Hold Fast Through the Fire

by K. B. Wagers

  As she reached for the chain holding his cuffed arms above his head, Melanie stopped. Jenks watched as disbelief followed by fury screamed across the woman’s face. “You froze my accounts?”

  Nika smiled. “Took a little longer than I’d hoped, but Sapphi had a lot to track down, didn’t she? She got all of them, I’m guessing? Even the ones you didn’t think we knew about.”

  Melanie snarled and punched Nika twice.

  Right in the wound in his side.

  “You fucking—” Jenks broke off when Nika’s legs gave out and he tried, but failed, to hold in his gasp of pain.

  “Still bougie, gutter trash?” Melanie asked, then stepped up onto the ledge behind them and released the tension on the chain holding Nika’s cuffs. He collapsed to the ground, his cuffed hands pressed to his side.

  The tension on Jenks’s arms released a moment later as Melanie hit the same release and Jenks breathed a sigh of relief that the chain was long enough to allow her to scramble over to Nika. “Hold still.” She pulled his shirt up to examine the wound and swore.

  “It’s fine,” he whispered with a weak smile.

  “Like a fucking dog surrounded by fire fine,” she snapped, trying to tamp down the fear crawling up her throat.

  “You’ll need this.” Melanie tossed a med kit at Jenks, who snarled in response. “Look at it this way, Chief Khan, now we’re on a time limit. You’ll want to tell your people to hurry and get my accounts unfrozen.”

  “If he dies I’m going to take you apart.” Jenks didn’t even look up when she said it, all of her focus on bandaging his wound with the grimly archaic supplies she’d been handed. “What the hell? Have you been hoarding these since the Collapse?”

  “You’re infinitely amusing, but that mouth of yours is going to get someone killed one of these days,” Melanie said.

  “Let’s all hope it’s you,” Jenks replied as she helped Nika sit up so she could wrap the bandage around his middle. She pressed her forehead to his for a moment and then turned to Melanie. “Let me call my lieutenant or so help me neither this chain nor those goons behind you will be able to stop me from killing you.”

  Max sat in a chair in the kitchen and patted Doge as the conversation swirled around her. The dog was pressing so hard against her leg it was probably going to bruise, but the sensation was strangely calming.

  “Jenks is scared,” Doge said over the com.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Can feel it. Can’t find her, but can feel her.”

  Max frowned, unsure how to respond to the ROVER, who shouldn’t be able to feel anything, let alone understand what it meant. “I don’t blame you for being scared,” she whispered.

  “Not me. Jenks. She was angry before. Not scared. Jenks is so rarely scared. Now she is and I do not know why?”

  Max looked down at the ROVER. He was talking only to her, not over the team-wide com, and he lifted his metal head to rest it on her knee. “How do you know she’s scared, Doge?”

  “Does it matter?” The lights in his eyes flickered through a range of colors before settling back to his normal cool blue shade. Then they flashed red. “We need to go help her. I do not want her to be scared.”

  “I know, but we don’t know where she is, buddy.”

  “Then we should go find her.”

  “Max, I’ve got an incoming call for you,” Sapphi said from across the room.

  “Who is it?” Max asked.

  “It’s Jenks.”

  The sound in the room dropped to zero.

  “Put it on the main screen, incoming but not outgoing video.”

  “Got it.”

  The image resolved and Max felt Doge vibrate at the sight of Jenks. But she wasn’t alone; Melanie Karenina was standing next to her with a gun to her head and there was blood on Jenks’s hands when she raised them and rubbed at her cheek.

  “Jenks, are you okay?” Max asked.

  “She’s fine, Lieutenant Carmichael,” Melanie replied.

  “Where’s Nika?” Stephan asked.

  “He’s fine. Bleeding a little—okay, a lot, but it’s not life-threatening. Was that Commander Yevchenko? Back from the dead?”

  Stephan gestured at Sapphi and Melanie’s smile widened as the picture resolved itself on their end so she could see them.

  “Well, I, for one, am glad you’re not dead. Is Luis still around?”

  “What do you want, Melanie?”

  “I’m not injured,” Doge said. “N was stabbed in fight. M just punched him and he’s bleeding a lot. She knows accounts frozen.”

  Max didn’t look down at Doge when the dog started talking over the com again. Jenks still had her hands up, her index finger restlessly tapping against the side of her throat.

  “What are you saying, Doge?” Max murmured, trying to keep her mouth from moving.

  “Don’t know where we are. G here. Six goons plus M and G.”

  It was hard to focus on both the ROVER and Stephan’s conversation with Melanie, so she let him do his thing and concentrated on what the dog was saying.

  When she got it all, she went back to listening to Stephan.

  “We’ll meet, then. Discuss terms. You can give me my money and I’ll give you your people back.” Melanie glanced downward and smiled. “I’d hurry. He doesn’t look well.”

  Max gave Jenks a little nod before the screen went black.

  Scott’s low curse rolled through the room. “What the fuck did she do to Nika?”

  “He got stabbed in the bar,” Max replied, and Stephan raised an eyebrow at her.

  “You know that how?”

  “Doge, go to external speaker. Give me the full playback.”

  The ROVER complied and Stephan frowned as he recited the same thing over again.

  “Where did he get that?”

  “Jenks,” Luis said. He brought his own hands up and tapped on his throat. “She was communicating. Doge is the only one who caught it.”

  “Sapphi, give me the playback without sound,” Stephan ordered. A few moments later he nodded. “It’s Morse code. I missed it. I was watching Melanie.”

  “Correct. That is what I’m here for, Commander Yevchenko. Jenks taught me. She said it was a good thing for me to know.”

  Tivo laughed. “Trust Jenks to have taught her dog Morse code.”

  “We need to get moving. That location she gave us is pretty far from the outpost,” Scott said.

  “I know those coordinates,” Chae said. “That’s a dangerous area, lots of washouts and unstable ground.”

  “They are no doubt already there and will be able to pick their spot,” Stephan replied. “The only thing we have going for us is that Melanie wants to make a deal and she wants her money back.”

  “Why does she only want Zuma to show up for this meeting if she wants us to take Grant into custody?” Tivo asked, and Max realized she’d missed more than she thought of the conversation.

  “Because that means there will only be four of you versus their eight—at minimum. She’s hoping you’ll be concerned enough about Nika that you’ll be more willing to agree to her terms,” Stephan replied. “She’ll try to pull something; I know her well enough to know that. I don’t think she’s really interested in turning Grant over to us, no matter what she said. We’ll send you in for the handoff, but the rest of us will be stationed here and here.” He brought up a map on the screen and pointed at the location.

  It was a large washed-out gulley at the canyon’s edge where the landscape flattened out and spread into the flatland in one direction, while on the other side was a sheer drop-off into a deeper part of the canyon. Max made a face. “That’s a shit location. There’s no cover.”

  “Yeah, she knows that. It’s probably also why she reopened Nika’s wound, to keep us from arguing over the meeting place. Melanie wants control of this—it fits with everything else she’s done so far.”

  “I don’t like her,” Doge announced. “She’s made Jenks scared.”


  The dog’s comment dropped a second blanket of silence on the room. Max shared a look with Scott, who got to his feet.

  “Well, like it or not, this is what we’re doing. Let’s get our shit and get out there.”

  Thirty-Eight

  “You all right?”

  Chae looked at Max for just a moment and then returned to the task of landing Zuma on the edge of the meeting spot. There weren’t words for everything rolling around in their head right now, though a strange calm had descended on the whole ship, Chae included.

  Luis and Tivo were with them, but the others had come in on ST-1’s ship, to be split and stationed at strategic points both above and within the canyon yawning to their left.

  Melanie may have picked this spot, but Stephan was determined to make the most of it, and with Chae’s help they’d been able to do just that. Chae knew this canyon inside and out, knew where all the hidden tunnels were—and more important, which ones were still probably open even after the heavy spring rains.

  The canyon continued to their right, the washed-out portion running only forty meters or so before the walls dropped sharply again.

  “Chae?”

  “Sorry.” They shook their head. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

  “Dog in a fire fine? Or actually fine?”

  “What?”

  She laughed weakly. “Sorry, I was trying to—never mind—I don’t have Jenks’s sense of humor.”

  Chae reached for her hand. “They’ll be okay. We’ll make the handoff and get them back.”

  Max squeezed their fingers once before letting go. “You’re right. Melanie won’t risk ruining her chance at a deal.”

  “I still don’t want to make a deal with her, LT.”

  “Me either, but we don’t have much choice. Not with Jenks and Nika still in danger.”

  “Why not just go in force, then? We’ve got the proof from Julia—everything we need to bring all of them down. She’s got to know that. I don’t trust her. What if she’s planning something else?”

  “Again—this is the way we can keep our people safe. But you’re right: she most likely is planning something, Chae. Because here’s the thing about rich people—pre-Collapse and post—they care more about their money than anything else.” Max frowned in thought.

  “What is it, LT?”

  “Just a—hey, Sapphi? How easy is it to make it look like Melanie’s accounts are unfrozen?”

  The ensign made a face, tapping her hand on the top of Doge’s head. “Not easy. Why?”

  “Chae has a very good point: we don’t actually need Melanie to bring Tieg down. At this point we’re negotiating purely for Nika and Jenks’s safety. Once we have that, all bets are off, right?”

  “I could unfreeze them and then rescind the order. It’s risky, though, Max. If it happens while she’s still got them, her reaction will not be good.”

  “I know.”

  “I feel like they’d both be on board with this plan,” Chae whispered. “If it meant Melanie wasn’t going to get away.”

  “Maybe, but it still means putting them at risk and I won’t do it without their approval.”

  “They agreed to the risk.”

  “Not for this.”

  Max watched the shame flicker across Chae’s face.

  “LT, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you didn’t,” she cut them off. “It’s all right.” If anything, the reminder was for herself, that she wouldn’t do the very thing she’d been so angry with Nika and Stephan over. Even while her mind was spinning for some way to tell both Nika and Jenks what they had planned and get approval.

  Sapphi still didn’t have them on coms and there was no way to tell if Melanie had cracked the encryption and could listen in to those or monitor the chats. Whatever Max did would have to be verbal.

  The memory of an old TV show Jenks had foisted on her surfaced and Max frowned again as she headed down the stairs of the bridge.

  Would it be enough?

  “I know that look, LT,” Sapphi said. “What is it?”

  “I might have an idea.” She switched on her com. “Stephan, you copy?”

  “Here.”

  “I have an idea, not sure if it will work, though. Permission to give it a try and we’ll just go back to plan A if Jenks doesn’t catch my signal?”

  There was a moment of silence, then Stephan spoke. “Is it dangerous?”

  “More than what we’re already doing? No.”

  “All right, permission granted.”

  Tamago, Luis, and Tivo met them at the already opened airlock and silently waited for Max and the others to shrug into their harnesses before passing over their swords. Doge was sitting nearby and Max put a hand on his head.

  “Doge—”

  “Lieutenant Carmichael, please do not ask me to stay behind.”

  “Doge, you can come,” she said. “But if you shoot anyone, make sure it’s not lethal, and you cannot shoot until I say so.”

  “Noted, Lieutenant.” Doge jumped from the doorway, landing easily in the shifting red dirt.

  Max followed Luis out of the Interceptor, squinting against the late-afternoon light cutting through the canyon.

  “Here they come,” Luis murmured from her side. “What’s this new plan you’ve got?”

  “It’s not much different from the current one, just involves not letting Melanie get away. Sapphi thinks she can unfreeze and then refreeze her accounts, we just need to make sure Nika and Jenks are safe before Melanie realizes what we’ve done.”

  Max didn’t look away from the transport as it dipped down into the washout. Grant was driving, Melanie next to him. Jenks and Nika were in the back surrounded by three guards.

  “I see three more targets behind the rocks on your one o’clock,” Stephan said over the coms. “Scott and I are in position. The others are in the tunnel, headed your way. They’ll take those three out first.”

  Nika leaned on Jenks as they got out of the transport. He was paler than usual and Max could see the lines of tension on both his face and Jenks’s.

  “They’re both cuffed, hands in front,” she murmured, bringing up her gun as the group drew closer. The guards responded by bringing their own weapons up until Melanie lifted her hands with a smile.

  “There’s no need for such hostility. Luis, how are you?”

  He looked past her to Jenks and Nika. “You okay, Dai?” he asked.

  “Better when we’re done here,” she replied.

  “Ms. Karenina.” Max handed her gun to Tamago and stepped forward. “We’re here as requested.”

  “I recall saying just the members of Zuma’s Ghost.”

  Max didn’t bat an eyelash. “Well, we were short two so I made a command decision. Couldn’t let you have too much leverage.” She looked to Jenks as she spoke. “Sapphi’s on the coms with Hardison right now. Check your accounts.”

  Hardison? Jenks mouthed when Melanie and Grant were distracted. Max allowed herself only the slightest of smiles, hoping that her teammate would make the connection on her own. The quick thumbs-up from Jenks seemed to confirm it.

  “Well, Carmichael, you came through,” Melanie said, gesturing to Grant. “Uncuff them.” She backed off with the guards and Max took a few steps forward, catching Jenks when Grant shoved her over and pushing her in Luis’s direction without taking her eyes off of Nika.

  Grant didn’t notice Melanie getting back into the transport as he unlocked Nika’s cuffs.

  “Mr. Grant, I regret to inform you that I no longer have need of your services.”

  He whipped around to stare at Melanie. “You b—”

  Max jumped forward, putting her shoulder into Grant and knocking him back a step as she grabbed for Nika. She spun him out of the way, covering him with her body as shots rang out.

  Nika landed in the dirt hard, Max on top of him.

  “Sorry,” she said in his ear as she rolled off him, dragging him behind the dubious safety of a large rock. “Tamago!”
she hollered, and then was gone.

  “Right here. Stay down, Nika.” Tamago slid to a stop next to him, med kit in hand. “Let me see.”

  “It’s fine. Just slap a patch on it for me so I can get up.” Nika could see Melanie from where he was as she leaped from the transport and ran for the canyon.

  “Excuse me? Beyond the gunshots whizzing around, you’ve been stabbed.”

  “Tama, come on. Don’t make me order you.”

  “You’ve lost a lot of blood, Nik, and it’s messing with your head,” they said, pulling out a heal patch. “But I get it, and this is nasty but not life-threatening or I’d never let you go. Looks like Stephan put a shot into the engine of Melanie’s transport and at least one of the goons is down. Jenks and Chae took off after Grant.”

  “Where’s Max?”

  “She followed Melanie.” Tamago smoothed down the patch. “I put some numbing agent on there, too, but you’re not invincible so don’t act like it. It’s going to hurt cleaning it later and I’m going to have to do a thorough job because you’re being pushy.” They pulled their sword free and pressed it into his hand. “That way.” They pointed into the canyon. “And Sapphi says to tell you that Melanie’s accounts have been refrozen.”

  Sapphi comes through again.

  Nika sprinted after Max. Melanie had turned and run for the canyon, dodging behind the cover of the scrub brush. He slid over the top of a rock, Tamago’s sword in hand, landing on the balls of his feet and continuing on.

  He heard the clash of swords, ducked under a massive boulder that had tumbled from the top of the canyon, and slid to a stop.

  Max and Melanie were locked in a fight in the hollowed-out circle of the canyon floor. Their swords rang together, Max’s matte black against the shining silver of Melanie’s blade, and then separated.

  “You’re really going to be unsporting about it and go two on one?” Melanie asked as Nika circled around her.

  “Trust me,” he said. “If I had a gun I’d shoot you right now.”

  Melanie smiled and lunged at Max, who managed to sidestep enough that the tip of the woman’s sword hit her on the outside of her shoulder rather than in her heart, where Melanie had aimed.