by Kelly Jensen
“And a good portion of the stolen data was his journal entries.”
“You think they’re looking for something he left behind? Why would he leave something on Petrel?”
Elias held up a hand and extended one finger. “Dieter was here for what, two months? And he was working the whole time he was here.” He extended a second finger. “Dieter worked covert ops before he was recruited to Project Dreamweaver.” A third finger joined the parade. “He was pretty messed up by the time we found him. Blanking and forgetting things. But he was like Marnie. Had backups of his backups.” A fourth finger uncurled, but Elias didn’t have a fourth point. “Where did Marnie take you when you were here last? Where did you find Dieter?”
Nessa started walking. “This way.”
Following, Elias opened a comms channel to the asteroid.
For a change, Ryan answered, his bald head reflecting the light of the holo display. “What’s up?”
“We need to know what was in those journal entries of Dieter’s the hackers stole.”
* * *
Fingers plucked at Zed’s hair. He ducked away, instinct insisting he did not want to be touched right now, even by Flick—then he moaned. Everything hurt. His wrist was the worst, but his head wasn’t too happy, either.
Could have been so much worse.
Flick pulled off Zed’s rebreather and tossed it aside. “You’ve got foam in your hair.”
“Fuck the foam,” Zed growled.
Flick shot him a dirty look. “I think that foam deserves some recognition. It saved our lives.”
Zed grunted and leaned back against the wrecked copilot’s chair. The bridge was a mess of disintegrating impact-foam—designed to soften and dissolve once the ship stopped moving—and twisted metal on the starboard side, toward the rear of the bridge. Clearly they’d spun and smacked into something hard. The acrid tang of smoke and burned-out circuits polluted the air. Low-level emergency lighting illuminated the bridge, enough to see the damage and not much else.
“So your wrist and your head? Did you lose consciousness at all?”
“Pretty sure.” He remembered Flick holding his hand...then nothing until Flick was pulling softening foam off his face. Might have been the pressure of reentry fucking with him, but Zed didn’t think so. “You okay?”
“Okay enough.” Flick probed Zed’s scalp gently. “Crashing is never fun. Oh, here we go.”
Zed bit back a hiss and fought the nausea that surged as Flick’s fingers found a knot hidden beneath his hair.
“Damn it,” Flick whispered, his voice filled with regret. “The foam should’ve prevented this.”
“I might not have been strapped in perfectly,” Zed admitted. “Because of the wrist.”
“Slacker.” Flick shot him a grin, one that didn’t quite meet his eyes, then moved off to find the bridge’s first aid kit. He moved a bit more stiffly than usual, but not too badly, considering. Zed let his eyes close for just a second.
“Hey, no sleeping.” Flick nudged his knee, setting down the first aid kit.
“I’m not.” He squinted at Flick, annoyed that even the dim emergency lighting seemed to be too much for his sensitive eyes. “I’m concussed, but not badly.”
He’d had a bad concussion once. It had been a solid couple of months before he’d been cleared for duty again. Weeks after that before he’d felt completely back to normal. This was annoying, nothing more.
Flick brought up a simple medical diagnostic on his bracelet. “Yep. Concussion and a broken wrist. But, lucky you, the bones seemed to be aligned pretty well. Lucky me too,” he muttered.
Right? Setting a lover’s broken bones wasn’t high on Zed’s to-do list, either.
At Flick’s gesture, Zed reluctantly held out his left hand. He watched as Flick splinted the joint and wrapped it up, thankful that the Apex Rapere had been stocked with an emergency med kit. But no Mendo—the substance that strengthened healing bones needed to be administered by a doctor. A shot of it in the wrong spot...wouldn’t be pretty. Flick’s fingers were gentle, touching his skin with the softest of caresses. He knew how much a broken bone—even a minor break—hurt. The fingers of his original left hand—the one replaced by his sparkling crystalline limb—had been mangled and all but useless after being broken in the stin POW camp and left to heal improperly.
“Hey, you still with me?”
Zed blinked. “Yeah.”
“Want to try a shot of something for your headache?” Flick rifled through the med kit, looking for a hypo.
For a second, Zed thought longingly of the stash of pills he’d once carried with him to battle the severe headaches induced by Zoning. The altered state of consciousness had once had a high price—no more, though, not since the Guardians had fixed his recipe. A cup of humanity, a dash of stin, with a teaspoon of ashushk and a sprinkle of resonance equaled one functional super soldier/emissary.
Okay, maybe his concussion was a little worse than he thought.
“What’s in there?”
They quickly determined that the only painkiller in the kit would be burned off by Zed’s metabolism before it could do anything. Still, if the headache got any worse, it might be worth trying. Not now, though.
He was about to ask Flick what the plan was when the ship rocked. Flick jolted up and slapped foam away from the pilot’s console, trying to get the interface to wake up and give a report. Zed staggered to his feet, cradling his broken wrist to his chest. His vision rocked out of time with the Apex Rapere, so he closed his eyes, hoping to stave off the need to vomit.
“Triple fucking shit.” Flick slammed a palm on the console. “We need to abandon ship.”
“What?” Every bit of training that had been drilled into Zed’s brain shouted No, bad idea. You stuck with your wreck when you went down so searchers could find you. It was fucking basic. But Flick had had the same training, knew the same shit, so if he was saying it...”Why?”
“Because I overshot your landing strip and we’re getting swept out by the tide.” Flick turned to Zed and scooped his good arm around his waist. “If the external sensors are still working, outside atmosphere looks breathable. Let’s get you out and onto shore, and if we don’t suffocate, I’ll see what I can recover before she’s gone.”
“So we crashed...and we’re gonna sink?” They bumped into a wall as the Apex Rapere shuddered again, turning Zed’s soft chuckles into a hiss. “Man, when you wreck a boat...”
“It’s not my fault!”
“Who was flying?”
“Asshole.”
“See, if we were married, this cost could come out of a joint—”
“Really?”
They lurched into a dim, twilit landscape. Zed had an impression of boulders, maybe trees—but damn, it was tough to concentrate when every step on the uneven rocky beach jarred his wrist and his head. Flick deposited him a few meters from the listing Apex Rapere and darted back to the ship without a word.
From the angle of the ship—which grew more acute as the minutes dragged on, the nose dipping downward—Zed could only surmise that the bottom of the lake or sea dropped off significantly a dozen meters or so from the shore. As the tide encroached, waves washing closer and closer to Zed’s perch, the Apex Rapere groaned, sliding farther into the water’s embrace. Just before Zed got really worried, Flick leaped out of the rear hatch, a pack dangling from one elbow, his arms full of equipment.
He marched past Zed to higher ground and deposited the gear. “Think you can make it up here?”
Yeah, the tide was getting closer and God knew how high the tides on this planet got—though thank God the gravity felt about the same as Earth Standard. Groaning, Zed pushed to his feet and made his way gingerly across the rocks to Flick’s haphazard camp. He’d chosen a plateau of sorts, a small one bordered by a pair of large bould
ers. It was difficult to tell in the waning light, but Zed couldn’t detect any tidal marks on the rocks. That was a good sign.
“What’d you rescue?”
“Some comms equipment. The first-aid kit. Some survival gear. I’m gonna go back and get—”
A loud creak followed by a huge splash and gurgle cut off Flick’s words. They watched the Apex Rapere give up her fight to stay above water and slip into the dark waves.
Zed stared, the ramifications of what had just happened sinking slowly into his concussed brain. “Well...shit.”
Chapter Six
Felix slapped his neck for the tenth time in a minute and felt something squash beneath his fingers. “Got you, motherfucker.”
But not before the dead bug had bitten him. The warming itch on the side of his neck was just one reason Felix hated planets. In less time than it took for another bug to find his neck, Felix counted several other annoyances: the water swallowing their ship, the smothering darkness, the whisper and hiss of whatever lurked under the cloak of night, and the absolute fucking lack of information about their environment. They could breathe, but the air smelled and tasted weird. Air shouldn’t have a flavor.
“Tides go back out, right?” When Zed didn’t answer right away, Felix nudged him with his boot. Zed jerked and smacked his lips. “No sleeping,” Felix grumbled.
“Wasn’t sleeping.”
“You need to tell me about tides. And fire. Then you can take a nap.” Felix aimed the meager light of a holo into the chittering darkness of night and wondered if he was brave enough to go looking for something to burn.
“Best thing we can do tonight is stay close and make a lot of noise,” Zed said. “We’ll scout the area when it’s light again. As for the tide, it depends on the moon.”
“This planet has three satellite bodies.”
“We know at least one of them is exerting a gravitational force.” Zed shifted in the near darkness. “Why do you want to know about the tides? Even if the tide goes back out, you don’t think you can repair the Apex Rapere, do you?”
Felix considered the muted glow of his crystalline fingertips. He could make small tools. Repair tools, not ship-salvaging tools. “I’m good, but not that good. No, I was thinking we need more gear. Some more protein bars, water pouches and maybe a hidden stash of Mendo.”
“Wrist doesn’t hurt much.”
Ignoring the lie, Felix chose a direction and peered into the darkness. “I wonder if that energy signature was a settlement. Maybe they saw us go down?”
“Not sure I want to run into the kind of people who choose to live in uncivilized space.”
Felix turned back to the vague shape of Zed and leaned in to bump their shoulders together. “I’m supposed to be the pessimistic one.”
“I was trying for humor.”
Wrapping an arm around Zed’s broad shoulders, Felix encouraged him to lean forward, into his lap. “Why don’t you try for that nap now? I’ll keep watch and see if I can do something with the comms equipment I saved.”
Zed nestled his head into Felix’s thigh with a deep sigh. “You know, the tide is a good thing.”
“Do I want you to explain that?”
“It’ll hide all traces of our crash.”
“Still trying to find the good in that.”
“Think about why we’re here, Flick. The data trail? This isn’t a chartered planet. There shouldn’t be anyone here, settlement or otherwise. But there is.”
A growl built inside Felix. A roar of inaudible but familiar sound. Anger and impotence. Deliberately, he put his bare hand to the side of Zed’s face, stroking his cheek. “Not going to let anything happen to you.”
Maybe it was time to quit all this running around, chasing jobs and credits. Had Zed been thinking along those lines when he proposed marriage? Was he as bone-achingly tired?
Zed’s warm hand covered his. “Ditto.”
Felix moved his fingers up to stroke Zed’s hair away from his face. “This hurt?”
“Feels good.”
He stroked Zed’s head—well away from the lump—until Zed fell asleep. Zed’s immediate and soft snores made him smile. Covert ops agents don’t snore, my ass. For a while, Felix concentrated on the whisper of connection between them. He never got much when Zed was sleeping, which was something of a relief as it meant Zed didn’t get much from him at night either. They both had their own share of unpleasant dreams. He liked the thrum of association, though, as if their souls came into alignment when they touched, resting easily together until they parted. Even with Zed asleep, Felix could feel the essence of him. His strength and goodness, his concerns, his sense of rightness.
With another pat, Felix withdrew his hand and aimed the feeble light of a single holo projection toward the jumble of comms equipment spread across the ground. Working with something pinning his right thigh to the ground proved frustrating, but he’d rather cut off his leg than disturb Zed. As the blood flow to his foot diminished, he sorted components into two piles: useful and maybe useful. Nothing in the galaxy was totally useless. But by the time Zed stirred—and thank fuck because Felix couldn’t feel his toes—he’d sketched a quick plan.
Zed sat up, rubbing the side of his head. He winced as his fingers encountered the lump.
“Feeling any better?” Felix asked.
“Not really.” Zed nodded toward the holographic drawing hovering over the other side of Felix’s lap. “What’s that?”
“A beacon. I figure it’s our best shot of getting a signal through this atmosphere. Not going to have enough power to send and receive, and I don’t have the right components anyway. Unless I sacrifice my bracelet.” Even then, signal strength would still be an issue. “We’re going to have to gain some elevation, though.”
Zed fingered the Guardian cuff around his right wrist.
“Can you use that to boost my signal?”
“I could try, but you know how imprecise anything I do with the cuff is. I could end up grabbing hold of all the comms equipment on the planet.”
“Would that be such a bad thing?”
“If we don’t want them to find us, yeah.”
“We’ll save it as a last resort, then.”
* * *
The storefront looked promising—in a quiet, “we accept unhooked credits” kind of way. But the sign out front didn’t simply lack holographic flair. It was dead. And the concourse sweeper had left a dusty curve by the sealed front doors, one unscuffed by recent foot traffic. Elias scanned the shop with his wallet to see if anything inside had a heat signature. Nothing pinged, not even a rodent corpse swarming with maggots.
He let out a heavy sigh. “Another dead end.”
Nessa rubbed a circle in the middle of his back. “The Blythe is still in dock. They haven’t found what they’re looking for, either.”
“Maybe we should compare notes.”
“Ha!”
“We’ve met stupider criminals.”
Nessa’s brows drew together. “Yeah, but we still don’t know exactly who we’re dealing with.”
According to Marnie and Ryan, the Blythe was registered to Havoc Shipping, and available to anyone with enough credits to rent her. Cracking Havoc’s database had proved simple enough, but the identity of the last person to rent the Blythe was just thick enough to have a pilot’s license in the name of Sora Berwad. Licenses were easy to forge. They had yet to identify the man in the holo capture Qek had provided.
Elias pulled out his wallet. “This was the last stop on our list.” And not a promising one, at that. His wallet chimed and Elias opened a second display. “Hey, Marnie.”
“Find anything at the last stop?” she asked.
“Nope.” Elias turned a slow circle, showing her the derelict storefront. “We’re probably t
he only people to have visited Pieces and Parts in the last decade.”
“Pieces and Parts?” Marnie frowned offscreen. “Hon, are you sure about the coordinates for Arlo Beck’s lab?”
A moment later, Ryan appeared next to her. “Yep, last stop on the list from Dieter’s journal.”
“If Fixer were here, he’d be muttering about bastard coincidences or something,” Elias said.
“He wouldn’t be muttering, he’d be digging a hole through the floor,” Nessa said.
Gears slid together in Elias’s head. “Maybe that’s what we should be doing.”
“What?”
“Let’s check the back door.” There wasn’t a lot of traffic on this level, but if they loitered much longer, they’d look suspicious. “Marnie, send me one of your hacks. Something any idiot can use.”
“How about if you just show me the lock and let me do it remotely.”
From behind Marnie, Ryan said, “I don’t have a detailed blueprint for that section of the station, but there could be a subfloor.”
The access corridor behind the storefronts had an equally seedy atmosphere. Elias’s heart leaped when he saw the dusty footprints by the rear door of the shop.
“We’re not the first here,” he murmured.
“Okay, scan the lock for me,” Marnie said.
Nessa kept a lookout, her boots echoing softly as she paced back and forth. Four and a half minutes later, the nearly invisible lock clicked and Marnie grinned through the holo.
“Reckon Flick could have done it faster?” Ryan asked.
She turned to swat him.
Mouthing a quick thanks, Elias cut the connection, folded his wallet in half and slid it into a pocket. Then he nudged the door open and listened. He heard nothing but Nessa breathing behind him. Pushing the door wider, he stepped inside. The theme of abandonment continued inside the shop. Empty shelves, dangling light fixtures and debris collected in dark corners. Picked out by the light slashing through the open doorway, a trail of boot prints marched across the floor to an opening. One of the large tiles had been lifted away and set aside, exposing a dim square of light.
