by A. R. Knight
Zaydi fired, the pistol shot grazing Rovo’s side and sending a hissing burn through his nerves, one followed real quick by the charred smell from his now-ruined clothes. Zaydi didn’t look finished by her miss, and tracked Rovo for shot number two.
So Rovo went for the tackle.
Weapons 3 didn’t have much space for its experiments, and Gregor’s giant suit currently claimed most of that space for itself. Zaydi had three meters between the room’s control center and the armor, distance Rovo closed with a side-stepping lunge.
But Zaydi had enough time to get off a second blast, this one scoring Rovo in the chest. A hot wave added to the sting from the first laser, Rovo’s lungs feeling like they were about to melt. Lasers, though, don’t do anything to stop momentum, and Rovo’s carried him through, right into Zaydi.
They hit the floor in a wordless struggle, Rovo trying to get the pistol away while Zaydi tried to zero in a third shot. The woman had skill, but Rovo had desperation. Zaydi managed to curl her wrist even as Rovo held it, getting the pistol in line for a fatal shot to Rovo’s head. Rovo, instead, used his head to deliver a sharp ram to Zaydi’s own, cracking into her with a blow that left Rovo’s vision blurred, and Zaydi’s body limp.
“Okay, that sucked,” Rovo hissed, his breath whistling down his throat and vanishing into fiery pain.
First things first: Rovo ripped the pistol from Zaydi’s hands. He could’ve blasted her right there, and man did he want to, but Rovo had seen too many intelligence reports come across his old desk to ignore the value a hostage might have. Instead, he stood up, looking towards that control center.
As Rovo straightened, his vision warped again, this time going fuzzy. His arms and legs felt alien to him, as if he’d slept with rocks on all his limbs. A step towards the blurred console felt like tripping through another world, and Rovo vaguely realized this was what happened when a laser burned its way through your insides.
He’d never really been shot before. Not like this. Not without power armor or a vest or something to blunt the blow.
Turned out, getting hit by a laser was not a good thing.
A second shaking step sent Rovo into a stumbling fall forward towards the console, his hands dropping the pistol to catch himself on the console’s edge as Rovo planted on its base. One hot breath later and Rovo pulled himself back up again, choosing to ignore the deep red stain where he’d hit the console.
Thankfully, DefenseCorp didn’t make its systems all that complicated. Weapons 3 offered up a simple options menu, and Rovo unlocked Gregor’s suit with a single button press. Behind him, chirps and hisses sounded as the suit once more responded to Gregor’s inputs.
Arms grabbed Rovo’s shoulders and threw him back from the console and to the floor. Zaydi, now holding a small knife she must’ve pulled from elsewhere, went for a thrust towards Rovo’s heart.
The rookie rolled, embracing the agony, using the adrenaline. Zaydi’s stab, aiming to be the coup de grace on a dying man’s day, went slow and missed, the knife glancing off the floor. Lifting his leg, Rovo kicked Zaydi back against the control console. She hit the boxy, metal thing, shook her head and swore.
“You’re not supposed to be this hard to kill,” Zaydi said, lunging back at Rovo, knife held in both hands.
“Sorry to disappoint,” Rovo said, catching the diving attack with his hands wrapping around Zaydi’s wrists.
Zaydi had weight, momentum, and Rovo’s steadily sapping strength on her side. The knife came down, its point gunning for Rovo’s throat. A target it would hit, and Rovo felt an odd panic as he realized there wasn’t any damn thing he could do about it.
But he didn’t have to. Two huge metal hands swooped in, crunching around Zaydi’s shoulders and pulling her away from Rovo. She shouted, squirmed to try and get away, and failed as Gregor lifted the agent over his head and threw her right into the control console. The screens shattered, sparked as Zaydi crashed into and rolled away from the computer.
“Nice toss.” Rovo laid his head back on the cool floor. “Good timing.”
Behind him, the suit popped as Gregor came out, and the big man’s mug filled Rovo’s view for a single, concerned moment.
“Bad hit,” Gregor said.
“Uh huh.”
Rovo, using his arms, tried to sit up. Saw Zaydi lying on the floor, not moving. Gregor, though, had ran to the suit’s other side. For a second, Rovo wondered whether the man had abandoned him. Then he remembered: the med kit, of course. Good old Gregor, caring for the rookie after all.
“Empty!” Gregor cursed, then came back around the power armor, looked at Rovo with as much concern as the rookie had ever seen in the man’s eyes. “The med bay’s not far. Can you walk?”
“Look at me,” Rovo said, smiling despite himself. “What do you think?”
“Right,” Gregor said. “Hold in your guts.”
“What?”
Gregor squatted down, slipped his hands beneath Rovo’s legs and back, then lifted the rookie up. Rovo managed to keep from shouting at the sudden pain, reducing the noise to a hissing gasp instead. Tears flooded his eyes without warning. Warmth pooled around his chest, cupped in Gregor’s arms.
He didn’t need to ask what it was.
Weapons 3, like most rooms on the Nautilus, required a badge to get in but didn’t ask for it to leave. They went into the small room, Gregor turning to the side to fit with his cargo, then bustled into the concourse.
Rovo watched these events with a numbing detachment. He knew, objectively, that the reason why he didn’t feel so much constant pain anymore was due to shock. His body was doing what it had to do in order to keep Rovo alive, or at least feeling that way. His mind? Oh, his mind turned.
The unconscious pulled at him, but Rovo pushed it away. Focused, instead, on Zaydi. On the woman’s uniform, her seemingly random appearance in the mess hall line. She’d been so ready to pay for their meals, so ready to sit with them and have a conversation, as if she had no other friends eating lunch on the ship.
And the line about Aurora? Knowing their captain was a woman?
All that leading up to the assassination attempt.
Why kill Rovo and, presumably, Gregor? Back on Wexer, in their brief captivity session, the video message from whomever that officer was implied DefenseCorp wanted Sever alive for an interrogation. Apparently that stance had changed, and apparently the Nautilus wasn’t the peace treaty Aurora thought.
More importantly . . .
“We have to tell the others,” Rovo croaked, shoving himself back into full consciousness.
“Getting you help first,” Gregor said between breaths as he ran down the concourse. “We’re almost there.”
Over Gregor’s shoulder, Rovo picked out a white and red hovering form. A medical bot, scrambled when someone on the Nautilus noticed Gregor holding Rovo’s wounded form. The bot, a meter-long oval, bristled with small compartments. Each one packed emergency supplies, the things that could keep Rovo, maybe, alive until better care arrived.
“The bot,” Rovo said, trying to lift an arm to point and finding himself lacking the strength. As if the strings tying his brain to his muscles had frayed, leaving only a dull pressure. “Can’t that help?”
“Too slow,” Gregor replied. “Quiet, now.”
The Nautilus med bay had enough room for a hundred patients. Rovo hadn’t spent time here, but he gathered most of Sever had enjoyed its glossy confines in the aftermath of one of their missions. Laid out in descending rings, with more critical patients in more expansive rooms towards the middle, the whole med bay allowed human providers in its middle to track and operate the bots doing most of the actual care.
Dark with localized lighting to let patients sleep, the med bay resembled a neon nebula, the ramp Gregor descended glowing light purple. Rooms studded their levels with even-paced walls, each one emitting a soft outward aura for its patient’s condition. The low population meant green and blue rooms shown in between empty black stretches.
In the air around and above them, medical bots like the one trailing Gregor glided from room to room. Food, meds, and diagnosis updates were delivered through the little things, and occasionally a doctor’s voice could be heard coming through a bot’s speakers, delivering a remote discharge. Only in the med bay’s central, high intensity center, did any real action happen.
When Rovo stopped by on his first week’s tour of the ship, he’d found the med bay a calm, sanitized place where mechanized competence put DefenseCorp’s troops back in action before they had any right to be there.
Now, as Gregor clomped down the steps with Rovo in his arms, all that calm vanished. Bots and humans cleared out a room for Gregor to drop Rovo into a bed, the big man no sooner setting him down than mask-clad physicians pushed him away.
Bright lights clashed down at him while new pokes found their way past Rovo’s shock-numbed nerves. Beeps sounded, long and sharp mixed with short and dull. Rovo tasted iron, smelled something sticky sweet.
“Rovo?” Gregor’s voice cut over the medical chatter. “I’m going to warn the others. I’ll be back.”
Rovo tried to say he heard the big man, but then a doctor slapped an oxygen mask over his face and he couldn’t utter another word. Couldn’t imagine another one to say, either, as the drugs began to do their work.
The pain didn’t so much vanish as recede into a tiny bubble, there on the absolute edge, while Rovo drifted. His eyes hazed again, but he picked out a bot hovering over him, its many little metal limbs stringing up an IV bag. Almost cute, the thing. Sever ought to have one on the Prisa, given how many times they were likely to get shot.
The Prisa. Eponi would give Rovo endless crap for this. She was always telling him to stay on edge, to keep a watch for someone doing something stupid. Here he’d known Zaydi had something weird going on, and he’d still turned his back on the woman.
Rookie mistake.
Six
Reversal
Even with the simulator's air conditioning, Aurora left the training room covered in sweat, her Sever uniform's black-and-white detailing damp, her hair plastered to her face along with a sharp smile. Her half-dozen had come out ahead in the skirmish with Sever's A team through a combination of smarts, quick orders, and Aurora's own life-saving double shot into some forgotten power packs near the enemy's base.
Nobody called her rookie after that.
"Have to say, I'm impressed," Deepak said as Aurora left the training room. Her squad headed off, a few glancing back Aurora's way, but she waved them on. She saw them every day, all day. "You're clever."
"You sound surprised?" Aurora said, folding her arms as they stood in the crowded concourse.
"I, uh—"
"Just messing with you." Aurora slapped on a grin, took in Deepak's always-crisp uniform. "Aren't you supposed to be doing something important?"
Rescued from his own words, Deepak flushed into something approaching relaxation, though the man couldn't stop folding and unfolding his hands, "Break time. Saw your squad on the schedule, thought I'd stop by. You have any plans for lunch?"
"I'm real gross right now."
"Then I'd say, between the two of us, we're about right," Deepak countered.
Hard not to give into those bright eyes, spend the victory rush sharing a meal with someone fun. They laughed through that lunch, and the next, and the one after that, until the Nautilus reached its destination and the assignments started coming in.
With two guards behind her, a liar in Deepak next to her, and a mysterious enemy pointing to a chair, Aurora played the only card she could: she sat.
With the tone called, the move to the chair came both fast and slow. Aurora drew in the room with different eyes than she’d first seen it, looking this time for weapons, for stances, for possible ways out or opportunities.
First, Deepak. He looked troubled, almost panicked. Not at all like someone who’d just pulled the prey into his trap. His uniform, crisp and perfect, lacked the slack or the holsters to carry weapons. Aurora didn’t recall the admiral being much of a fighter himself, but his sweaty, nervous attitude suggested he might be as much a prisoner here as Aurora.
The guards behind her, caught in view as Aurora walked to her chair, pulled it out, and sat down, held a different sort of casualness. A bland confidence in their inevitable victory. That, at least, Aurora had seen time and again on the faces of her soon-to-be victims. Everyone believed they were a winner until they lost.
These two packed pistols, the weapons lingering on belts at their waists. They kept their eyes fixed on Aurora, but one let his trail to his wristlet while the other scratched at his nose. Hardly robots, then. Relaxed with their power.
Easy to surprise.
The officer across from her, his crimson uniform devoid of medals and ranks aside from black stripes running down its sides—just like the guards—plastered an accommodating smile across his wide, smoothed face. He kept his hands clasped, but Aurora picked out the white press on the skin. Nervous too, though perhaps in a different way than Deepak.
The stakes here rested on his shoulders, and someone wouldn’t be very happy if he failed.
“I’m sitting,” Aurora said. “What do you want?”
“No,” the officer replied. “The question is who. Who do we want?”
The message in the cell on Dynas gave filled any gaps from Deepak’s arrangement to allow Sever to land on the Nautilus. The officer wanted anyone who knew about Kaia, the little girl that, so far as Aurora knew, was the only living survivor of Helix’s adaptable virus.
“You already have them,” Aurora said. “Us. Sever.”
“Wrong,” the officer said. “That’s not all.”
“What, you want the two guards? Lani, the DefenseCorp agent that flew with us off-world?” Aurora said. “We don’t know where they are.”
“That was it?” the officer said. “Nobody else?”
Aurora could’ve been cagey with the intel, but she wasn’t playing some tricky game here. She didn’t have a weapon, was outnumbered and outgunned, and didn’t have anything to hide. If giving the man what he wanted would let her out of this room and get her squad off this ship alive, well, she’d tell him everything.
“Anaskya. Kaia’s father Kashmal. That’s really it.” Aurora sat back in the hard chair, shot Deepak a glare to make sure he understood she wouldn’t forgive him for not mentioning this little ambush. “Looks like you might be a paranoid man, so let me tell you that we’re not in the business of making friends.”
The man, at least, laughed at that, “No, no you’re not. We had trouble finding anyone on this ship aside from Deepak who even cared that your squad deserted. It’s quite hard to make a profile of people when nobody knows who they are.”
Aurora didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
The officer’s smile trembled in the silence. Deepak, taking the chair next to Aurora, looked down into his lap like a child about to be scolded.
“Do you know why DefenseCorp doesn’t chase many deserters?” The officer said, breaking his clasped hands and laying them flat on the table, as if about to reveal a surprise. “Because most aren’t worth a damn. The few that are, we find a sweet enough reward gives us what we’re looking for.”
“Nobody cares that much about us,” Aurora said. “Anyone who does, wouldn’t know where we are.”
Sai and Rovo had families. They’d sent messages on Wexer, but a few days wouldn’t be enough time for those beams to get halfway home.
“That’s true. Lani, however, does care quite a lot about herself,” the officer said. “She didn’t want to die, and she didn’t want to go back to Dynas. Instead, she gave us you.”
Anger came easy, Aurora killed it easier. Lani bought her life by helping Rovo survive the escape from Dynas, by giving up Aurora’s power armor. Sever could’ve spaced the DefenseCorp agent, but they’d played it right.
If she ever saw Lani again, Aurora would pull the trigger. That thought w
as enough to keep anything showing on her face, and once again the officer’s grin shook, faded when Aurora didn’t give him the satisfaction.
“Nothing surprises you,” the officer said. “I suppose that’s a sign we do train our soldiers well.”
“He did,” Aurora said, nodding towards Deepak. “You don’t.”
“Him?” The officer laughed again, an annoying, squawking noise that Aurora attributed to the man’s obvious facial operations. “He does what he’s told, just like you will. Lani mentioned the girl, this Kaia. You know where she is.”
“I don’t.”
The officer held up one finger. Both officers drew their pistols, aimed them at Aurora.
“According to Lani, you do,” the officer said. “And Lani’s been right about everything else so far.”
“We ditched them on Wexer,” Aurora replied. “They took a transport somewhere. Not my problem.”
“It is your problem, because I’m making it your problem. Either you give me a solution, or they will erase you now, just like I am erasing all of your colleagues at this very moment.”
Wait. What?
Almost all of Sever had left the Prisa after Deepak’s introduction. Aurora could see them all splitting up. Could see more agents like these two tracking them down, one by one. Outnumbered, attacked by surprise in the one place Sever would consider safe?
“Say that again,” Aurora said.
“You tell me where Kaia is, perhaps I’ll call off the assignments,” the officer said, now, finally, getting his chance to gloat. “Do hurry, though, because you are running out of time.”
Was he bluffing? Would he stop these attacks, even if Aurora knew where to find Kaia?
Did she really want to spend another minute listening to this guy?
The Nautilus maintained, through its mass and magnetic fields, enough gravity to keep feet on the ground, to keep most things working as nature intended. Try to press against it, though, and you’d find yourself jumping to the ceiling.
