Above the body was a trapdoor of sorts in the ceiling. It was open. Nate figured he knew what had happened: Grace had been cruising down here, minding her own business, and this specific man in black — did they have names, or serial numbers? — tried to jump her. The bugs still seemed to be on their capture-not-kill directive for Grace Gushiken, which wasn’t working out great in their favor. Nate walked — step-squeeeeak, step-squeeeeak — towards the trapdoor. He looked up. Right into a set of eyes, above another black suit.
It was what he’d expected. He didn’t scream, jump around, panic, or dive for the ground. Rather than any of those things, he said, “Hey.”
The man in black nodded back at him. “You mind?” A hand outstretched, a small wave of the fingers. Get out of the way.
“Sure,” said Nate, backing up. The man in black slipped down through the trapdoor, swinging it closed behind him. “You guys all shop at the same store, right?”
The man in black laughed, the sound like old leaves blown over grass. Not much of a laugh at all, just mechanical movement of the internal plumbing to mimic something this thing had seen humans do. “Nathan Chevell, you should go.”
Nate looked at his blaster, then used the barrel to scratch his forehead. He swapped it to his metal hand, then held it low and ready. “How you figure that?”
“Grace Gushiken is beyond your reach.” The man reached under his jacket, pulling out a sword. It was a short, black thing, with one of those nasty nanoblades Nate had seen the last man in black use. Nate backed up another step, and the man in black smiled that same not-quite-a-smile. “Ah. You’ve seen what we can do with one of these. You’re outmatched. I can see inside your mind what happened last time. How Grace had her own blade cut in half. It’s hard to fight those who can read your—”
He was picked up off his feet, the top half of his body turning into a pyre of plasma fire. The nanoblade fell to the floor, sliding into the ceramicrete like a hot knife into butter. Nate looked at the sword, then at his metal hand. The hand had pulled the trigger. Again. Like it was learning what he wanted, when he wanted it. Without thinking about it. More evidence of illegal AI, but now wasn’t the time to be worrying about that.
“Huh,” said Nate. He hoped he would live long enough for it to be useful again. These fuckers wouldn’t know when he would pull the trigger, but Nate figured the bugs would still give him significant static. Last time he’d fought ’em, they’d swarmed him hoping to implant his body with alien larvae. They’d wanted to take over his ship. It turned out that injecting larvae into a metal arm didn’t work so well.
Time to move on.
Nate made the next door, this time pushing it open with his meat hand, the metal hand nosing the blaster to follow. The door swung open into the gloom, revealing a similar situation to last time. Bodies, check. Ant farm, check. No assholes this time. Just Grace. She’d turned at the sound of the door, or perhaps it was the step-squeeeeak of his walk. The beam of his light picked out her athletic form — he figured he’d know that anywhere, anytime now — and the half-sword she carried, the metal glinting back at him. Her black hair was half over her face, just one eye visible to look back at him.
“Thank God,” said Nate. She’s alive! “I mean, uh.”
But Grace was running back to him. For him. She reached him, not even slowing down, and grabbed him in a fierce hug. Buried her face in his collar. Nate put his arms around her, flesh hand holding her tight, metal hand clumsy with the blaster, and took a breath of her hair. She wasn’t his girl. But he could dream.
“You came,” she said, pulling away. He didn’t want her to.
“Always,” he said. “Thanks for not letting me barbecue out there. You know.”
“Thanks for not letting me burn to death in a fiery explosion,” she said. “You know.”
“Right,” said Nate. Uh. Don’t say ‘uh,’ Chevell. “So. Uh.” He winced. “We got your basic Ezeroc infestation, looks like.”
“Looks like. I found another one of those guys dressed all in black.”
“Me too. I mean, your one, and then another one.”
“From the roof?”
He saw she was sweaty and grimy, a strand of hair down over her face. He wanted to push that strand of hair away, and stilled his fingers. “The very same,” he said. “I figure, this is an elaborate trap or it’s Ezeroc central. Ant farm.”
“The layout?”
“Yeah.”
She nodded. “There’s another possibility.”
“Which is?”
“It’s both,” said Grace. “It’s a trap. And it’s Ezeroc central.”
“That’s an uncomfortable thought,” said Nate. He paused. Fuck it. “Grace?”
“Nate.”
“You know what they’re building the trap for, don’t you? Who they’re building it for?”
“I think so,” she said.
“Then why the hell did you come in here?” He wanted to shake her. He wanted to say, I am terrified because I do not want to lose you, but it wouldn’t have been right, because she wasn’t his to lose. Just more Chevell fantasies. “You should have stayed outside. Waited.”
She cocked her head sideways at him, like she was listening to something only she could hear. “Two things,” she said.
“Shoot.”
“First thing. Let’s say you saw a box. A trap. And inside the trap was the person who wanted to trap you. Would you walk away and let them make a better trap? Or would you go in there and exterminate them?”
“This is a different thing,” said Nate. “Totally different. I mean. Because, this is a race of aliens bent on consuming all of humanity for fuel. And because they have been trying to get you — like, specifically you — since we bumped into them.”
“Answer the question,” said Grace.
“I’d go in the fucking box with a bunch of grenades and turn everything inside into spare parts,” said Nate.
“The second thing,” said Grace, as if Nate had agreed with her, which he guessed he had, “is I don’t want to lose you either.” And she leaned forward, not very far because they were still close, and kissed his lips. He felt his eyes go wide, a series of thoughts skipping through his mind like stones across a pond. She doesn’t care about the arm, or the leg. Grace doesn’t care about the fire. She came in here because she didn’t want you to die. And then, the important one: She is kissing your — kiss her back. So he did, a hand reaching up to the back of her head, his body pressing against hers.
They broke apart. She gave him a small smile. “So, Nathan Chevell. You ready to turn everything in this box into spare parts? With me. Together.”
“Together,” said Nate. “I don’t have any grenades. But…”
“But what?”
“I’ve got something better,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE TYCHE BUCKED and yawed under her fingers, the sticks trembling like they were injured. El clenched her teeth, the thrust of the drives keeping her firm in the acceleration couch. The thrust wasn’t making her clench her teeth: it was that damn hole in the stern of the ship. The Tyche wasn’t sealed, her sleek lines disrupted by the sucking vortex created by the breach in the hull. She pulled up a feed of the cargo hold, saw Hope in her rig — which looked fucked, missing an arm, one other arm dragging like it’d had a stroke — trying to weld the door sealed.
October Kohl held a piece of metal against the storm of the wind. Every time he almost got it seated, the vortex effect would pop it out.
Looks rough, thought El. But hey, at least they weren’t dead, or in a Republic reprograming facility.
She wasn’t pushing the Tyche that hard, just a little bit of thrust to keep her in the air. The ship was eager for it, like she knew where they were going. The ship remembered the last time they’d tangled with the Ezeroc, and how another Earth ship — the Gladiator — had given her life so the Tyche could live. Ships knew. And they paid it forward, both the good and the bad.
Speaking of knowing… The RADAR blipped, her holo spitting out a stream of tactical information. The database had been updated courtesy of the selfsame Gladiator, and the Tyche knew about the latest ships and models, their weapons, their mass, their defenses. The Goddess of Luck didn’t need so much luck anymore: she had hard data. Automated systems double-checked the RADAR with another ping, then LIDAR reached out across the air, found and mapped the targets, and presented them to El like a dog presenting a retrieved stick. Here you go. Look what I found.
“Good girl,” said El. Then, “Well, the Republic have brought themselves a pair of knives to a blaster fight.”
The comm chirped. Male, full of the arrogance of a bureaucrat with a whisker too much power. “Free trader Tyche, this is—”
“Imma have to cut you off there, chief,” said El. He’d said Tyche like tai chi, and that was plain rude. “It’s not the martial art. It’s the Greek Goddess. Hard K sound, you get me. Tai. Ki.”
“Say again, Tyche—”
“Don’t know who you’re talking to,” said El, “but there ain’t no ship out here that’s named after a system of defense training known for its health benefits.” She kept her hands on the sticks, one eye on the feed from the hold. It looked like Kohl and Hope were getting along fine. That breach was almost not a breach. Give them a little longer, and they could bust out of this thin pillow of air and get back into the hard black, where they belonged. Shit had gone wrong on Absalom Delta, but worse shit had gone wrong here.
“Tai Ki,” said the voice. “Tai Ki.”
“That’s it,” said El. “This is the free trader Tyche responding to unidentified Republic vessel. You have failed to identify yourself. Please respond.”
There was a pause. “I haven’t had a chance,” said the man, “because—”
“And the thing is, it’s law,” said El. “Unless we’re under arrest, which you haven’t said, and by the way, good luck to you in those tin cups you’re flying if you try that shit with me. You need to identify yourself, unidentified vessel, or we will open fire.” That was a tiny — fractional — variation of the truth, because strictly speaking El could only fire on them if she was an acting officer of the Republic Navy, which she wasn’t. But assholes like this weren’t big on fact-checking. Just big on weight-throwing.
“Tyche, this is the Republic police vessel Falling Star,” said the man. “I am accompanied by the Republic police vessel Rolling Thunder. We—”
“Who names your ships?” said El. “Someone with an inferiority complex?” She tweaked some of the drive controls, giving a little more stability to the starboard actuator. Wouldn’t want that flying off, what with a bunch of aliens to fight.
“Tyche, we order you to cease flight and prepare to be boarded.”
El stared at the comm for a second. “You’re joking.”
“This is not a joke, Tyche. We have intelligence—”
“Because we’re not in space, dumbass,” she said. “Ceasing flight will lead to a heightened incident of crashing. I don’t know about you, but I don’t crash my ships.”
“Tyche, you need to land your vessel at these coordinates,” said the voice.
“Bite my ass.” Before the coordinates arrived El cut the comm. She pulled up the internal channel. “Hope?”
“You’ve got Hope,” said the Engineer, exhaustion in her voice. A little something else too — a memory of actual hope. El might have been imaging the last.
“How we doing on that repair?”
“Lousy. It’s a horrible weld. Seam’s all wrong. Haven’t feathered the bead right. I mean, it’ll stop us sucking vacuum and hard rads, but they’d kick me out of the Guild if they saw it.”
“Hope? They did kick you out of the Guild.”
“Oh. Right.”
Kohl’s voice came in. “What’s up, El? We got trouble?”
“The best kind,” said El. “We’ve got spare targets. Here’s what we’ll do.”
• • •
Three ships blasted across the night sky. One was a warship, a heavy lifter from back when the Old Empire stood tall as humanity’s bastion against the unknown, the Republic a hungry pup biting at its ankles. It was a common design, or common enough at the time, but enough dropping into atmosphere under fire had seen them winnowed out, lost to the storm of war, nothing but spare parts in junk piles if there was anything left at all. They were used, and used hard, their Endless Drives capable of jumping them into new systems at a moment’s notice. Small enough to slip through a RADAR net like a small rock in the vast hard black. Only a few were left, a very lucky few.
This was one of the luckiest. Her previous owner — a bartender who had no idea what to do with a heavy lifter aside from smuggling things onto a planet that had everything — had left her to stagnate in a hanger. No name, no Helm, no Engineer. No crew, no heart. Her new captain had found her, put a hand on the old metal of her hull, and called her by her true name: Tyche. Goddess of Luck. Causer of great destruction, famines, plagues. And great fortune, to those who loved her. She would lay down her life for those who touched her with a gentle hand.
Dying wasn’t required. What was required was a little of that famous luck. Which brings us to: the other two ships.
Policing vessels, designed for coast guard duty where the coast was the hard black of the Sol system. Neither had been shown a gentle hand. But they also hadn’t tasted the kiss of Ares. Hadn’t been fired on, plasma streaming around as they fell into atmosphere, the fire of re-entry screaming defiance at defenders below. Their ungentle care was in the hands of civilian criminals. Nothing like the hard talk of enemy armies, fighting until their last so that whole planets could live.
It wasn’t that they were on different teams. It wasn’t that they were in different leagues. The policing vehicles were playing, and the Tyche was built to go to war. She didn’t talk, dance, or cajole through delicate legal systems. She fought.
The policing ships were on a hard burn, trying to keep up with the Tyche. The Tyche, sprinting before them, her fusion drives kicking out fire and fury. The ship’s Engineer, reducing the thrust so buildings weren’t incinerated. It wasn’t efficient, it wasn’t safe for the Tyche, but it would stop a rain of building debris from killing hundreds of thousands of people. Safe didn’t matter so much when you had a little luck on your side. The load, though? That was another matter. That kind of strain — drives burning hot, Endless systems providing lift, PDCs fangs-out, masers and lasers online — should have overtaxed the reactor the Tyche was born with. But sometime since she’d last been in a registered shipyard, she’d had a new heart. Borrowed from another dying god: the Ravana’s reactor burned within. Crazy, putting a torch that bright in a smaller hull. That’s what they’d call her Engineer. Crazy, or gifted. Or just plain lucky.
Citizens of the Republic, already experiencing high levels of anxiety from a reactor incident earlier in the day, were on high alert. Construction sites didn’t just explode, sucking down girders like overdone spaghetti. Fatalities had been zero, casualties light, a miracle of safe shutdowns in modern reactors. The Republic news anchors agreed: everyone had been so very lucky. Luck or otherwise, those citizens of the bright Republic — under whose flag the Tyche sailed — watched the skies that night, eyes up. Looking for falling air cars. Instead, they saw a goddess in her prime, throwing spears at dogs that nipped at her heels.
The Tyche zipped over the top of the cityscape, soaring like the idea of freedom itself. Policing vehicles behind stabbed at her with sharp knives made of light and energy, but their attack was insufficient. The Tyche was used to battle; she saw the fire coming like an underarm toss and banked out of the way. Her Helm would have had a holo up, tactical readouts showing the pace of battle — slow, by military standards — and maybe given a small, tight smile as she worked the sticks. Her Engineer would have been in the engine room, heat and steam all around, coaxing the Ravana’s borrowed heart to not destroy the goddess it now lived in.
All of this cat-and-mouse was a means to an end. The Tyche was running, but she wasn’t running away. She was running to, her target south and west of the city center. To an old and dark part of town, where lights burned low and crime burned high. The perfect place to hide imperfect deeds. Or an alien outpost, if that was how you wanted to roll the dice. Aliens, on Earth: if only the bugs knew they were rolling dice against the Goddess of Luck.
Strained and tired from a run without a catch, one of the Republic vessels launched missiles. Guided, hard-locked on the shape and texture of the Tyche’s hull. Those rockets knew her like the shipyard that birthed her, the best tech money could buy. It was a bad call for all parties: bad for the Tyche, because one of those rockets would core her hull, burn to ash everything inside, and rain debris on the city below, strewn out over kilometers at the velocities they were traveling at. Bad for the citizens of the city, because of that selfsame debris rain, hot with radiation and plain old kinetic load. Bad for the Republic flight jockey who’d pulled the trigger, because raining radiation on the citizens — even in the hard, cool judgment of an efficient Republic — was a surefire way to get yourself down the bottom of the rung. You’d never put your boots on a ladder again, and you might find yourself cutting rock out of an asteroid for the rest of your days.
Bad call all around. It was … just plain lucky that a goddess flew the skies that night.
Two rockets, nothing fancy enough to take down a capital ship; the policing arm of the Republic didn’t have access to that kind of ordnance. Just big enough to be proper mischief for the Goddess of Luck, who was focused on different priorities that night. But that’s what family was for: when you were up to your eyeballs in alligators, someone else had your back. Here, the Tyche’s Helm saw those two rockets coming at her, and did nothing. Not until they were very, very close. The two rockets galloped like greyhounds in tandem, rushing for the Tyche’s rear, where her armor was weakest. Drives bright in the night sky, too bright to miss. As they were close, the Helm did something unorthodox with the Endless Drive. She unbalanced the negative mass field that gave vertical lift on the left side of the ship, causing the Tyche to lean in that direction. At the same time, the Tyche’s Helm hit the positive mass generator of the Endless system on the right side, creating temporary gravity above the hull. The effect was the Tyche rolled like a puppy, spiraling sideways through the air, the frame of the ship shaking with the strain of it. Strained, but not broken, courtesy of another fallen ally: the Gladiator had reshaped the inside spar of the Tyche, making her stronger than new. Inside the Tyche it would have been chaos, up becoming down, left becoming right. A deckhand, unsecured, would have been tossed around inside to rattle against the hard surfaces of the hull. Swearing, cursing the Helm. The Engineer would have laid a hand on a reactor burning too hot while the Tyche skipped out of harm’s way.
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