“Maneuver to greet her, Commander,” Jessica said calmly, knowing Emily was already moving the ship. “And put me through to Chryse, if she’ll take the call.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Gladkoff, suddenly neither idle nor intimidated by Bristol, reached up with his bound hands and touched his comm. “Captain Bayandi, I presume,” he said. “How nice to finally meet you.”
There was a pause, and then Bayandi’s voice came over Gladkoff’s comm. “Who are you?”
He did not, Jessica thought, sound like a congenial old man anymore. Any hint of warmth or pleasantness was gone.
“Who I am is not important,” Gladkoff said.
“Don’t be so modest,” Jessica snapped. “You’re the one who’s been controlling him.”
“Who is speaking?” Bayandi asked.
“It’s Commander Lockwood, sir,” she said. Captain Lockwood now.
“And are you working with this . . . person?”
Absolute frigid disdain. So he can be intimidating. “I am not, sir. I’m here to protect Yakutsk, and you, if it’s possible.”
Gladkoff broke in, his voice reassuring. “I’m here to protect Yakutsk as well. And you can help me with that, Captain Bayandi.”
There was a pause. “Yakutsk is at peace,” Bayandi said. “The fighting on the surface has ceased. Several thousand colonists are currently off the surface, but the others are alive. Breathing. Warm.” Jessica thought she caught something in his voice with that last word, and had to remind herself he was a machine. “I think you are a liar.”
Gladkoff laughed. “I’m many things, Captain, but a liar is not one of them. My proposal for you is simple: come back with me to one of our research stations, and Yakutsk will be quite safe.”
“And if I refuse?”
“If you know the people in the domes are currently alive and well, then you know what I can do.”
And just then, there was a quiet voice in Jessica’s ear. “Lockwood.”
She stepped backward, whispering. “Dallas?”
“That long-range comms, Lockwood. It’s broadcasting, and not just to the PSI ship. Whatever you’re talking about in that room, it’s going out to someone else.”
Shit. “Where are you?”
“I’m in the machine room.”
“Why the hell didn’t you get off the planet?”
Dallas made an exasperated sound. “Can we encrypt the signal without triggering the nukes? Screw up what they’re getting?”
She shook her head. “It would take too long. And without knowing how Gladkoff’s set up the nukes, it’d be too dangerous. Try to find out where it’s going.”
“Not a comms hacker, Lockwood.”
“Well, do the best you can.” She thought she knew who it was going to; the precise location was irrelevant. “If you’re going to be stupid enough to stay here, make yourself useful.”
“Yes, Captain.”
She had the distinct impression Dallas was saluting her again. “But really, screw that. You should get off this fucking rock, Dallas.”
“You be careful, too, Lockwood,” Dallas said, and disconnected.
She turned; Gladkoff was still explaining the nukes to Bayandi, who surely already knew it all. “It’s very simple. Airlifts or not, there are still twenty thousand people on this moon. And if you refuse to come with us, they will all die.”
“As will you,” Bayandi pointed out.
“But you won’t allow so many deaths,” Gladkoff went on, as if Bayandi had not spoken. “I know what you are. I know your programming. Twice the population that was lost at Athena Relay. Give us control of your nav systems, Captain, and I will disable the weapons.”
There was a long silence, and it took Jessica a moment to recognize what was strange about it: she could hear Bayandi breathing. And then, his voice no longer cold and threatening, he said, “No.”
Gladkoff blinked. “What?”
Bayandi sighed. “You say that you know what I am. I am afraid that I know what you are, as well, Gladkoff.” And with a shiver, Jessica realized Bayandi knew far more about the situation than Gladkoff had assumed. “You are human. You have approached this with a human calculus, with the perspective of a human life span. I have lived more than seven hundred years. I have seen far more than twenty thousand people die. I have no wish to cause more deaths, but I know what Ellis would do with me, and I know twenty thousand people is not all there are.” He paused, and his next words were full of his old familiar gentleness. “I am sorry, Commander Lockwood.”
Her throat abruptly thickened. “That’s all right, Captain,” she told him. “I think my calculus is closer to yours.”
Gladkoff looked confused. “I—you can’t,” he said. But Bayandi wouldn’t respond anymore.
Gladkoff’s comm sounded again, and he touched his ear apprehensively. “Yes?” This time he kept the response silent, but Jessica saw him go white. “I—yes. Of course.” He disconnected, and turned to Jessica. “I’ve been instructed to disable the nukes. I’ll need to get to the machine room.”
She and Bristol escorted him. Dallas was there, frowning at the comms readout, scrolling through the data and squinting. She glanced at the display; Dallas hadn’t been able to encrypt the signal itself, but the destination was highlighted on the map: Ellis’s secret station. Where Elena had gone.
Why am I not surprised?
Gladkoff went up to the panel with the exposed nukes. “What’s to stop you from killing me when I shut them down?” he asked.
Jessica shrugged. “It’s not my call, really.”
Dallas was still working with the comms data, and did not turn around. “You’ll be tried for the shooting from yesterday. Deportation is most likely.”
“But you won’t space me.”
Dallas’s smile was dry. “Not today.”
Gladkoff turned, and laid his hand against the panel’s controls, and spoke a few words. “They’re off.”
Jessica hit her comm. “Captain Bayandi. Are you still under compulsion?”
There was a pause. “Yes, Commander.”
She glared at Gladkoff, but he was only frowning. “I don’t understand,” he said, mostly to himself. “I’ve turned it off. The nukes are off-line. The nav directive should have ended.”
“Commander Lockwood,” Bayandi said, and his voice sounded strange and distant. “I have been redirected.”
Well, this can’t be good. “To where?”
“I am . . . directed to fly into the surface of Yakutsk.”
“And what will that do?”
But she knew before he spoke. “It will kill everyone,” Bayandi said, confirming her fear. “It will pull the moon apart.”
Chapter 55
Indus Station
“Well, open the damn battery up,” Elena’s jailor was saying. “I don’t care what it’s reading.” Another pause. “If it’s radioactive enough to kill you, you idiot, we’re all dead anyway!”
The lights in the brig flared brightly, then went off. A moment later the emergency lighting in the floor came on, illuminating her captor’s odd features from below, and then an alarm began to sound.
Every thread of hope she’d had disappeared.
Her captor shouted over the comm. “Cage. Cage!” Then he turned, leaning over her and grabbing her shoulders, shaking her, making her head hurt. “What have you done?” he demanded again.
“I told you.” She had no energy anymore—frustration had drained her of fear. “I’ve destroyed your station.”
“How do I stop it?”
Too late. “You can’t.”
His wide eyes were furious. He threw her back in the chair and opened the door, stepping out into the hall, where all the lights had gone red. She could hear running footsteps; as he stopped someone, she heard an explosion in the distance. “What’s going on?” her captor shouted.
“The generator blew,” the man said hastily. “The fail-safe, too. This whole place is going up in less than ten mi
nutes.”
“How do we fix it?”
“There’s no fixing it.” The man wrenched away and ran.
Her interrogator stood for a moment, and she saw his fists clench. Then he turned, fury on his face, and stormed back into the room. “You will stop this!” he shouted at her.
“I can’t.”
“You think you’ll get back to your ship? You’ll die with the rest of us.”
“It wouldn’t matter if I did get back to my ship,” she told him. He knew all of this. “The landing decks are locked. Nobody is getting off this station. No matter how highly placed they are.”
He could see it in her face, she knew: the truth of what she had done, the truth of his own death. He raged, hitting her again, over and over, until she thought she would black out; and then he pulled his gun and braced the barrel against her forehead.
“If I’m going to die,” he snarled at her, “I’ll see your brains on that back wall before I go.”
She kept her eyes open, staring at him—
—and something outside the room exploded, taking out the door and most of the section of hallway. Elena was flung through the air and into the rear wall. She slid onto the floor, and something heavy dropped on top of her. When everything around her stopped falling, she opened her eyes, and saw her captor—or rather, part of him. The left side of his face was burned black, and most of the back of his head was gone. One staring eye pointed more or less in her direction. Flesh, bone, and blood were dripping onto her face.
Good timing, she thought.
As she listened to the klaxons her vision began to dim. She could not find it in herself to be too sad. She had succeeded, after all. She had stopped the Olam Fleet—or most of it, anyway. Earth would survive, she was sure. They would be all right. All of them—her mother, Greg’s father, their families. That this whole place was going up, and everyone with it—the guilty and the innocent, all at once—was not perfect. Not how she had wanted to die. But at least she was dying in the line of duty, and that was all right.
A pair of legs appeared next to her, feet in short boots standing next to her head. She had not heard the steps. As she frowned at the toes of the boots, wondering why they looked familiar, the person squatted in front of her. Bright hair, blue eyes, petite, lovely in a way Elena had never been: her mother. Her mother. What was she doing here?
“Are you going to die here,” her mother asked, “underneath a dead lunatic?”
Elena blinked at her, waiting for her to disappear. She didn’t.
“I don’t think it matters, Mama,” she said.
“If you get up,” her mother suggested, “you could make it to an airlock. You could see the stars.”
“One last time?”
“You could leave the station,” her mother said. “You don’t have to die here. You could be out there, with the stars. In the open. At home.”
That . . . that sounds lovely. “I’m tired, Mama,” she said, and she was.
“Some things need doing,” her mother said gently, “even when you’re tired. Get up, Elena.”
Chapter 56
Budapest
“Weapons live,” Savosky said.
“You’ve got shit for weapons on this thing,” Greg pointed out.
“She’s got enough to take a bite out of them before they kill us. Arin?”
“Data capture is ready,” Arin confirmed.
Greg hit his comm. “Captain Taras?”
“We’re ready here, Captain.”
He did not correct her. For her, he supposed it was a part of his name. There would be time later—perhaps—to establish new protocols. “Then let’s do this.”
They had decided, in the end, to have Meridia drop out first. Greg had argued with Taras on that, believing that an errant freighter would be less likely to be seen as suspicious; but she pointed out that a PSI starship was a drastically different political entity than a commercial freighter. “Blowing away one little freighter can be brushed off as a mistake, if anyone notices at all,” she said. “If they shoot at us, they’ll expose themselves, and make an awful lot of enemies they do not want.”
Privately, Greg held out hope that Bayandi would be able to do something via the artifact. He wondered if Elena knew what it was, or if she had only brought it along out of sentiment. Bayandi said it had been active for a while, which meant she had been in contact with it. He wondered if it had spoken to her again, and what it might have said.
He wondered if she would listen.
He wondered if she was still alive.
Meridia dropped out, and he held his breath, waiting for a warning comm from the station, waiting to hear the telltale alarm indicating she had been fired upon, or destroyed. But there was silence, and Savosky, paying more attention to his flying than Greg’s anxieties, dropped them out of the field.
The station was hanging there, industrial and utilitarian, not looking at all like the place that would build stealth weapons or direct an invasion fleet to Earth. It might have been any other commercial manufacturing station, except that it was silent.
“Taras?” Greg asked.
“Their sensors are live,” Taras said, puzzled. “As far as I can tell they should’ve detected us. But they’re not reacting at all. No weapons locks, no comms, nothing.”
“On your toes,” Greg said, his stomach knotting. “Herrod said it came suddenly. If we—”
The bottom of the station, as blandly geometric as the rest of it, burst suddenly into a fireball and dissipated into pieces.
Elena. “What was that?” he asked.
Arin replied. “Their battery containment. I’m pulling data now, and it’s telling me . . . the station’s going to go up, Captain.”
Greg abandoned the weapons console and ran down the hall toward Budapest’s landing bay. “How long?”
“Ten minutes. At the outside.”
Taras took care of sending the message for them. “Indus Station,” she said, “we are prepared to offer airlift to your people. Proceed to the airlocks. Leave your weapons behind.”
“What’s the complement on that station?” Greg asked.
“According to what I’m seeing here,” Arin told him, “one hundred and forty-three.”
They had nothing like enough space for that many. Damn. “Taras?”
“Our enemy is not going to be space, Captain Foster. It will be time. They have five airlocks—with you and Captain Savosky, we will have eight ships.”
“Arin,” Savosky was saying, “stay here. If we get caught in the blast, get away from here, and get that data out. Stream it raw if you have to, but make it public.” He appeared at the doorway of the landing bay, and headed for the shuttle next to Greg’s. “You ever flown a freighter shuttle, Foster?” he asked, as Greg climbed aboard a shuttle and powered up the engines.
“Sure,” Greg told him. “Twenty years ago, when I was still living with my dad.”
“They steer just like a fighter,” Savosky told him, “except you feel it all the way down to your heels.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Greg said, and Savosky laughed.
“It means,” he said, “don’t crash my ship, Foster. Now let’s haul some people out of there.”
Greg did not dare hope Elena would be one of them.
Chapter 57
Indus Station
Elena got up.
She shoved the interrogator off her, and more bits of him came off. The smell of the dead man was appalling, but it was rapidly overwhelmed by the odor of burning metal and chemical from the hallway. She rolled to her knees and almost collapsed. There was something terribly wrong with her right hip, which seemed to be unable to hold her weight or to make much progress controlling her leg. She put a palm on the wall and pushed herself to her feet with her left leg, but the pain nearly made her black out.
“It’s not far,” her mother said. “You can do this, Elena.”
I don’t know about that, she thought. But she levered hersel
f forward, lurching against the wall toward the door. She was leaving great smears of blood on the dank gray walls; hers or his, she didn’t know. The contrast of colors was almost beautiful.
Out in the hallway, her mother was looking from side to side, watching the people go by. “It’s faster this way,” she said, gesturing toward a small auxiliary corridor.
Elena frowned. “Then why are the others going that way?”
“They’re looking for escape ships. You only need to get outside.”
How do you know that? She grasped the doorframe and gave herself a push, reaching out for the opposite wall. Her weight shifted briefly onto her right foot, and agony shot through her, toes to scalp, so sharp it woke her up even as she nearly blacked out. Suddenly she felt everything: the arrhythmic vibrations shuddering through the walls and the floor beneath her feet, the lights, dim and bright in turns, the smell of electricity and human sweat and, yes, blood, not just on her, but all around. Her eyes swept the hallway. The blast that had taken out her captor had taken out three people on the other side of the wall. Or maybe more; she couldn’t identify all the pieces. Carnage and suffering. My doing.
“You can’t help them now,” her mother said gently. “Come along, Elena.”
Everyone was yelling, and there were alarms, and for a moment it was too much. Someone ran past her and bumped into her, and she collapsed again, cursing. Stars, she thought, and clung to the wall again.
Her stomach lurched briefly; the gravity systems were going. Her eyes skimmed the wall; no grip. Gravity might give her hip a break, but she’d have some trouble guiding herself through the unfamiliar halls. Straightening as best she could, she limped forward, pushing at the wall, doing her best to keep the weight off her bad leg, ignoring the motes flashing before her eyes every time her right foot brushed the ground.
She came around a corner and stopped. There was the familiar utility room, and there were Mika’s feet, just where Elena had left them.
“Elena,” her mother said, warning in her voice.
“I need to bring her.” Mika had screwed up and allowed Elena to succeed, and she was going to miss her vacation and die because she had been kind. She deserved the stars, too. It was all Elena could give her.
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