Keller heard the crashing of feet on the ladder and angry voices in the corridor.
This is the stupidest plan in the history of stupid plans, she thought.
She threw open the top of the two closest crates. The first held three defused greenhouse bombs nestled in quarantine fabric, heavy as the kettlebells in the gym she used on Europa and just under the size of her head. She kept them as swaddled as possible as she shoved them into the next crate, the one holding the green B9s they’d picked up the second week in the spinfield. Natalie would scream at her. Natalie would tell her that she was crazy, that they didn’t really know how this shit worked. If the Vai show up you could be dead in seconds, get your hands off of that.
But Natalie wasn’t here.
And neither were the Vai.
Small blessings, she thought.
A woman’s voice. “We’re not going back to HQ?”
“Not yet. That R&D cit says we’re not done.”
“You don’t think Aurora’s picked that corpse clean?”
Laughter. “I think there’s plenty left for us.”
With a swallow of revulsion, Keller yanked the first crate closed and locked it, then slid herself into the one she’d nearly emptied, drawing the top closed and clicking it into place. The round, cold weapon that was left pressed into her belly, and she gathered herself around it, holding it between her chest and her knees like a baby to keep it from rolling around, turning herself into a trembling human quarantine blanket. The footsteps grew close, and she shivered and went still, remembering too late that she hadn’t gone to the bathroom in a few hours. And that she had no idea how long she was going to be trapped.
Shit. And then: Oh, God, I hope not literally.
She bit her bottom lip, five seconds away from terrified, screaming laughter.
Next came the crashing sound of boots on the deck, the hollering of enemy voices, the mechanical whir of self-propelled dollies. The dolly her crate was on jerked to the left as someone fired it up and pushed it out toward the umbilicals.
“This thing’s unlatched,” the first voice said.
“So fucking latch it,” said the other.
Her hand went instinctively for the multi-tool in her pocket, ready to defend herself with the cutting edge of the knife, but all she heard was the double click of the crate’s latches falling into place.
The person pushing the dolly made an abrupt right, and Keller’s shoulder hit the side of the box and wrenched with a sudden, wrong pain. She bit her bottom lip to keep herself from crying out. Keller ached, then, the blank greenhouse bomb pushing, impossibly cold and viciously round, at her belly and her muscles and her bones. As the gravity fell away, she realized: this was it, she was leaving Twenty-Five, possibly forever.
She could tell the moment they hit the full gravity of the enemy ship by the breath that was knocked out of her chest, and she counted—forty steps, two lefts, and a lift—before the dolly came to a rest.
Even the air smelled different here.
The stevedores worked around her for an interminable time, lifting boxes, chattering and grumbling. Her leg muscles cramped and groaned. Time passed in monotonous skeins until she felt an ache in her stomach, felt the hot stink of a lack of oxygen, a desert in her mouth, unwelcome pressure against her bladder.
She set her jaw. I’ll piss myself over my own dead body—
She shoved her nose against the seam where lid met body, then took long, quiet breaths of sweet, recycled air, listening to the engines. The grav-drive on the competitor vessel spun with a light, sweet soprano, a marker of a newer Kimbright-Hawn or a late-model Hansen, which meant this Company had cash to invest. The spin rate ran longer than Twenty-Five’s, which meant the bones of the ship were heavier, which meant—a cruiser? A hauler? Which Company felt they needed a cruiser to take down a ship as small and unimportant as Twenty-Five?
You should take it as a compliment, she heard.
Ash’s voice again.
Great, she thought. I need to pee so badly that I’m hearing things.
Ash’s tough, sweet laughter. You were hearing things before.
Keller heard Ash’s voice nearer, now, as if the woman had slipped into the box beside her, as if her lover’s soul had slipped into the dead weapon she cradled and caused it to speak. It felt warm, almost welcoming, like something had kindled inside at her presence.
The moment Solano got on the line, I should have figured out how important that weapon was going to be. I got distracted by the shinies, by the thought that—that we could maybe, that Ash—Keller gulped down the desert behind her teeth, unable to finish. She closed her eyes, black against black, and tried to sleep.
When she woke, it was quiet outside. The stevedores were gone for the first time since her arrival on the competitors’ ship. Keller pressed her fingers against the top of the crate, feeling the ache of her cramped muscles. Whatever thirst-driven psychosis that had conjured Ash up and slipped her into the aching dysphoria of the situation slithered away, and she was suddenly afflicted by a starving clarity, carrying a wrenching empty knot where the rest of her life had been.
She placed her palms against the top of the box and pushed up, feeling a solid, curving resistance at the box’s standard latches, seeing a slight curve of light through a seam. The box had been placed underneath another, but the weight was light, and Keller was sure she could dislodge it by kicking hard enough—if her cramped legs would play along. She forced herself to relax, to listen, to breathe; she heard nothing but the spin of the engine and the soft croon of the unfamiliar ship systems around her, but no footsteps or human voices.
Time to go.
Keller twisted her body so that she was lying on her back. She pushed her foot as hard as she could against the top of the box, fighting off the blinding ache of a leg cramp. The latches stuck. She grabbed the dead boltgun from her waistband and held it again by its damaged barrel; straining the latches and hinge by pressing her knee against them, she slammed the butt of the gun over and over into the hinge until the force of it made her hands numb, until she was convinced someone would hear her, until the hinge slipped apart and she could push the lid far enough to shove her hand out, flip the latch, and open the crate.
The box above her clattered to the floor with a piercing racket. Keller blinked away the pain of the sudden light, and then peeked over the edge of the box.
Keller was in a large cargo bay. This ship was no freelancer; it was Company quality, newer than her own had been. The deck shone in the brassy way of newly installed plasteel, devoid of deckplates dented and darkened by years of shuffling feet and rolling dollies. She hauled herself to a sitting position, then attempted to push herself up and out.
The attempt failed.
Keller felt a moment of addled panic as her body refused to work, as her arms cramped, as her legs filled with blood, as she fell back, numb, against the bottom of the crate. She stretched one limb at a time, feeling the serrated, needlepoint agony of her blood speeding up, feeling returning to unused muscles, trying not to whimper. When she felt like her legs were hers again, she swung her feet over the side of the box, climbing down the stack of crates with the confidence of a small child on the playground, coming to an ignoble stop as her foot slipped and she hit the deck, face-first, with an audible crack.
Picking herself up, wiping blood from her already broken nose with the orange armband she’d taken from the man she killed, she looked around for shelter. A bathroom. She needed to pee. She needed to clean herself up, to get rid of her Auroran clothes. She felt the bawling need for water in her bones, the angry complaint of an empty stomach. She had no idea how long she’d been in the box.
Too long, whispered Ash.
She slid the damaged boltgun into her belt and limped to the cargo bay door, on the verge of the unknown, peering into the empty hall. She knew she should turn left, head for the pod bay, make an attempt at escape.
But Sharma’s zero-point theory echoed in her brai
n, bright and loud.
A proper boundless energy solution had the power to change everything. It meant an unbelievable amount of savings for the Company that owned it, and a huge push toward an end to the scarcity that had defined space travel since humans had thrown themselves away from Earth two hundred years before. It meant batteries that never died, tools and boltguns that didn’t need to be charged, the easy ability to power entire stations, fleets, colonies. Entire planets.
And if that Company could use it to replace the corporate reliance on celestium—why, that would be a freedom beyond anything Keller had ever imagined. How far could she go, if she never needed to return to port? What would happen to the indenture system, to the need for people to earn their way in the world? It could reshape the entire scope of human industry and culture. It meant wars that never had to happen for resources that would never run dry—
No, she thought, her mouth a desert. It means wars that never end.
Wars that have already begun.
She’d been imagining the weapon as Aurora’s all this time, but the scientists who had died on London hadn’t had the time to truly understand what they were looking at. It had belonged to someone else before this. If she didn’t do something about that, it would continue to change hands. People had already died for it, and people would continue to die for it. They would never stop fighting for that kind of advantage.
Well, whoever Ramsay is working for, they can’t have it. I have to get this back to Aurora, she thought. For me, for Ashlan, for all of us. For everyone.
How do you think Aurora will be any different? Ash’s whisper.
Hovering near the cargo bay doors, on the verge of the unknown, Keller had her first quiet doubt.
She didn’t like how it felt.
16
For the second time that week, Ash stood unsteady in alien darkness, trembling and astonished to be alive.
Her world had receded to a black-blood silence, the bare yellowing behind the trees the last evidence of the turn of the planet from its star. As if loosed from a spell, she stumbled forward against one of the bulky trunks, coughing, the pain of the molecular weapon still incandescent on her skin. Natalie struggled up from where she’d fallen, crossed the distance between them, and threw her arms around Ash’s shoulders.
Once again, Ash shook in Natalie’s tight grasp. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move. She had been so certain that she was going to die, so sure that the alien forest would be the last thing she saw. Her knees buckled. Natalie helped her to the ground, then sat herself.
“I should be dead,” Ash whispered. She couldn’t manage more than those few words before her lungs demanded to be filled again, and all she could do was suck down sulfur-tinged air. Ash licked her dry, unburned lips. She touched her shoulder, her neck, where she’d felt the certain crackling of her skin to black; her blue expedition jacket was tattered and burned, but her skin was as olive and unbroken as ever.
“How did you do that?” said Natalie.
“I … ran. I was fast enough.” Ash’s words stumbled, caught on her recalcitrant tongue.
Natalie kept her close for a few seconds longer, then released her, looking from Ash’s shoulders to her torso to her eyes. “No. I was fast enough. That wasn’t it. It killed you.”
“It was going to. Going to pull me apart.” Ash felt the panic spin up again, threatening to scramble into her shaking limbs and stay there.
“But how—”
“I don’t know. Stopped by itself. Changed its mind.”
Natalie shook her head. “That’s impossible.”
Pain squeezed at the center of Ash’s chest, and she grabbed Natalie’s hand, crushing her fingers, as if she couldn’t believe the other woman was real. She felt like she was back in the tunnel on Bittersweet, dirt shoved down her throat, crawling in the darkness, her world pushing in around her. “We can’t think about that right now. The shuttle—”
“It’s gone,” Natalie said, slurring her words. “They’re gone.”
“They might have—”
“They didn’t listen to me.” Natalie’s voice broke.
Ash’s vision sharpened as she calmed, and she drew her hand across Natalie’s head injury—a bloody mess at the hairline just above her temple. The cut was shallow; the blood made it look worse than it was. “Hey. You hit your head.”
“I’m fine.” Natalie set her jaw and attempted to rise, wavering. “I’m not the one who ate a screamer and lived.”
Grateful to put her attention anywhere other than the burning residue of her encounter with the weapon, Ash steadied Natalie’s shoulders with her hands.
“You’ve probably got a concussion,” Ash said.
Natalie made a face. “Don’t have time for that.”
“We have plenty of time. You’re the one who told me that the detonation of a molecular means that the Company waits at least an hour before sending a rescue team. And I’ve got my monitor, so they’ll know I’m still alive, at least. We have, what, fifty-six minutes?”
“You’re slurring.”
“So are you.”
“It’s fine.”
Ash looked down at her hands. In the boozy aftermath of the adrenaline shot of near death, she hadn’t noticed that her hands were shaking again. She’d have to tell Julien the half-life of this trihexphenidyl crap was—
Oh, hell. Dr. Julien.
She looked around into the darkening forest, then reached into her pack and took out a bandage, pressing it against Natalie’s forehead. “Here. Keep pressure on the wound and stay here. I need to find Dr. Julien.”
“Think he made it?”
“He was ahead of you,” Ash said.
Natalie coughed—a welcome, human sound against the dusky, crackling chirping of the alien wildlife, even as the cough worried Ash. “I’ll try to raise Rio on my local while you’re gone—though, if the shuttle took out the ansible, we might just have to wait in the black until they feel comfortable breaking the molecular quarantine. Could be a few hours.”
Ash smirked. “Weren’t we just playing this game? ‘Sit around and wait for Rio’?”
“Yeah, well, we’re good at it.” Natalie’s fingers lingered against her shoulder, and for a moment, Ash wondered if there was forgiveness in them.
“Go get him,” she said, pushing Ash away, leaning back against the tree. She reached for the talkie at her belt as Ash turned back to the forest, picking her way through the brambles and bushes. Julien’s path was easy enough to follow—the disturbed leaves and the footprints in the loamy black soil were all easy enough pointers to the degree of the man’s panic.
She called his name as Natalie’s position was swallowed by the creeping branches behind her. The forest returned nothing but the dusky sound of wind in the trees and tiny creatures in the bushes, singing down the sun. The sulfur taste grew as she walked farther, fetid and slippery, coating Ash’s tongue with a foul taste she couldn’t spit out. As the forest tightened around her, she marked her path by worrying bark off the trees, until she saw Julien’s jacket—his blue executive’s jacket, his golden citizens’ tags, his name in white stitching—impaled on a shattered trunk, and the bag of medical supplies he’d been carrying opened to the sky, syringes and bottles and autobandages scattered.
“Dr. Julien!” she cried. Then, even though she knew she shouldn’t put a citizen’s first name in her indenture’s mouth: “Aram!”
Nothing.
Ash inhaled again, testing the air; on the tongue of the sulfur air was the faint smell of flame. Her lungs burned, and her body labored to keep up. If she went much farther, she’d find herself out of oxygen. He had to be close.
A small, loud voice in her hindbrain began to panic.
All right, calm down, Ash told herself. You’re either on the outer range of the atmospinners or the madness is kicking in, and either way, you don’t want to be alone when that happens. That poor guy is gone.
She dropped into a squat, gathering the medic
al supplies from a puddle, wiping the water on her pants leg, and was going for a second syringe of trihexphenidyl when she heard the whine of a boltgun safety going off.
She felt a press of metal against the back of her head and knew exactly what it was: the round, tough, business end of an Aurora duty boltgun.
“Stop.” A man’s voice, dark and shaking. “Turn around.”
The voice was Julien’s, ragged and frightened and just as slurred as Natalie’s. She lifted her hands behind her head and turned. Adrenaline kicked in. She felt frantic, wanting to breathe, wanting to run, unable to do either. Julien’s face was bloody, dirt-stained. He’d fallen, or tripped, or slammed straight into a tree.
“You were going to take my stuff and leave me here?”
“I wasn’t going to do that,” Ash said, keeping her palms open, near her ears. “I came looking for you. I thought—when you didn’t respond, I thought it got you.”
Julien’s eyes were dark and desperate. On the ship—even ten minutes ago—he’d seemed cool, cosmopolitan, executive. Now the fear in his eyes betrayed how young he really was, how out of his element he was in the threatening embrace of the alien forest.
“How did you survive?” he said.
“I ran. I just ran. I outran it. Like you did.”
“That’s not what happened,” he said.
“I swear, on my contract—”
The gun whined, and he raised his voice. “No. That’s not what happened. I saw it eat you. You were glowing—I could see right through you, like I could see through Marley, could see the light gobble up your bones—and then you just—you just lived.”
Ash still felt the incandescent afterburn of the weapon in her throat. Above them, Ash heard the rustle of feathers, the flapping of wings, the crack of a branch breaking. “I don’t think you saw what you thought you saw.”
“What are you?” he whispered. “Are you Vai?”
“That’s insane.”
“It would explain the test results. You know, I was at Grenadier,” Julien said. In the near dark, Ash could see his Adam’s apple bobbing. “With R&D. I was there. I saw the final massacre, the shit loosed on the 121st. The Vai mechs waded right in, dropped them. And the 121st, they—” His voice shredded for a moment. “They died just like Marley. Glowing. Screaming.”
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