by Natalie Grey
“Is there any data embedded in it?” Foxtail asked. Her group had found another entry into the ship and Nyx could hear them clanking around a ways away.
“Ah … yes, actually. Yes, there is. Well spotted. Gimme a sec.”
“Tell me if you need help.”
“Will do. It’s actually not encrypted, though.”
“Makes sense for a distress signal,” Wraith pointed out.
“Yeah. Seems like it really is one. It’s asking for help, it says that the person is a captive here, and it is signed…. HT. Well, that’s helpful. What are we supposed to do, wander the halls asking everyone if they’re the HT who sent the distress signal?”
Nyx snorted with laughter. “Most people don’t think too clearly when they see a chance to escape, you know that. It’s up to us to do the clear thinking. Just like it’s apparently up to us to stop this damned war. All right, Foxtail’s team, you’ll join up with us and head for the main building—our friend is probably in there somewhere. Wraith, you and your people will get every detail you can out of this from here and see if there’s any way to shut all these robots down remotely. Meet us back at the ship, and don’t take too long. Choop and Maple, keep the engines warm and your finger on the trigger. We’re likely going to be leaving at high speed.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“ALL RIGHT, Captain, I’m sending over a rough map of the main building.” Choop had the half-distracted tone of someone who was still researching.
Nyx pulled up the maps on the side of her visor as she moved. Coming down the stairs from the ship was a lot more finicky than going up. The urge was always to jump, but they were at the tricky altitude where any parachute or analog technology was risky.
She had still considered it, though. If someone was seizing their chance to be rescued, they couldn’t wait.
That was one of the lessons of combat leadership that was drilled into both the Navy and the Dragons: you couldn’t wait for perfect information. By the time you had all your facts straight, your allies were dead and your chance at victory was gone. A successful operation was planned to be flexible and adaptable, using the best information you had at the time.
“They’re opening the hangar doors,” Maple said suddenly. “Somebody is getting ready to leave.”
“Fuck.” Nyx broke into a run. “Foxtail, your team on the double! T, Widow, pick it up!”
The timing was just too coincidental to be anything but a bad sign. They showed up to a mostly deserted base, got a distress call, and suddenly had people leaving? No way that was random chance. Their captive was being moved.
On the plus side, that meant they hadn’t just shot him in the head. Or her, Nyx supposed. HT could stand for anything.
“The main compound is going on lockdown.” Maple’s voice was tight. “The main gates are closing and that building will be sealed in under a minute.”
“Go, go, go!” Nyx did not waste time or breath responding to her. She and her team put on a burst of speed, made a split second choice, and took two bounding steps past a robot before flinging herself out into thin air, off the edge of the scaffolding.
There was a whoop from T as the rest of the team followed her, and a laughing mock-groan from Widow.
“We’re doing this?” the woman asked—rhetorically, Nyx assumed, as all three of her crew had dutifully jumped with her. “Really?”
“I’d like to point out that generally speaking, the team doctor doesn’t do this sort of shit,” Doc added. She, too, however, was laughing.
The ground was coming up faster than Nyx would like, all else being equal, but she’d done this sort of thing enough times to have a plan in place. The fans in her suit wouldn’t kick in all the way, but they’d slow her enough to get through this. She angled her body and half-skidded, half-rolled her way through the landing.
“Son of a—fucking—” She was up and running a second later. “Walk it off, everyone, come on!”
“I miss Mallory,” T said whimsically. “This new captain is gonna get us all killed.”
Nyx shot him a smile, carefully composed to seem carefree, and she heard herself give the expected response: “You wanna get smart with me? You can go first through those gates, then.”
She was unexpectedly touched, however. Losing a team leader was a special kind of trial, and Mallory had meant a lot to this team. To have T joke about Nyx, clearly with some loyalty and appreciation already appearing, meant a lot.
It meant, among other things, that the team was starting to heal.
Not the team, though. My team, Nyx thought to herself, and she felt a wave of something she had no words for. Protectiveness, maybe. Satisfaction. Happiness. None of those terms was even close to sufficient, and she knew now why Talon said that leading Team 9 was the best job he’d ever had.
She’d never been comfortable with strong emotions, so it was lucky that she had no time right now to wallow in them. The main compound was ahead of them, with its blast doors sliding into place and the thick walls topped with razor wire.
“What were they worried about?” Widow asked. “Robot uprising?”
“You should always be worried about that,” T called back. There was a round of chuckles from the team, but not many—people were running too hard. Nyx’s group was just trying to distract themselves from all the bruises they were going to have tomorrow.
“You should be worried about getting up those walls, smartass,” Nyx called back.
“Yeah, yeah. I have a plan.”
“This should be good,” Widow muttered.
“Captain.” Wraith sounded like she was trying not to laugh. “I have to say, allowing T to make plans might not be your best delegation ever.”
“If everyone would stop being so negative—” T began, before a sudden spray of bullets tore into the road in front of him. “Whoa! Rude!”
Nyx’s team split, T and Doc going to one side of the street, Nyx and Widow to the other.
“Doc, you and I cover.”
“Roger.”
T and Widow sprinted forward as Nyx and Doc searched out the gun turrets on the walls and returned fire. There were two flanking the gates, and they actually seemed to be manned, which gave the Dragons more of an opening than Nyx had expected. The targeting was uncertain and the gunners were liable to duck as soon as any bullets came even close.
“Cowards,” Doc muttered.
“Cowards spraying bullets everywhere.” Nyx shook her head. “What a day.”
Ahead of her, T had reached the wall. He whipped a grappling hook as he ran and hooked it over the lip of one of the gun towers—the only place on the wall that didn’t have barbed wire. The architects had probably assumed that no one was going to climb up the second story of sheer concrete and have a fistfight with the gunner.
They had clearly never met any Dragons.
“Widow! Other tower!”
Widow held her hand up in answer and made for the tower on the double. Nyx continued to lay down cover fire, hoping to distract the gunners long enough to get T and Widow into the compound.
The pound of feet behind her, as well as the cheerful proximity chirp of her suit, told her that Foxtail’s team had caught up.
“Boss, Chief and I will keep up the cover fire if you want,” called a man named Casper Brooks, somehow nicknamed Sasquatch despite his immaculately clean-shaven face and buzz-cut hair.
“Good call. All except Chief and Sasquatch advance. Wraith, tell me your team is on the way to the Conway.”
“Yep.” Wraith didn’t add any further details, and Nyx trusted her enough to know it was all well in hand.
“Good. Maple, what’s the word on the launch pad?”
“Keep moving. Ship’s coming out now—slowly, but it looks like they’re already warming up the engines. Whoever HT is, they really want him.”
Nyx was minded to agree. Warming up a ship’s engines inside a hangar was a risky proposition and had probably done permanent damage to the structure. These peo
ple were putting themselves in considerable danger to keep HT.
…On the other hand, this meant the person was probably already aboard, and their chance of getting onto a ship with hot engines was close to zero.
Fuck.
“Get a lock on that ship,” Nyx instructed. She was at the wall and starting to climb. “Foxtail—”
“I don’t think anyone’s in there anymore,” Foxtail said. She was climbing behind Nyx, her voice strained from the effort. “I’m betting you they’re all on that ship.”
“Goddammit. At least if we get in there—” Nyx was levering herself into the gun tower when Widow gave a shout and pushed her roughly out again. Nyx gave a yell as she scrabbled for the rope and barely hung on, but the hollow boom and the shudder through the tower told her exactly why Widow had done it.
The whole place was on a self-destruct.
“Everybody out!” T yelled.
Below Nyx, Foxtail let go of the rope and dropped, and Nyx followed suit. She didn’t want to leave Widow up there, but there was no point in climbing back up and putting herself in danger simply to be the last one out of it again. She had to have more faith in her team than that.
The tower was beginning to creak as Widow swung herself out and climbed down, hand over hand to the highest point she could manage easily—after the last jump earlier, she couldn’t take another hard fall.
“Come on,” Nyx breathed. “Come on.”
Hand over hand, and the tower was beginning to sway.
“Come on….”
The tower started to topple. Widow let go of the rope and shoved with her feet, trying to get as far as she could away from the concrete that was coming down on top of her, and Nyx burst into motion. She was there as Widow landed, tackling her sideways, dragging and rolling to take her crew member out of the way of the tower’s ruins. Chunks of concrete thudded down close by, one clipping Nyx’s armor, and she hissed in pain, arching her body to cover Widow’s head—
Silence. Nyx picked her head up and looked behind her to see a cloud of dust.
There was a pause, and Widow started to laugh. Her chest shook. She pushed Nyx back and sat up, one hand over her side.
“Shit,” she said. “Didn’t even see you move. I was watching that tower come down on top of me and thought, ‘well, fuck.’” She took Nyx’s hand to stand. “Thank you,” she added quietly.
“Anytime.”
They both looked up as the boom of an accelerating ship reverberated through the atmosphere. Nyx shaded her eyes and watched with a sigh.
“We barely knew ya, HT.” She flexed her arms; her armor had come out of place in the tackle. “Maple, tell me you got that lock.”
“Not a lock, but we’re tracking their progress and may get a heading.” Maple sighed. “I got some registration details, but what does that tell us? That it’s one of Ghosts’s ships?”
“We’ll pass it to Lesedi,” Nyx said soothingly. “Who knows what magic she can work? All right, everyone in one piece? No one smushed? Let’s see if we can get anything out of the rubble before we leave. It’s long shot, but—”
“Captain?” It was Choop this time. “Talon’s on the line for you and he says it’s important.”
“I’ll be right there. Wraith, you handle the search.” Nyx turned and headed for the Conway at a jog.
She could only hope that whatever Talon had found, it was more useful than what they’d gotten here on Qaryat.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TERSI TOOK a moment to stand still in the darkness of the armory, and then launched into the motions of his warm-up. It began with slow, small motions that repeated and grew in complexity until at last he was executing full kicks, blocks, and punches.
He wished Loki was here to beat the crap out of him, because there was nothing that gave him so much peace as physical activity. When he worked out, or—better—sparred, his mind went completely blank, and for a while, he could forget Sphinx.
It didn’t seem fair that he was alive and she was dead. In his worst moments, he was afraid she had taken a bullet meant for him. Most of the time he was able to tell himself that wasn’t true. They’d been facing opponents with more skill than usual, using weaponry that was tailored to their weaknesses. Her death had been a consequence of battle, nothing more.
He would still rather it was him, and the part of it all that made him feel worst, made him feel like nothing, was that he wasn’t just grieving her, and what could have been. He could live without her. He had been just fine before he met her, after all.
No, part of why he was hurting was that it made no sense. One person died, and another lived. He didn’t know what to do with himself after that. Now that the immediacy of it had passed, he didn’t know how he was supposed to be feeling.
He was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to be mooning around after someone else, though. It hadn’t been that long.
And what would Sphinx even think if she could see Dess? Speaking of whom—
He caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye and stopped dead, every sense on high alert. He was racking his brains for something to say, but he couldn’t remember what sort of thing you usually said at the beginning of a conversation.
“Oh?” he said.
No, that was wrong.
“Uh, I mean—can I help you?”
Her face broke into a smile, as if she were reassured by his awkwardness. Tersi hoped she found it endearing; it was pretty much the only thing that would save him at this point.
She seemed to be gathering her courage. “I just came looking for you,” she said finally. “Jester helped. At least, I think that’s what he said his name was.”
“Ah.” Tersi fought the urge to groan. Jester would be telling everyone about this. On the other hand, he had some time alone with Dess, and he did like that. “Did you need something? Network stuff?”
“No, I … have everything I need.” She shook her head and swallowed. “I wanted to apologize.” She sounded formal now, like the woman he’d first seen: professional and self-possessed. “It wasn’t right to look down on you for your job—or what your job is.”
Tersi had been thinking about this as well. “We’re probably called in for very different situations,” he pointed out. He grabbed a towel and wiped at his face. He wished he weren’t quite so sweaty.
“Less different than you’d think,” Dess said. She looked around. “Would you like to sit down? You seem out of breath.”
“Not really anywhere to sit.” Tersi looked around. “Unless you count the crates. Not sure you could get up there, though.”
From the look on her face, Dess was having the same thought, but she gave a little shrug. “I can stand.”
“I could lift you up,” Tersi suggested. He wasn’t sure if this was the best or worst idea he’d ever had, but it was definitely one of the two.
She didn’t say anything as she walked over, though she paused to slip her shoes off before walking on the mats, and there was a moment where the two of them were far too close for comfort, his hands at her waist, her face turned slightly toward him. He waited as long as he dared, hardly breathing, before turning her carefully and lifting her up. His hands lingered, his eyes locked on hers, and he cleared his throat before jumping up beside her.
Now that they were here, of course, neither of them seemed to know what to say.
“So, how did someone with a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry wind up in the Dragons?” Dess asked finally. She snuck a glance at him. “I know I teased you about it, but I’m actually curious.”
Tersi gave a laugh and a sigh. “My whole family is military,” he explained. “I grew up on ships, I enlisted because of course I did, I hated it….” He shook his head. “They all wanted me to go to Rowan—you know, the big Naval Academy? Yeah. Well, once you’ve been enlisted, you don’t always have the highest opinion of officers, so then I didn’t want to at all. So I buggered off to do something that would make them all shut up about it.”
&nb
sp; Dess laughed. The sound made him happier than he could remember being in recent memory. “But how did you choose poetry?” She looked over. “I’m serious, you know. I love poetry. Most people don’t.”
“You do?” He raised an eyebrow skeptically.
She looked away for a moment, then down at her hands. Her voice, when she spoke, was quiet. “You turned away,” she said, “but turning with a prayer, left me here collecting all our days: this dripping sunlight and the rainy weather, mingle memory and dream and yesterday, I remember the sunlight in your hair, and raindrops slipping down your upturned face.” She cleared her throat again, embarrassed.
“Did you write that?” Something in him had stirred when she spoke. It had been so long since he had sat with a book of poetry—and longer since he had written any.
“No.” She gave a self-conscious smile. “A poet from Old Earth. I just loved it.”
“I can see why.” He could not take his eyes from her, and so it was with a sort of horror that he heard himself say, “I should tell you … well, I was in love. She died—when we were going for the Warlord.”
Dess turned to look at him sharply. There was worry in her face, and pain. “I … I didn’t know.”
He hadn’t meant to say anything. He knew he shouldn’t have. This wasn’t the time to bring something like this up. He closed his eyes, sighing at his own stupidity. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“No, I’m sorry.” She swallowed. “I shouldn’t have, uh—” She went to jump down from the crates.
“Wait.” He reached out, a totally involuntary gesture. “Stay. I didn’t mean for you to go, I just meant to explain why … well.” He swallowed. She didn’t have anything to say, and so he plunged on. “It’s all new, and I don’t know…..”
There was a silence.
“What the rules are,” Dess said finally.
He looked over in surprise. That was exactly how he felt, and he hadn’t expected anyone else to put a name to it. To his further surprise, when he looked at her, he saw that she had braced her hands on the crates and she was looking at the mats as if she was going to cry. She swallowed hard.
