And we were intent on chasing down that act’s executor, deeper in the tunnels of the dead.
That would make us the hunter’s actual prey. Not a comforting thought.
We moved up to the higher levels of the promenade—another one of Jane’s maxims, “always claim the high ground”—and tried not to gag on the lingering smoke from the still-smoldering bodies. We covered each recess in the rock walls as we moved past, the homes and shops where the people butchered in the center of the street had gone about their lives; it was impossible not to notice the bloodstains on the floors, or the smashed-apart doorframes. The thing in the armor had been methodical in his carnage, precise, bashing into apartments or shops one by one after he’d taken out those in the main thoroughfare, not just killing those in his path, but also hunting down anyone trying to hide from the slaughter.
Like he’d tried to hunt us down, on the train.
“Tell me we’re not far now,” I asked Jane—almost begged her—as we passed by the corpses themselves, piled high enough that even from the upper level we could still see them rise above the railing of the catwalk. I could have reached out and touched the topmost bodies, blackened and twisted by the heat of the fires. I did not.
Jane consulted her HUD. “We have to cut through a maintenance section, and then we’re there,” she said. I could tell by her voice she didn’t want to hang around here any longer than we had to.
I couldn’t blame her.
CHAPTER 10
We cut into the maintenance access tunnels, the walls bare rock supported here and there by girders; this part of the station looked like the actual mine it used to be. Thankfully, it had also apparently been somewhat disused, so it didn’t look like the abattoir that the rest of Valkyrie Rock had been turned into.
“Are we going to talk about what we saw back there?” I asked Jane as we made our way through the dimly lit chambers, passing strange designs carved or painted on the bare walls. The mining tunnels continued to alternate between barely touched rock, the natural interior of the asteroid, and the occasional piece of massive tech jutting from the stone, the guts of the machinery that kept the station alive.
“Do we need to?” Jane grunted, pausing at a split in the tunnels. “It’s this way.”
“The thing that did all this—”
“It’s no different from what he did to the factory city. Just on a . . . smaller scale.”
“God, Jane.” Sometimes I forgot how callous she could be. “The people here—”
“If there’s anyone left alive on this station, Esa, the only way to help them is going to be reaching the AI core and tracking down that motherfucker ourselves.” Her voice was almost brittle as she said it, the rage I’d missed earlier—when I’d been thinking she was callous—leaking out around the edges of her words. “So we need to move, we need to—here.” She stopped in front of a sealed metal door, incongruous among the rough-hewn rock around us. Again, she jimmied open a control panel, started digging around inside.
I kept watch, trying to alternate between staring back the way we’d come, and down the corridor that lay ahead of us. In a relatively short time—but not as quickly as I would have liked—Jane had the door open; we stepped into a room full of blinking computer systems, rows and rows of data banks. The core of the AI that ran the station; Charon’s brain.
“Do you actually know what you’re doing?” I hissed at Jane; keeping my voice low just felt like something I should do in here. I wondered if Charon could feel us, trespassing inside his mind like a headache.
“Sure. This isn’t the first time I’ve needed to . . . convince an AI to let me access something it didn’t want me to.” She made a beeline toward a control panel that, to me, looked like all the rest of the control panels; she started typing. I stuck my head back outside—still nothing moving, in either direction.
“And we’re done,” Jane said, stepping away from the console. That had been fast. She paused, then spoke, not to Charon, but to Schaz: “You’ve got administrative privilege within Charon’s systems now,” she told our ship. “Can you patch into camera feeds, tell us exactly what’s going on in the rest of the station?”
“Can do, boss,” Schaz replied. “Let’s see: oh. Oh, no.”
“You found the glowing guy with the fuck-off armor?”
“I found the glowing guy with the fuck-off armor. He’s looking for you two. His ship’s docked on the far side of the asteroid from my berth—it looks like he was inside, doing god knows what, but he just came back out. He must have had some sort of . . . digital tripwire, rigged up on an access point—we triggered it when I accessed admin status.”
“Which means he knows we gave ourselves that status manually,” Jane swore. “Which means he knows where we are.”
“Isn’t that what we wanted?” I asked, my voice . . . weaker than I would have liked. I wasn’t exactly sure it was what I wanted, not after seeing the damage he’d left in his wake.
“We wanted to set a trap for him,” Jane growled. “That’s harder to do when he’s busy setting one for us.”
“He’s heading back through the main thoroughfare,” Schaz reported. “You need to get out of there, and not back the way you came.”
Jane paused, thinking. “Does he have administrative privileges as well?” she asked. A good question—if he’d set up some sort of alarm system in Charon’s databanks, he might have tried to pull the same trick we had.
“No,” Schaz reported succinctly. “I’m listed as the only ‘living’ administrator on the station.”
“How many other ‘living’ station occupants are there?” I asked.
Schaz paused. “Three,” she said.
Jane; myself; the asshole. He’d actually done it. He’d fucking murdered everyone on board the asteroid. Hundreds dead, maybe thousands, in just a few hours’ time.
Jane shook her head, swallowing back her own horror at the carnage. “Classify him as a threat,” she told Schaz.
“Charon’s already done that. I’m reviewing the files now; nothing he threw at the bastard worked. Jane—he’s had something of a . . . Protecting the people in this station was his only priority. He failed to protect the people of this station. He’s well on his way to a serious algorithmic crack.”
Jane swore, sulfurously. I didn’t know what the hell any of that meant, but it sounded . . . very bad. Being stuck in this station of the dead—the term now significantly more literal than I thought it would be on our approach—with the armored guy hunting us was bad enough; being stuck in this station of the dead with the armored guy hunting us and the system AI losing its mind sounded even worse.
She turned and looked at me, raised an eyebrow. “Well?” she asked.
“Well, what?” I didn’t know what the hell she wanted from me.
“I’m asking you for ideas.”
Well, she didn’t do that very often; not a good sign. I thought it through, shook my head. “Direct combat’s right out. After what he’s done here, and how appreciatively outclassed we were back on Kandriad . . . it’s a no go.”
“I could rig up the fusion reactor, blow the station.”
“Why do you always want to solve things with explosions?” I hissed. “How will that solve anything?”
“I’m just reminding you of my skill set.”
“I know what your skill set is, it’s not—” I paused at that, the phrase tripping something in the back of my mind.
“What?” she asked, keeping the rising tension she must have felt—that we both were feeling—out of her voice, but only barely.
“ ‘Don’t fight an enemy until you know their full skill set, not if you can help it.’ You taught me that.”
“And?” she asked, not doing such a great job holding back the impatience in her voice now.
“Whatever you two are doing,” Schaz interjected, “do it faster. He’s got your scent—he’s headed into the maintenance tunnels. He . . . doesn’t look pleased. Or maybe he does. His mask
is damaged, and his face is made out of fire, just like the rest of him; his facial expressions are . . . hard to read. It doesn’t look good, that’s what I’m saying.”
I ignored Scheherazade for now; I already knew what was breathing down the backs of our necks, thank you very much. “If we just keep going at him head on,” I told Jane, working it out in my head even as I said it, “the only way we learn more about him is when he hits us with something new, and ultimately, he’ll hit us with something we won’t be able to bounce back from, because we didn’t see it coming.”
“That’s . . . what the maxim means, yes.”
“So we need to see it coming. We need to know what he’s got up his armored sleeves. We’ve got administrative access,” I reminded Jane, reaching up to toggle the “mute” on my comms, and gesturing for her to do the same. Frowning, she did so. “Schaz does, at any rate. She can lock the station down, she can fry any local ships in the docking bay; they’ll be hardwired into Charon already, the same way she patches into John Henry back at Sanctum.”
“You don’t want to take him on at all.” Jane was finally putting it together. “You want to trap him. To turn the whole asteroid into a trap.”
“And slam the door shut behind us,” I nodded. “And in order to do that—to beach him here, without a way off this rock—we’ve got to get to his ship.”
Jane blinked at me, piecing my plan together, such as it was. “We lead him on a merry chase through the station, slowly working our way toward whatever docking bay that weird craft of his is sitting in.”
“Which should buy Schaz time enough to fry out the drive core of every ship connected to Charon,” I added.
Jane nodded slowly, still working over my plan in her head. “We break into his ship—should be doable, with Schaz’s admin privileges—and see if we can’t access his databanks, find out who and what he is, what he wants. Learn whatever weaknesses we can.”
I nodded. “And then, you know: we fuck it right up. Maybe plant a bomb or something. Because fuck this guy. If we can take out his ship, it doesn’t matter how unkillable he is—with the local craft grounded, he’ll be stuck here. Then we bug out, get somewhere we can get a message to Sanctum, rally the troops, come back with everyone. Like . . . everyone. Javier and Marus and the Preacher and Criat and Sahluk and as many combat-trained personnel as we can fit on board our ships; hell, even MelWill will want to poke at this son of a bitch. For a cure for the pulse? The whole of the Justified will turn out to take him on.” And in the meantime, he’d be stranded here with only the corpses of the people he’d butchered for company. I saw a bit of poetry in that. Grisly, grisly poetry.
“That just might work,” Jane nodded slowly. “We can do even better than that—Schaz can program a broadcast, a quarantine warning or something. Warn off anyone who might get close, so we don’t risk some poor bastards stopping in for repairs or something, then getting their ship hijacked and letting the bastard loose.”
“You two really need to get moving,” Schaz put in again; she couldn’t hear what we were discussing, not with our comms muted, but she could still see us through Charon’s cameras. “Get moving now.”
“So we’re doing it?” I asked Jane. I hoped so—I was fairly proud of the plan. Plus, you know, it didn’t involve us actually fighting the son of a bitch, so I was happy about that, too.
“Not quite. You’re doing it.”
“What?”
“We won’t be able to spend enough time on his ship to learn anything—let alone to spite the fucking thing—if he’s breathing down our necks. You’re going to find his ship. Schaz can guide you through tunnels over the comms.”
I shook my head. “He has access to our comm channels.” That’s why I’d muted them in the first place. “Remember? On Kandriad? He broke our encryption without even trying; if Schaz tries—”
“Have a little faith, kid.” Jane turned back to the console in front of her, typing a flurry of commands in; keying Schaz in on our plan, without broadcasting the information where our enemy could hear it. “Schaz will guide you, but she won’t say anything about your destination. ‘Left right left right straight’ will just be soup to this asshole. Besides—he’s going to be busy.”
I moaned, very softly. “You’re not,” I said.
She nodded. “Somebody’s got to keep him occupied, buy you time—you and Schaz both, you to get to his craft, her to spite the local vessels. I’ll engage him, then fade. A running fight. Lead him on a merry chase, one that’ll loop me right back to Scheherazade.”
“Jane, this guy is—just look what he’s done around here.”
“I’m not some death-obsessed cultist, Esa; I’m not afraid of demons.” She raised her revolver; checked that each chamber was loaded, which, of course, they were. “Go. Get moving; get moving now.” She stepped to the door, her weapon raised. I followed her through, still hating this plan. She reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “You’ve got this,” she told me.
“Don’t you fucking die on me,” I swore at her.
“I’ll do my best.”
“I want better than that; I want a promise.”
“Kid, what did I tell you?”
I sighed. “You don’t make promises you aren’t sure you can keep.”
“Stay safe—I’ll do my damnedest to do the same. That’s the best I can do. Now get going. I’ve got a date with a motherfucker in armored plating.” She was actually grinning as she turned her focus back to the corridor that led back to the main thoroughfare, the route we’d taken in. Somewhere between here and there was the asshole hunting us, and Jane was actually pleased she was going to get to fight him again, even after the fact that it had taken Schaz hitting the bastard with a ship-to-ship laser blast to put him down the last time.
No matter how much she trained me, no matter how much combat I saw: I didn’t think I’d ever get to that.
I reached out to touch her—just on her arm, just to remind myself that she was there, so that if the unthinkable did happen, I would at least remember doing that—and then I turned, and I ran.
Deeper into the tunnels carved straight through Valkyrie Rock.
CHAPTER 11
I ran in silence through the endless-seeming tunnel system that crisscrossed the interior of the asteroid like arteries through a body. Everything was so still that just the sounds of my labored breathing and the pounding of my heartbeat were deafening in my ears. The rock walls around me seemed unchanging, repeating: the same twisting designs, the same abandoned heavy machinery, the same stripped-out veins of ore. I didn’t even need directions from Scheherazade: so far, there was only one way through.
I was almost glad to have the silence broken when I heard Jane’s voice in my ear, until I realized why she was talking. “Hey, fuckstick!” she shouted. “I think I’m a little tired of your attentions. You want something from me, why don’t you try asking politely?”
I couldn’t hear whatever response he made—if he made a response at all—but I did hear Jane’s reply: it came as I entered a chamber unlike any I’d seen before, endless rows of metal racks holding pans of foul-smelling algae. Must have been what the former inhabitants of the asteroid ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “I don’t give a damn about what you want, you ugly son of a bitch,” Jane said. “In fact, I—” Whatever threat or insult she might have issued was drowned out by the roar of a gunshot. That might have meant her enemy had attacked, and she was answering; it might have just meant she shot first, trying to catch him off guard by breaking into her own sentence with a sharp piece of violence.
“Left, then down a ladder,” Schaz told me; I veered between the racks of algae, and I could see the ladder she’d mentioned, sticking up out of a hole in the rock floor.
“Well that was rude,” Jane said, and there was something in her voice I didn’t like—something that might have been fear, or pain. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t we just—” Another gunshot; it seemed to echo as I began my descent, the tig
ht confines of the rock brushing against my shoulders.
“At the bottom of the ladder, go right, then keep moving straight through the next chamber.”
“Got it,” I answered, forgetting for a moment that my comms were muted, that Schaz couldn’t hear me.
“Fuck you, and fuck whatever you might call a mother, and take your fucking crusade and your fucking genocidal tendencies and you fuck them both with a—” Jane’s tirade cut off in mid-flow, and there wasn’t an answering gunshot this time; I felt fear bloom up through my chest as I hit the bottom of the ladder. Very little could stop Jane in mid-insult.
The corridors were tighter down here; good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic. I was on the shortish side, and I still had to stoop—that put me at eye level with a strange maxim, carved into the rock: “Those who await redemption lie beyond.” What the fuck did that mean?
Still, it was my route; I pressed forward. Still nothing else from Jane. In desperation, I unmuted my comms. “Schaz, what’s happening?” I asked.
“Jane’s taken the fight into the reactor chamber; it’s unshielded, and the radiation is interfering with her comms,” Schaz told me. “Don’t worry, she’s all right. I think. There aren’t any cameras in that room.” She sighed. “I’m going to have to decontaminate her all over again when she gets—”
Another voice boomed out, not just through the comms, but through the speakers built into the girders inches from my head: “Ad infirmum purificatorio!” Charon, screaming the words throughout the entire asteroid.
“Oh, dear,” Schaz murmured.
“What the—what’s going on? Did that AI just shout something in a dead language? Why does the AI speak a dead language?”
“Because it was programmed to, dear,” Schaz replied mildly. “Charon just vented the reactor’s excess heat in the general direction of Jane’s adversary. Don’t worry about Jane—she should be all right, I’ve coded Charon to make her survival a priority. Just concentrate on where you’re going. You should be about to reach—”
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