by Rachel Bach
“Enough,” he said, his voice shockingly cold. He’d been so warm to me for so long, I’d half forgotten he could sound like that. “How long have you been aware?”
“Since shortly before Caldswell handed me over,” Brenton replied.
“Then why didn’t you speak up earlier?” Rupert snapped.
“Easy, killer,” Brenton said, tilting his head. “We’re both traitors now. You don’t get to play high-and-mighty with me anymore.”
I looked back and forth between the men. There was a dynamic here I didn’t follow. I knew they didn’t like each other, but I’d thought the animosity was strictly professional. Apparently, I was wrong, because Rupert’s glare was very personal as he turned to Brenton and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked like he was trying to decide just how slowly to gut the older man, and I was starting to worry I’d made the wrong choice listening to the phantoms.
“What do you want?” Rupert said. “And make it quick. We don’t have time to play your games.”
“I never play games,” Brenton replied. “And what I want depends on Morris over there. She’s the one who sprung me.”
Brenton turned to me then, and I had to focus to keep from cringing at the sight of his symbiont’s battered face. “Thank you for that, by the way,” he said. “And for the record, despite what Charkov here might be implying, I wasn’t trying to give you the silent treatment. I couldn’t speak up until just a few minutes ago. The drugs make it … difficult to think clearly.”
“Why did they have you on anti-plasmex drugs?” I asked. “Are you—”
“Plasmex sensitive?” Brenton finished, shaking his head. “No more than most Eyes.” I arched an eyebrow at that, and Brenton explained. “You need a decent amount of natural plasmex to keep the symbiont running, but nothing out of the ordinary curve, and certainly nothing they’d need to drug. The drugs weren’t for my abilities. They were to dampen my plasmex aura so Maat couldn’t talk to me.”
“Why would Maat want to talk to you?” I asked.
I couldn’t see Brenton’s face through the mask, but it didn’t matter. I knew he was smiling. “Because she loves me.”
“She doesn’t love you,” Rupert said scornfully. “She was using you to kill herself. Maat is insane. She doesn’t love.”
“Just because she hates the rest of you doesn’t mean hate is all she has,” Brenton replied.
Rupert opened his mouth, but I raised my hand. “Actually, I think Brenton’s right.”
“He’s delusional,” Rupert said, dropping his voice. “You didn’t see what he did when he went rogue, Devi. He used to be one of our top-ranked Eyes. He was Caldswell’s own partner for years before Maat’s whispers started to get to him. Commander Martin had just taken over then. He ordered Brenton contained, but Caldswell convinced him to give him a second chance, and do you know what he did with it?”
I could guess, but Rupert was going to tell me anyway, so I let him finish.
“He killed his new partner plus five other Eyes,” Rupert said, glaring at the symbiont on the other side of the room. “He murdered his entire team in cold blood, stole their three daughters, and ran.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Brenton said with a shrug. “But so long as we’re talking about the past, why not tell her how you came after me like Caldswell’s attack dog and then killed the daughters we liberated when you couldn’t get to me?” He turned his alien mask in my direction. “Three little girls, Devi, can you imagine? Charkov here broke their necks like a farmer killing chickens.” He raised his hands and mimed a twisting motion, making Rupert go tense. “Crack, crack, crack.”
“I had to kill them because you let them degrade,” Rupert said, his voice so icy I was surprised I couldn’t see his breath. “You let Maat’s madness devour them.”
“I set them free,” Brenton said, his hoarse voice shaking with conviction. “Better they be mad and themselves than your mindless dolls. At least when the daughters were with us, we treated them like people.”
Rupert’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You used them just as much as we did.”
“Ah, but there isn’t any ‘we’ anymore, is there, Charkov?” Brenton replied with a cruel laugh. “You’re just as fallen as I am, and for not nearly as good a reason. I left to do what was right, to be a knight in shining armor for a girl who had no one to be her champion. You turned traitor because you got hooked on a sweet piece of Paradoxian—”
I had Sasha out before he could finish, my gun trained right at the sweet spot between his cloudy bug eyes. “That will be quite enough of that,” I said, making my voice as cold as Rupert’s. “In case you’ve forgotten, Brenton, we’re in enemy territory and we’re running out of time. Now, how do we get to Maat?”
“I could have told you that,” Rupert muttered behind me, but I motioned for him to shut up. The phantoms had told me to save Brenton, probably at Maat’s behest, and I was betting this was why. I certainly hadn’t done it for the pleasure of his company.
Brenton sighed and took a seat on an ammo crate. “Finding Maat isn’t the problem. It’s surviving the trip.”
He reached down, using his claw to trace a crude map of the Dark Star Station in the layer of dust that covered the metal ammo crate’s surface. “We’re here,” he said, tapping a spot halfway down the bottom ray. “And Maat is here.” He lifted his claw to tap the very tip of the ray on the station’s opposite side. “To reach her, we need to go all the way across, cutting through the center of the station below the command deck and around the primary generator.”
I whistled, calculating how much ground we’d have to cover. “That’s a lot of traps.”
“Actually, the first part isn’t bad. The real challenge comes when we enter Maat’s part of the station.” He spread his first two fingers to indicate the entirety of Maat’s ray of the star. “This entire wing is known as the kill box.”
“I thought this whole place was a kill box.”
“Not like this,” Brenton said. “The lab and Maat’s cell only take up a small portion at the very tip. The rest is a snaking corridor of blast-rated doors and walls broken up into fifteen compartmentalized checkpoints. You don’t have the credentials, they lock you in and blast you—with gas if they’re feeling generous, bullets if they’re not. There are also three break points.”
I frowned. “Break points?”
“Explosive rigged airlocks,” Rupert said, leaning down to draw three thin lines on Brenton’s map, dividing Maat’s ray neatly in thirds. “The checkpoints protect against a boarding, but if the Dark Star was ever attacked from the outside and was in danger of falling, command could blow any one of these points, detaching Maat’s prison so it could be picked up and ferried away to safety by the battleship on guard.”
“Like a lizard shedding its tail,” I muttered, only here, the tail was the important part. “What else?”
“I should think that’s enough,” Rupert said, crossing his arms. “There’s a reason no one has ever made it to Maat. We’ve gotten this far thanks to the power outage, but now that things are back online, I don’t know if we can even make it to the kill box, much less through. Once the guns are operational, it will be like shooting fish in a trap. We won’t have a chance.”
I ground my teeth in frustration. It did look impossible, but I couldn’t believe I’d made it all this way just to fail here because of a damn security system. I was about to ask Rupert if there was any chance of cutting the power again when Brenton suddenly spoke up.
“We absolutely have a chance.”
Rupert and I both glanced up to see Brenton leaning back, his chin raised proudly. “Unlike your doomsayer boyfriend, I’m actually older than this station, old enough to remember the Dark Star didn’t start out as a maze. This place used to be a normal four-corners starbase. Caldswell and I built it up over the years as Maat grew more dangerous and our needs changed, but the problem with building over old equipment is that there are some things, crucial parts o
f the infrastructure, that you just can’t alter no matter how much you spend.”
He paused dramatically, and I gave him a killing glare for his trouble. “Where are you going with this?”
“Exactly where you need to be,” he replied smugly. “Sometimes it’s the old dogs who know the best tricks, and I know one that might get us through the kill box if we move fast. But if we’re going to make it, we have to leave right now, no arguments and no backtalk.”
His scales made following his eyes impossible, but the tilt of his head told me he was looking straight at Rupert. Rupert returned the favor, scowling at Brenton like he meant to toss him into the hall for the other symbionts to slice into little tiny bits. As someone who’s stared down a lot of macho bullshit over her career, I didn’t begrudge him the hard feelings in the least, but I didn’t have time for them right now either.
“Let’s go, then,” I said.
“Devi!” Rupert hissed, but I just shrugged.
“It’s not like we’ll be any deader if he screws us over,” I reminded him. “I’ll take a crazy chance over no chance any day of the week.” I turned back to Brenton. “Ready?”
“Whenever you are,” he said, pushing himself to his feet.
I headed for the door, looking both ways before darting into the hall. Rupert came out right on my heels and took point at once, and though he was too polite to grumble, I knew he didn’t like this one bit. I sighed and promised myself I’d make it up to him later, if there was a later. For now, I ran like my life depended on it. Which, of course, it did.
According to the timers I’d set when Rupert had told me our time limits, we left the armory with two minutes, fifty seconds until the station’s security measures came back online. That wasn’t much time by anyone’s standards, especially with Brenton in such bad shape, but we were still two symbionts and a damn fine suit of powered armor. If we didn’t make it, no one could.
We went at a full run, choosing speed over stealth. I thought for sure we were going to get jumped any second, but we never even saw another person. Apparently, whoever was running the station was waiting for security to reboot, too, so they could kill us at a distance. A smart choice considering my record versus symbionts and how the tight hallway would eliminate their superior numbers advantage. I should have been disappointed we wouldn’t get a chance to thin their numbers with a few easy fights, but all I felt was smug. It was nice to finally get some damn respect.
We had fifty-eight seconds left when Brenton skidded to a halt in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable hallway. “Here we are.”
Rupert and I stopped as well, looking around. “Here where?”
Fast as we were going, I hadn’t bothered trying to follow Rupert’s memories, which meant I was completely lost. Since the hallways here looked more military industrial than military aggressive, I assumed we were in the middle of the station where they kept the power core, shield generators, and other key machinery. But rather than answer my question, Brenton grabbed an important-looking panel covered with warning stickers on the ceiling and yanked it down, breaking the latch to reveal an empty metal pipe just big enough for a person to crawl through.
“What’s that?” I asked, craning my head. “Air shaft?”
“Please,” Brenton said. “This isn’t amateur hour. None of the vents here are anywhere near big enough to crawl through.” He nodded up at the open pipe. “This is the shield feeder.”
I made a choking sound before I could stop myself. I didn’t know much about space station construction, but even I knew about shield feeders. The shields needed to protect something as huge as a space station required enormous amounts of power. Since you didn’t want generators that big on the outside of your battle station where they could get hit by stray fire, this often meant the heavy shielding plasma was generated wherever the power core was and then piped out to the station edges for projection. The stuff was crazy hot and crazy dangerous. Most places big enough to need feeder pipes kept them buried deep in the support girders for public safety, and now Brenton wanted us to climb inside one?
“Brenton,” I said with what I thought was impressive calm, all things considered. “The whole point of this is not to die.”
“Then we’ll have to move quickly,” Brenton said. “We are sitting on an unparalleled opportunity here. This pipe runs to the shield generator at the end of Maat’s wing, which means it runs directly over the kill box, skipping right over every checkpoint and trap. It’s a straight shot.”
“A straight shot to the head,” I snapped, glaring up at the dark hole above us. Sure the pipe was empty now, but: “If we’re in there when the shields come back online, we’re going to get flooded with superheated heavy shielding plasma. We’ll be cooked through before we can even scream.”
“Actually, I think Brenton has a point.” Rupert’s voice told me he really hated to admit that, but he was a professional, and he explained his logic quickly and efficiently despite his obvious loathing. “The Dark Star’s systems were never meant to be turned off completely, so they’re slow to come back online. The shields take the most power, which means they’ll come on last. Twenty minutes from power-up, assuming no damage.”
We’d lost ten already, so that gave us roughly ten minutes of clean pipe before we got baked. Not great odds, but then, we were talking about a straight shot, which was definitely preferable to a kill box. “I don’t know,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “You sure this will take us all the way? I mean, a pipe running straight over a death maze sounds like a pretty obvious vulnerability.”
Brenton shrugged. “We couldn’t impede the flow if we wanted shields on that side of the station, and anyway, the pipe is normally full of superheated, pressurized plasma. Not exactly a viable path of invasion.”
He had a point, and we were running out of time, so, with a long sigh and a prayer to my king, I hopped up and grabbed the edge of the panel Brenton had just yanked down.
Unsurprisingly, considering the power had gone out less than thirty minutes ago, the pipe was burning hot. So much so that I could feel it radiating up even through my suit’s thermal shielding. I paused just long enough to make sure I wasn’t going to get burned before I swung myself into the pipe, which now felt much smaller than it had looked from the floor. There was room for my suit lying down, but just barely, and though I could pull myself forward on my forearms, I couldn’t turn around.
The combination was close enough to the mines that my heart started pounding. Fortunately, my panic was staved off by the fact that I wasn’t underwater and, more importantly, I could see this time. That might not sound like much since there wasn’t anything to look at other than the pipe going off into the distance, but seeing all that open space in front of me helped me get over the heat and the terrible closeness of the walls, and I was able to pull myself forward after only a few seconds of hesitation.
Rupert came up next, then Brenton, who closed up the pipe behind him, blocking off the light and hopefully any chance of us being followed. I set my timer and focused on moving as quickly and quietly as possible, but even with my suit’s coolers, the residual heat from the metal quickly grew intolerable. I was sweating buckets before we cleared the first hundred feet, and I had no idea how Brenton and Rupert kept going, though I was sure the promise of impending death was a motivating factor.
All things considered, we made excellent time. Eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds later, my floodlights hit the coil-covered wall of the shield projector. We’d made it to the end of the line; now we just had to get out.
As we’d been crawling, I’d seen several more emergency hatches like the one Brenton had pulled down, spaced at regular intervals. Sure enough, there was one at the tunnel’s end. I broke the latch as quietly as I could and lifted the panel, and then let out a relieved breath when I saw it let out into a crawl space and not, say, a gun emplacement. Even so, the power was almost completely restored now, which meant I could see the people gathered through
the cracks in the drop ceiling.
I motioned for Rupert and Brenton to be silent and crawled out, using my suit’s stabilizer to make sure I made no sound as I let myself down onto the metal grate that shielded the pipes and wires from view. Rupert came down next, followed by Brenton, who quickly replaced the panel. Not a second too soon, either. I could already feel the pipe vibrating as the shield prepared to come back online. Without that panel, we would have gotten covered in molten shield sludge. With it, though, we were safe for the moment, giving me time to examine our enemies.
Symbionts don’t show up on density sensors, and the hot pipe beside us blinded my thermo, so I couldn’t count how many people were in the room below. Going by the muffled voices that drifted up through the drop ceiling, however, I was guessing quite a few. My density scanner picked up the rest of the room just fine, drawing me a picture of a single room twice as long as it was wide with a door at either end. Thick walls, too, nice and defensible. Unless, of course, your enemy came from above.
I grinned and turned my attention to my suit, arming all of my grenades and setting the variable payloads. When everything was ready, I shot Rupert and Brenton a pointed look and raised three fingers. Two fingers. One finger.
When I had nothing left but a fist, I slammed it down on the metal ceiling panel beside me. The drop ceiling crumpled like cardboard under the blow, and I leaned forward, letting my ordnance payload fall. The ting ting of grenades hitting the metal floor was almost musical, and I was treated to a collective gasp as everyone in the room below simultaneously realized what that sound meant. By that point, though, it was too late.
Before they could run, before I could even pull my arms back to cover my head, the whole room exploded in a flash of light that whited out my cameras. As soon as it faded, I shoved myself forward, rolling headfirst through the hole I’d made in the ceiling.
Because I mostly worked ships and compounds, my ordnance was ship-safe. Even when I dumped my full payload like I just had, the combined explosions wouldn’t do more than throw a symbiont around. They did, however, make a hell of a lot of smoke, and smoke was what I was after.
