by Rachel Bach
I landed on my side, skidding across the hangar’s stone floor for a moment before I slammed my hands down. My fingers dug deep grooves in the compacted landing bed for nearly a foot before I finally jerked to a stop. The moment I was still, I checked my leg.
The shot had chewed a two-inch hole in the plate over my calf. Through it, I could see the puffy white wall of my breach foam. The quick-hardening antiseptic goo had plugged the hole in me as well, soothing the pain and stopping the bleeding, but I was still in a bad spot.
Back on the ship’s ramp, the lelgis was reaching for me, its huge, hooked tentacles stretching out a surprising distance, and I shot on instinct before I remembered not to. Fortunately, it seemed that only the lelgis’ head was shielded, because my bullet blew the barb off the first tentacle’s end. Before I could get a second shot off, though, something big and black barreled into the lelgis from the side.
After bouncing Sasha’s bullet, I half expected the lelgis to bounce this too, but apparently even a plasmex shield wasn’t strong enough to take a pile drive from a symbiont. Brenton hit the thing hard enough to knock it off the ramp, and the two of them slammed to the ground in a tangle of black claws and barbed tentacles. Through it all, though, the lelgis made no sound. It didn’t even seem to feel pain. It just flipped its barbs around and dug them into the new attacker.
The thick spikes went right through Brenton’s scales, drawing blood before I could shoot another one off. I was about to shoot again when Brenton bellowed at me. “What the hell are you waiting for?” he screamed, digging his claws into the lelgis below him. “Get on the ship!”
I was scrambling up to do just that when my suit’s proximity alarm began to beep. When I looked away from Brenton’s fight to see why, I nearly dropped my gun. The huge hangar was filling with lelgis. Aliens of all kinds were pouring out of the mouth of the ship that had breached the plasma shield, big spindly giants like the one I’d burned, barbed ones like what Brenton was fighting, and others, huge ones and small ones, flying ones and ones I couldn’t even make sense of. There were so many even my suit couldn’t count them, and though none had eyes so far as I could make out, every single one of them was clearly searching for something. Searching for me.
“Go, Deviana!” Brenton screamed, slamming the lelgis into the floor. “Go now!”
He didn’t have to say it again. I ran, kicking my suit into high gear as I jumped over Brenton’s fight. I landed on the ramp of the little stealth ship and used my momentum to roll inside. The door closed the second I was through, and the ship jumped as Nic hit the thrusters hard.
I scrambled off the ground and up to the cockpit, but as I dropped into the copilot’s seat, I saw we were flying the wrong way, toward the rear of the big hangar cavern rather than the front where the door was. Not that we could have escaped through the hangar door when the lelgis’ ship had it completely blocked, but I didn’t see a way out the direction Nic was flying either.
“Please tell me you have a plan,” I said.
“We had several,” Nic replied, gripping the flight stick like he was holding on for dear life. “Though this is the one I was least hoping to use.” He reached over and hit the live fire button on the gunnery console. “You should fasten in, Miss Morris.”
I grabbed my harness as the ship’s main cannon whistled to life right under my feet. Nic was flying us straight at the top of the cave. I couldn’t even see the other ships or the lelgis anymore, just the curved wall of the hangar’s ceiling thirty feet away. Twenty feet.
When we were ten feet from crashing, the cannon fired. A pulse of white light exploded in front of us, blasting a hole in the asteroid. The rock blew outward, sent flying both from the cannon blast and the force of the cave’s atmosphere as it was sucked into the vacuum of space.
Through the ship’s tail camera, I saw the lelgis begin to scramble as the air vanished through the hole, and I grinned wide. A phantom would have just kept floating along, but it seemed the squids needed atmosphere, or at least they couldn’t take the vacuum. I couldn’t see any of the symbionts anymore, but I didn’t have time to worry about them. We had bigger problems.
Our impromptu exit had taken us out on the far side of the largest, weirdest space battle I’d ever seen. The xith’cal battleships were clustered tight around the asteroid, and the xith’cal fighters, little ships with fast engines and huge cannons that all fleet officers cursed, were swarming around them like gnats. Between the battleships’ own fighters and the ones from the hangar, there had to be a thousand xith’cal ships at least, enough to give even the Royal fleet serious trouble, but the lelgis barely seemed to notice.
There were five lelgis ships in total, not counting the one currently wedged into the asteroid’s hangar. They were the same huge, graceful, beautifully colored vessels I’d seen on the monitor in the medbay destroying the xith’cal ghost ship, and they were attacking like they had then, shooting lines of beautiful blue fire that cut through the xith’cal ships like hot wire through snow.
The lizards were still putting up a hell of a fight, pounding the lelgis ships with cannon fire, but they were clearly outgunned. The battle couldn’t have been going on for more than ten minutes, but already two of the xith’cal battleships were listing. That was bad for us. If the lelgis ships had a chance to take their eyes off the lizards long enough to spot our little ship, we were done for.
I turned to tell Nic as much only to find him punching in coordinates into the hyperspace terminal as fast as his fingers could go.
“We’re jumping?” I cried as the coil began to spin up. “With no gate? Are you insane?”
“If we do not jump, we will be shot down,” Nic said calmly, entering the last numbers before going back to check the first ones.
He had a point, but … “What about Brenton?”
“He is the one who planned this,” Nic said. “His orders were that you must survive at all costs. Lelgis enter and exit hyperspace at will. We cannot outrun them on normal engines, and there is nowhere to run to out here anyway. Our only chance is to jump while they are distracted.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all, but we didn’t seem to have a choice. “Let’s do it, then,” I said, getting a death grip on my seat. “I just hope to the king you’re as good at math as your sister.”
Nic smiled as he plugged in the last variables. “Not quite,” he said, punching the commit button. “Hold on.”
The words were barely out of his mouth before the jump flash washed over us.
CHAPTER 11
I braced for a jolt, but the little ship eased into hyperspace as smoothly as a fish slipping back into the water. All at once, the battle vanished. So did the asteroid and the lelgis, leaving us floating perfectly still in the purple-gray blankness.
Nic let out a breath, leaning back in his chair. I followed suit, giving him a sideways look. “That was some fast calculating.”
“I cannot claim undue credit,” Nic said. “Mr. Brenton knew it might come to this, so we actually had everything preprogrammed. All I did was put in the final variables.”
“You mean he planned on an ungated jump?” I asked, horrified.
Nic shrugged. “He had reason to believe we would be leaving quickly.”
All I could do was shake my head. Before Caldswell’s jump away from the emperor phantom at Unity, I’d only done one other ungated jump in my entire life. Now I’d done two in two days, which struck me as courting disaster. If Nic had messed up even a single number, we could come out of hyperspace a hundred years later than we’d planned, if we came out at all. But done was done, and we had more immediate problems, first and foremost of which was the hole in my leg.
Now that my adrenaline was fading, my calf was throbbing like a bitch. Gritting my teeth, I hauled myself out of the copilot’s seat and hobbled back to the bench where I’d cleaned my armor to take a look at the damage. The breach foam had set up into a hard cast, allowing me to remove my boot and leg plate without too much
pain, but the moment I cracked the foam around my calf, things were going to get bloody.
I glanced at Nic. “Do you have a first aid kit?”
Nic hopped out of the pilot’s chair and hurried to the back of the ship, returning with a large med kit complete with bandages, grafting agents, and prefilled labeled syringes.
“Perfect,” I said, setting the kit on the table. But as I was laying out my tools, I realized Nic was still hovering beside me like a brooding hen. “You might want to turn away,” I warned.
Nic shook his head. “I would be helpful if possible.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
I took the armor off my left arm and gave him the tourniquet, holding out my biceps so he could tie it tight. When the vein at my elbow was good and puckered, I injected a painkiller followed by a clotting agent. The throbbing in my leg dulled as the drugs hit my system, but not nearly as much as it should have. I rolled my eyes as the tourniquet came off, thankful that Hyrek wasn’t here to crow over being right. While the drugs finished kicking in, I grabbed a bandage out of the medkit and tied myself a nice fat knot.
“Okay,” I said, tapping on the shell of hardened breach foam around my leg with one hand while I wedged the knotted bandage between my teeth with the other. “Pull it.”
Nic obeyed, and I bit down hard as he yanked the foam away from my wound. The pain hit me like another shot when the breach foam tore free, and for a second I was afraid I’d black out. I didn’t, barely, but there certainly was a lot of blood. Fortunately, Nic was ready with a towel, so I didn’t make too much of a mess. I stayed still until I’d gotten the pain, or at least my reaction to it, under control, and then I grabbed the tweezers and started the long, arduous process of digging out the bullet.
Sasha’s anti-armor rounds have two phases. The first is designed to drill through ballistic plate, while the second splinters to tear through flesh and electronics. It’s a nasty little one-two shot, and I was hating it at the moment. The bullet in my leg had split into three shards. By the king’s own miracle, all three of them had missed the bone, but my calf was wrecked.
By the time I finished digging out the final shard, I was ready to pass out. Fortunately, the next bit was easy. I motioned for Nic to hand me the can of grafting solution. I shook it hard and sprayed the mixture of synthetic skin, glue, and anti-infection agents over the wound.
Even with the painkillers, it stung something awful, but by this point I was so happy to be almost done I didn’t even hiss. The canned stuff wasn’t nearly as good as an actual skin grafter like the one Hyrek used, and I would definitely have a scar from this, but the spray patched me up better than a bandage could. I’d still need to get to an actual doctor at some point, but for now at least I wouldn’t bleed to death.
The wound wasn’t a terribly large one, but it still took most of the can to cover the area to my satisfaction. When I was done, Nic helped me get my leg up on the bench for the thirty-minute wait while the graft dried. “You’re, um, very skilled at that,” he said as he propped my heel against the corner.
“Survival skill,” I said with a weak smile. “You don’t last very long as a merc if you don’t get good at patching yourself up.”
I expected him to smile back. Instead, Nic’s face turned a little gray, and I decided it was time to change the subject. “Where are we going?”
“Montblanc,” Nic replied. “That’s our base inside the Republic.”
I barely hid my relief in time. Apparently, Brenton hadn’t worked his decision to go directly to Maat into his emergency plans. I’d never been to Montblanc, but I knew it was one of the bigger Terran colonies. It was also the farthest out of all the major Republic holdings, which explained why Brenton was using it as a base.
“We’ll be there in forty-five minutes or so,” Nic said, glancing at the ship clock.
“Or a hundred years,” I mumbled.
Nic shot me a disapproving look. “Dwelling on unfortunate outcomes only leads to internal disharmony, Deviana.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, leaning back against the wall. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to pass out for a bit.”
“Of course.” He stood up at once. “I’ll wake you when we exit.”
I nodded and turned away, pressing my face into the cool glass of the little port window. Behind me, I heard Nic settle back into the pilot’s seat, but I didn’t care about him anymore. I didn’t even actually care about passing out, though that would probably have been the smart thing to do. My mind was simply too full.
Before I’d signed on with Caldswell, my life had followed a pattern: obey orders, climb the ladder, keep my eyes on the prize. It was a good gig, dangerous and exciting with glory as my reward. Most of all, though, it was simple. A path of my own choosing where I did what I loved, knew where I fit, and understood where I was going. Now, though, I felt like a dollhouse in a tornado. Over the past thirty hours, my entire life had been uprooted and turned on its head, my hopes and ambitions dashed then reshuffled then dashed again. But now that the storm had quieted, even for a moment, I was determined to pick up the pieces and get myself back on the right track. First, though, I had to figure out what track that was.
I looked down at my bare hands. Beneath the smears of my drying blood, my skin looked normal, but I knew better. The black stuff was still there. Carrying death in my hands was nothing new, but unlike my weapons, which I trusted with my life, I couldn’t control the virus at all, and I knew enough now to understand exactly how huge a disaster that could be.
I closed my fists tight. I’d sworn on my honor to Maat that I’d set her free, just as I’d sworn to myself that I’d end the awful system that had killed Ren and her father. I still intended to keep those oaths, but with the lelgis and the xith’cal involved now, this was all getting way too big for one merc to handle on her own.
Hard as it was for me to admit, I needed help—someone with the knowledge and resources to get this virus out without killing me or the rest of the universe. I’d thought I’d found that person in Brenton, but all he’d cared about in the end was killing Maat, and I just couldn’t do that. Anyway, Brenton was almost certainly dead now, and while I was relieved I wouldn’t have to fight him over going to the Dark Star, I still needed help, and unless I wanted to go find some more xith’cal, I had no one left to turn to except the Eyes.
Just the thought made me queasy. When I’d first decided to leave the army and look for a private mercenary contract, my grandmother had warned me not to sign with any of the bargain companies. You couldn’t trust people who treated life cheaply, she’d said, because they were the ones who’d sell you out for nothing. And while no one would ever call the Eyes a low-cost operation, Rupert and Caldswell had made it abundantly clear that everything was expendable when measured against the threat of the phantoms, and that didn’t sit right with me at all.
I’d never thought of myself as a particularly good person. That wasn’t the sort of claim you could make when you killed for money and generally had a fun time doing it. But even though I’d probably shot more people throughout my career than all the Eyes put together, my hands were cleaner. I killed, sure, but I killed pirates and xith’cal raiders, armed enemies who fought back. I didn’t shoot civilians, I didn’t kill children, and I didn’t torture animals. I’d known the Eyes did the first two from the very beginning, but after experiencing the phantom’s panic myself, I knew now they did the last as well. Worse, they felt it was justified, a sacrifice to keep the universe safe, and that was what bugged me most of all.
I was no stranger to sacrifice. “My life for the Sainted King” was the first oath Paradoxian children learned to say. To die for king and country was the greatest honor a Paradoxian could achieve, but we were soldiers. We chose to die as heroes, but the daughters’ choice was made for them. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand why the Eyes used them, I just didn’t agree that all of our survival should be bought with the life of someone who neve
r even got a say. Brenton might have been crazy, but I agreed with him on one thing: what the Eyes did was wrong, and it had to stop.
By keeping the fight against the phantoms a secret, the Eyes made us all complicit in the cowardice that killed children so that everyone else wouldn’t have to be bothered. But life wasn’t a gift that was given to you. Survival was a prize we all fought for together, not a guarantee bought at the cost of an innocent life. Everyone knew that, which was why the Eyes kept the daughters hidden, because if word of what they were doing got out, it wouldn’t be panic over phantoms that tore the universe apart, it would be rage. Rage over what was being done to those poor girls, rage that they had made us murderers, too, without our knowledge. But I knew the truth now, and I refused to dishonor myself any longer.
I looked again at my clean hands, clenching my fingers tight. I hadn’t asked for this virus, but it was mine now, and I would be damned if I gave it to those child killers. I didn’t know why my king had seen fit to give this burden to me, but I would not let him down. I would use this plague as a weapon to make sure what happened to Ren and Rashid never happened again. I would stop the tragedies, and if I died in the process, at least I’d meet my end as a Paradoxian should, with my honor intact and my head held high. But so long as there was breath in my body, I would do whatever needed to be done to see this through, and I would never, ever go back to the Eyes.
But while all these noble promises made me feel a lot better, they actually made my immediate situation more dire, because now that seeking out the Eyes for help was synonymous with moral defeat, I had no idea where to go. Even if Brenton had miraculously survived the lelgis attack, I didn’t want to stay with a bunch of former Eyes who thought Maat’s death was the same thing as victory. If I left, though, I’d be on my own with no money, no ammo, and a busted leg. Forget the virus, I couldn’t even put my suit back on thanks to the bullet hole. Before I could even think about the long term, I needed a doctor, food, and a Paradoxian armorsmith, but where the hell was I going to find a—
