by Alex White
She narrowed her eyes. “That’s not the same chicken they were making during the interrogation, is it?”
Cordell laughed. “We ate that one. Figured you’d want your favorite before I give you some bad news.”
Her stomach churned when he said that. Cordell had never been one for cushioning things, and she didn’t exactly want him to start. Her appetite returned, a gift from the hot steam and browned skin of the chicken. The honey dill carrots didn’t look that bad, either.
“Did you, uh, bring a fork?” she asked.
He sucked his teeth. “I forgot.”
Boots snorted. “Room service is lousy here.”
Cordell put his hands on his hips and grimaced. “I’m your captain, not your butler. Let’s get this over with so you can get your own damned fork.”
Boots put the plate aside, though she certainly wouldn’t leave it untouched when they were done talking. “So what’s the news?”
Cordell sat down on the chair by her bed, an oddly intimate gesture for him. He’d always been the type to stand, or sit behind the desk in his captain’s quarters—making it clear there was distance between them. “We know how to break the curse on you.”
She sat up straight, suddenly invigorated. “How sure are you?”
“While you were under, we ran some simulations, did some research, talked with a few experts over the Link.”
“That’s supposed to be my job, Captain.”
“Had to be sure before we shared our plan. It’s dangerous as hell.”
Tired of waiting, Boots picked up a piece of chicken and popped it into her mouth, savoring the salty brine and yeast of the ale. “Whatever gets me a shot at Stetson, I’m in.”
“So … we were thinking …” Cordell leaned forward, massaging his weathered hands. He chewed the inside of his lip and squinted, having trouble getting the words out. “Uh … that binary star system where we found the Harrow has a pretty decent magic suppression field. Basically all of our unshielded tech didn’t work, like, you know … the sensor arrays.”
For a moment, Boots stared at him, wondering why he would bring that up. Then, the pieces clicked into place, and she nearly slapped him.
“You’re going to toss me out the airlock!”
Shaking his head, the captain said, “No, it’s nothing so informal. We’ve got—”
“‘Unshielded.’ You specifically said that! You want me out there without a suit on!”
“Now, Boots, I think you’re being a little bit unreasonable here. We’ve got the best doctor around and a legendary group of explorers. It’s not like we’re winging this.”
She stood up, her plate clattering to the ground. “We wing everything! It’s what we do! Oh, my god, you’re going to get me killed!”
Malik peeked around the door frame, looking considerably haler than he had on Hammerhead. “Boots, may I come in?”
“Yes!” she said. “As a medical professional, please explain to my captain that space is bad for you.”
“I told you to let me break the news, Captain.” The doctor ran a hand through his hair and sat down on the bed beside her with a sigh. “You’re technically correct, and as the ship’s medical officer, I wouldn’t recommend being outside without a suit. However, with planning, we can mitigate those factors. Every year, hundreds of people are involved in airlock accidents, and most of them live.”
“Yeah,” Boots said, “but not over Chaparral Two. Not with weird, antimagic binary stars! You’re not even sure this will work! Do I get to be part of the planning, or just the frozen meat?”
“Are you an expert on decompression and arcane nullification?” asked Malik. “I am, and we have a battery of experts ready to assist you. Miss Brio and Miss Sokol are working on technology to help the twins cast over a distance. Mister Vandevere is running umbral and orbital simulations. I’ll be taking care of your physical health.”
“The plan is good,” said Cordell. “The real question is: do you want to get Stetson Giles or not?”
She stared long and hard into her captain’s eyes while her mind wrestled with Giles’s location. She desperately wanted to just spit it out and skip the whole “naked in the vacuum of space” thing, but Cordell was right. She couldn’t go after Giles. She couldn’t send someone after him. No one said anything about trying to break her contract.
She’d put everything on the line for longer shots than this one.
“Okay,” she breathed. “Okay. Yes. When do we do this?”
Red lights flashed in the corridors, and Aisha’s voice echoed through the halls. “All crew to ready stations; we’re coming out of the Flow in the Chaparral binary star system. Normal space in five minutes.”
“About that …” Cordell began. “We were thinking in an hour.”
The cargo bay airlock was cramped with four people inside: Malik, Alister, Jeannie, and lastly, Boots. Of course, they were all in spacesuits, and she was in a set of loose-fitting pajamas she’d brought with her from Hopper’s Hope. If she was to be cast out into the great beyond, comfy pj’s were preferable. Malik had fitted her with a plain fall restraint harness and anchored her to a tether point inside the closet-sized room.
For some reason, Jeannie insisted on standing next to Boots, which didn’t hurt her feelings much. Alister could be a little creepy at times.
Nilah and Orna had stripped all the orichalcum out of the resuscitation bot in the med bay and fashioned a conductive wire, which they’d woven into the tether with a long, barbed tail on Boots’s end. It wouldn’t be useful to her if she started dying, anyway. Without a cardioid to respark, the bot would likely just watch her life ebb away.
Malik turned to her, his helmet lights blaring in her face, and she shielded her eyes. He took the barb and fished it up the back of her shirt before swabbing her neck with antiseptic.
“A quick stick,” he said through his tinny speaker, then pressed the barb into her skin below the base of her skull. “This is going to let Jeannie cast her mark on you from the shelter of the airlock. If she fails, Alister will try. Then, we’ll pull you back.”
“I’ll do better this time,” said Alister. “Better odds.”
“You won’t need to,” said Jeannie, flatly. “I’ve got you, Boots.”
Boots tried to feel the wound, but Malik brushed her hand away and taped the wire down.
“A human can maintain consciousness for fifteen seconds in a vacuum,” Malik said. “After that, you’ll pass out and begin to asphyxiate. I’m going to cast my mark on you so you can retain some higher brain functions even through an unconscious mind. Think only of Stetson’s location. You can go three to five minutes out there without any air before we’re looking at permanent brain damage.”
“I’ve seen the safety videos,” said Boots, trying not to think of the vets she’d met with tremors and cognitive impairments from violent decompression.
“Good,” Malik continued, “then you know to blow out as hard as you can before we open the airlock. Plug your ears when you decompress. It should help the air escape a little more slowly so we’re not repairing hearing damage. I don’t care if you’ve heard it before, I’ll say it again: if you have any air in your lungs, it could cause your tissues to rupture and you’ll perish from an air embolism. Am I clear?”
“Yeah, Doc.”
“Explain to me what I just said.”
She did, and he rewarded her with another swab and a jab in the neck from an automatic syringe. “Damn it, Doc!”
“That’s Hemaflexin. Takes two minutes and improves the solubility of your blood gasses. We want to reduce the impact of the bends on your body.”
“The shadow of the umbra basically ends fifteen meters out,” said Jeannie. “We’re going to push you as hard as we can when that door opens. Once we’re certain you’re in the solar rays, I’ll cast my mark, which will be transmitted up the orichalcum line.”
“Best be fast,” said Boots.
The intercom chimed and Cordell said, “
You have a moment if you want to say anything to the crew before we get underway.”
Boots narrowed her eyes and thought about it.
“You guys are a bunch of assholes.”
No one laughed.
“But …” she began, “I guess that’s why I fit in so well. Don’t let me die out there.”
“That’s it?” She could hear the grin in the captain’s voice.
“Yeah. Now leave me alone. I need to reflect on my life or whatever.”
“One minute thirty to mission start,” said Armin. “Mission crew, check in.”
“Spyglass, standing by,” said Jeannie.
“Pensive, standing by,” said Alister.
“Sleepy. Ready to execute,” said Malik.
The mission clock ticked down, with Armin calling the intervals. When he reached the ten-second mark, Boots fixed her gaze on the airlock door like it was a rabid dog.
“Mission execute,” said Cordell. “Kill the gravity, Missus Jan.”
Her weight fell away. Boots plugged her ears.
“This will keep your conscious mind active during the minutes it takes to asphyxiate,” said Malik, casting a glyph and touching her bare forehead through his spacesuit. “Breathe out, right now.”
She blew out as hard as she could until her eyes bulged. Malik yanked the emergency override before mashing the release.
Then all sound vanished as the door opened.
The cold that greeted her was beyond anything she’d ever felt in her life—worse than the icy caverns of Wartenberg, worse than an open cockpit on Hammerhead. She wanted to scream, but drew in nothing to help her. She shook uncontrollably, and rough gloves gave her a hard shove into the great black beyond. The pajamas did nothing to shield her from the bone-deep frost creeping into her.
Close your eyes. Her eyelids stuck partway as the corneas froze, and she pushed her palms against them, trying to salvage what warmth she could and melt her tears long enough to get them shut. Dancing sparkles filled her periphery, a sure sign she was about to lose consciousness, maybe from pain, maybe from asphyxiation.
And then heat covered her over, filling her frostbitten skin with a painful itch. Except it got hotter—
And hotter.
She was like a coin—one side boiling, the other side frosty.
The tether snapped taut, jerking her palms away from her eyelids, and sunlight filtered in, bright and bloodred. She no longer had the strength to protect her face. Everything hurt. Before her, hell; behind her, oblivion.
But the queer dissolution of thought that followed unconsciousness never came, and so she filled her mind with the one thing that could possibly give her comfort:
An impossible gala. A never-ending dance.
Stetson Giles and the coordinates to the Masquerade.
Chapter Fifteen
Solo
Boots convulsed in the medical bay gurney.
“I need those numbers, Nilah!” Malik shouted.
Nilah had never heard him shout before. Now that she’d thought about it, she’d never seen him in a management role at all.
She and Orna had been stationed in the med bay to help operate the equipment they’d gutted by stripping out all the orichalcum. The various machines couldn’t use the rare metal probes, so Malik had to call out Boots’s vitals, and the mechanists would psychically feed the data back into the systems. Nilah closed her eyes and sifted through the system architecture, looking for a tiny strip of code in a sea of variables.
“Numbers!” Malik repeated.
“Proteins, twenty-eight percent! Synthesis drivers holding steady,” Nilah replied.
He glanced to Orna before threading a needle into a vein on Boots’s arm. “How’s the dermax coming?”
“It’s cooking,” said Orna. “Fifteen more seconds.”
Nilah fished out the sedative Malik had requested and passed it over, then Orna gave him the skin regeneration spray. The poor woman’s body was a bright pink color, as though she’d been attacked with sandpaper, and drool bubbled up around the bite guard Malik had slipped into her mouth.
“Be ready with that sedative,” said Malik. “This should rebuild a lot of the epidermis, along with some pain nerves. The shock could prove too much.”
Nilah gaped. “Uh, where do you want me to inject her?”
“Any fatty areas,” said the doctor. “The radiation and frost have sterilized most of her surface, and the dermax ought to do the rest.”
He clicked the nozzle trigger on the pressurized bottle of dermax, spraying Boots down. Her pink skin grew veiny and black as nanites burrowed into her flesh. The room stank of sulfur and eidolon powder, like burning rubber on a racetrack.
Boots began to choke, and her eyes rolled back in her head.
“Sedative now,” said Malik, guiding Nilah’s injector down to the soft flesh of Boots’s thigh.
She clicked down the trigger, and the older woman fell still. The powdery dermax faded from black to gray ash, then flaked away like snow onto the table. The nanites continued crawling over Boots’s flesh, knitting her cells back together to build a protective layer.
Once the alarms subsided and Boots appeared stable, Malik turned to the pair and said, “I think we’ve got everything under control. If you can get those monitors working, that’s most of what I’ll need. Can you get the orichalcum back out of Boots’s tether?”
“We’ve got it, Doc,” said Orna, and the pair of women silently set about repairing the circuits on the vital monitors with the metals they’d stolen.
Malik was fast asleep when they finally got the last component online, and the night cycle had worn thin. Aisha had come to give Malik some food, and she rested in the corner bed with her head on his shoulder, a thick blanket covering the pair of them.
Jealousy tugged at Nilah’s heart as she looked on them. Orna’s short hair had matted to her head, and Nilah hardly felt fresh after crawling behind the drug compounding console to do repairs, but she wanted what Malik and Aisha had. Every cold moment with Orna was a needle of ice in her chest, and she desperately wanted to talk things out.
“I’m going to bed,” Orna said, rising and walking out of the med bay with little notice.
“I’ll come with you,” Nilah said, but Orna waved her off.
“It’s fine. Why don’t you get some breakfast?”
Instead, she followed her girlfriend back to their quarters and shut the door behind them.
“Okay. What is your problem?” Nilah asked, and Orna just looked at her with a flat expression, pausing midway through pulling off her sweaty top.
That could mean anything. Nilah had seen that look from Orna when she didn’t care at all, when she cared deeply and was pretending not to, and when she was about to break into her signature killing grin.
When Orna didn’t speak, Nilah repeated herself, adding, “You’ve been acting weird since Pinnacle. You’ve been … well … bloody cold, and you’re pissing me off!”
“Is that how you want to start this?”
Nilah narrowed her eyes. “Listen, darling, we’ve got to start somewhere, and it might as well be with your bloody attitude.”
Orna nodded, pulling her top back on and slicking back her hair. “All right, then. You know what’s so annoying about you? You’re just assuming that I’m the problem!”
“You are the problem! We’re supposed to be in love, and you’re giving me the cold shoulder every five minutes!”
“And why do you think that is, Nilah?” Orna put a nasty inflection on her name that she’d never heard before. No one talked to her like that. “You figure I just woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m going to piss off my girlfriend today’? No! You’ve been treating me like crap, and I’m tired of it!”
“Before this mission, I have wined and dined you across the blighted galaxy. Don’t you—”
“You did rich people stuff, and that cost you basically nothing. Don’t act like fancy gifts matter.”
Nilah sprea
d her arms wide in a “fight me” pose. “Yeah? So gifts are only worth something if they severely cost me? Is that how you measure love? In suffering?”
Orna rubbed her brow. “That’s not what I’m getting at.”
“That’s what it sounds like you’re saying!”
“Okay,” said Orna, crossing her arms tightly. “We’re not doing this right now. I’m tired, you’re tired—”
Nilah’s eyes should’ve caught fire from the glare she shot Orna. “I don’t give a damn about how tired you are. You may not keep running away from me, Orna Sokol.”
“You think you can just walk all over me, huh? I’m not one of your fans, and I’m certainly not Lana, bowing and scraping to keep you happy. I can do whatever the hell I want, Nilah Brio, and right now, I’m going to take my crap and sack out in the cargo bay! Don’t think you can tell me what to do any more than you can go prancing off on some suicide mission in my robot!”
Nilah’s chest puffed out. “Is that what this is about? Your stupid robot? We needed him to rescue—”
“‘Stupid’? How dare you? He’s a replacement for the one you killed!” With that, Orna yanked the blankets free of their bed and spun on her heel, dragging them into the hall with her.
Nilah’s cheeks burned like she’d been slapped. Standing in the middle of the bedroom, she couldn’t quite believe what’d just happened.
Orna couldn’t have been that mad about her little jaunt inside of Charger, could she? It hadn’t been Nilah’s fault; it was simply an operational parameter.
Simultaneously dazed and furious, Nilah wandered into the hallway to watch Orna leave. Instead, she found Armin standing around with a pair of teacups.
“What?” she asked, annoyed with herself for blinking back tears.
“I saw Orna dragging a comforter through here, so I guess it happened.”
“What happened?”
“You two had a fight,” he said. “The data points line up.”
She puffed out her chest. “Yeah? Well then a bloke like you ought to know not to talk to a lady after—”
