“Bring us Devlin Hart,” the voice shouted. “No armor. Hart can negotiate with us. If anyone in armor steps up, we start shooting.”
“You’re a popular guy,” Amira said.
I stood up.
“What are you doing?” Zhao stiffened.
“Shucking,” I said. My armor, at a mental command, began to crack itself open. I stepped forward and out, feeling totally naked in just my gray basic wear.
“Rockhoppers don’t shuck,” Zhao said.
“They want to talk. I’m going in. Ken, hold the corridor. If I’m not back in an hour, you get to make the big decisions.” He came up beside me and I grabbed his armored shoulders, feeling small beside him. “You’ll get your platoon, Ken.”
His helmet slid away and Ken’s dark eyes blinked. “I will not be doing that,” he said. “If they capture you, I’ll be in to take you back out. You are the commander here.”
There was something more I wanted to say, but Amira stalked up next to me and stopped. Her armor began to lean back and peel itself off her.
“They didn’t ask for Amira Singh,” I told her.
“It’s buy-one-get-one-free day for Rockhoppers,” she said. “You’re not going in alone. Ghost sign is increasing, I want to get in closer and sniff. I’m not going to sit here while decisions about our future get made down there.”
Ghost sign. Right. This wasn’t just mutineers we were dealing with. The Conglomeration had its fingerprints on all this.
I stepped out with my hands up. “It’s your lucky day,” I called out. “Because I’m actually Devlin Hart.”
“Bullshit,” the voice down the corridor said.
“It’s me, I swear,” I said. “I’m coming forward with Amira Singh.”
A face peeked quickly around the bulkhead. I recognized it. “Mr. Dismont. From Shangri-La Base.”
Dismont stepped out into the open as well. “Holy shit, it’s really you.”
I stepped hesitantly forward. “I’m just going to keep walking forward with my hands where you can see them, Amira as well, and we’ll talk.”
20
I faced the council of mutineers in a room deep inside the carrier’s shielded core after being silently trooped past corridors lined with construction workers holding crude, cobbled-together weapons. Arc welders, unwieldy rail guns, and other contraptions I wasn’t sure about.
This was the heart of the insurrection: ten tired engineers, gangly men and women with screens strapped to their forearms, staring at us without saying a thing.
“Why did you call for me?” I finally asked.
“When everyone ran on Titan, you stayed behind,” Dismont said. “Many of those engineers were tasked to work here on these carriers. We know who you are. We trust you. We will talk to you. We want you to get us a cease-fire to get us some time.”
“What do you think you can do? Run to the Conglomeration?” I asked.
“No,” Dismont shook his head, exasperated. “It was never that. Conglomerate messages are all over the networks, I know that. Offers to leave us alone if we defect. Preserve a place for us as we are. Promises of power and technology. Promises of land. We don’t buy it.”
“Then what the hell is all this?” I asked.
“It began with protest,” he told us both. “Understand, since we got here from Titan, they’ve thrown us into this project full bore. We work long days, and we work dangerous situations. The workers on the carriers are suffering from blowouts, and they’re expected to work without suits, as the gloves slow them down. We complained, but nothing changed. Everything was rush-rush. Good men started dying. One, airlock accident; one, a tunnel boring blowout. They kept stacking up. We kept holding services.
“Five hours ago, there was a memorial service for three tunnel borers who died after a seal breach. The Arvani sent carapoids to break it up and get us back to work. We were angry. We broke and fought back, refusing to leave. Demanding better safety. More rest time so mistakes aren’t made. We know we’re in the middle of a war. It’s one thing to risk your life for it. It’s another to see our lives spent so cheaply.”
That rang true. I glanced over at Amira. She wasn’t paying attention. Her eyes were half closed. She was focused on ghost sign.
“So, what’s the play?” I asked. “My team was just the first wave of what they can send at you. You going to make a stand here?”
“We’re going to run,” Dismount said. “We can fly this thing, Devlin. All we need is some time.”
Amira cocked her head. Something was going on in that invisible world of hers. “And where will you run to?” I asked him.
“We have the entire solar system to hide in. Get away from all this. All we need is time so we can continue getting the engines up. We need you to get us time,” Dismont pleaded.
I wanted to join him. Run for somewhere in the dark and hide from everything we’d seen. Everything we’d been asked to do. Forced to do.
“There’s a problem with that plan,” Amira said, opening her eyes.
Dismont frowned and looked at her. “What’s that?”
“The engines aren’t ever coming on.”
Shit. I recognized Amira’s ready stance. It would have looked casual if I hadn’t seen it before. She had relaxed a bit, a friendliness in her face. But her feet had moved into a more stable position. Her neck was angled just ever so slightly forward. The faintest grin on the corners of her lips. But behind the silver eyes, there would be nothing but a spring being slowly compressed.
Here we go, I thought, and half turned toward the engineers with the hand-built weapons aimed at us.
Amira snapped forward and twisted behind a nearby engineer, shoving a carbon fiber knife from up between her fingers into the side of his neck. “No one fucking move,” she said calmly, pulling him back toward the wall with her so that she could keep everyone in front of them.
“Fuck,” I hissed, holding my hands up in the air and stepping between her and the guns.
Dismont was crushed and confused. “Whoa,” he shouted, “everyone calm down, calm down. She hasn’t hurt Chris.”
Yes, I thought. Let’s stay cool. “What are you doing with Chris?” I asked Amira.
“Chris is a Conglomeration spy,” Amira said. “I’ve been tracking him. So, I repeat myself: Those engines won’t come on. Only your weapons that are facing the Trojans will work. Everything else has been disabled. You’re being used.”
Dismont stepped hesitantly forward. “That’s a hell of an accusation.”
“It’s what she does,” I said. “She finds this stuff. She found them out on Titan. She found them out when they attacked Icarus Base.”
I hated invoking Icarus. But the moment I did it, I could see the engineers paying close attention and looking at each other.
“On Icarus Base, Amira tracked the Conglomeration as they attacked. She kept us alive. And if you want to survive, you’d better damn well listen to her,” I continued.
“I’ve worked with Chris inside the engines for a month,” one of the mutineers said. “He saved my life down there.”
“This is insane,” Chris said from behind me. I wanted to turn around and look at Amira. I wanted to mouth the word “ghost?” I wanted to get a nod or a shake of the head so I knew what was standing just behind me.
Instead, I swallowed. “We can test this.”
Dismont looked at Chris and Amira and then back to me. “How?”
“I get you your time. I call it in. Time enough for you to fire those engines and see if they work. Or if Amira’s right. Time enough to test your weapons, too. Okay? If you can fire them, if everything is good, then we have a second conversation. That sound good?”
Tension hung heavy, but eventually Dismont nodded. Weapons weren’t lowered, but they were relaxed.
I slowly turned back to Amira. “
Do you want to—”
Chris yanked free of Amira, throwing her back up against the wall with a single shove of the hand. She left a bright ribbon of blood along his throat as she was tossed back and hit the wall with a loud thud. Amira leapt forward after him.
“Hey!” one of the engineers shouted as he stepped in front of Chris.
Chris punched him in the face. Blood sprayed into the air and the man dropped, skull shattered and face a sudden mess of flesh, blood, and brain. Then Chris sprinted through the door.
One of the shocked engineers had the presence of mind to shoot a rail gun a second too late. The bullet smacked the rim of the door.
“Ghost?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s mine!” Amira snarled, picking up the knife knocked loose when she’d hit the wall. She exploded out the door.
Dismont was on his knees by the killed engineer. “Jesus,” he said, in shock. He put a hand down on the ground, unsteady.
I squatted next to him, trying to ignore the bloody mess that had been a person’s head. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Chris isn’t what anyone thought. Chris is Conglomerate. A ghost.” No sense in fighting to keep all that a secret. It was time to explain things. Because I had no idea how long any of us were going to live now.
“A ghost?” I had the attention of everyone.
“Yes. And it talked you into this mutiny, I’ll bet. I’ll bet Chris was all over the place, giving you all suggestions. Getting you to trust him. But now we need to figure out why this, why now?” I was betting it meant more shit was about to come down on us. Forget the Accordance wanting our asses. It was Conglomeration about to try and kill us now. “Get control of your ship. It won’t be able to meddle with things now that Amira is openly hunting it. Get your scanners up. Open channels to CPF. Surrender. But get yourself facing outward. Get your weapons ready. See what I’m saying?”
Dismont looked at me, eyes wide with tears and rage. “Yes.”
Good. Angry was good. “I’m going after Amira. Get my platoon in here. Call them in. With armor.” Rockhoppers didn’t shuck.
“I will,” I heard Dismont say as I ran out into the corridor.
Where had Amira gone? I ran full tilt until I saw blood. Spatters of it on the ground.
They’d engaged. There was an indentation in one of the walls. I kept running. Found a body, twisted unnaturally and tossed aside. For a second, my breath caught. Then I saw the coveralls. Not Chris. Not Amira. Some unfortunate person, her long hair wet with blood, who had just been in the way.
I dug deep and ran even faster. Then almost tripped over Amira at a corner as I skidded to a stop. She crouched against a wall, covered in blood. For a second, I thought she was crying. I moved slowly toward her.
“Amira?”
She looked at me, shivering. Chris’s body was at her feet. Lifeless. His throat had been torn out, and Amira still held wet tissue in one hand.
“Amira?”
The second time, her name got her attention. She looked at me, blood smeared across her face. Shit. She was crying.
“You’re okay,” I said softly to her. “You’re okay.” I put a hand on her shoulder.
“I know I’m okay,” she said. “I’m angry. I tried to capture it alive. I really, really fucking tried. We could have gotten it to talk. Figured it out. But I had to kill it. It got my knife away. It got the upper hand.”
I looked down. “You did what you had to.”
Amira looked down at her hand and opened it. Then wiped her hand against a thigh. “Fuck, Devlin. I was so close.”
I looked at the body. The walls shivered and buckled slightly; booms echoed through the corridor. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Contact,” Amira said with a sigh. “We’re under attack.”
“Who?”
“Everyone, apparently.” Atmosphere-loss alarms triggered. Amira wiped the back of her hand against her cheek, smearing more blood around. She took a step forward and buckled.
I grabbed an arm and pulled it over my shoulder, and we ran together for safety.
21
Platoon members turned to look at us as we staggered in. They stared at Amira, and I shook my head. Catching the signal, almost everyone found something else to pay attention to. The engineers did not. Their jaws dropped, unable to take their eyes off the blood-splattered Amira.
Ken thudded over. “Your armor’s in the corner,” he said. Shriek, helmet down, paced back and forth near one of the walls, raggedy feathers puffed and his head bobbing oddly.
“Shriek, there are people in the corridors who’re hurt. See if you can set up treatment, coordinate what you can,” I said.
Shriek paused, cocked his head. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”
He took off.
Amira brushed past him and headed right for her armor. I watched her nestling down into the gaping maw of opened armor, and then saw Ken’s expression. “What?”
“You’ve been offline for almost half an hour.” He leaned closer. “In the meantime, three Conglomerate ships came in at speed on a high angle of attack. Most of the carriers and human-operated ships did not return fire. Sabotage. Mutinies. Everyone had to scramble to figure out what was happening.”
“Situation now?” I beckoned him to follow me as I walked up to my armor.
“They were on an attack run. They’ve swept through, done the damage. Chatter says something on the order of four or five thousand CPF dead; they’re tallying things up.” Shit, I thought, as I turned around and backed into my armor. It made contact with the back of my neck, and the stinging sensation of neural synchronization passed as I closed my eyes and tried to pretend that alien technology wasn’t wriggling its way into my spinal cord. “We think there might be a slower, secondary-stage attack on the way to take the Trojans. But defenses are getting spun up. Rumor is that some Accordance assets are heading in. But that isn’t the big news we need to be worrying about right now.”
My armor folded itself around me. I opened my eyes and looked at Ken. “What more do we need to worry about?”
“Anais is coming in. With two platoons. They’re on the hull and getting ready to board.”
“Is he coming for us?”
“I don’t know,” Ken said. “I left Delta to be a welcoming party for them. Whatever kind of welcome we need. All he’s said to me was to wait for him to board.”
“No mention of . . .” I looked around at the engineers making calls and coordinating repairs. The Conglomeration had gotten several good hits in. Amira had routed us around unsafe corridors to get us to the core. I lowered my voice. “. . . our little problem back on the Trojans?”
“No.”
“Amira, can you help them with their ship?” That would get her focused on something besides the damn ghost she’d killed. Taking her along to meet Anais right now might not be the best move.
She nodded, a little distant. “Yes. I can do that.”
“Thank you.” I nodded at Ken. “Let’s go see what we need to do about Anais.”
“Okay.” Once more out into the mess of it all, I thought as Ken’s helmet snapped up.
+ + +
Anais came through a service airlock with his platoons spreading out in front of him like a metallic shockwave. Once the bay was secure, the nervous engineers with their handmade weapons gently pushed back out into the corridors, I moved forward. A wall of crimson-painted armor parted to let me through.
“Hello, Hart,” Anais said, helmet down, looking me over. “You have the ship. Well done.”
“I’m not sure—” I started to say.
“Oh, you did well. The leadership of the carrier, who had been under the threat of a Conglomerate spy holding them hostage, contacted us once they were freed and worked to help get systems back online to try and help us fight the attack. Now we’re all gearing up for the second wav
e that’s on its way. Couldn’t have done it without you, Hart. Well done, soldier.”
We were face to face now.
Ken shook his head. “We were supposed to kill them all for you; now you’re saying they were never really a mutiny? What the hell is this?”
Anais leaned forward. Then, slowly, he repeated himself. “The leadership of the carrier helped get systems back online to fight the Conglomeration after the hero of the Darkside War killed a Conglomerate plot to take the carrier over. What do you not understand?”
“The fact that it is not true,” Ken gritted.
“But it is true,” Anais said. “And if you disagree, Ken, you put the lives of every single one of those engineers in here at risk. If they’re truly mutineers of their own design, then they’re to spend the rest of their lives in jail or face execution for treason against the Accordance. So, Ken, what happened here? Truly?”
“This is playing public relations; this isn’t about the war.” Ken folded his arms.
Anais leaned in close, grabbing Ken’s neck ring. “War is public relations, son. It’s about how to bring the coffins home. Triumphantly, or secretly. It’s about telling everyone at home the enemy is so evil that unless we throw all our might against them, all is lost. It’s about convincing ourselves we’re all on the same page or it all falls apart. There is no war without PR. Never has been.”
“So, you’re saying the Conglomeration are not evil?” Ken shot back.
With a laugh, Anais let go of Ken. “Hell no, Awojobi. They’re evil as all fuck. What I’m asking is, do you want all these engineers here so we can pilot some of these carriers back to Titan, along with the rest of the CPF, and take back Titan? Or do you want to stand here and debate CPF operational tactics?”
Ken’s eyes widened. “We’re going back?”
“If your folks will lower their defense screens, I have an entire company waiting to jump out into the dark and over to the hull. We boogie out, but we leave enough hardware back here to keep fighting the next wave of Conglomeration coming for the Trojans. I’m here to retake Shangri-La and rescue more of our people. See the big picture, Awojobi?”
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