His eyes glazed with tears that would not fall.
Stars above, she was going to get so much fan mail.
CHAPTER 16
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3771
A DAY OF NEW FACES
Tomas Cepko. Sanda read his name twice, tracing her finger over the thin screen displaying the vital information of the man preserved in the evac pod. He was an Icarion, military, something to do with communications. She wondered what he’d be like, how he’d react to the terrible news she had to give him. As excited as she was to meet the man—get a chance to save somebody from this disaster—she dreaded that moment with all her heart.
Bero didn’t say a word as she transported the mag pallet to the cargo elevator and then wheeled him down to the medibay. A few scrapes marred the pod’s paint, but it was otherwise whole. The readout claimed the occupant was in good health, but she wanted to be ready. If he came out injured, or ill, having him already in the medibay could save precious time.
She rubbed her palms together with excitement and reached for the open sequence.
“Wait,” Bero said.
“Oh, now you’re talking to me.” She hesitated, fingers poised above the buttons.
“You don’t know who this man is.”
“Tomas Cepko, communications first class, like it says on the reader. Seems clear enough.”
“He’s Icarion.”
“So? So are you.”
“And you’re very much not.”
Damn, he had a point. An Icarion agent was unlikely to react kindly to a lone Ada Prime woman making her home on an Icarion research vessel, especially one as classified as Bero. Combine that with the awful news she had to tell him, and things could get nasty in a hurry.
She swore. Waking up alone had been a gut-wrenching affair for her, and she hated to do it to Tomas, but she couldn’t think of a better solution. Until she knew just what kind of man he was, she would keep him sequestered. For both their sakes. If he slowed down her efforts to reach Atrux, it could mean their death.
Luckily, the medibay had a quarantine scenario programmed into its locking system. It took a little extra time to grab foodstuffs, a cot, and make sure the medibay’s small bathroom was operational. She rushed through the process, Bero offering suggestions all the way.
When she finished, she brushed sweaty hair back from her forehead and adjusted her prosthetic. A blister was forming along the back of her thigh.
“Happy?” she asked Bero, her gaze glued to the evac pod.
“It is the bare minimum. You realize that if you expect both of you to survive to Atrux, you’re going to have to scavenge more supplies. You found enough to repair one pod, but—”
She waved for silence. “Give it a rest, please? I’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out.”
Grippy rolled into the medibay while Sanda retreated to the safety of the hallway. The door dilated shut behind her, and she punched the codes for a medical quarantine into the lockpad. The door limned in red LEDs—secured. She hated to give Grippy up for the time it’d take her to get a read on this guy, but somebody had to press the release buttons, and it certainly wasn’t going to be her, or Bero.
She retreated to the command deck and strapped herself into a seat. Bero splashed every camera view of the medibay across the smartscreen. She leaned forward, licking her lips as Grippy approached the pod.
“Initiate release,” she commanded. Her fingers tightened on the chair’s armrests. A pointless affectation in low-g, but it made her feel secure.
Grippy input the code. Sanda held her breath.
The evac pod slid open on all sides, the armadillo-like scales collapsing down into the primary frame. Preservation foam held its shape a moment, a large globule of purple-grey matrix, then it destabilized. Slid out and away from the person it preserved.
Tomas Cepko woke seizing on the hard foam bed of the evac pod, every muscle twitching violently as his body threw off the invasive, metabolism-slowing foam.
Sanda averted her gaze. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to watch her in the same state. She knew what he was going through, had experienced it herself. Hers had been a gentler awakening, the NutriBath having already soothed and healed any aches. Tomas came out of the foam just the way he’d been put in. No mood stabilizers, no painkillers. Just raw emergence. Someone should be there for him. Someone he trusted. Someone safe. But there was only her and Bero, and Grippy had gone into hiding as soon as he’d hit the buttons.
“He’s moving,” Bero said.
Tomas crawled on his elbows toward the edge of the evac pod’s bed, a much lower lip than the NutriBath had been. His jumpsuit hung about him in tatters, every muscle of his body trembling as he crawled through foam degrading into liquid and, more than likely, his own waste.
“Hello?” His voice was raspy, strained, but deep. He gripped the edge of the bed, his strength temporarily failing him, and rolled to his side to look around. “Hello?”
Sanda’s thumb hovered over the speak button on her armrest. She didn’t press it. She didn’t want to tell him what she knew she must.
Tomas rallied and forced himself to a seat, then swung his legs over the edge. Very, very, slowly he eased himself upright. His knees wobbled, but they held. Flesh hung loose around atrophied muscles, the result of too long in an evac pod. He found the pile of towels, microcleanse, and fresh clothes she’d left for him and, methodically, washed and dressed himself. She looked away, granting him a little privacy. When Bero told her he was finished, she looked back to the screen.
Tomas Cepko sat cross-legged in the middle of the medibay, staring straight at the smartscreen on the wall. He had a hard face, a jagged quality that hinted at a life spent making difficult choices. The FitFlex jumpsuit hugged him tight, revealing the emaciated state of someone who’d spent too long in an evac pod. No surprise there, her own ribs still showed.
He said nothing. Just kept staring at that blank screen. Some sort of Icarion training? No—of course not. She was a damned moron. The quarantine protocol. She thumbed the zoom on Bero’s lens and got a good look at the smartscreen. Sure enough, red letters on a black background flashed: QUARANTINE ACTIVATED.
Great. What a wonderful way to kick off getting to know each other. She was hoping to ease into that little bit of information, convince him she’d rather not have locked him up, but really she didn’t have a choice. But now she was going into it backward, and he was probably pissed. She would have been.
Sanda took a breath, donned her command voice like an old sweater, and thumbed the talk button. “Welcome aboard The Light of Berossus, Mr. Cepko. How are you feeling?”
He cocked his head, glancing around for the source of the speakers. “I’ve been better. Who am I speaking with?”
“This is Gunnery Sergeant Sanda Greeve.”
A flicker on his face, a slight twitch at the corner of his eye. Probably just a spasm. “I am unfamiliar with this ship, and your name. Why am I under quarantine?”
“This an Icarion research vessel.”
He raised both brows. “Yes. I can see that.”
Of course he could. He was Icarion himself, and in their military. This ship wasn’t nearly the mystery to him that it had been to her upon awakening. She thumbed off the talk button to clear her throat, and started again. “What is the last thing you remember before the evac pod?”
He chuckled. “My mission was classified. But I can tell you my cruiser was hit by a Prime railgun. Did the others make it?”
“Negative.”
He stiffened, snapping his head back. “All souls?”
“Save yourself.”
He bowed his head, mouthed something she couldn’t make out, and lifted his head once more. “Sergeant Greeve, may I request confirmation of your clearance level?”
She snorted, and let Tomas hear it. “Later, Cepko. We have other things to talk about first.”
“I sincerely hope they have to do with the nature of this quarantine, and why nothing you’r
e saying is in line with protocol.”
She hadn’t wanted to mislead him regarding who she was, but she also didn’t want to dig into certain details right away. The longer she waited, the more irritated he was going to get. With a sigh, she flicked on her video feed. He sat bolt upright, eyes wide. She could see what he saw in a screen-in-screen display Bero put up for her.
Sanda sat, strapped into the command chair of Bero’s deck. Her FitFlex jumpsuit fit, they always did, but she wore no insignia, no demonstration of rank. She’d hacked her hair back to little more than three inches of length, and her dark curls stuck up in all directions in low-g. It’d been a while since she’d looked at herself in the mirror—her aquiline nose was too much her brother’s, her fathers’—and her own face startled her. She’d grown gaunt. Dark circles smeared under her eyes.
“You,” Tomas said, “are no Icarion, Sergeant Greeve.”
She smiled. It looked tight and pained on the camera. “No. I’m not. But I am your ally, Tomas Cepko.”
His lip curled in derision. She held up a hand to forestall him. “Please, let me explain.”
And she did. Slow, at first. Meandering, hedging around the point, the salient catastrophe of both their lives. Bero remained silent, not prodding, not correcting when she muddied small details and had to backtrack to straighten them out. He only added graphics to the screen, visuals and videos to underline her points. Tomas let her talk, too. From the slack shock in his face, she wondered if he were capable of interrupting.
As she spoke, the words became easier. She realized how long it’d been since she’d said more than a few sentences together. Bero was here, yes, but he knew all that had happened. She did not need to tell him her story. This man, this audience, patient and listening, absorbing, did more to relieve her tension than anything she’d tried in the days since her awakening.
“So, you see,” she said, coming to the end. “I apologize for putting you under quarantine, but it was the only way to ensure my safety until we grow comfortable with each other. If you prefer, later, I do not make use of hab two. You may have it to yourself. But we are going to Atrux. Bero can take us there.”
He was silent a very long time.
“Mr. Cepko?”
“That,” he said, “is the most bullshit story I’ve ever heard.”
CHAPTER 17
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3541
A WEEK AFTER DRALEE, SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT
Biran rode the shuttle planetside. Some streak of nostalgia had made him don the jumpsuit common among military cadets and spacefarers of all kinds. Maybe some part of him had hoped the jumpsuit would make him blend in with the average populace. That part of him had been wrong.
Strapped into one of the five first-class seats, Biran caught the occasional set of eyes from the economy acceleration couches behind him in the mirrored sheen of the shuttle’s viewscreen. They watched him in spurts and glances. He pretended not to see them, just as they pretended they weren’t watching him.
Through the mirror-glaze of eyes, raw space moved outside the viewscreen. Not a simulation, not a screen piping in fresh video from cameras mounted on the shuttle. In some fit of anachronism, the original station-to-planet shuttles of Prime Inventive had been designed with real windows between the passengers and space. The first-class seats offered an uninterrupted and private view.
Biran wished he’d opted for the cheap seats. All he could think as he watched the atmosphere domes of the settlements of Ada come into view was how fragile they looked. How woefully unprotected.
“Docking,” a gender-equalized voice said cheerfully from the speakers. Biran tightened his grip on the five-point harness hugging him in place. Pressure mounted as the shuttle passed from the vacuum into the thin atmosphere of the dome.
The shuttle turned, a lazy slalom designed to show the passengers the vista of Alexandria-Ada, the founding city of Ada Prime. All first Prime cities were named after the company’s founder and original CEO, Alexandra Halston. Most of them got shortened to the planet’s name in practice, but the homage was always there.
Biran wondered what she would have thought of that. For all her visionary thinking, the writings she’d left behind hadn’t signaled that she was prone to that flavor of hubris. Probably, she’d be embarrassed. Though she was centuries dead, he felt a little empathetic embarrassment on her behalf as the speakers sang the welcome jingle to Alexandria-Ada (the Ada aspirated, pronounced so softly he could only hear it because he knew it was there).
The shuttle shivered against its docking port, and after a moment’s hesitation the connecting tunnel door dilated, his harness swinging up in the same instant. Biran stood and stretched, then scooped his duffel out of the storage crate bolted to the floor alongside each first-class chair.
“Keeper—?” A voice, thin, came from behind him.
Biran hurried out before they could waylay him, guilt panging through him with each step he took. He didn’t have time to glad-hand, to soothe nerves or answer questions. He needed his own nerves soothed, and soon, before they snapped. Before he snapped.
An autocab awaited him at the curb just outside the station’s main door, his ident number cycling in the side window, but not his name. He’d requested that. The last thing he needed was a crowd gathered around a cab flashing SPEAKER BIRAN AVENTURE GREEVE.
He didn’t plan to be planetside long—he had only told Keeper Shun that he was going—and he wanted to be back long before he was missed. Preferably with no one noticing his presence here. The last week had seen him facing down the people of Ada every day through a camera lens, updating them on the war and Prime’s efforts to keep the Icarion threat contained. Telling them all that the diplomatic mission to recover the lost was moving along smoothly. Soon the convoy would reach neutral territory and negotiations would begin in earnest. Peace, he assured every morning on the news broadcasts, was coming.
He didn’t need to lie to them in person, too.
The car greeted him with a cheery beep as he swiped his wristpad over the sensor and slid in, slumping his weight against the cool poly-leather seats as if he’d been holding all his muscles taut by sheer force of will until that moment.
He closed his eyes and was asleep in an instant. An arrival beep startled him out of his brief nap. The door snapped open to reveal the smooth, paved walkway up to a familiar, low, green house. Biran swiped his wristpad to pay and stumbled out, only remembering to grab his duffel because the cab alerted him he’d left something behind.
At 0300, the streetlights had been reduced to a milky glow, the dome above the city shaded indigo blue. Silence thickened the air like a heavy, warm blanket. The scent of a night-blooming flower and dirt—real dirt, not the sanitized flowerbeds of the station—kissed the breeze. This city was just as artificial as the station, he held no illusions about its authenticity, but the details here… The details here were the details of life, not work. Of family. Of home.
The front door opened. His father Graham filled the entrance, his hulking frame allowing only tiny slivers of the interior light to escape. He wore loose-legged sweatpants and a sleep shirt twisted askew, but he smiled like he’d known Biran was coming, and leaned against the doorframe.
“Gonna stand out there all night, son?”
Biran found himself in Graham’s arms with no memory of the time in between, his duffel somehow slung over Graham’s shoulder as he shuffled them both inside and plopped Biran onto the worn-shiny suede couch that Biran’d spent his childhood being told not to jump on.
Miraculously, the scent of cocoa-spiked chili drifted in from the kitchen. Ilan poked his head around the corner, a tomato-stained wooden spoon held aloft.
“You find him?” Ilan squinted at the pair.
“Found him standing on the street like a lost puppy,” Graham said, and dropped the duffel on the floor.
Biran stared from one to the other. “You knew I was coming?”
“Please.” Graham held a hand over his heart as if
wounded. “You think I don’t have every system in this city flagged to tell me when your ident number is used?”
“That’s illegal.”
“Ask me if I care.” Graham snorted. “Though you could have picked a better hour to pay a visit. What would you have done if we were asleep?”
“Used my ident to access the house. Unless you’ve kicked me out of the system…?”
Ilan studied the ceiling, Graham a picked at a speck of lint on his pants.
“You did?”
Ilan smirked. He was always the first to crack. “You are so gullible! Graham’s got so-called illegal scripts combing the systems waiting to see if your ident gets anywhere near us, and you think we’d lock our kids out of the house?”
Kids. Biran winced and looked down at his hands, unwilling to meet his fathers’ eyes as the slip became apparent to them. Sanda’s number wouldn’t be in their system. Not anymore. It would have been automatically purged from all systems the moment some bureaucrat switched her file from active to deceased.
“I hacked it in,” Graham whispered. “Just in case. Ain’t no bean counter’s going to tell me I can’t hope.”
Illegal, too. Biran smiled, wistfully, and squeezed his older dad’s knee. Ilan had done a lot to clean up Graham’s act—or so he claimed—in the years since they’d been together, but Graham had never lost his flair for the underworld, his distrust of the system that both of his children ended up embracing. And being betrayed by. Biran swallowed the thought.
“What drags you down from orbit, anyway? I thought we wouldn’t see you for a while, what with the convoy to manage and all,” Ilan asked, forcing his voice up too high to sound fake cheery.
The options swam through Biran’s mind in a dizzying rush. All the things he should be there for—Sanda’s loss, that he hadn’t seen them outside of CamCasts since the graduation. And the real reason, the words that hounded him every night. Buoy. Trap. Weapon. The words he could not say, for they were classified, and he’d done enough damage there already.
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