“I was trying to be optimistic,” Maya groused in reply, though there was little heat behind the words. It seemed as if most of the planet had forgotten how to be optimistic for the time being, and she couldn’t really find it in herself to blame anyone.
Paige cleared her throat, drained the last dregs of her third drink, and got that slightly befuddled, slightly constipated look on her face that meant she was trying to think of a way to change the subject.
As if to save her the effort, Paige’s wrist holo started to beep insistently until she answered it. A disembodied voice, hardly audible over the chatter of the bar, wondered brightly, “Somewhere you can talk? Ah, doesn’t matter, I’m not going to be saying anything that important.” Immediately afterwards, he informed them cheerfully, “I’m almost done here. Security’s going through its lockdown procedures. I’m just about finished shutting everything down in the weapons stores and the hangar deck.” Bourne’s voice took on a note of smug satisfaction as he added, “Give it ten minutes once I’m done and no one will even be able to guess that there’s ever been a base down here.”
“Good work, Bourne,” Paige assured him, getting to her feet. “Maya and I will be there soon to get you.”
“It will be so roomy on the isolated network.” He sighed dreamily. “Right, well. Pip, pip, cheerio, all that…whatever. See you soon.” The call ended, and Paige reached out to catch Maya’s elbow, tugging her to her feet and towing her towards the door.
“Don’t we have to pay?” Maya wondered, falling into step beside Paige as they walked through the door.
Paige waved it off flippantly. “I handled it when I got here,” she replied, glancing around before deciding that going right would be the quicker route. She hadn’t driven, knowing that needing to loiter until she was sober enough to drive again would just be wasting time that could be better spent on the move.
Walking, though, always led to thinking. Occasionally a little too much of it.
As they walked, Paige wondered eventually, “So, we’re all sure we’re making the right choice here?”
Maya wrinkled her nose. “I put the network together myself,” she pointed out. “It’ll be fine. Besides, it’d be cruel to just leave him up on Gaitune on his own. He’d go nuts inside a week.”
“Well, yeah,” Paige agreed. “But it’s not exactly your handiwork I’m questioning here. I’m just…having visions—waking nightmares, even, let’s go with that—about all the trouble he would find on the university network.” She made her eyes wide, feigning horror as she mused, “Changing grades, tormenting students he doesn’t like, pranking faculty—”
“He agreed to the code,” Maya reminded her, folding her arms over her chest.
“For whatever that’s worth,” Paige shot back, eyebrows rising.
Maya shouldered into her good-naturedly before they both fell back into step again. They walked in silence for a little while after that, until Paige recognized the alley where she had left the pod.
“This could be the making of him,” Maya stated finally, sliding her hands into her pockets. “Or I think it could, at least. Give him a chance to deal with regular, non-military people without a mission involved? He could surprise us.”
Paige clapped a hand over her mouth, but a burst of laughter still bubbled forth. “Surprising us is what I’m worried about,” she replied, though she didn’t sound particularly displeased about the idea at that point. “But I guess you’re right,” she sighed, watching the pod swiftly descend to ground level. “No way to know until we give him a chance. Though he’s probably going to laugh at us showing up buzzed to collect him.”
Maya scoffed, hopping into the pod. “By the time we get there we’ll both be as sober as a High Priest, and Bourne will never be the wiser.” There was a beat. “Assuming he wasn’t watching us through one of the bar’s holoscreens.”
Paige punched Maya’s shoulder, her words breaking around laughter as she cried, “You’re not making me feel any better about this!”
Unknown Location, Somewhere with the ARs
Cold steel and harsh darkness.
Metal surfaces housed computers and life-support machines.
Artificial, unnatural temperature differentials demonstrated that some intelligence with technology had been occupying the space with a specific agenda.
Just beyond a generator that was throwing off heat, a drop of condensation traced a path down the window on a capsule. Though it was difficult to gauge against the backdrop of machinery in darkness, on closer inspection the capsule appeared the size of a body.
A human body in this case.
The machinery functioned diligently, housed on some kind of ship: sighing and groaning as it lurched undetected in space.
Approaching the capsule, it became apparent that the environment within was controlled: oxygen content, temperature, moisture, and nutrient density. There was no doubt about it. This was a stasis capsule, although nothing that anyone this side of the frontier had ever seen before.
And there wasn’t just one.
Just beyond the first, which contained a human female, there was another one. This one housed a male, also naked, and dormant. Beyond that another female, and then a Zhyn: albeit in a much bigger capsule, and then more capsules beyond.
It appeared that there were enough capsules to house an entire crew.
But not just any crew. The capsules seemed the correct size, and number, for a very particular crew.
Days had turned into weeks as the stasis capsules did their jobs, repairing and rebuilding the strange organisms that were being reassembled from teleported fragments of their DNA.
Only the consciousness of one of their guests was apparent.
He went by the designation of Oz. It seemed he was able to communicate between their systems, and one of the humans—normally, at least.
At first he had seemed distressed. They had considered that this was a result of the explosion. However, after interacting with the entity for some time, they came to understand that there was a connection between him and the human they had spoken to.
The visitors concluded that there must be some symbiotic relationship between the two entities.
Time drifted aimlessly on. Without reference to the outside world or any sensory data, Oz found he had no concept of time or space or anything beyond his overwhelming existence. Perhaps this was death. His death.
He spent the long hours, if that’s what indeed they were, trying to access any data that might help him make sense of the situation. Most of his faculties were still intact. He had memories. He had access to information that he’d assimilated over his life. He regretted not having studied death a little bit more though. After all, if there was something that he could have done or was meant to be doing now in this Purgatory he found himself in, it would certainly have been nice to have a heads-up on it.
Death wasn’t something the Federation had many training modules on though. It was almost as if all the effort they made was to avoid death. As if death were failure. As if death wasn’t an option.
But now facing the question of his own mortality, and that of Molly’s of course, he found himself contemplating what it really meant, and how he might prepare for it, knowing that it was an inevitability at some point: both for him, and his dearest human counterpart.
Why Molly had never talked about death, he didn’t have any answers to either, he realized.
And what would happen to him if she died? Would he just carry on? As he exists now in this blackness alone.
If this was her death, then he didn’t want any part of it. This was no life for him. He would rather not go on existing if it was without her.
His mind continued to churn in free fall… never landing.
You won’t be without her, an external consciousness intervened in his own thought process. She is healing. She’ll wake when she is ready, it reassured him.
Residential District, City of Sasea, Estaria
The house look
ed too simple. Considering everything it stood for, Alisha had expected it to be some enormous manor, gaudy in its opulence.
In her thoughts it had become a monolith, looming over everything.
But it was no manor.
It was just a regular townhouse, wedged in between two others. A bit on the small side, even. It had window boxes and a mat on the stoop in front of the door. If not for the number on the wall, it would have been almost impossible to tell it apart from any other house in the row. Alisha found herself reading over her copy of the rental forms—a short-term lease, applied for in a hurry and with a rather sizable down payment to grease the way—just to make sure they had the right place.
The details hadn’t changed from the last several times she had read over them, and then she flipped her holo closed. Her seatbelt clicked open a second later, but she didn’t move immediately, instead just sitting in the driver’s seat.
She should head inside. Before Sloth realized there was an unfamiliar car parked on the curb in front of his safe house. She knew she couldn’t just sit there all evening, and yet she couldn’t quite bring herself to open the car door and climb out.
“You know you don’t have to do this.”
Hans had reminded Alisha of that detail every day for weeks, and he was determined to keep the trend going. “Not like this, at any rate. I mean, becoming a killer is kind of a big step. Not generally viewed as a good career move, you know.”
“I was trained for this,” Alisha reminded him, just as she had done every other time. Even so, she couldn’t actually bring herself to feel annoyed about the repetition.
“You weren’t trained to be a killer,” he replied insistently. “That’s not a guaranteed part of this job; you know that.”
“Sloth is the reason Joshua is dead,” Alisha snapped, her voice rising sharply. She gripped the steering wheel just for something to do with her hands, her fingers tightening until her knuckles paled.
“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” Hans replied, his tone turning slightly placating. “And I didn’t say that we shouldn’t do anything. All I said was that you still have a choice in how this is handled, and in who handles it.”
It was a familiar stance, and Alisha had protested against it the same way every time before. But it was different when she was actually looking at the townhouse, knowing that Sloth was inside and knowing what was coming.
It was different knowing that one of the men who needed to die was just a few yards away.
Slowly, Alisha slumped forward, until she was resting her forehead against the steering wheel. She felt a hand on her shoulder, and she drew in a sharp breath. Her heart just felt heavy. Heavy and dull from the pain of loss.
“Go. Just—go. I’ll make sure the car doesn’t get towed.” The words came out in a rush as she spat them out before she could change her mind or waste even more time with more deliberation.
Hans squeezed her shoulder before he pulled his hand away.
Alisha didn’t look up when she heard the car door open, instead keeping her gaze centered on the dashboard. That was where she focused for the next few moments, until she could hear Hans successfully hack the door’s lock. She looked up in time to see the door open and to watch Hans step inside.
The door closed behind him, and Alisha stared at it, waiting for Hans to reemerge. She would have no way of knowing how it turned out until then; if they wanted to avoid the neighbors immediately realizing something was going on, then they needed to avoid something as noisy as a gun.
He was inside for only a few minutes, but it was still long enough for Alisha to begin putting some serious thought into just charging through the front door. Before the idea could begin to seem too tempting, though, the front door slid open once again at last and Hans stepped out.
He paused on the front step just long enough to reengage the lock, and then he cleared the distance to the car in a hurry, hopping down the few steps to the sidewalk and jogging to the car.
Once he was seated in the passenger seat, Alisha didn’t even wait for him to buckle his seatbelt before she started the car and pulled away from the curb. The car rose into the air and began to speed away. From the corner of her eye, Alisha could see Hans cleaning his knife before he slid it back into his boot.
They drove in silence at first. It didn’t last for long, though, before Alisha turned off at the first exit and pulled the car to a halt at the first rest stop she spotted. The car sank gradually to the ground, where she parked and slumped back in her seat.
“So nothing strange happened?” she asked, glancing at him sidelong. “Nothing we need to worry about?”
“I wouldn’t put it past any of them to have some sort of contingency plans,” Hans replied carefully, “but no, everything went about as we expected it to.”
Alisha nodded slowly, distracted, her thoughts churning like sea foam. Finally, voice low, she offered, “Thanks. For…not letting me do that.”
“I wouldn’t have stopped you if you really wanted to,” he pointed out.
She nodded again. “I know, yeah. I just…” She heaved a sigh, her head falling back against the backrest. “I just don’t think I’m quite ready for that sort of thing yet.” She wrinkled her nose. “So much for training. Joshua deserved better than me just sitting in the car keeping the seat warm.”
“Hey.” Hans’s voice was firm. His hand closed around hers and he squeezed, his grip warm. “No amount of training makes you ready to kill someone. If you can put it off, then you should, for as long as you feasibly can. And regardless of who killed whom, we wouldn’t have even found him without you.”
“I know,” she mumbled, before she straightened up, turning to actually look at him. “I know,” she repeated, firmer that time. Her expression steeled as she asked, “Where to next?”
Hans cleared his throat. “We’ve got reports of Ghetti hiding out in Shanxi in the Kalamar district, on Ogg,” he replied. “Once he’s dealt with, that’s that.”
“I’m coming with you,” Alisha insisted instantly, her fingers finally tightening around Hans’s.
He looked down at their joined hands, and then back up at her. “Well, as long as you’re sure,” he agreed.
Alisha scoffed. “Of course I’m sure,” she replied, as she started the car once again. “Let’s get it organized. No time like the present.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Giles’s Classroom, Skóli Uppstigs Academy, Spire, Estaria
There was a blog that was well-known amongst the students of the university. They referred to it as the school paper. The Bates Explainer was typed across the top of the blog in letters that looked as if they had been made with an antique typewriter—and they liked to think that it was a secret.
They weren’t entirely correct on that front, but the blog did its job admirably all the same.
Molly had always been so good at telling stories. They had been her way of relating to her students. They had been her way of assuring them that yes, what they were learning would someday come in handy in the real world and they weren’t just trapped in a cycle of rote memorization.
The Explainer had always been a way to share her stories, passing them on to students who hadn’t had a chance to hear them in person. It had become something of a shrine in the past few weeks, with new entries pouring in at an unprecedented rate. Some fantastical stories, some mission stories, and some daily encounters that were simply…Molly, as she was when she wasn’t saving the world.
As Giles patrolled through the rows of desks and chairs in his classrooms, he stopped when he came upon the fourth student in the room surreptitiously trying to read the Explainer under her desk on her wrist holo. He loitered there for a few moments, waiting for her to notice him. Gradually, other students in the room began to snigger as she continued to fail to notice Giles standing there.
Finally—finally!—she tensed as the student just in front of her glanced over his shoulder and then rapidly looked away. Like a nervous fawn, she peered ov
er her shoulder, and hastily turned off her wrist holo and folded her hands on top of her desk.
“Professor,” she greeted cheerfully, as if she had simply been waiting for him to continue the lesson the entire time.
“Welcome back,” Giles returned, followed by, “If you’re that disinterested in the lesson, I do have to wonder why you’re actually here.” Not that he had much of a leg to stand on, but he was, at the very least, considerably better at faking his interest in education at this difficult time.
The girl flushed and slid down in her seat, mumbling, “Sorry, professor.”
With a sigh and a brief shake of his head, Giles continued on his way, strolling back to the front of the class. It seemed that the lesson was effectively forgotten by that point, though, as they were all talking once he made it back to the front of the room.
What’s going to happen to this place without her?
This was her school. What does that mean for the rest of us?
Hey, remember that time at the Senate building?
Does anyone else remember that thing she did with the necktie?
She was such a badass. Think I’ll ever be able to do anything like that?
Giles brought two fingers up to his mouth and whistled, sharp enough to nearly break glass, and every student in the room whipped their attention back towards him.
“As a reminder, we have counseling available for anyone who feels like they need it,” he pointed out. “Even if you only think you might need it a little. A little can turn into a lot when you least expect it.”
He got a murmured cloud of affirmations, but he knew he wasn’t going to get them back on task at that point. He set them to doing bookwork until it was time to dismiss them, knowing they would hardly get any of it done.
His students left in a haze of chatter once the class ended, filing out of the room. As soon as they finished traipsing out of the class, Gareth stepped into the room.
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