Aurora Blazing

by Jessie Mihalik

  He smiled at me, a true smile, and my breath caught at the beauty of it. “You may not have noticed,” he said calmly, “but I’m hard to kill. Next concern.”

  “Alex and Aoife know they are going to die, and they’re going anyway—I’ve seen that look before. They were kind to me and they helped me and I won’t repay them with death.”

  Ian stepped closer, into my personal space. “Alex and Aoife are soldiers. They know what it is to prepare for battle. I didn’t order them to come, they volunteered—after I’d warned them about the risks. They hope to be able to kick some Rockhurst ass, but they’ll settle for MineCorp. Next concern.”

  “Ada will never forgive me.”

  Ian slowly and carefully slid his arms around me. When I didn’t balk, he pulled me into a gentle hug. I rested my head against his shoulder and wrapped my arms around his waist.

  “Your sister will forgive you,” he said. His voice vibrated through his chest, a soothing rumble. “She understands sacrifice. Next concern.”

  Lulled by the comfort he offered, the truth slipped out. “I’m worried that if I let you, you’ll break my heart.”

  I tensed. He froze. His breath caught, interrupting the even rise and fall of his chest. Finally, he said, very quietly, “Anyone lucky enough to be entrusted with your heart would be a fool to treat it carelessly.”

  “Are you a fool?” I ventured.

  “I was, once. I try not to be anymore.”

  Chapter 22

  Ian coaxed me back to the flight deck. We did not speak of the final words whispered between us, but the sprig of hope nestled next to my heart burned brightly.

  I responded to Ada’s flurry of messages with just a single line: I will bring him home. I wrote another message with everything I knew about Ferdinand, MineCorp, and XAD Seven. I encrypted it with our shared key and set it on a twelve-hour timer. If anything happened to me, Ada would know where and why.

  I briefly searched through the files I’d pulled from MineCorp. They had regular shipments of people headed to XAD Seven. Either Rockhurst was radically expanding mining operations, or workers were dying at an alarming rate. Maybe both.

  Ian took us into orbit, then turned to me. “Where is Ferdinand?”

  “XAD Seven.”

  “Fuck.”

  Well, that pretty succinctly covered my feelings, too. “Yeah. It’s not quite as bad as if it was XAD Six, but it’s not great. The only positive, if you can call it that, is that MineCorp keeps shipping in new people. We have a few options.”

  “Any idea how advanced their base is?” Aoife asked.

  “No. Ada said XAD Six wasn’t terraformed, so I don’t expect Seven to be, either. They’re mining, so they’ll be underground. And based on the number of people they’re shipping in, it’s either a large operation or multiple sites.”

  “I will check to see if House von Hasenberg has any recent intelligence or surveillance,” Ian said.

  “As far as I can tell, we have three options.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “One, we go in stealth and parachute in from a high altitude to avoid detection. Once we grab Ferdinand, Phantom will need to do a hot pickup then disappear.”

  Ian grimaced. It wasn’t my first choice, either, but it was an option.

  “Two,” I continued, “I fake the registration on Phantom and we pretend to be a MineCorp special delivery or inspection. XAD Seven is far enough from a gate to buy us time while the verification goes through. Even if they’ve set up an FTL hub on XAD Six, we’d still have over two hours before the response comes back. But if they have their own hub, then we’re screwed.”

  Direct FTL communication was tricky to set up and wildly expensive, so most messages were bounced through the gates on communication drones and passing ships. For distant planets far from a gate, messages could take days to be delivered.

  I touched my third finger. “Or option three: we take over a real MineCorp shipment. Ian and I will sneak in and find Ferdinand while Alex and Aoife deliver the workers.” My mouth curled in disgust at the word. We’d be delivering people to a hellhole they’d never escape—and we couldn’t take them back out with us.

  “Do you have a preference?” Ian asked.

  “Option two probably has the fewest failure points,” I said. “Especially if I can find an actual special delivery we can mimic. I grabbed a bunch of files but I haven’t had a chance to look through them. What about you?”

  “It would be better if no one knew we were there, but a ship entering the atmosphere is hard to hide. You’re also hard to hide; you look like a von Hasenberg.”

  “People see what they expect,” I said with a shrug. “No one would expect me to be on a Rockhurst planet in the middle of a war. Different hair, glasses, and a little bit of makeup will go a long way.”

  All three of them looked dubious. Aoife said, “Assuming that works, how do we get you out?”

  “That depends on the capabilities of this ship and whether RCDF is enforcing the neutrality of the gate.”

  Attacking enemy ships within five light-minutes of a gate was technically against Consortium law, even during war. But controlling a gate gave one side control of the war, so it often happened when the RCDF wasn’t around to stop it. Both Houses were likely rushing to set up temporary gates near their primary planets.

  “RCDF has at least one ship at the gate, but I’ve also heard Rockhurst controls access. House von Hasenberg ships are being advised to use their emergency jump locations if they need to leave the area before the temporary gate is up,” Ian said.

  “Can you get us an emergency jump point for Phantom?” I asked.

  Ian shook his head. Reserved for active military ships, emergency jump points were calculated in advance and deemed reasonably safe for a certain period of time, usually two months. Predicting clear space so far in advance carried an inherent risk. There had been a few accidents, so they really were meant for emergency use only.

  “If the Antlia gate is not safe,” I said, “then that complicates things. We’ll have to jump to von Hasenberg territory. It’s close enough we won’t need a gate. Benedict’s battle cruiser arrives tomorrow. He’ll give us his emergency coordinates and protect us until we can jump again.”

  “I don’t like having the three of you in one place,” Ian growled. “It’s a huge security risk.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” I said. “But unless we want to tip our hand by getting RCDF involved, I’m not sure what we can do.”

  “I’ll see what I can find in our House intel. You look at the MineCorp files and figure out our cover. We’ll stay here until we have a plan.”

  “Sounds good,” I agreed.

  Alex stood and gestured me to his console. I thanked him and slid into the seat. I plugged in my secondary com and started going through the files I’d grabbed. MineCorp was dumping a ton of people on both XAD Six and Seven. Ships were arriving twice a month with anywhere from five to twenty workers aboard.

  I dug deeper, looking for patterns. Most of the laborers were unskilled indentured servants, as expected. The skilled workers included machinery operators, mechanics, supervisors, guards, and engineers. Occasionally, a new skilled employee would arrive separately to fix some immediate crisis.

  I just had to invent an employee and a crisis, something urgent so they wouldn’t look too closely at our identities.

  I thought about it for a few minutes, discarding ideas as fast as I came up with them. It had to be scary and something the Rockhurst soldiers couldn’t easily verify one way or another.

  That left disease. Indentured servants didn’t have money for nanobots. They were susceptible to all kinds of illnesses, but it needed to be a disease that made the soldiers want to stay away, too. A manufactured virus, sent as a weapon, designed to overpower nanos.

  But before I could spread chaos on the ground, I had to make sure we’d actually get to the ground without Rockhurst shooting us out of the sky. The ship’s registration would need to be bullet
proof.

  I checked the existing registration. Phantom was registered as a mercenary ship to a company I’d never heard of. A quick search didn’t turn up anything, so it was either tiny or a shell company.

  “Do I need to change the ship’s registration?” I asked Ian. “Will it lead back to you?”

  Ian glanced up from his console. “It won’t lead back to me,” he said, “but I’d prefer not to have to rename my ship after this, so at least update the name.”

  “Do you want to do it?” I asked. Just because I could didn’t mean I should. I would be furious if someone messed with my ship’s registration without permission.

  Ian shook his head slightly. “I trust you,” he said.

  His tone was serious, not teasing, and the words arrowed straight into my chest. I ducked my head before the heat in my cheeks could give me away. “Okay, I’ll save the existing registration so you can use it again when we get back. Do you have a name you’d like to use for the next couple of days?”

  I peeked up at him and found his eyes were still on me. “How about Opportunity?” he asked.

  I tried not to read anything into the name, but it was difficult when he kept looking at me, warmth and worry in his eyes. I cleared my throat. “It’s a good name,” I agreed. “I’ll get to work on the registration change. I’m also going to buy, steal, or fake a MineCorp authorization seal.”

  “If you can, find out where their ships normally jump in. Our intelligence is showing a lot of activity in that area.”

  “I’m on it,” I said.

  I used my second spare com to set up a secure connection and bounced it through a few servers I didn’t usually use. Then I carefully probed MineCorp’s network, looking for the terminals I’d compromised. Two of them were down, but the third responded.

  So had the sysadmins found my back doors and left this terminal as a honeypot, or had they merely overlooked it in their search?

  Either way, I needed to move quickly and grab enough data to cover my true intent. I got to work.

  I leaned back and stretched my arms over my head. I’d gotten closer and closer to the console over the last couple of hours as I raced to stay ahead of the sysadmins who were trying to keep me out. They’d been good, but I’d been better, and satisfaction filled me.

  “You look pleased with yourself,” Aoife said. She was sitting in the captain’s chair and Ian was nowhere in sight. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I did.” I’d carefully collected ship authorizations, employee rosters, and approved jump coordinates. It had taken so long because I’d had to dig through a bunch of data I didn’t need to cover my tracks, but I had some interesting reading for later. Finally, I’d unleashed a destructive, fast-acting virus guaranteed to keep the sysadmins busy for a day or two.

  I updated Phantom’s registration and added the MineCorp authorization seal I’d lifted from their servers. I was tempted to leave the internal name the same, but Ian needed to get used to the new name before we had to answer questions about the ship.

  I turned on the ship-wide intercom and said, “The ship’s temporary new name is Opportunity. Please use that name when making requests.” I closed the intercom and followed my own advice. “Opportunity, where is Ian?”

  “Captain Bishop is in his quarters,” the ship responded.

  Invading Ian’s quarters felt a little too personal after our conversation earlier, but I needed to see what he’d found and let him know we could jump whenever he was ready. I also wanted to run my plan past him.

  Aoife grinned at me when I stood. “Ian asked for you to come find him when you were done, but it seems you were ahead of him.”

  “I’m not sure that anyone is ever ahead of Ian Bishop,” I said.

  “Isn’t that the truth,” Aoife groused good-naturedly.

  The door to Ian’s quarters was closed. I knocked quietly. I heard a muffled voice from inside, then the door slid open. The room was small, with a double bed, a single chair next to a tiny table, and a door leading to either a closet or an en suite bathroom.

  Ian sat in the chair, a tablet in his lap and a steaming cup on the table next to him. The room smelled like coffee. My stomach rumbled and I glanced down in surprise. I actually felt pretty good, despite the signals from Sedition. I would try to eat something before we arrived on XAD Seven.

  “Come in, Bianca,” Ian invited when I remained in the doorway.

  I stepped into the room and the door closed behind me. I refused to let this be weird between us. I sat on the edge of the bed, facing him. “I got us MineCorp authorization and jump coordinates,” I said just to break the silence.

  “It’s no wonder Albrecht is desperate to have you home,” Ian said.

  “I have my uses.”

  Ian grinned before he turned serious. “It’s worse than I thought,” he said. “Rockhurst is all over the sector. I had hoped to jump far enough out that we’d be ready to jump again as soon as we landed on XAD Seven, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to. Phantom has an unmatched stealth system, but we can’t avoid ships that are right on top of us.”

  “It looks like the usual jump coordinates are about an hour out. How long is the FTL cooldown?”

  “Right at six hours,” Ian said.

  “It’s better than eight, but there’s no way we can drag it out that long. We can jump farther out if we come up with a believable excuse. Bad coordinates? Garbled message?”

  “Maybe,” Ian said. “It would help if we knew where Rockhurst was concentrating their forces, but so far our recon just shows them everywhere.” He sighed and met my eyes. “I wish you would consider staying behind.”

  “I need to see this through,” I said quietly.

  He bowed his head in acknowledgment. “Did you find anything that could get us in?”

  “I plan to claim a possible weaponized infection in one of the recent shipments of people. I’ll be a MineCorp lackey sent to assess the situation and you’ll be my mercenary guard. And of course MineCorp wants to keep it all hush-hush.”

  Ian mulled it over for a few minutes. “That could work,” he finally said. “Let’s talk it through. What if they want you to consult with their doctor first?”

  I pursed my lips. “I’ll have to do some research before we land. I’ll find an appropriately horrible hemorrhagic fever and learn enough that I can wing it. But I’ll attempt to talk my way out of the meeting if it comes to that.”

  “Are you going to have them bring the subjects to you?”

  “No. I considered it, but really I want them to leave us alone as much as possible. I’ll ask for access to their records and hopefully locate Ferdinand that way. It’ll mean more work for us because we’ll have to delve into the mine to grab him, but it’ll also mean that we might be able to slip out unseen.”

  “And if they refuse to leave you alone?”

  “We bring Ferdinand back for examination and then fight our way out. Did you find any intel on how big their base is?”

  “Frustratingly little,” Ian said. “They are focusing their forces on XAD Six but they don’t want to give House von Hasenberg any chance to get a foothold in the solar system, so they’re patrolling everything. We can’t get drones close enough to do a ground survey.”

  “So we have no chance of being able to stealth in?” I asked.

  Ian shook his head. If we wanted to retrieve Ferdinand, we had to go in as MineCorp. Five lives would depend on my ability to play a convincing role. I swallowed the anxiety that wanted to devour me whole.

  Ian scooted his chair closer. After a brief hesitation, he reached out and squeezed my hand. “What are you thinking?”

  “There are so many things that could go wrong. I could be leading us all to our deaths. But if we don’t go, Ferdinand dies. It’s impossible.”

  “You can do it,” Ian said quietly. “Impossible isn’t in your vocabulary. Look at what you’ve accomplished already. I would not be helping you if I thought you were going to fa
il.”

  I laughed. “I didn’t give you much choice.”

  “Where your safety is concerned, there is always a choice,” he disagreed. “And I chose to work with you.”

  Now I just had to live up to that trust. “When do you want to go?”

  “The days are short on XAD Seven—around fourteen hours,” Ian said. “Today, midnight local time falls around six Universal. If we jump by four then coast in for two hours, our time on the ground will be in the dark. That gives us a little less than two hours of prep. Is that enough?”

  “The less time I have to freak out, the better,” I said. “Does the bathroom have cosmetics equipment? We both need to change our hair color. I have my handheld, but it’ll take forever.”

  “This bathroom does,” he said with a wave at the far door. “You’re welcome to go first.”

  I hopped up, too anxious to sit still. “Thanks.”

  The attached bathroom was tiny but clean. I brought up the cosmetics settings and was happy to find the full suite of options. I watched the preview of the changes in the mirror as I swiped through the different hair colors.

  My current color was light brown with blond and red highlights. It had taken me years to find the exact shades I liked and the profile was saved to my own cosmetics kit. Because of that, I’d been sporting nearly the same hair color for the entire time I’d been in the public eye.

  I needed something that would blend in but also be completely different from my normal hair color. Black made my skin looked washed out and added several years to my age even before the makeup. I added strands of gray, aging me further. I turned my head, eyeing my reflection from multiple angles. This would work.

  I removed the coloring wand from its dock and the mirror preview went translucent, so I could see my real hair color under the new color. I ran the wand over my hair from root to end, like I was brushing my hair. In the mirror, the section of hair under the wand turned black with gray strands, matching the preview.