Jane spun her giant gun on its swivel, aiming down at her target; I started building a teke slam in my fist. Schaz had slipped into hover mode, keeping us about twenty feet above the bridge, and I could actually smell the ionization as her rear turret began heating up as well.
Whoever this motherfucker was, he was about to have a real bad day. . . .
A crackling, high-pitched whine filled the comm bug in my ear, like a feedback loop, then a voice, low, mechanical, almost grinding, rising from the sonic depths of the interference. “Her great reckoning will not be so easily diverted. The day will arrive—but not yet. Do not doubt your place in the fires.”
That shouldn’t have happened. We were using an encrypted frequency.
From where it stood on the bridge, oblivious to the very large weapons directed at it, the mechanically angelic creature raised a gauntleted hand toward us, and pointed. Right at us. The implication was clear—it was the exosuited figure that had hacked our comms. Whoever our pursuer was, they’d just cracked Justified encryption like it was nothing.
We opened fire. The static still filled our comm channel, the noise almost a kind of laughter, even as the lasers and the giant fucking bullets and my own teke blasts tore through its armor like paper, revealing more of that awful cobalt glow beneath. It didn’t matter where we hit it—the chest, the mask, the wings—that’s all that was inside. Just that terrifying liquid light.
It didn’t matter that the thing’s armor was cracking apart, shattering and melting under the sustained fire; it didn’t matter that at this point the thing was more blue glow than actual form. It still broke into our comms one last time, and said: “Her existence is a scream.”
Then the bridge collapsed beneath it under the weight of the barrage and it was gone, falling into the buildings below, lost to the dust and smoke.
For a moment, I simply stood on the ramp, my breath heaving in my chest; I’d put absolutely everything I’d had into that barrage of telekinetic attacks, and I barely even had the strength to stand. So I didn’t.
I dropped down to a boneless squat on the edge of the ramp, utterly exhausted. If I hadn’t been holding on to one of the anchor straps with my free hand, I might have just kept sliding until I was right back on the bridge below. Not at all my intention.
“Sho,” I told our cargo, “don’t take this the wrong way, but: fuck your planet. I hate it.”
“Try living here,” Sho replied with something almost approaching equanimity.
“If everyone’s so unhappy to be here, can we please leave?” Schaz asked. “A pulsed atmosphere like this doesn’t get more comfortable the longer I’m in it, you know.”
“Time to go,” Jane agreed, though there was something in her voice—a kind of catch—that I didn’t quite trust; it was the way she sounded when she wasn’t quite lying, but when she had a more . . . distant relationship to the truth than usual. Either way, though, she’d already stowed her big fuck-off gun so she could reach down and give me a hand up, and whatever she was thinking, she was going to keep it to herself, so I reached for her outstretched hand, groaning as I took it; moving was bad. Then again, sitting on the ramp when Schaz closed it would be worse.
I pulled myself into the armory proper, and Schaz started closing her doors, giving us one last glimpse at the just-now-starting-to-dissipate mushroom cloud that was all that was left of Sho’s factory city, one last glimpse of his terrible homeworld, where the tens of thousands who had died today would be just a drop in the ongoing flood that was the endless war raging across its surface.
I stood by my statement. Fuck this planet. I was ready to be off it.
Schaz kicked in her engines, and I got my wish.
ACT
TWO
CHAPTER 1
Once Schaz had sealed up the outer airlock door, I carefully unstrapped Sho from Jane’s back and set him on the low bench that ran along one side of the airlock. He watched from there as Jane and I set about pulling off our gear piece by piece, stowing it inside the hidden armory compartments as we went.
“You two have . . . a great many guns,” Sho said, sounding torn between awe and trepidation. “Are the wars just as bad elsewhere as they are on my home?”
“Not everywhere.” Jane shook her head, freeing various knives from their sheaths and buckles and ties and attaching them to the magnet inside her locker. “But there are enough places where they are that we . . . like to be prepared.”
“I’ve never seen anyone who fought the way you did.”
“Well, she is a hundred and eighty-eight years old,” I told Sho, using a damp cloth to rub at the camo on my face.
“You said something like that before, and I wasn’t sure if you were joking or not. Do humans really live that long?”
“Yes, they can, but no, I’m not,” Jane said sourly. “Ignore Esa. She likes to make a game out of trying to guess my age.”
“Why won’t you just tell her?”
“Because it’s good for some people not to have all the answers; they’re impressed enough with themselves as it is.” Ouch. Point for Jane, I suppose.
I’d gotten as much of the face paint off as I was going to with the cloth; I tossed it in the laundry chute—Schaz had a complicated, automated laundry system built into her recyclers, another one of those awesome things about non-pulsed technology that never failed to impress someone who’d grown up doing their washing by hand—and made my way between Jane and Sho, to the inner airlock door, which was still sealed for some reason.
“Hey, Schaz?” I called. “You going to open up for us, or what?”
“In a bit,” she replied evasively. “All your complicated gear is sealed away, right?”
She knew damn well it was; she had cameras in the airlock. Why wouldn’t she open the door? “Yeah, it is. Come on, Schaz; I want a shower.” I didn’t whine the words, exactly, but I’ll admit there might have been a quality to them that might be described as “wheedling.” I’d had a hell of a day.
“Who’s that?” Sho asked, looking around the airlock. “Is that the ship?”
“It is indeed!” Schaz replied brightly. She always liked meeting new people. “Hi, Sho! I’m Scheherazade; you can call me Schaz. I’m your friend! Your friend who’s about to spray you with gunk. Gunk!”
Nozzles appeared in the walls and the ceilings, and then we were absolutely drenched in some sort of horrible-tasting foam, halfway between a liquid and a gel. I knew it was horrible tasting because plenty of it got in my mouth, and I was left spitting and gagging, gasping “What the hell, Schaz?”
“And why would you think shouting ‘gunk’ was a fair warning?” Sho moaned, scrubbing futilely at the foam, which, of course, only drove it deeper into his fur.
Jane—who, I couldn’t help but notice, had stood stock still through this process, and also had made sure she was near the locker with the towels in it—began cleaning herself off, tossing two more towels to Sho and me. “Relax, kids,” she said. “Schaz had to do it; it’s procedure.”
“What fucking procedure?” I could still taste the awful, deep in my mouth. “She’s never sprayed us with gunk before! Not even after that . . . that fucking . . . the swamp world, the one with the . . . the . . .”
“We’ve never been in the fallout zone from a nuclear explosion before, either,” Jane said wryly. Apparently done with her gunk shower, Schaz shifted the nozzles over to a mist of water instead, which at least made it easier to get the gunk off our skin. Watching Jane scrub at her hair and Sho go at his fur, I was actually super pleased—maybe for the first time—about my decision a few weeks ago to shave my head. “We just took a bath in extremely harmful radiation. This is decontamination protocol.”
“Radiation?” Sho asked worriedly. “That sounds . . . bad.”
“It’s not good,” Jane admitted, “but it’s not likely to be fatal, not since we got the decontamination showers active so quickly. This shit”—she nodded at the foam being sucked down by the wash of water
into hidden drains under the lockers—“is designed to suck up radiation like a sponge. Scheherazade will eject it out into space before we get out of system, and she’ll adjust her lights inside to give us a constant counter-rad bath for the next few days.”
“A warning beyond ‘gunk’ still would have been nice, Schaz,” I growled in the general direction of the airlock.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she replied meekly. “But the sooner I got it done, the sooner we can get all that nasty radiation off of . . . me, and you know how I feel about radiation.” The nozzles quit with their spray—Sho looked around for a moment, his expression still suspicious, as if he were waiting to see what other strange substance Schaz would coat us with next, but when nothing was forthcoming he shook out his fur, still covered in slick patches of foam.
“You’d better have the shower first, buddy,” I told him with a sigh. I turned back to the door. “You ready to open now?” I asked Schaz.
She slid open the inner airlock without comment.
Jane got Sho into the shower, with instructions to let Schaz know when he was done; that might not be for a while. Not only did he have a great deal of foam to scrub out of his fur, he’d grown up on a world where water was at least a semiprecious resource. It hadn’t been quite as rare on my home-world, and I’d still spent, like, half a day in the shower once I realized we had an endless supply of hot water—that it was, in fact, the exact same water raining down over and over again, just drained, filtered, run past the drive core for heat, then spat back at my head.
While they were doing that, I rotated the kitchen into place, mainly to get at the cooling unit so I could dig out some fruit. I was starving.
“So,” I asked Jane around a largish bite of Klitek marsh flower. “Are we gonna talk about all the whatever the hell back there?”
Jane nodded, taking a seat at the table and calling up the holodisplay, Kandriad, the last world accessed, spinning up again. I stuck my tongue out at the glowing map—man, fuck that place—but Jane was zooming in, going over Schaz’s scans of the factory city. Or what was left of it.
“We’re done, Jane,” I said, suspicion coloring my tone. “The kid’s in the shower. We can stop looking at Kandriad now.”
“Thing is—we actually can’t,” she said, shaking her head, still staring at the map. “That thing that attacked us—you haven’t thought it through yet, have you?”
“Thought what through?” I neglected to add that what with all the lasers and glowing people and nuclear fire, my critical thinking skills had taken something of a back seat to basic survival instinct. It appeared Jane’s hadn’t, even after all that, and I wanted to know what conclusions she’d reached.
“Go at the problem like Marus would,” Jane said—still being Jane. No situation so dire she couldn’t turn it into a lesson. “See how the puzzle pieces fit together.”
I frowned; Marus was one of Jane’s oldest friends, another Justified operative—one who’d served with our sect even longer than she had—and if Jane was invoking his name, she meant she wanted me to look at it dispassionately, like a riddle to solve. I took another bite of my flower before setting it on the table and trying my best to think like Marus.
I am cool. I am calm. I am collected. I secretly devour Reetha romance novels because deep down inside I am a great big softy. I am analytical. I break the data down into pieces. I was incredibly proud of Esa on the day she decided to train with a submachine gun, like I do, instead of a big, stupid rifle, like Jane.
“Okay,” I said, through a thick wad of marsh flower. “As I see it, we’ve got three separate questions.” Jane was still examining the map, but she didn’t stop me—a tacit acknowledgment to continue, so I barreled on, setting the questions up chronologically in my head as I swallowed my bite of sweet pulp. “First: how or why was the pulse radiation ignoring some of the tools on the world down below?”
Jane nodded, absently reaching out and stealing my half-peeled flower and taking a bite. “That’s the big one,” she agreed, ignoring my glare. “The one that means we can’t leave, I mean. It’s not planetwide.” She nodded at the holoprojected map. “In point of fact, it’s so minimal Schaz’s scans can’t even pick up the drop in radiation levels; hence why we didn’t know about it going in. But even still—even if it’s just localized, it was enough to let the Tyll sect put planes in the air, power those drilling machines, and the implications of that are just . . .” She shook her head, an expression on her face I didn’t often see: something close to wonder.
So I did what Marus would have done: I thought it through.
If there was some sort of “cure” for pulse radiation, even if it was small in scale—could only make complex machines work for an hour or two, at most, in a pulsed atmosphere—what would that really change? Communication, maybe—worlds that had been entirely cut off from the greater galactic community would suddenly be able to rejoin it, even if that just meant building a single signal tower in a single square mile that was cleared of pulse rads once a month; worlds that thought the sect wars were still raging, where sects had declared their allegiances to empires long since collapsed, could be shown the truth. Wars would be ended in an instant, almost.
Of course, new ones might begin as well. Predicting the future was a fool’s game—if nothing else, the Justified had taught me that, even inadvertently. They’d set off the pulse with the best of intentions, trying to save their home-world from a planet-destroying superweapon while at the same time avoiding the levels of mass destruction that came with deploying a superweapon of their own, except the pulse had cascaded in a way they never would have been able to predict, and changed the galaxy forever.
So that wasn’t what had Jane so excited—her view had always been that war was inevitable. So instead, she was thinking about . . .
She was thinking about the pulse itself, about her role in setting it off. She blamed herself for what had happened after; she always had. And the worst of that guilt had always been what had happened to the Barious.
The pulse itself left them unharmed, but their factories—where new Barious were “born”—had gone silent.
A “cure” for pulse radiation—even an incredibly small-scale one, even for just an hour at a time—could it alter that? Reverse that damage, power up the long-silent factories again? Could new Barious be brought into the universe, for the first time in a hundred years?
The Barious were enduring a slow-motion extinction. Even if this only had a fractional chance to undo that—Jane was right. We had to learn more.
Goddammit.
CHAPTER 2
Okay—I get it.” I leaned back in my chair, and swiped my marsh flower back from Jane. “This is . . . big.”
She just nodded patiently—at the thievery and the embarrassingly long time it had taken me to realize what she must have seen the instant we’d first caught sight of those planes wheeling through the golden sky of Kandriad. “So our first question then becomes: what’s the scope? What’s the scale? How far does this . . . ‘cure’ . . . reach?”
I stretched across her—keeping my flower held back, away from her pinching fingers—and called up Javier’s original scans of the planet from three years ago, reading over his initial findings. “According to Javi, Kandriad should have had early industrialization, steam power and coal furnaces, even early gas-powered generators—which we saw a few of—but nothing close to aircraft. He even noted it in his report: ‘nothing moving in the atmosphere; the various sects are contained to the factory ruins, the fighting mostly taking place in the no-man’s-lands between the various former industrial sites.’ Which matches what we saw, except for the warplanes shooting at us. And the drilling tools the Tyll sect used to get down into the subway tunnels.”
“And the bomb,” Jane added dryly. “Nuclear fission should have been off-the-table impossible, except for the pulse cure, which leads us to question two: how and why did someone detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface below?” She fetched another mars
h flower for herself, dropping the peel into the recycler and taking a largish bite of the fruit.
“Not to win the Tyll sect’s war, that’s for sure,” I said. “They were streaming inside—through the tunnels—before the blast went off. Their soldiers died, just like the citizens of the Wulf sect.”
Jane nodded. “Which means the question becomes: was it because of the pulse cure? Or because of us? Or because of—” She turned, looked at the door to the shower. Because of Sho.
We weren’t going to answer that one, not until we had an answer to question three, so I went ahead and put it out there: “And how does all this relate to the armored . . . angry . . . flying . . . glowing fella there at the end? Did he set off the bomb? If he did, how did he survive the explosion? He came out of that fire like it was nothing, and he seemed to know right where we were, which would seem to indicate the blast wasn’t for us; if he was tracking us somehow—with our comms, say, since he broke right into those like they were unshielded—then he would have known we weren’t in its radius. Instead, it seems more likely that it was—”
“To cover his tracks.” Jane nodded. “To cover up whatever he was actually doing on Kandriad. That makes sense. Which means he was there for a reason, and we’re back to question two. Sho? The cure? Or us?”
“The Justified have plenty of enemies.”
She nodded. “And there are plenty in the universe who would use gifted children for their own ends—which you know, firsthand.” I shuddered; I still didn’t like to think about what might have happened if the Pax had reached me first. “And—obviously—a way to cure the pulse, even in a limited capacity, would be worth . . .”
“Everything,” I nodded. “Everything people had, and more.”
She frowned at that. “Maybe we’re going about this backward,” she suggested.
“How so?”
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