“I think we made a wrong turn somewhere, is all. Your initial theory—which I agree with, by the way—assumes the blue fucker set off the blast, to cover his tracks, to cover up . . . whatever he was after.”
“Well, if it wasn’t the Tyll, and it wasn’t us, it sure as hell wasn’t the Wulf—”
She nodded, waving me off—she was already there on the reasoning. “But if that’s the case,” she continued, “he was the one who’d found a way around the pulse radiation. It had to have been him—otherwise why would he even try it? Why set up a bomb like that at all, unless you knew, somehow, against all logic and reasoning, that the pulse wouldn’t stop it? There may not be anything special about Kandriad at all; maybe it was just him. If he knew how to set off a nuke on the surface of a pulsed world, maybe he was somehow sucking the rads out of the atmosphere, in small pockets, at least—”
“—which cleared the way for the sects down below to suddenly realize some of the dead tech they had lying around wasn’t so dead anymore.” I nodded, seeing where she was going. “That makes sense. The bomb scarring, the craters from the payloads dropped from the air that we saw coming in—they were new, mostly, the last few weeks, or else very old, from before the pulse. And the assault the Tyll sect was launching, down through the tunnels: that wouldn’t have worked without the new tech, the drilling equipment and maybe even the pumps for the gas. If they could have done it a decade ago, they would have.”
Jane sighed, leaning back in her chair and glaring into the middle distance. “Which means we may have just killed the only person who could have answered our questions,” she growled. “Great.”
I shook my head. “We’re missing something,” I said.
“We’re missing a lot of things,” Jane agreed, her tone unhappy. “The ‘why,’ for starters. He wants to kill us with the bomb—except he chases us out of the fire, so he knows the bomb didn’t do it, so maybe not. He wants Sho, maybe, but again: he’d been there for weeks, at least—the air raids had been going on for at least that long, so why not make a play for the pup earlier? Based on what we saw, it’s not like the Wulf could have stopped him.”
That was a grim thought; the thing in the metal mask, wading through the sect soldiers like the spectre of death. Still, it didn’t quite square with me. “Don’t give him more credit than he deserves, though,” I said thoughtfully—another one of Jane’s own maxims, deployed back against her. “Even if he was after Sho—maybe he was just like us. He knew there was a gifted kid in that city, somewhere, but not how to get at him—it’s not like a fucker in a suit of metal armor could just walk up and knock, like we did. And if he started wading through the halls, murdering everyone, the chances that Sho would have run, escaped his grasp, before he got to him: pretty high, especially if he didn’t know which kid he was looking for.”
“Fair point,” Jane acknowledged. “But it still leaves us with the question: why would someone who had that sort of ability, to dissipate pulse radiation—why would they only use it to set off a nuclear bomb on a backwater world, to slightly improve the weaponry of a sect war they didn’t care about winning? Why limit your ambitions to hunting gifted children, or the Justified, if one of us really is who he was after?”
“There’s got to be—there has to be a way to . . .” I let my words trail off, running a hand down my face and covering my mouth to stifle a yawn; this conversation hadn’t made me any less tired. I sighed, still mumbling into my palm. “If we can just—”
“I hate to interrupt the tail-chasing you’ve got going on,” Schaz broke in, “but you should know: there’s a ship lifting off from the planet below.”
“There’s a what now?” Jane asked sharply.
“There is. A ship. Approaching orbit. From Kandriad.”
All of a sudden, I wasn’t tired anymore—a jolt of adrenaline coursed through me at Schaz’s words, and for a moment, Jane just looked at me, and I looked back, the same impossible thought going through both our minds.
We both stood and rushed for the cockpit at the same time. This wasn’t good.
CHAPTER 3
We crowded into the cockpit; Schaz already had the relevant camera feeds at full magnification, Kandriad plastered across the viewscreen.
Yep. That was a ship, all right.
It didn’t look like any ship I’d ever seen—it was twice the size of Scheherazade, who was already largish for her class, but nowhere near as big as, say, a frigate or a cruiser. Its design was rounded, all curves and smooth lines, no hard angles at all. That wasn’t super strange in and of itself—not only had the various races all come to starcraft design independently, but plenty of those designs had then influenced and shifted each other during the Golden Age and the wars, meaning there were hundreds of thousands of possible permutations for “thing designed to haul people through the vacuum of space”—but the look of it was familiar, in a way I really didn’t like.
It was covered in the same strange plating our pursuer on the planet below had been, the alloy flowing over the ship like skin over muscle, moving and shifting along the craft’s chassis as it powered up through the atmosphere toward exit velocity. It almost looked like it was flying—actually flying, like a bird, despite its lack of wings. Like the ship had muscles underneath its armored skin, and they were flexing and stretching as they lifted the ship up through the gravity well.
“But . . . we killed that fucker,” I protested; I was almost offended by the notion that he might have survived, despite the fact that Jane had just been bemoaning the fact that, in killing him, we might have killed our best chance for answers. “We killed him a lot.”
“We didn’t see a body,” Jane growled, taking the flight stick for herself and swapping one of the windows on the viewscreen to a forward perspective, so she could pilot. “If we didn’t see a body, we can’t assume he was dead.”
“We shot him with lasers! We shot him with lasers, and with very, very large bullets, and there were very many of them! I hit him with enough kinetic force to bring down a Mahren superpredator! He fell through a bridge! Gravity kills everything, Jane. Everything.”
“Apparently not.” She wheeled the ship away from Kandriad, heading toward the nearest of the world’s three moons, a monster a third of the size of Kandriad itself—or at least it had been before it had been cracked nearly in half during the sect wars, and one of the halves had been pulverized into a debris field ringing the intact portion of the satellite.
It was into that very debris field that Jane took us, engaging every single stealth protocol Schaz had as she did, then—once she had us into a stable position, just another part of the slowly circling orbit of the other debris—she powered down as much of the ship as she could.
She wanted to see what the bastard was going to do.
“If we have to go up against him . . .” I murmured, not liking the look of his ship. For one thing, “bigger” carried a great deal of weight in a dogfight—meant more shields, more weapons, more acceleration, though not necessarily more mobility. For another, it was still . . . weird, and we didn’t know what it could do. Another one of Jane’s aphorisms—never start a fight with an enemy who knew more about you than you knew about him, not if you could possibly avoid it. We didn’t even know what the hell this guy was, let alone what his craft was capable of, and he—somehow—seemed to know all about us.
“We’re silent running; we’re instrument cloaked; we’re just one more floating, metallic object in a sea of them,” Jane said calmingly, though her body language belied that calm: she still had the stick gripped tightly, leaning forward toward the cockpit window, the throttle under her free hand. “He’s not going to find us.” It sounded more like a hope than a surety.
“He’s looking.” And he was—an oscillating beam of green light stabbed out of the underbelly of his ship, part of what was undoubtedly a whole suite of scanning systems. It swept over Kandriad’s first moon—it played across the gray lunar surface like an aurora, then leapt to the
second satellite, his ship barely shifting its position as he did.
Our turn.
The scanning laser swept across Schaz’s position; once, twice, three times, each time filling the interior of the cockpit with a witchfire green glow. “We are being scanned,” Schaz said, somewhat unnecessarily.
“We noticed,” I told her; I hadn’t realized my teeth were gritted together until that instant. “Did he find us? Or did the stealth tech hold?”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Jane replied, her gaze still locked on the enemy ship itself, ready to power Schaz up and leap from “hiding” to “fighting” at a moment’s notice.
The green sweep of the laser cut off, and for a moment, the strange ship just hung in the atmosphere like a silent monolith—no running lights, no engine flare, it might as well have been a weird piece of forerunner tech, just floating through the void.
Then a flare of . . . something, from behind the ship, something not the same as the blue blaze of a sublight engine, and it was moving. Moving away from us, at speed, until Jane had to dial up the vidscreen display just to track the thing. A shimmering wave of light spilled from the craft’s engines, and suddenly we could see the stars through the hull of his ship—he’d made the jump to hyperspace, and we were just seeing the afterimage.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding, reaching up to thump the ceiling of the cockpit affectionately. “Let’s hear it for MelWill’s stealth tech,” I said, my voice slightly uneven.
“Schaz?” Jane said, her command voice in full effect. “Get me a read on his escape vector.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, no, no. Jane, that sounds like you’re thinking of chasing him. In the litany of bad ideas—you do remember we just dropped half a bridge on that guy, right? And the nuclear bomb he apparently set off?”
“We just talked about how important this could be, Esa,” Jane said, still flipping switches above her head, readying Schaz to make the jump to hyperspace, to go after the bomb-dropping asshole.
“We did, but I’m asking: what are you planning to do when we find him? You want to—what, to capture him, interrogate him?” I didn’t like that word, or what it implied, so I rushed right past it. “His ship is bigger than ours—and we can’t take him on the ground, either, we proved that on Kandriad. Wanting answers for what he did down there is all well and good, but if we don’t have a plan to . . . to subdue him somehow, we don’t have a way to get those answers, even if we can catch up with him again!”
“It’s too big a gain just to let our only lead run off, Esa. Sometimes you have to take risks. Schaz?”
“His vector is locked,” she said. “Shall we follow?”
“No!” I stood up and pointed behind me, back toward the living quarters. “We already have our mission, Jane—he’s in the shower, terrified and grief-stricken and completely unprepared for what the wider universe is actually like. We can’t drag him through all of . . . of . . .”
“Didn’t work out so badly when it happened to you, did it?” she asked me, a slight grin on her face. I couldn’t believe it—she was grinning now.
There were a great many things Jane and I shared—things she’d passed on to me as my combat instructor, things she’d passed on to me as my partner, things she’d passed on as a Justified operative. But that thing—the thing that made her like danger, that made her like going up against something she couldn’t possibly beat, that made her like pain, just a little bit: that wasn’t one of them.
“Go after him.” I turned; Sho was done with his shower, and had managed to pull himself up to the cockpit using just his arms—was, in point of fact, pulling himself up the handrails so that he could get closer to us. An impressive level of dedication that only served to underline the steel in his words.
“Sho,” I said quietly. “We don’t understand—”
“I heard you talking.” He was panting, a little, from his exertions, but his voice was still firm. “You think the person in that . . . in the other ship . . . is the person in the suit of armor, the one who attacked us on the train. You think he’s responsible for what happened on my home, and you think you can . . . help people . . . if you track him down. Find out what he knows.”
“Yes, but we also—”
“Go after him,” he said again, implacable, even as he pulled his frail form into one of the jumpseats in the back of the cockpit. “Find him. Find out why he did the things he did. I want to know. I need to know.”
Jane and I exchanged a look; even though she’d just been the one arguing for chasing the armored what-the-hell halfway across the galaxy, if we had to, she didn’t like that Sho was perfectly willing to do the same. “Sho, maybe you should—”
“He set off a massive bomb in my home city.” Sho hissed the words out between his fangs. “He made sure our enemies were better armed, better prepared than we were. He killed my mother.” His golden eyes fluttered closed for a moment; when they reopened again, he’d fought back the tide of anger that had filled his voice, made himself calm again, almost too calm, worryingly so. “Go after him,” he said again.
I looked from him to Jane; she was looking back at me. I thought back to how I’d been, when Jane had pulled me off my homeworld—she was right. I’d survived what came next. Sho would too. If it left him scarred, well: no more scarred than I was. Hopefully.
“Go after him,” I echoed the young Wulf boy, and Jane nodded, laying in our course from Scheherazade’s calculations.
We made the jump to hyperspace.
CHAPTER 4
The stars poured by the viewscreen until they were a single merge of light, like a liquid flood of illumination—Sho was watching, his face awed. Even after all he’d been through, nothing compared to the first time you saw that. Jane stood, and stretched; without comment, she helped Sho out of the jumpseat and back into the living quarters—no real reason to stay in the cockpit, not if we had no idea how long we’d be staying in hyperspace. After some mental gymnastics—could I stand up? Did I even want to? It had been a long, long, long day—I followed them both.
Jane was rummaging around in the cold box, Sho installed at the kitchen table; I tapped her on the shoulder, pointing toward the now-freed shower. “Your turn,” I told her. Over the years, Jane had spent way too much time alone, and sometimes forgot little things like “a shower after a trip through a war zone is a very good idea.” Plus, if she didn’t clean up soon, she’d get stains on Schaz’s floors, and we’d never hear the end of it.
She just nodded, sticking another peeled marsh flower in her mouth, and made her way into the shower. “You want something to eat?” I asked Sho, taking Jane’s place in front of the cold box.
“Please,” he said, sounding a little embarrassed that he was hungry, after all he’d been through. It was only natural, of course—the body wants what it wants, and starving yourself won’t help you process trauma any faster.
“On it,” I said, rummaging around in the fridge again for something more like a meal: Jane and I had a great many skills between the two of us, mostly on Jane’s side, but “culinary aptitude” was not one of them. Mostly we lived on prepackaged stuff.
I slid two packets—chosen at random—into the reheater slots, and Schaz started humming merrily as she engaged the microwaves and whatnot. She couldn’t cook either, but she somehow seemed to think that reheating premade packets that had been prepared and then frozen back on Sanctum counted as cooking, and she got weirdly domestic about it.
“Can I ask you something?” Sho asked.
“Sure thing,” I said, taking a seat at the counter across from him. That was the other reason I’d wanted Jane to shower first—even after a century of ferrying kids back to Sanctum, she was . . . pretty piss-poor at dealing with kids, especially kids working their way through the tectonic shifts in their reality that came with being whisked offworld by an operative of a sect they hadn’t known existed until Jane showed up.
“I’ve met . . . very few human
s,” he said, looking at me carefully, like he was trying to modulate his words, making sure he didn’t give any offense. He was a careful kid, our new recruit—much more so than I’d been. I cocked my head, listening, trying to gauge his exact age as I did: I’d say seven or eight, which, for a Wulf child—who matured faster than humans did—would be the equivalent, on an emotional and intellectual scale, of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old human. That made sense—our gifts tended to manifest right around puberty, which hit a Wulf around five or six, and he’d clearly had his abilities for at least a little while, given that his sect had time to figure out how to power things with their furry little battery.
“I wouldn’t figure you’d met any at all,” I prompted him—everyone we’d seen in the factory city had been Wulf.
“Traders, sometimes, from other settlements. When the war was . . . calmer.” Made sense—the population of Kandriad had been roughly divided between Wulf, human, and Tyll, and the various sects couldn’t all have been at war with each other. “But I’ve never seen one that had . . .” He motioned toward my head, the gesture almost embarrassed.
I laughed, and ran a hand down my shorn scalp. “Combat efficiency,” I told him. “Jane’s had a century or more to learn how to fight with long hair—I’ve only been doing this for a couple of years.” That was a total lie; the real reason I’d shaved my head had been way dumber. Sounded good, though. “Any other questions?” He must have had thousands, though at that moment Schaz ceased her humming, and the reheater dinged; I pulled the plates out and set one randomly in front of Sho, not even checking to see what I’d cooked. Hopefully something high in protein; Wulf subsisted on a far more meat-heavy diet than humans.
The same dish for both of us: vat-grown beef in gravy, with potatoes on the side. Excellent; Sho wasn’t the only one who was more than ready to eat. We both dug in, and the conversation paused for a moment—I’d never known a teenager from a pulsed world who would let anything get between them and a warm meal, and that included myself.
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