by Rachel Caine
We got kicked out of the inner sanctum before I could process what was going on. Obviously, events had taken a catastrophic turn, but Bacia refused to say if it was more Phage or system failure, so I glanced at Marko, wondering if he’d noticed anything that had slipped past me. But he was looking woozy, a memento of his first face-to-face with Bacia.
For a few seconds, he crouched, like he was trying to get over motion sickness. “Your bond with Nadim shields you?” he guessed.
“Somewhat. Typhon didn’t help?” My mind was elsewhere, replaying the meeting.
He stared at me. “I can’t feel him at this distance, Zara.”
Right. I didn’t mean to rub it in.
I sighed. “Well, at least we got paid. In theory.” Which reminded me . . . shit. I’d forgotten to specify a time frame. It’d be just like Bacia to stiff us with some far-future delivery date.
Outside their lair, the alarm wasn’t as glaring, so maybe it wasn’t a station-wide emergency. Could be more of a personal issue. Or hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if Bacia had set the whole thing up, to keep us from getting our due. At that thought I wheeled and almost tried their security system, but Marko put a hand on my arm.
“Let’s not start a fight if we can avoid one. They agreed to our terms. Now we just need to wait.”
The pause made me remember Bacia’s reaction too. Whatever was going down, we probably wanted to get some distance from it, because I recalled that flash of fear. With a mumbled curse, I shook him off and pretended he was talking me down. “Fine, I hear you. Bacia knows what we want. I’ll give them time to deliver before I shake the tree.”
“Are you sure you made the right choice? Wouldn’t the data be better than the finished drones? We could learn a lot from the designs,” Marko asked.
“Normally, I’d say data would be better, but we don’t have a production facility, and let’s face it, it’s not exactly calm out there. How long would it take us to create a functioning drone army on our own? We need weapons, not hobbies.”
“Then we might want to think about a contract, where Bacia agrees to supply us with a certain number of drones, renewable as we use them to fight the Phage.”
“Too bad you didn’t mention it when I was making the deal.” I was kicking myself. I admit, I’d had it in my head that Marko was all hat and no cattle, like my grandma used to say, but he’d just shown me otherwise. I hadn’t considered a long-term contract. Bacia probably didn’t think we’d be alive long enough to need one, either. I wondered what my shot was at amending that deal.
Probably zero.
Marko smiled at me, not the PR expression he used so often on Earth, but a real one that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Sorry. My head wasn’t on right during the negotiations. But there’s no point in hanging around here. We should get back to Nadim and Typhon.”
“If Bacia doesn’t send word about drone delivery soon, I’ll come back to collect.”
As I leapt from the platform into the slipstream, the klaxons from Bacia’s sanctum burst on station speakers. Lights flashed as I plummeted, halogen brightness mingled with the twirling red that usually meant a dire emergency. Marko landed hard behind me, stumbling on his still-healing leg. Which was weird. I still had my cast on, so walking was awkward, but it didn’t hurt anymore. Shouldn’t Marko be better by now? Or maybe I was the weird one. Come to think of it, EMITU had mentioned that one of my other wounds shouldn’t have healed as fast as it did. Making a mental note to get my ankle checked out, I watched the aliens scramble on Tier One. All around us, they were locking down their shops, packing up hover dollies, and pulling chains and fences up around them wherever possible.
“What the hell?” It was more of a rhetorical question, but Marko seemed to take it seriously.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” he said.
“You and me both. We need to scramble.”
Too damn bad the entire lower-tier population of the Sliver had the same idea. The press of bodies swept us up, pushing us toward the tunnel that led to the honeycomb of the docking area. I got shoved into one of the Jellies, and the tentacles carried a shock-charge that left me twitching. Raising a fist, I about went full gladiator on its quivering ass, but Marko stepped closer and put his body between me and the rest of the scrum.
“It won’t take much for this to turn violent.” He spoke into my ear. “These people are scared, they want out. We can’t fight all of them.”
I took a deep breath, knowing he was right. There was a time to throw down and a time to haul ass. I was smart enough to distinguish between the two. I grabbed the nearest alien; from the suit design, it looked like one of Suncross’s kinfolk.
“What do the sirens mean?” I demanded.
The lizard held up two hands in a gesture I recognized as a shrug. “Been here four years, never heard them before. Can’t mean anything good. Even the Phage attack was level two. This is level three.”
Everyone was bailing on the assumption that they didn’t want to meet what could make Bacia’s personnel hit the panic button? Fair enough. They must have ships capable of carrying them away from the Sliver. Anyone who didn’t have a ride off-station was screwed. Desperate aliens shoved through the throng, eagerly trying to book passage on somebody’s ship, shouting outlandish offers of mynt and fita, which didn’t matter a damn in the chaos. That coin only carried value here, not out in the black.
I smothered a twinge of sympathy. Nadim and Bea might be willing to take in strays, but Marko showed no such inclination. He forged forward, trying to clear a path for us. There was a lot of damn shoving on the way to the tunnel, and then it got downright claustrophobic with tall, lumpy-headed aliens hemming me in on all sides. Before this I wouldn’t have said I feared enclosed spaces, but I couldn’t see anything but mech armor, jelly tentacles, faceplates, everywhere I looked. It got hard to breathe, and we were creeping along. There was a logjam somewhere up ahead, and people piling up behind us.
Marko was trying to calm me down, but I was about to start punching people when Nadim came through on comms. “Zara, what’s wrong?”
Funny how just hearing his voice felt like a shot of sedative. Suddenly I could breathe, could tolerate how trapped I felt. “Something’s going on, not sure what. We’re working on evac, but everyone is trying to leave at once, so it must be bad.”
“Be careful. Come back to me soon.”
“On it.”
We had reached the midpoint, and I could feel the deep chill of the honeycomb ahead, likely due to its proximity to vacuum, when the red lights stopped flashing and the alarms went deathly quiet. For some reason, that didn’t reassure me. I had zero confidence that Bacia had quietly dealt with the problem and was now sounding the all clear.
To me, this felt more like the eye of the storm.
Extract from Just the FAQs! Your preferred e-choice for hot gossip
Recently, we caught up with billionaire and entrepreneur Torian Deluca at his tower HQ in New York. Let me tell you, he was wearing a Spinelli suit, perfectly tailored, and he offered us some vintage cognac, which I virtuously declined. (Okay, I had a nip!)
He’s promising us big news in the future, but for now, we found out that he’s in talks with the Russian monarchy about his lovely daughter’s engagement. Do we hear wedding bells? Let’s hope Princess Ivonne doesn’t forget us when she’s in Prince Alexei’s arms.
Just the FAQs also got the scoop from Mr. Deluca’s new assistant (an impressive young man with a mysterious past), Derry McKinnon, on what it’s like working for the most powerful man in North America. Watch for that interview, coming soon!
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Binding Eternity
ALL AROUND, THE aliens were calming down, taking stock. Some seemed to think everything was good and were turning to make their way back toward Tier One, while others were wary like me, still shoving toward the docking annex.
Marko grabbed my wrist. “Let’s get out while we can.”
It
wasn’t like I was hesitating, but with the crowd now of mixed minds, leaving was like being a salmon determined to spawn upstream. I shoulder-checked and shoved my way toward the exit. I’d never wondered if I could parkour off somebody’s back before, but it was starting to seem tempting. So many Jellies, though, I’d probably hit one and get wrapped up and stung to death. Avoiding their swirling appendages would take a fair bit of maneuvering, but—
The Sliver rocked. The tremors hit like an earthquake, or the shudder of a massive explosion. Everyone listed to the side and I slammed into a wall, Marko right on top of me. I cussed and shoved him off as my remote link with Nadim sparked to life.
“Zara, there are multiple fires on the Sliver, several breach points. I’m reading a huge energy source and—”
Bacia cut in, jamming the transmission somehow, and their voice was in my head, on my H2, on my remote link; they were everywhere, booming a request that felt more like a demand. “Zara Cole, I need you and your Dark Travelers immediately! The god-king is risen and has broken containment. You must retrieve. If you fail, the Phage will not matter. All life dies in his wake!”
Bacia sounded deeply shook, and even if they were being honest, I smelled a deal in the making. “We already retrieved your pet god,” I told them. “What’s in it for us?”
“All life dies if you do not!”
“And?”
Bacia’s voice took on an edge that said I wasn’t going to like coming back here next time. “If you succeed, you will have all the drones you need, forever.”
Now that was an offer I couldn’t refuse. “Deal.”
Suddenly, Bacia’s voice was everywhere, ringing from the walls, the floors, every surface. “Stand aside for the softskins!”
As soon as Bacia’s order came through, the Jellies nearby cleared a path for Marko and me, stinging and stunning everybody blocking our way who were slow to comply. Many retreated, and more fell—just knocked out, I hoped. But either way, we finally had a route to the Hopper, paved with twitching bodies.
Didn’t much bother Marko, who ran forward without my urging. He was still favoring that leg, and I had to steady him a couple of times; walking over bodies required good balance. He saved me from a tumble once. But then we passed through into the clear space of our docking bay, and there was our Hopper, ready to go.
“How exactly are we supposed to hunt down a god?” Marko asked. A damn fine question. Nadim and Typhon were both drained, and replenishing at a star wasn’t an option if we went tearing off after Lifekiller. “And what do we do when we catch it?”
“We’ve got the recordings we used before; those seemed to work to lull him back into a trance. Starcurrent said zis people managed to take down almost all of them, so maybe they’ve got a handy manual on How to Kill Your Gods lying around. We make do.” I flashed him a grin, more attitude than humor.
Marko grinned back. He was starting to develop a ruthless streak; I liked it on him. He and Chao-Xing made a good, balanced team, but I wished Typhon could appreciate what he had. They might not feel exactly like the pilot and starsinger he’d lost, but from what I’d observed of the Leviathan, they needed a deep emotional connection to thrive. While Typhon might’ve existed for a long time, he wasn’t really living.
After a glance at Marko, who shook his head, I got in the cockpit. All of us had flight training, but Bea and Chao-Xing were our best. “You sure?” I asked.
“Your scores were higher than mine, trust me.”
I took some time to check my calculations on the nav computer because exiting the pull of the Sliver was higher geometry, and a mistake could cost our lives. To my relief, we launched smoothly; Bacia must have locked down all the other bays, because not one ship was in our way on the exit. Once we grabbed some distance, it was clear the Sliver was in bad shape. The Peak looked trashed, and so did several levels below. There was a blowout on the opposite side from us that must have taken several docking bays. The venting, burning air made thick candles marking the damage, and all of it burned a peculiar teal blue.
We had to avoid some spinning, frozen bodies on the way out. Ejected from the Sliver before the shields kicked in for emergency venting, I’d guess. I could see about thirty. None of them were moving on their own, and as far as I could tell, none had been in space-quality protection. No rescues to be made. I silently steered around the corpses and poured on speed to get back to Nadim. As I disembarked, Marko shifted to the pilot’s seat and sped away so fast I barely had time to clear the bay. We only had the one working Hopper between the two ships for right now, but our busted-ass vehicle was starting to heal up on its own. Organic tech. Useful as hell.
I felt Nadim’s intense relief course through me in a thick, cool wave as he drew me closer. The bond was an embrace, sweet as anything I’d ever known, even at this light level. Just being part of him, and him part of me, gave me a wicked surge of energy, and I felt it flood into his system as well. An added boost we both needed right now. “Welcome back,” he said, and the tone of his spoken voice felt just as intimate as the blend of our minds. “Are we in trouble again?”
“Are we ever not?” I asked.
I moved toward the control center—because I shared Nadim’s awareness of where everyone was—so I knew Bea and Starcurrent were there. “This kind of trouble may be the good kind. Gets us what we need to fight the Phage.”
“Then whatever we have to do will be worth the effort.”
“That’s the spirit.” I kept my doubts well away from him, and I suspected he was doing the same to protect me. Dumb, but kind. “Get Typhon on the line for me.”
I ran the rest of the way, which reminded me that though I’d had workouts aplenty on the Sliver, the grav there wasn’t quite as heavy as human normal, which meant my muscles needed conditioning. I’d put in a sparring session later, if I lived that long. Meanwhile the run pumped me up, though I arrived a little short of breath.
Bea threw herself into my arms, a full-body hug that I felt spark between us into Nadim’s bond, and then she headed back to the boards. Starcurrent lifted several tentacles and shook them in greeting.
“Good to see both of you,” I said. I felt safe here. Confident. Probably stupid, but I felt like I could take on a god with these people, easy. “Where’s Suncross and his boys?”
“Not far,” Nadim said. “They dropped Beatriz and Starcurrent off a while ago, and they’re awaiting your orders. I think they like you, Zara.”
“Everybody likes Zara,” Bea said. “Or else.”
“Keep that mess to yourself,” I told her, and hip-checked her. She bumped back. “Typhon? Are you there?”
“Here.” His voice sounded like an earthquake in vocal form. “What is it you want?”
“You chill again? Can you hold it together if we go after the Lifekiller together, or are you going to go all berserker? Because we don’t need that right now. We need to be smart, and precise. Lifekiller’s all volume, all the time. Can’t fight that direct. Understand?”
“I’ve existed for a thousand of your years,” Typhon rumbled at me. “I understand. I will comply.”
“Chao-Xing? Yusuf?”
“Yeah, we’re listening.” It was Yusuf who answered, which somehow surprised me. He sounded stronger. Steadier. “We’ll keep him calm. Zara? Need some fuel. Soon.”
“Copy that.”
Bea had her H2 in hand, scrolling the latest intel from Bacia. “Looks like Lifekiller’s stolen a ship heading who knows where.”
I nodded, saving a smile just for her. “Then we need to get on his tail. We’ll try to map a course that takes us close to healthy sources. Good enough?”
“Not much choice,” Yusuf said. “Let’s do it.”
With traffic locked down in and out of the Sliver, we easily tracked the lone ship racing away from us. The god-king must have been batshit after all that time in cryo, and there was no telling what he was planning. If the Abyin Dommas had decided this race had to be stopped, I didn’t want to c
onsider the consequences of failure. Bacia had read me all wrong: I would have done this for free.
Nadim leapt after the enemy vessel, and at Leviathan speed, we should’ve been able to overtake a mech ship in a matter of hours. But no matter what we did, no matter how we adjusted or checked our numbers, the god-king’s ship just kept putting on speed. Bea stared at the charts, then slammed her fist against her thigh.
“This . . . this isn’t possible. That’s not how physics works. The laws of thermodynamics . . . There’s just no way that ship has the power—”
“Is burning life force, the most powerful fuel in the universe,” said Starcurrent. “Will need more soon.”
“Wait.” I stared at the Abyin Dommas, unable to process what I was hearing. “Are you saying that the god-king can convert biological energy and feed it to a fully mechanical starship?”
“More complex than that, but . . . yes.”
I didn’t like the vision that came to me, of that creature with a captive crew on board, sacrificing soul after soul to make his ship go faster. Nauseating.
But Starcurrent wasn’t done. “If Lifekiller powers up fully, will be very bad.”
“How far ahead of us is he, Nadim?”
“We won’t catch up unless he stops.”
“To refuel,” Starcurrent said. “He will run out of lives soon, must take on more.”
Meaning that ship would find an inhabited world and start grabbing sacrifices. I felt a wild, strange wish that I still believed in God, that I had the faith my mother did in His love, because it would have come in damn handy right now. I hated having no options; reminded me of the worst days in the Zone, when I couldn’t even afford sticky rice because Derry had spent our food money on chem. No, worse than that: this felt like being a child again, tied down on a dirty table in a church where I’d lost my faith while a fake preacher had held a knife to my head.
Deep bonding might comfort me, and it was an advantage in combat, but I couldn’t feed my energy to Nadim just to help him move faster. Had to save up for now because we’d for damn sure need it later. He touched my mind, lightly, and reassurance drifted through me. Nadim didn’t doubt we’d be okay; we were the extra-special Honors team, who’d graduated to the Journey without completing the Tour. Or some such shit.
