’s jaw a little.

  As Triz surveyed the situation, the wallport lit up, its screen crawling with red and yellow warning symbols. A good sign. The maintenance crews uphab must be busy. She crossed to the wallport and offered her fob, which clicked once and promptly died. It, too, had lost its integrity to the bacteria in Reclamation. She unlatched the manual keypad from its node and typed in her own queries. She didn’t look up when Kalo approached, but resentment crawled out between her clenched teeth anyway. “So, you’re a Ceebee.”

  “Gods of—do they have exclusive rights to mods? There’s billions of people in the Confederated Worlds and most of them have one augment or another.”

  He hadn’t actually answered her accusation. She met his bluster with stony silence.

  He exhaled noisily. “No, Triz, I’m not a Ceebee! Or if I am, I’m a pretty awful one, considering how many of them I blasted out of the sky at Hedgehome. You think I’m the only pilot with nano repairs? Or combat mods?” He sat down against the wallport, smearing a sticky trail of muck down the wall. “Being a Ceebee isn’t about what you do to yourself. It’s about what you do to other people to get what you think you deserve. So tell me, Triz, what exactly do I deserve?”

  Triz bit her tongue. She didn’t know whether he was lying to her and didn’t have the stomach to figure it out now, to hold up the pieces side by side, and see where they matched up. Someone wanted Casne’s career ended, someone close to her who had the opportunity, motive, Fleet access . . .

  She couldn’t make the shapes fit the Kalo she’d known, so she didn’t try and keyed in a query to the family quadhome instead. The call rang and rang and rang unanswered, so she tried another query. This time, she put in a request to an unmanned wallport terminal upstairs in the Arcade. “What are you doing?” Kalo asked. She ignored him, and he let his head fall back against the wall behind him.

  Mercifully, this time it pinged a response, and she keyed in her passcode for access. When she needed to do her weekly shopping, she’d always liked to use an open Arcade port to make sure the crowds weren’t packed around the fungus vendors and the nutrient tankers. Maybe she could use the same method now to get a glimpse of the situation upstairs. Better yet, someone might notice the in-use port and actually tell her what in all the worlds was going on in the Hab. And whether whatever was going on uphab might be going on in Justice too. If Kalo couldn’t handle it, maybe she could fly the Scooper herself? How hard could an old ore hauler be to fly?

  She grasped at the tenuous fragments of that fantasy as the screen flickered, then resolved. Or almost resolved; Triz squinted and tried to make sense of what she saw.

  After a moment, the image came together in her brain as well as on the screen. It was the Arcade she knew, but scribbled over in lines of gnarled green-brown. White lines flashed back and forth and left lingering visions on the port screen. Triz asked for volume and received it. The shrill hum of the white lines sliced through her. After a moment, a pair of lancet guns barked in answer.

  Kalo’s chin lifted off his chest. “What was that?”

  She gestured to the screen, wordless.

  He whistled low. “Tunnelguns.”

  That word Triz recognized. Tunnelguns were Ceebee stuff, the technology still beyond what the Fleet’s exotics-wranglers had been able to come up with. And probably more unpredictable than what the Admiralty would have tolerated in service anyway. “That green shit must be one of their bioweapons,” Triz murmured. The Hab’s immunodefenses should have stopped any kind of bioweapon, Triz wanted to say, but should haves didn’t patch the plastiglass.

  Kalo was already on his feet. “Rocan,” he said, and cursed. “Rocan has to be behind this. Someone helped him escape Justice.” He looked around wildly. “I need a fighter. Get me in the most spaceworthy one you’ve got.”

  “What?” That tore her attention from the wallport. “To stop him or to save him?”

  He rounded on her, his bad hand held close to his chest, bent at an unnatural angle that indicated it was missing some significant metal-based infrastructure. “Shitting stars, Triz! You want to have, what, an ethical debate on biomods right this second?”

  Arguments died in her throat. This was Kalo she was talking about. What an awful thing, to accuse someone she’d . . . cared about of being a Ceebee. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to mean it. His shoulders pulled taut. “I don’t—I don’t understand, and I can work on that later, but what I want right this second is to make sure Casne’s safe.”

  His stiff posture slackened a little and the hard tendon in his jaw softened. “Getting me in a light attack Swarmer right now gets you a step closer to that.”

  “There’s two whaleships at anchor outside! Let their swarms handle it.”

  He gestured violently to the port. “They don’t know he’s on the loose with a Ceebee rendezvous on the way, but we do.”

  “I think you’re overlooking one shitting detail. What are you going to fly with? Your feet?”

  “I’ll figure something out.” He was already stomping toward the row of moribund Skimmers and Arcwings, stepping over the coils of loose tubing and ducking under the tangles of wires that dragged out of open panels. “This one doesn’t look half bad.” He pointed, hand flapping.

  Triz threw her arms in the air. “It looks fine because we pulled the entire arc array out of it for refitting. We were stomping all over its guts in Metal Reclamation ten minutes ago. Leave it be.”

  A flicker of activity tugged Triz’s eyes back to the wallport. Two figures cut their way across the Arcade, in her view. The one taking cover behind must be Rocan. The Ceebee commander’s eyes weren’t mere holes anymore: even at the distance afforded by the wallport, Triz saw the faint gleam of some kind of misbegotten tech. The translucent outline of exotic-based body armor draped the shoulders of both men like a cloak, only flaring into full light when a lancet burst came close.

  The second man . . . looked like Lanniq?

  That didn’t make any sense.

  Triz frowned at the strange sight and tried to remember what she’d been saying. “The only thing close to ready is the Scooper I told you about. Kalo, I think Rocan is on the move. And . . .” Confusion bit off her words. She’d already seen the damage done by a misplaced accusation. Shitting stars, she’d done a little damage herself just now. But this time, she didn’t think her eyes had lied to her. “And I think he’s got Lanniq with him running cover.”

  “Lanniq?” Kalo spun on one heel and almost tripped over a vacuum casing. “No. He hates the Ceebees. His nephew joined them, and Lanniq never heard from him again.”

  “See for yourself.” Triz gestured at the port screen so violently she almost missed the flash of movement. Not a barrage of lancet fire. Just one
body in Fleet gray that dropped onto Lanniq from the Arcade level above. Triz’s heart beat a ragged double-time.

  Casne. Casne, why?

  Casne’s legs scissored between Lanniq’s and sent him sprawling. She ripped his antilancet cloak away from him, but a vicious kick knocked her rolling several paces. Triz gasped. When Lanniq ran to meet her head-on, she was on her feet waiting, and he seemed to see her for the first time. Whatever words passed between them were lost in the chaos. Then, a flash of movement behind Casne: Rocan’s palm, turning upward toward her.

  A scream of warning died in Triz’s throat.

  The tunnelgun hidden inside Rocan’s wrist fired.

  Casne took a step forward. Triz couldn’t say which happened first, until the white lines cleared from her vision, and she saw Casne tumbling head over foot toward the new hole in the Arcade perimeter. A hole opening into space.

  “No,” Triz heard herself say softly.

  That tiny figure was framed in the space of the hole for just a moment, a perfect X. A shimmer at the neck: Casne’s Tactics collar insignia catching a shard of light.

  Then the limp doll of a Justice officer’s body slammed into Casne, and they both blinked out of existence. Only a black hole left where Casne had been, with starlight flickering like funeral lights in the void.

  “No,” Triz said, “no, no, she can’t, no.” She couldn’t feel her face; her teeth clipped her tongue, and her mouth filled with blood, but it didn’t hurt. It felt like drowning.

  She couldn’t look away from the wallport. Lanniq and Rocan strained, their feet held securely against the metal plates of the deck. Mag boots—or Mag feet, perhaps, in Rocan’s case. She couldn’t see Lanniq’s face, but Rocan’s was expressionless, intent only on their destination across the Arcade.

  The lift tubes.

  They still have reserves hidden out there, Saabe had argued. Maybe somewhere webward of Golros.

  The Fleet detected an encrypted tight-beam transmission to the Webward Pearls, Kalo had told her.

  And he’d asked her for a fighter . . . oh.

  The Ceebees were coming to collect their wayward leader.

  So Lanniq and Rocan were heading for the lift to climb down to the wrenchworks. Of course they were, because the wrenchworks was their ticket out of the Hab. Rocan would never be able to swim an umbilicus tube fast enough to make it to a rescue ship before the whaleboats mustered their Light Attack Swarms to intercept. But a fast, small ship could enter via the wrenchworks airlock and be gone again before the whaleships could react.

  When Triz blinked, the broken pieces of her rescue fantasy cut the insides of her eyelids. “I’ll get you a ship,” Triz said, and blood ran down her chin. Casne would have known what to do now. Maybe Kalo would too.

  But when she looked over her shoulder, he was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  Of course he was gone. Kalo was always going to be gone at some point, and that was why this shitting quad could never be. He was half man and half precarious quantum state teetering on the edge of collapse. Erased from existence by the barrage of a ground array’s superheater? Or beating a retreat from responsibility and sentiment and grief? Gone was gone.

  Triz picked up her wrench. It didn’t matter what Casne would do, or what Kalo would say. She wasn’t either of them. And she knew what she needed to do now. She didn’t know how long it would take Lanniq and Rocan to climb down the length of the Hab, though with a tunnelgun in their possession, she guessed they wouldn’t suffer the indignity of having to traverse the recycling engines.

  She had to get a ship working. One boot in front of the other. If there was no one else in position to intercept Rocan’s rescue, then she would have to do it herself. Sure, she’d never flown a ship before, but she’d been in one so many times, hadn’t she? Albeit on this side of the Hab bay doors. How different could it be to take this thing into space? Her stomach pitched queasily. She took a different tack: imagining how satisfying it would be to apply the drill bit to the hull of whatever Ceebee ship dropped out of space to make the pickup.

  Her wrench bit down on a bolt. Two dust-clogged filters to replace, and this Scooper would be spaceworthy. Just two. Her wrist turned, her arm strained. It felt good to work. Working, at least at this stage of the process, did not require thinking. Only doing.

  A dirty filter hit the floor and coughed up rust-red powder. Triz kicked it aside and hefted a clean one. It clicked neatly into place. Triz liked things in their place. So did Casne. Triz’s pairhome had always been neater than the rooms shared by Casne’s quadparents. It was comfortable to nestle, for a moment, in the warmth of memory. Too comfortable. In memory, Casne was still alive. Triz’s eyes watered, but she fastened the filter back into place and reached for the second one.

  It was something, to have been witness to Casne’s final moments. An act of bravery. Never the cowardice they’d accused her of. She’d tell Veling and the other quadparents. Quelian too. She’d scream it into his face if he wouldn’t listen. She thought he would. She’d make him.

  The second panel popped into place, and it occurred to Triz none of Casne’s quadparents might’ve survived her. She didn’t know how much of a hole the tunnelgun had created in the Hab. Obviously, support systems were still running, but it was entirely possible Rocan had shot through the part of the Hab where people lived. She closed the open wound in the Scooper’s side and probed the oozing sore of the possibility of an entire quadhome erased in an hour’s bloody work. No. She had to believe they were still alive, that Rocan’s main goal was getting here, to this wrenchworks.

  And Nantha. Oh, no. She could imagine telling Casne’s mother what happened, their knees close together and hands twisted into two-tone knots. But her wife, who had made her home in Casne’s heart and occupied so many of the warm hollow spaces in Triz’s too? She didn’t have words for that.

  The Scooper was finished. Triz stood up and looked at her hands. She’d raised a blister on the heel of one thumb. It would heal. It would have to. She needed to fill the fuel tanks. She needed to work faster.

  The soft patter of falling water reached her ears. The sound stopped her completely.

  Her head turned toward the wrenchworks office, and her body followed. She stepped over Kalo’s wadded shirt on the floor, his trousers, his boots. The fading emergency lights lit the office a dull blue; she pushed on the half-closed door to the staff shower, where Kalo sat beneath the spray. He might’ve been here the whole time she worked. It was closed-circuit water, devoted to the works, so there was no ration to use up. But he must have used up the remaining heat without the ambient generators flowing to power the heating elements: his skin was raised in gooseflesh.

  So he didn’t leave after all.

  “Kalo. Get out of there.”

  “I thought of rescuing Casne before you did, you know. Not with a starfighter, just on my own two feet. Shooting my way into Justice like the hero in a bad ‘port drama.” He turned his hands palm upward; one collected water, while droplets cascaded down the slack one. “If I’d had the conviction to act right away . . .”

  “You’d probably be in a Justice cell yourself. Or maybe you’d be dead too.” Dead. That word jumped in Triz’s mouth. It made things too real, brought them in from their safe distance. She edged forward, put herself under the icy spray of the shower. The cold cut her to the bone, and the water washed away the things she couldn’t handle yet. One thing at a time. And at this time, she needed a pilot.

  At this time, she needed someone who wasn’t gone.

  She put her arms around him and shared his shivering. The elbows of her shirt wept dirty water. Triz didn’t cry. She wasn’t ready to open that reservoir yet. It ran deep, and she didn’t want to look at the things lurking below the surface. She’d already mourned once, for the Casne who was unjustly arrested; she couldn’t plumb those depths afresh already. She reached over her head and turned the water shutoff. “Kalo,” she said. She put her hand on his neck; he lifted his
head and met her eyes. “We need to move.”

  He complied and climbed to his feet. Some vestige of military discipline kicking in. They found spare clothes in the crew lockers. Triz dressed in her own clean tunic and leggings; she rifled through the others’ things to produce something usable for Kalo. He shrugged into one of her old shirts, which stretched too tight across his shoulders, and cinched a pair of Quelian’s sagging pants about his waist. There was nothing for it but to shove his feet back into his own sodden boots. “Are you spaceworthy?” she asked, and his chin jerked in a nod. “Good.”

  From the wrenchworks proper, a rhythmic banging echoed its way to them. Triz stiffened; Kalo’s head came up. “Rocan,” he said, and he was already striding toward the door.

  Before he left the office, Kalo’s good hand went to an empty pocket where a Fleet sidearm might usually rest. He looked over his shoulder at Triz, and if he was afraid, it didn’t show on his face. “Stay here. I’ll take care of this.”

  “What are you going to do, slap him to death?” Triz swallowed irritation with an undercurrent of anxiety and shoved in front of him so she alone occupied the office doorway. She craned her neck for a better view of the wrenchworks. “Besides, I’m not so sure it’s him.” Kalo made an irritated noise and wedged himself between her and the door. The sound repeated itself: the same pattern of knocks she’d heard the first time. “That wasn’t coming from the lift, it was coming from . . .”

  “The airlock,” he finished. He slammed her arm aside and crossed the works at a dead run before she knew what was happening.

  “Wait!” He was already keying in an order at the terminal at the base of the works. Beneath Triz’s feet, the floor hummed and jumped as mechanical gears ground together. The outer airlock was dilating, and gods only knew what lay on the other side. “What are you doing? If there’s a Ceebee entry team out there, we don’t stand a chance.”

  “It’s not an entry team.” The humming beneath Triz’s feet stopped briefly, then began cycling again. Closing the outer doors, pumping air into the sealed chamber. She stepped back from the lock, avoiding the lifttrain that would have hefted whatever wounded ship waited inside. Maybe a canister of spray sealant could function as a makeshift weapon—if she could find a hose she could spray it in an unguarded face—