by R. M. Olson
“Lev?” asked Masha, once the Ungovernable broke through the atmosphere and they were surrounded by the sweep of shallow space. “Would you please put the coordinates through to Jez? Once she’s set a course, I’d appreciate if we could have a short discussion.”
Lev pulled up his holoscreen, trying not to think about the empty copilot seat next to Jez in the cockpit, and swiped the coordinates through to the ship’s com.
A few minutes later, Jez sauntered out of the cockpit and dropped into a seat, a blissful smile lingering on her face.
“Going to do a hyperdrive jump in a few minutes, but figure if you eggheads wanted to talk—” she shrugged.
“Jez?” asked Masha briskly. “Are you alright?”
She shot them all her cockiest grin. “I’m always fine.”
Lev sighed and glared at her. “Jez. You said you were fine the last time you were hit by a heat-gun.”
She shrugged, still grinning. “Yeah? Well maybe I was. Anyways, I’m good. Hell of a lot better than what I figured I’d be, seeing that Ysbel gave me a defective damn gun.”
Ysbel looked up from her seat, narrowing her eyes. “I did not give you a defective gun, you idiot. I told you exactly which gun you should take, and you completely ignored me and took the gun I hadn’t finished working on yet.”
“Like I said,” drawled Jez.
Lev drew in a long breath, fighting down the lingering, irrational panic.
“Ysbel? Tae? I assume you dealt with the tracking on the city gate?” Masha glanced at Tae, her face pleasant.
Tae gave a slight smile. “Honestly, I think we could have paraded down the street with flags and whistles and the gate guards wouldn’t have noticed. They’re not going to know we left. In fact, they’re not going to know anyone leaves through that gate until they find the spoof we set.”
“That’s excellent to hear,” Masha said.
Lev managed a smile. “At any rate, it should give us a head start.”
“Well,” said Jez, leaning back with a smirk. “Guess that bastard Dima was good for something after all.”
“Jez, you were just about shot in a damn alley,” he said through his teeth, even though he knew that it would make no difference whatsoever.
She rolled her eyes at him, and his stomach flip-flopped, which was actually ridiculous, and he refused to think about it.
Ysbel turned back to the table. “So, Masha. What is it you want to talk about, considering that in a few standard hours we’ll be visiting the mafia krestnaya and possibly all be killed?”
“Thank you, Ysbel. I’m glad that there is someone in this crew who has managed to keep her mind on our current situation,” said Masha, her voice carrying the slightest hint of a barb. “Now.” She pulled up her holoscreen and flipped through to the list Lev had sent her earlier that day. “Tae, as I promised, your street-kid friends are as safe as it’s possible for them to be at present. As the apartment we’ve housed them in is frequented by people who tend to have family in the government, I suspect that we no longer have to worry about police interference.”
Tae turned to Masha, raising an eyebrow. “How did you get an apartment in that complex anyways?”
She smiled slightly. “I did work for the government for some time, and it happens that I do have some connections. I’m not quite as unlikable as all that.”
Tae gave a reluctant chuckle, and Jez snorted in amusement.
“Guess it depends on who you ask, you bastard,” she drawled.
Lev gritted his teeth and drew in a long breath.
“Grigory Korzhakov, on behalf of the mafia, promised to keep Peti safe for at least three weeks, and as we are ahead of schedule, I believe that problem has also been resolved,” Masha continued. She paused a moment. “As you are all aware, however, those are not our only pressing concern.”
Lev felt a familiar jolt of worry at the thought.
Two and a half weeks. That was how long it had been since the government had managed to flood Prasvishoni, and the entire crew of the Ungovernable, with the particles of programmed metal dissolved in gas that would enter through the victim’s lungs into their bloodstream. The metal that, almost certainly, had already congealed in each of their brain stems, in a high enough quantity that all it would take to kill any one of them was a few strokes of a keyboard. And not only them—every person in Prasvishoni. It was, he had to admit, a brilliant scheme, if you happened to value the ability to control mass amounts of humanity with minimal effort and didn’t mind killing them to make that happen. You could track any person in the system, find them, and shock them, or disable them, or kill them with a few dispassionate keystrokes.
And of course, there was the additional downside that he’d helped develop it, inadvertently, as a young university student. And that Evka, the professor he’d been working with at the time, who he’d considered both a mentor and a friend, had tracked him down three weeks before and almost killed Jez, because she’d found them both asleep on his couch, Jez in his arms, and decided that planting a subcutaneous explosive under the skin at the base of Jez’s skull would be a good way to convince Lev she wasn’t joking when she told him to leave this alone.
And Jez wasn’t going to be used as a motivating factor ever again. That fact was the hard, solid, immovable object against which every single damn one of his objections foundered every time he drifted into a daydream about Jez.
Which, honestly, was happening much less often these days.
Only once every couple minutes or so.
“Lev?”
He shook his head and brought his attention back to the table. Masha was looking at him, one eyebrow raised.
“Yes, Masha?”
“I asked, what is your opinion?”
He sighed. “I apologize. I—had my mind on something else.”
“I gathered that,” she said, her tone a mixture of coldness and wry amusement. “Although I’m certain that there are many things that are demanding your attention, I would appreciate if you could possibly spare a moment or two to the problem of how long we have before we are all killed, and what solutions may have presented themselves to you over the last weeks.”
He managed a rueful smile in return. “I’m sorry.” He gathered his thoughts for a moment. “I—believe that we will have a few weeks yet. Knowing Evka, she’ll be intrigued by both the virus Tae hacked into the system, and my modification to the equation they’re using to run it. Furious, of course, but intrigued. I suspect she’ll attempt to pick out the changes I made, and believe me, I made that very difficult to do. In addition, someone will have to find a way to pick out the changes that Ysbel made to the chemical equation for the composition of the gas. But Evka is—very smart.”
“And coming from you, that’s saying something,” Ysbel muttered. “Alright, so we have a few weeks before this very smart professor of yours kills us all?”
“In fairness, I don’t think she’d do it only for the chance to kill us all,” he murmured.
Ysbel rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m sure that will be a great comfort to us all when we all get an electrical shock in the brain stem, yes?”
He shot her a slightly-irritated glance. “Ysbel. I am aware of the danger. Believe me, between Tae and me, we’ve explored every option that either of us could come up with to somehow disable the system, in-between working on how to keep the damn mafia from shooting us all down when we show up on their ship. I’m afraid we don’t have a great deal of time to figure something out.”
Jez leaned back in her chair, grinning. “I still say we find her and set off one of Ysbel’s explosives. Bet she’d have a harder time doing whatever the crap she’s doing with all your numbers and crap if she’s trying to do it in pieces from the bottom of a damn crater.”
He sighed. “Yes, Jez, and, if you recall from the last fifteen times you suggested some variant on this theme, we have absolutely no idea where the government is keeping her, and even if we did, I’m positive it would be virtually
impossible to reach her. She will be well aware, and will have made everyone in the government well aware, that we will be trying to stop whatever it is they’re doing.”
Jez shrugged, shooting him that sharp grin that always twisted his stomach. “Thought Tae made it look like we were all inside that damn building we blew up.”
“Yes, and if you recall, Evka knows me,” he snapped, more harshly than me meant to. “I’m fairly certain she won’t have been fooled by our little stunt.”
“Yeah? Well, maybe next time you can try working for someone who isn’t a murderous bastard.”
He narrowed his eyes, but Ysbel held up a hand. “Alright, you two.” She turned to Masha. “So. We’re leaving tomorrow for wherever it is those coordinates that Grigory sent to your com lead, correct?”
“Yes,” murmured Masha. She hesitated a moment. “Lev, I asked if you’d come up with any solutions to our problem with Evka, and the Vyernist Protocol, as I believe the government is calling the program. However, I have been doing some research myself. I—am not certain what Grigory wants from me. It was worth enough to him that he was willing to track us down, which could not have been easy, and kidnap Tae’s friend, in order to get me to agree to come. But, as I said, I have been doing my research. As you likely all know, Grigory Korzhakov is a man with extensive contacts in the government. Depending on what he wants from me, it’s just possible that we can use him in stopping this government program. If he knows about it, I doubt he’s much happier about it than we are, so it is a distinct possibility.” She glanced over them. “Lev, you’ve checked the coordinates, I assume.”
She paused meaningfully.
He dragged his eyes away from Jez, jaw still clenched, and sighed. “The coordinates lead to a position in deep-space that is, to all extents and purposes, lawless. It’s technically outside the legal jurisdiction of the Svodrani System because of a shift in the placement of the wormholes over the centuries since the System borders were set. There’s very little out there, but since it is outside the Svodrani System legal jurisdiction, it tends to be a place where some of the more legally questionably businesses have set themselves up. Weapons runners, for instance, gambling ships—”
Jez perked up slightly at the mention of gambling, and he shot her a disapproving glare. She smirked at him.
“So there’s no guarantee that he won’t kill us as soon as we leave the system?” asked Ysbel.
Lev shook his head. “There’s no guarantee of anything. However, if Grigory had wanted to kill Masha, there were several less-complicated ways of doing so than inviting her to his ship, and therefore I think I can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that he has something other than our immediate murder in mind.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” grunted Ysbel sourly.
“Very well,” said Masha, glancing around. “We’ll be there shortly. I suggest we prepare ourselves. Whatever we’re walking into, Grigory Korzhikov is a dangerous man. Ysbel, I’ll leave it to you and Tanya to finish the precautionary plans we discussed. Lev, Tae, if either of you come up with any additional insight regarding our government problem, please come discuss it with me immediately. Jez—” She paused.
Jez was grinning widely. “Don’t worry, Masha, I could fly my beautiful angel to whatever coordinates you wanted me to, fast asleep and pass-out drunk.”
“I am certain you could,” said Masha, pinching her lips. “However, I would prefer that you not give us a demonstration.”
Jez shrugged, still grinning. “Well, just because I like you, you dirty bastard, I won’t get drunk on the ride over, how’s that?”
There was a small, unfamiliar twinkle of humour in Masha’s eyes under her stern expression that Lev was certain hadn’t been there before, and he was fairly certain that he never would have seen directed at Jez’s last comment before they’d pulled the university job.
“That’s sufficient, Jez. Thank you.”
Jez leaned back again luxuriously, grinning, and Lev scowled.
Damn it, they’d both decided this was for the best.
And it damn well was for the best.
“Come on, Tae,” he said, shoving his chair back abruptly and getting to his feet. “Let’s go through everything one more time, see if there’s anything we missed.”
Somehow, he managed not to look at Jez as he made his way off the main deck and into the conference room, where he and Tae had set up their workspace.
Crack this government program, find out how to outwit Evka and stop all of them from being killed, get Tae’s friend Peti back from the mafia—there were plenty of things to worry about that didn’t involve Jez, the way she smiled, her loud, inappropriate laughter, the infectious, reckless, irreverent joy of her.
The heat of her body pressed against his, the spark in her dark eyes, her perpetually-mussed black hair, just long enough for him to tighten his fingers into while he was kissing her—
He bit back a groan.
He was being ridiculous. He’d made his decision, and so had she, and they were just crewmates and that’s all they needed to be.
It had been two and a half weeks, and he was almost completely over her. He was concerned about her, of course, in the same way he was concerned about Tae and Ysbel and Tanya and Masha, but no more.
And he conscientiously ignored the fact that no matter how concerned he was about Tae or Ysbel, he’d never once woken from dreams of them curled up against him, blinking up at him, sleepy-eyed and tousled and smiling softly, and not been able to fall asleep again for the rest of the damn night.
“Lev?”
He looked up. Tae had already pulled back a chair and taken his seat, and was watching him with concern.
He managed a small smile. “Sorry.” He pulled back his own chair, and tried to ignore the worry in Tae’s eyes. “You’re right, we’d better get to work.”
Ysbel looked up from the array of weapons components spread out on the ground around her as Tanya climbed down the ladder to the Ungovernable’s storage bay, where Ysbel had set up her workroom.
There was a tension in her wife’s posture that hadn’t left since they’d returned, two and a half weeks ago, to the hangar bay where their children were hiding, and found a boyevik soldier from the mafia waiting for them.
Peti had saved them, had volunteered to go with the mafia in exchange for them protecting Tae’s street children and little Olya and Misko. But … but even the thought of what might have happened made her nauseous.
She couldn’t blame Tanya.
“Are you alright, my love?” she asked quietly, as Tanya crossed over to her.
Tanya gave a short nod, but didn’t speak, and for a moment Ysbel was tempted to press her for an answer.
But that was one thing she wouldn’t do. Whatever it was Tanya was upset about, she’d tell her when she was ready, she’d known Tanya long enough to know that.
But had she? a small voice in the back of her mind whispered.
How well did she still know her wife, after five and a half years?
It was a strange feeling, this mix of aching familiarity and tentative reticence, knowing her wife like she knew her own self, and at the same time not knowing her at all.
“Tanya?” Ysbel asked.
Tanya smiled, but the smile was strained. “Yes, Ysi?”
Ysbel stood and crossed over to her wife. She ran her hand through Tanya’s smooth brown hair, still short from prison, and down her back, feeling the tension in her muscles. “It’s alright,” she whispered. “We’ll figure this out. How many impossible situations have we gotten out of so far?”
Again, Tanya tried to smile. “I know. But—Ysi, I know about the mafia. Believe me, there were plenty in that prison. I spent five and a half years trying to keep our children safe from them. And now—” she paused. “We’re flying straight into their arms. And you didn’t even ask for my thoughts.”
Ysbel frowned. “I did. I told you—”
“Telling me is different than askin
g what I thought.”
Ysbel closed her eyes wearily for a moment. “Tanya. My love. What do you want me to do? We can’t let Peti stay there, you know that. Not after that girl gave herself up to keep our children safe.”
Tanya sighed and turned away, the muscles in her slender frame tight. “I know. And I would never ask you to do that. I would never ask you to send the others in on their own, and you know I would never leave you to do this without me. But this?” She gestured around her. “This isn’t just getting Peti back now, is it? When did we start talking about Grigory being able to help us figure out this problem with Evka?”
“Tanya.” Ysbel bit back her frustration. “Listen to me. You breathed in that gas. Our children breathed in that gas. It will kill them. What do you want me to do, let that happen? I can’t. I can’t let them hurt you again. So what do I do?”
Tanya closed her eyes for a moment, and for the first time Ysbel saw the exhaustion in her posture. “I don’t know, Ysi,” she said at last, quietly. “I don’t know what we should do. I can’t ask you to leave these people. They broke us out of prison. I owe the fact that I have you back to them. But—but Ysi. I’m your wife. You can’t solve this by leaving me out of it. I don’t know what we need to do, but at least I need to have a say in it. These are your children, yes, but they’re my children too.”
Ysbel pulled Tanya towards her, and finally, reluctantly, Tanya leaned into her, allowed Ysbel to hold her. “I’m sorry, my love,” Ysbel whispered. “I’m sorry. But I need to do this. I need to protect you.”
“Even if it means working with the mafia?” said Tanya, her voice soft against Ysbel’s shoulder. “Even something I’ve told you I don’t want to do? Something I don’t want you to do?”
Ysbel could feel Tanya shift in her arms, and she tightened her grip. “It might not come to that, my love.”
“And if it does?”
Ysbel just held her, and didn’t answer.
Because the truth was, it didn’t matter. She couldn’t watch these people she loved more than her own life be killed. Not again. And she’d do whatever it took, it didn’t matter what it was.
