“Who the hell are you?” one asked.
“The only survivor of Blue Eight, as it happens,” Fergus said. “You stole suits off the dead, huh? Must be some of Gilger’s trash trying to move up in the world.”
The one with the Eight patch rushed him, which was what he’d been hoping for, because it prevented his partner from getting a shot off.
Behind him he could hear the envelope cycling again.
His attacker drove his shoulder into Fergus’s chest, feeling more like an iron battering ram than just human flesh. Damn those Warrens skunkers, he thought, gritting his teeth and resenting all his previous injuries. Despite the pain, he wrapped his arms around the attacker in a tight hug, then let the electricity flood through his hands. The man jerked once and went limp.
“Sorry about this, but I need you a bit longer,” he said, keeping the man’s unconscious body in front of him as he moved toward the other Blue.
The partner was aiming his pistol at them. “What did you do to him?!” he demanded.
“Aw, he’s just having a wee nap,” Fergus said. “Don’t wake him up, now.”
“I have reinforcements coming,” the Blue said.
“So do I,” Fergus replied as the envelope turned and a fire extinguisher sailed through the growing opening. The Blue barely ducked in time, and Fergus took the opportunity to throw the body he was holding at him; both fell in a heap, and Mari dashed forward and snagged the dropped pistol before the guard could recover.
The imposter Blue raised his hands.
Fergus winced as he crouched down beside the man they’d been beating. He was middle-aged, his face heavily lined and pocked like most lifetime miners. The man was conscious. “My nephew?” he asked.
Bale was kneeling next to the other body and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“He was only fourteen,” the man said quietly, then went limp again on the floor. “They just shot him. Like it was nothing.”
“What the hell?” Mari asked, keeping her sights steady on the two men on the floor. “Why shoot their own people?”
“They’re Gilger’s men, not Vinsic’s,” Fergus said. “Looks like Gilger and Vinsic aren’t friends anymore.”
The beaten man nodded. “Came in dressed in blues and killed Yefa, who was stationed here. Around a dozen, and they’re sweeping through the hab knocking doors down looking for Vinsic loyalists. I was just trying to get my nephew out; my brother is Blue Two, so I didn’t think he’d be safe.” The last word was deeply bitter.
Mari looked at Bale. “But still . . . why shoot a kid?”
“It’s war,” the still-conscious attacker on the floor protested. “That’s what happens in war.”
“Yeah? These people thought you were on their side,” Mari said. She stomped up to him, her magboots slapping on the platform floor, and shot him, then his partner. “So war it is.”
She stared at the two bodies, her face shifting from fury to confusion to horror, and then she started shaking. Bale gently took the pistol out of her hand.
“Don’t you dare tell me something dumb like I’ll get used to it,” she snarled.
“Nope,” Bale said. “Think about it later when you can afford to, when we’re not in danger. For right now, just put it all somewhere else in your head and don’t even let yourself peek at it. When you want to talk, I’ll be there.”
Mari bit her lower lip, her hands curling into fists, her face deathly pale. “All these years dreaming about killing Gilger, face-to-face, just like that . . . At least I know Gilger’s fucking name. I don’t even know who these two are. Were.”
“Murderers,” the uncle said, “and they weren’t done yet.”
Mari nodded, never taking her eyes off the bodies.
“Where were you going to go?” Fergus asked the uncle.
“Beancan,” he said.
“You can’t go that way. There’s filament,” Mari said.
“No reason to go now anyway,” the uncle said. “Where are you people heading to?”
“Attic,” Fergus answered.
“You’re not one of us,” the uncle said. Eyeing Bale’s suit, he said, “Wheels and Mezz Rock? Mr. Harcourt’s crew?”
“Sort of,” Fergus said.
“We’re trying to help end this thing,” Bale said, “or at least make trouble for Gilger, if nothing else. We just stopped to find an extra ’stick because we lost one.”
The uncle managed to get to his feet, wincing. “No ’sticks left here. But I’ll tell you what: I figure whatever Mr. Vinsic is doing, he’s either forgotten about the rest of us or he can’t help us anymore. I’ll give you my Attic doorpass if you let me have both pistols you just took off those two.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Free Pitch,” the man answered.
“I want one of their comms,” Fergus said.
“And I get the other,” the uncle said. “Deal?”
“Deal,” Fergus said. He glanced at Bale, who looked down at the pistol in his hand, sighed, and handed it over butt-first.
The uncle unfastened a pocket, took out an ID chip, and handed it to Fergus. “No guarantee they haven’t changed the security systems over there, of course.”
“Understood,” Fergus said. He bent down and took the wrist comm off one of the dead men, then stripped off the corpse’s glove to fingerprint activate it. The uncle watched him, then did the same with the other man.
“These guys were bragging about taking over the Rollers, so I wouldn’t make any stops there. I don’t know about Dout,” the uncle said. “Be careful.”
He held out his hand, and Fergus shook it. “I’m sorry again, and good luck,” Fergus told him, then headed back to the envelope with Mari and Bale. As they cycled out, he saw the uncle sit down next to his nephew’s body, lean his forehead on the kid’s chest, and start to weep.
On the platform, Bale slung Fergus over his shoulder, and they launched. Mari stayed at their side but wasn’t speaking, and Fergus decided it was best to let her be for now. “I’m going to patch the Goldies’ comm into our shared suit channel on receive only,” he said. “Maybe we can find out what we’re heading into.”
“Trouble,” Bale said. “We’re heading into trouble. And we still don’t have any weapons. And I’m still carrying your sorry ass.”
“Yeah, well, don’t drop me for saying so, but I think I already see that trouble you mentioned,” Fergus said.
They were running roughly parallel to the line from Pitch to Dout, but to their left off another line were the three cylindrical habs tethered together called the Rollers. People in suits crawled all over the surface of them, exchanging pistol fire. Bodies—some moving faintly, most not moving at all—drifted in space around the habs.
“Those must be Vinsic loyals,” Bale said, and pointed. While the floating casualties were a mix of both blue-striped and civilian suits, there were a few Blues fighting on the side of the civilians, who had tied blue strips of cloth around their upper arms to distinguish themselves from the attackers. “I hope they’re winning.”
“Too late for Roller Three either way,” Mari said quietly. Fergus could now see the gaping hole rotating into view, spewing a slow-motion cloud of burnt and broken debris. Not all the bodies trailing in its orbit were wearing suits.
The comm he’d stolen, which had been mostly echoing jammer static, burst into coherence. “—traveling off the lines!” a voice called in a distinct Luceatan accent. “Eal, get your partner and intercept them before they can contact anybody!”
“But the Asiig—” someone protested.
“You see any Asiig? Me neither. Now go! Or I will add the marks for cowardice and disobedience to your corpses myself.”
“Uh-oh,” Bale said as a shrapnel cannon rose up from behind the remains of Roller Three and turned in thei
r direction. “Here comes Eal. It’s going to take them a few minutes to get up to speed, but when they do, they’ll be faster than us. There’s nothing between us and Dout to use as shelter, and we don’t know if Dout is in hostile hands or not.”
“Hell, we don’t even know if both sides are hostile,” Mari said.
“Maybe you should go ahead—” Fergus started to say. She flipped him a finger over her shoulder. He took a deep breath and persisted. “Your ’stick is a faster model anyhow, and there’s only one of you riding it. At the very least, if the fake Blues haven’t gotten as far as Dout yet, you could warn them.”
“It’s a civilian hab,” Bale said. “If they don’t know about the imposters, they could be caught completely unprepared.”
“And leave you two behind?” Mari asked.
“I think I have a plan,” Fergus said. “You go ahead in case it doesn’t work. You know how my plans go.”
“Do I get a say in this?” Bale asked.
“You wanna ask Eal his opinion too when he gets here?” Fergus answered.
Bale grumbled loudly over the suit link.
“Fine, I’ll go warn them,” Mari said. “But don’t fucking die on me, or take off without me, or anything that might make me at all pissed at you. Agreed?”
“I’ll do my best?” Fergus said.
Mari opened up the acceleration on her ’stick, making a beeline for Dout.
As soon as she was out of range of their suits, Bale spoke up. “You don’t have a plan, do you?” he said.
“That was it. Get Mari out of range of the cannon, maybe save some lives. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It was the right thing to do,” Bale said. “But I still don’t want to die out here with you clinging to my back. Now hang on tight, because I’m about to make us harder to get a lock on.”
Bale jerked the ’stick’s throttle to one side and took a sharp dive, then straightened briefly before shooting back upward, sharply braking, then speeding up again. Eal tried to keep the shrapnel cannon aimed at their awkward, irregular sine wave, but despite its better speed, its maneuverability was crap, and it swung around wildly enough to blow most of its momentum.
Ahead, Fergus saw Mari reach the platform and immediately accost a blue-stripe waiting outside. Fergus had to assume it was a genuine Blue, since Mari didn’t seem to be tearing his limbs off. He glanced back at the cannon, which was now falling behind, and saw one of the two riders—Eal or Not Eal—raise something large and cylindrical up over the cannon body. “I don’t know what that is,” Fergus said. “Bale?”
Bale zagged in a new direction before glancing over. “Fuck! EMP wave gun!” he shouted.
“Can we dodge?”
“At this range it’s got a fifteen-meter diameter cone. Only if we’re lucky and they’re really shit shots,” Bale said, throwing the ’stick forward, braking again, then rocketing straight up. “Gonna try anyway. If we—”
The suit comm cut as a bizarre tingling sensation, almost like a cold wind, starting to wrap itself around Fergus. The electricity deep in his gut responded instantly, and it was as if he were pushing a static blast out from his entire body in a wave. The two competing fields intersected, intertwined, and collapsed into nothing.
Fergus’s suit rebooted.
“Bale!” he shouted as Bale stiffened upright. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I think,” Bale said. “My suit rebooted. I’ve got a lot of yellow lights, but nothing too critical. ’Stick display is shot, but engines are still responding. I think they must’ve just grazed us, or we’d be well on our way to corpsicles right now.”
“Let’s get out of here before they fire again,” Fergus said, not at all sure he should tell Bale what had just happened.
“Those things take six and a half minutes to recharge, and they stopped chasing us to fire it,” Bale added. “I think we’re gonna make it.”
As they neared Dout, a small team of blue-striped men on ’sticks launched outward in a fast-moving, incoherent swarm. They went right past Bale and Fergus and fired on the cannon from multiple directions the moment they were in range of it. Whatever or whomever they hit, the cannon didn’t fire back before it was overtaken.
“That helps,” Bale said.
“Looks like Dout has ’sticks too,” Fergus said. “And maybe we can get some water while we’re here.”
“You better not zap anything while you’re touching me,” Bale warned. “And here comes Mari.”
A familiar slight figure in a civilian suit was heading in their direction from the Pitch line platform even as the raiding party began hauling the shrapnel cannon back toward the hab. Two bodies were left floating behind them.
“Keep going,” Mari said as soon as she was close enough for their suit comm signal to overcome the background jamming static. “They appreciate the warning, but they say they’ll shoot anyone who approaches—friend or foe—on sight. They don’t seem to care where we go as long as we leave, and quickly.”
“Some gratitude there,” Bale muttered.
“Their gratitude is that they didn’t take us out with the cannon crew. I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to call that even.”
“Me too,” Fergus said. “Can we get out of here before they change their minds? I feel like I have a great big target on my back.”
“I do have a great big target on my back,” Bale said. “It’s called you.”
“You two!” Mari snarled. “Cut the fucking chatter, and let’s get this over with.”
She took off ahead of them, and Bale and Fergus followed. Fergus opened a private channel just to Bale. “Do you think she’s going to be okay?” he asked.
“I think she’s not going to be okay until all of this is done and behind her, and only then will we maybe know,” Bale said. “It’s gonna take time, and sometimes you never put stuff behind you, you know?”
Fergus knew that only too well. “Yeah,” he said.
“Anyway, that’s what friends are for: distracting you from your bad headspace. You must have people for that?”
“I would if I’d ever talk to anyone about it,” Fergus said.
“You should get the fuck over that,” Bale said. “My professional advice. Now look alive—Attic dead ahead, and we’ve got company.”
Over Bale’s shoulder, Fergus could see the large rock that was Attic, Vinsic’s home base. Much of it was obscured by a cloud of personal flyers in Vinsic’s blue stripes, and the intervening space between it and a smaller rock tethered close by was filled with mining equipment and repair robots working methodically in total oblivion to the war raging around them.
As Bale and Fergus approached, a robot reached one arm out to snag a body that had drifted into its path and added it to the trash gyre that had collected past the small rock. Despite his iron control over all mining in Cernee, Vinsic had stayed hands-on in the working details of his business. It explained why some people were so loyal to him, and made his apparent sudden collaboration with Gilger even less believable.
At least we’re about to get a chance to ask, Fergus thought. Maybe.
There were a lot of people in blue-striped suits gathered around the main platform, all watching them head in. The few that had their weapons drawn kept them lowered by their sides; that was as close to a gesture of welcome as they were likely to get.
“They could’ve already shot us by now if they were going to,” Bale said, echoing Fergus’s thoughts. “That’s something.”
“Something? Yeah. A trap,” Mari said. “Dead guy in the watch station.”
The watch station was a floating sphere tethered not far from Attic that functioned both as a guard post and a remote doorman. Dark blotches marred the curved expanse of xglass that ran the circumference of the top half but didn’t hide the floating body slowly spinning in circles inside as they passed it.
/> “If we turn away now, they’ll shoot us down for sure,” Bale said. “Only way through is forward.”
The suits gathered along the platform parted as they landed and set their magboots. One man stepped forward. The public comms were still filled with a low static, but they could hear him. “Come in,” he said, and he gestured for them to follow as he stepped into the envelope.
“That’s Parat, one of Vinsic’s,” Bale said over their private channel. “Small-time muscle, even smaller brains.”
There were more suited people inside, including a woman in blue stripes with her face shield up who grinned at them as they entered. It was not a friendly expression.
“That’s Doani, definitely Gilger’s,” Mari said.
“She’s not a Luceatan,” Fergus noted.
“She’s part of his original crew. They were locals, mostly Tamassi’s former people who figured they’d hang on and see if their fortunes improved,” Bale said. “Dunno if they did, but once the Luceatans moved in, it didn’t matter. No one was going to dare to leave knowing they’d always have to be looking over their shoulder for Graf.”
“Now they also have to check their pockets for him,” Mari said, and Fergus involuntarily snorted inside his suit and nearly tripped. Their escort glared at him.
Attic wasn’t all that dissimilar to Mezzanine Rock, if not as large. The walls were a mixture of fabbed panels and original cutaway rock, the corridors wide, well lit, and clean. They passed a few other people, all blue-striped, all standing to one side as they went by, none of them speaking.
“I don’t like this,” Bale said, and neither of them made the effort to disagree.
Parat led them straight into the heart of Attic and into a medium-sized room that was well decorated without losing the utilitarian feel of the rest of the rock. There was carpeting—the worse for the wear, lately—several large armchairs on each side, and a table with a mostly empty bottle and dirty glasses. There were also five more blue-stripes, standing just inside the door. A large desk with a high-backed chair stood near the far end, and in it, leaning his chin on one hand as he watched them enter, was a bone-thin man in blue.
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