He breathed a sigh of relief when he slid open the doors into the hab’s central control room and found only a single body there, tucked in a far corner with a pistol still floating near her hand. The one who shut the air and heat off, he guessed.
As he’d hoped, the control room had a point-to-point comm system; they only worked if you had line of sight to someone else, but they were practically unjammable. It took him a long, desperate minute to find the auxiliary power lead. An emergency fail-safe: if your hab was dead, you’d want to be able to plug in a battery so you could call for help. He pulled the lead out and jacked it in carefully to the wrist comm he’d gotten off the dead Blue Fiver. There was more than enough power there to run such a simple system. Shielding the glow of the comm display with a cupped palm, he powered the P2P on.
He still had the rotation of the hab to contend with. Timing it, he found that he had about forty-two seconds of usable visibility on the Wheels on each pass with a two-minute-fourteen-second dead zone in between.
The Wheels were just beginning to appear along the bottom edge of his view. “Uh, hello,” he said as soon as the P2P locked. “This is Fergus Ferguson. You’ve got a two-man creeping up on you from down-spinward on a deep arc, coming from Leakytown.”
A few long seconds later, a tinny voice came back out of the comm. “Who the hell are you? Are you—”
The Wheels was out of sight again. Two minutes and fourteen seconds was a very long time.
“—ello? Hello? I lost him. I think—”
“I’m here. I only have a short window. Did you get my message about the two-man?”
“Yes, thanks.” This time it was Harcourt himself. “We’re on it. What’s your status? Where are you?”
“We were ambushed on Mezzanine Rock. Bale was badly hurt; his brother has him. I’m safe somewhere else now.”
“Where—” The Wheels slid out of view again.
When the connection returned, Harcourt was still on the line. “—dark. Fergus, if you can hear me, can you see the two-man from where you are? We can’t pick it up.”
He peered at the display, cursing the resolution. “Got it!” he shouted with just seconds left before losing the connection again. “About thirty degrees up from parallel with the line and outside by a good margin.”
The connection went dead again before he finished speaking.
“—see it now. Go.” Go where? Fergus thought, but Harcourt didn’t seem to be speaking to him this time. There was a tiny flash from one of the spindles between the Wheels, and almost simultaneously the two-man powered up, changing trajectory wildly as it accelerated.
Not fast enough. There was a brief orange ball that collapsed instantly upon itself where the two-man had been.
“Ye—!” Fergus started to yell, then, where an instant ago there had been nothing but the afterimage of an explosion, there was now an enormous black shape, like a city-block-sized triangle made of darkness. “Fuck,” he finished. His knees were weak, his heart pounding in his throat as if fighting to get out. If there had been gravity, he was sure he would have fallen down.
“Uh, Fergus?” Harcourt said, his voice deathly calm. “Wherever you are, keep your head down and don’t move.”
The Asiig were here.
Chapter 11
The alien ship was utterly motionless. Even though it did nothing, showed nothing, Fergus found it difficult to take his eyes off of it. The two-minute-fourteen-second window when he couldn’t see it were an agony of uncertainty. On his wrist, the yellow light blinked at a frenetic pace. No shit, he thought. Thanks.
He should have been thinking about Tot and C’ga A⊄. He should have been planning his incursion into Gilger’s territory and subsequent escape. Instead he stared at the ship during each slow turn of his cold, grim hideaway and felt as if a dozen ghosts were staring over his shoulder, weighing whose fate would be worse.
A little more than an hour later, the ship twitched, inched forward just slightly, then was gone. Well, Fergus thought. There’s going to be a brisk business in new underwear on this side of the Halo after that.
The P2P crackled to life again in the short remnants of window left. “Fergus? You still out there?”
“Still out here,” he said, the words catching in his dry throat. “So what’s this everyone keeps telling me about the Asiig only doing flybys a couple of times a standard?”
“You tell me, Fergus,” Harcourt said. “They haven’t come this close in fifty years. Everything was quiet until you—”
The signal was gone again, but the words that didn’t transmit were hardly lost on him. He can’t really think this is my fault?
When the P2P reconnected, Harcourt spoke again. “Everyone and everything started going weird the moment you arrived at Cernee,” he said. “I don’t . . . I’m not accusing you of anything, but is there something you haven’t told us? Some reason everything went to hell as soon as you got here?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “I have nothing to do with any of this.”
Although . . .
They watch us all the time, Mari had said. What if instead of teen paranoia or old-lady delusion, that was the truth? If Mother Vahn had truly had some connection to the Asiig, then maybe it was her fault, not his.
Fergus opened his mouth to say as much, but the window was closed again. If Harcourt knew there was a connection there, he wouldn’t have asked if it was me, he realized. By the time Turndown faced the Wheels again, he’d disconnected from the P2P and shut it down. The Vahns must have had reasons for not telling Harcourt, so he wasn’t going to do it for them.
He made his way back through the rooms of the dead to the airlock chamber, powered the outlets back up, and plugged his suit and air tanks back in to finish recharging.
This was why he’d left home, why he had left Mars, why he never stayed too long at the Shipyard even though the Shipmakers were the closest thing he had to friends: complications.
He waited until the airlock was on the far side from the Wheels before he cycled himself through. With the hab between him and Cernee, he fired up the ’stick. This time a storm of tiny holographic clouds rained XOXOs all around him. Squinting, he found the tiny light-source projector on the ’stick’s frame and, bracing himself, pressed his thumb against it until it snapped. The light show evaporated.
He was sure the universe would make him pay for that, but he needed to be gone from this place, away from its ghosts and back among the living.
“Down” was an arbitrary, planet-born concept, but down he went, letting the ’stick carry him low away from Turndown and the Wheels. He needed to focus, get his ship, and get out of this mad place with no more entanglements.
He docked at a small rock on the outskirts whose name he didn’t know. He left the purple flystick there, secured to a public hitch post with a hastily purchased lock and a ten-cred Haudie South chip wedged up under the pedal in the hopes that it would make its way back to its owner and they’d be able to repair his vandalism. From an auto-vend he rented a new flystick devoid of any kind of sparkles or special effects. Fifteen minutes after landing, he was back out in the dark.
From there, he headed obliquely back up into the Halo. He kept his eyes open, looking for signs of Gilger’s or Vinsic’s people, but he found none. There were a few people about, some on ’sticks, some traveling the lines on spiders, but if he was being followed, he couldn’t tell.
The rock he’d left was now little more than a potato-shaped lump behind him. I wonder if it’s named TaterRock, he thought. Then: TaterRock. Tater Tots. Captain Tater, toon from Ares Three, circa 2114.
Gotcha! If that wasn’t a classic bit of Shipmaker association, he didn’t know what was.
Now it was down to C’ga A⊄. Help Us. Thirty-one hours left.
He was passing a small residential-only hab named Dented when the comm he’d taken off Vinsic’
s would-be kidnapper began to hum and whistle with traces of signal breaking through. “—Gold Nine and T . . . breached the interior of Blackcans . . . preparing to disable hab defenses. Heavy resistance.”
“Any Blue teams on site, Blue Two?”
“Sixteen. They’re outside the circle.”
“Have them fall back. Blackcans is a Gold show. The—”
“—Base. Sorry. They— Shit. Blackcans has evacuated the entire hab.”
“They abandoned it?”
“No. They opened it to vacuum. They blew out their own hab.”
There was a pause. “Orders is for our teams to be fully suited in hostile territory.”
“I . . . I’m not entirely confident our whole team was strictly following that instruction, Base.”
“And the Golds?”
“I don’t know, Base. Gold Leader Ten was the first to breach the interior, and he went immediately offline. There were reports of booby traps before we lost contact with the rest of his team.”
“Order any of our people still alive to get out of the area. Regroup at Beggar’s Boulder. This whole thing is shitting its own boots full. If . . .”
The last few words crackled over the link before the signal faded back into maddeningly unintelligible noise.
Blackcans was too far away to make out anything happening there, but as much as Fergus had wanted to personally cuss them out when he’d passed through with Mauda, he found himself sending silent good-luck wishes in their direction as he fell into the shadow heading up into one of Leakytown’s docks.
Leakytown was made from a defunct Sfazili freighter, its own shuttles grafted onto the underside of its hull like large metal boils. One of the shuttles had a gaping hole cut in the side with a line running into it, forming the entrance to a platform.
A small crowd of people were clustered inside the dock, including several families with small children. No one seemed to be going anywhere. As Fergus passed the flystick kiosk, the attendant was loudly explaining that they were all out and that people should go away.
“And where do we go?” someone shouted.
“To hell, for all I care!” the attendant screamed back.
An argument broke out over whether hell was Gilger or the Governor and which of them would take over Leakytown first. Someone at the back of the crowd pushed off a wall, angling towards Fergus. Fergus shook his head No and kept going. Two or three more people launched themselves in his direction.
Shit. Was he about to get mugged for his ’stick? The last thing he wanted was to be trapped here with no way off. He grabbed a wallbar with his free hand as he passed it and swung himself quickly around the corner, kicked off from a wall, took another turn, then hid in a public bathroom.
He waited in the tiny pod-shaped stall until he was sure he hadn’t been followed. When he left, he was careful to avoid corridors near the docks.
It didn’t take long to find a small, vacant rent-a-room and stash his things, including his now-irreplaceable ’stick. Then he pushed his way down to the hab’s central market through tight, badly lit, zigzagging corridors, desperate for information and something to eat.
Most of the market was closed, but he found a few booths still open and bought a tube of tepid soup. Hanging out on the netting as he sucked at it, he watched a small, harried man and his partner arguing about whether or not to wait the crisis out or shut down their stand and risk it being looted. They had a completely random mix of worthless goods: fake plants, a brand of Sfazili candy Fergus remembered spending days trying to get unstuck from his teeth, a giant mesh bag of tennis balls, gold and silver foil gift wrap, and what seemed to be sets of sexual accessories shaped like different alien species, distorted and arranged in a rainbow of Day-Glo-colored plastic.
Right, Fergus thought. Too bad no one I’d like to think less of me has a birthday coming up. He wondered if the merchants could even name any of the aliens so dubiously represented. There were a good number that lived on or passed through Crossroads with its active jump point, but he’d yet to see—or expected to see, honestly—any out here in the slowspace backwaters.
He tried to distract himself from the very bad soup by considering his obstacles. He had one more key to solve and an armed uprising exploding around him, making it hard to go anywhere. Then there were the sentry bobs and mines around Gilgerstone. Getting through them was a different problem altogether. At the same time, Gilger and Venetia’s Sword were constantly on the move.
If he caused a big enough disturbance, Fergus might scare Gilger into returning to his home base. Setting off a whole lot of the sentry bobs and mines wasn’t a bad way to do it, if only he knew how.
His stomach made a sound like someone trying to smother an apoplectic cat. He recapped the half-empty soup tube and, crossing the net, pushed it into a flash recycler.
The two junk merchants were now floating nose-to-nose, shouting, and Fergus wondered if they were going to start hitting each other. That roll of foil would make a good blunt-force weapon, although it would be a shame to dent up something that shiny, he thought.
He paused, halfway through the motion to push off back into the hall, and appraised the merchants’ inventory with a new eye. Well, huh, he thought.
The merchants were too intent on their argument to notice him until he tapped one on the shoulder. “I want to buy some things,” Fergus said. He pointed at their display of sex toys. “Do those vibrate?”
The men stared at him. “Uh, yes,” one said. “There’s six different sett—”
“Would they work in vacuum?”
This earned him blinking. “Yes, but we really can’t recommend—”
“How much for all of them, the foil wrap, the candy, and the tennis balls?”
“What?”
Fergus held out a hand toward their display. “I don’t want the plants,” he said.
“I don’t—” one man began. The other punched him on the shoulder, not gently, then named a figure in Cernee cred.
Fergus countered with a third as much. “And you help me get them back to my rent-a-room as part of the deal.”
“Done,” the second man said before the first one could speak. “You sure you don’t want the plants?”
“I’m sure,” Fergus said. They handed him an uninitiated cred chip, and after checking its integrity, he keyed it to his handpad and transferred the agreed amount onto it.
“Uh, what are you going to do—” the first man finally worked up the courage to ask.
His partner elbowed him sharply. “I’m sure it’s none of our business, sir,” he said. “Please do recommend us to your friends for all their . . . um.”
Thirteen minutes later, it was all floating in a big cloud of junk in the center of his room. The merchants fled the moment they had offloaded their wares. Fergus didn’t even have to argue with them about keeping the mesh bag. If he didn’t get out of Cernee soon, he was going to get a reputation.
He slid the door closed, locked it, and broke out his tool kit.
* * *
—
The comms intermittently crackled to life while he worked, and each time he found himself listening intently. Most of it meant little to him beyond simple scorekeeping—Gilger’s and Vinsic’s people were forcing their way closer to Central. Authority was laying siege to Mezzanine Rock to reclaim it. Gilger’s teams made up the majority of the front lines, along with those Blue teams that were “out of the circle.” Mostly it was names and places Fergus had no context for, a melee of information he could make no sense of.
“Blue Base, this is Blue Two. We intercepted Blackcans casualty reports from Gold Nine and Ten to Gold Base. Sixty percent loss, primarily due to improper exosuit protocols.”
Fergus looked up sharply. Sixty percent? Oh aye, he thought, and I bet he’s pissed about that.
“Are all our people out o
f Blackcans?”
“Yes, Base.”
“Good. Make it standing orders, both inside the circle and out, to stay the hell away from any ops on or near Blackcans. If Gilger’s so set on cutting the Wheels out of the Halo that he’ll abandon nearly a standard of careful planning, he can do it without us.”
“Got it, Base.”
Cut the Wheels out of the Halo?
“Blue Base, this is Blue Four.” The next message started just as Fergus was plucking another tennis ball out of the interminable-feeling mass. “We’ve located the other half of Blue Five. Deceased, body hidden in an old tunnel bypass.”
“Blue Four, did the deceased still have his suit and comm?”
“No suit, Base. Um . . .” There was a pause. “No, body is down to civvies. Gear gone.”
“Don’t say anything further. I am implementing Protocol Zero. You have sixty seconds. Base out.” His stolen comm went silent.
Protocol Zero?
A blue light started flashing on the comm, increasing rapidly in frequency. Nervous, Fergus unclipped it from his suit and held it as the light grew more intense. It began beeping.
Sixty seconds? What would you do if you wanted to protect yourself from people stealing comms in a battle situation? Hastily he pushed across the room and deposited the stolen comm in the smartfridge. He had just slammed the door shut when there was a muffled bang. He ducked, throwing his hands up to protect his head. When he peeked again, the door to the smartfridge was bulging outward, wisps of smoke curling through the cracks.
Well, damn. Protocol Zero. There must have been some secure sequence that needed to be entered before time expired. There went his inside intel into what was happening.
He was about a third of the way through his new art project when there was a loud pounding on his door. It startled him badly enough that he let go of his tools, sending a humming, bright orange, Veirakan-shaped vibrator sailing across the room like an obscene torpedo. He floated, frozen mid-gesture, listening. Someone must have knocked by mistake.
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