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Sunkiller Copyright © 2022 by Variant Publications

Book design and layout copyright © 2022 by JN Chaney

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

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No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.

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SUNKILLER

BOOK ONE

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1

The starship’s bulkhead shuddered under Chase Weston’s palm, a warhorse chafing at the bit, ready to charge into battle. Power coursed through the metal, nuclear fire slaved to the arcane inner workings of the Soong-Tierney drive, shredding the fabric of space like a boat propeller churning just beneath the surface. He couldn’t hope to understand it, had long ago ceased trying. If the best minds of the Twenty-First Century hadn’t been able to explain the S-T effect, then a beat-up former Army Ranger didn’t have a chance in hell. But he felt its power through the hull, just as surely as all of human civilization had felt it these last thirty years.

“You’d better get your ass strapped in, Weston,” Priyanka told him, not bothering to look away from the controls of the Tamar. “If the Alliance has Surface-to-Air Missiles, you’re going to wind up a wet spot on the bulkhead when I start evasive maneuvers.”

Chase grinned, throwing an off-handed salute at Priyanka Ambedkar’s back as he retreated down the steps from the cockpit.

“I’m heading to the drop bay,” he told her. “Gotta get the team ready to go.” He caught himself against the railing, stealing one last look at the main screen, which showed the view of the planet’s dark side. “You know, Pri, I’m old enough to remember before all this shit. Before the S-T drive, I mean. Back then, everyone was convinced the world could end any day, from nukes or some plague, or an asteroid hitting us. Just wipe us all out in one fell swoop.”

“Yeah, great, Chase,” she said with a long-suffering sigh. “Now all we have to worry about are pirates and revolutionaries or interstellar war.”

“But thanks for reminding us what an old fart you are,” Hill put in, turning around in the copilot’s seat to offer a twisted smile through a pockmarked, scarred face. “Tell me ‘bout the old days, Daddy.”

“I am not your daddy, Adrian,” Chase said, stabbing a finger toward Hill. “You ain’t blaming that face on me.”

“Get going, Chase!” Priyanka snapped. “Or your HALO drop is going to turn into a LALO!”

The Tamar was already bobbing like a boat in the surf as the atmosphere grabbed at its lifting surfaces, and Chase had to brace himself against the safety railing in the passage to make it back to the hold. The railing was hollow plastic, painted a bright red that contrasted with the faded eggshell of the bulkhead, and he was sure Priyanka had scrounged it from an old hotel. It jiggled against its metal fasteners, and Chase felt a familiar conviction that it was going to separate from its moorings at any moment and send him tumbling down the passage like an idiot.

But it held, just as it had on dozens of drops over the last five years, and he kept a death grip on it down the ramp all the way through the hatch to the drop bay. The others didn’t even look up at his arrival, all seven of them absorbed in the task of gearing up.

Chase threw open his locker and yanked out his tactical load and jump gear. “Are all of you trained killers ready to jump out of this perfectly good spaceship and kick some Alliance ass?”

“Hoo-ah, Master Sergeant,” Zack Wilson drawled, zipping up the front of his flying-squirrel suit. It was the largest one they’d been able to find, and it still barely fit the man. “Them Chinese and Russian spooks won’t know what hit ’em.”

“Let’s not be bigoted, Sgt. Wilson,” Lucia Perez cautioned, elbowing the big man in the leg as she pulled back the bolt of her rifle to check the chamber before she slapped the magazine home. “I hear there are Ukrainians and Georgians and Vietnamese and Cambodians and all sorts of other foreign nationals in the Alliance military.”

“Yeah, right.” Tommy McGovern snorted a laugh from the weapons cabinet behind her. He was still chuckling as he shoved spare magazines into pouches of the tactical vest beneath his unzipped wingsuit. “I bet you could count the number of officers and NCOs in the Alliance military who aren’t either Russian or Chinese without running out of fingers. And there ain’t a single admiral in their Space Navy that ain’t from mainland China. Diversity just ain’t an Alliance thing.”

“Why is it,” Chase asked, sliding his own M27 out of its slot in the rack, “that both of you knuckleheads only try to sound like redneck hicks when we’re heading out on a mission? Wilson, you’re from Indiana, and McGovern is from fucking Boston. And both of you have Bachelor’s degrees!”

“It’s for the same reason neither of them ever let the brass put them up for officer’s training,” John Ragland commented, taking his spot in one of the drop seats and strapping in. He, at least, didn’t try to affect a redneck drawl. “They figure if you think they’re stupid, you won’t force them to be in charge of anything complicated.”

“Well, there’s nothing complicated about this op,” Chase told them. “It’s your standard Alliance listening post. They put it on a habitable, deep inside untracked wilderness because it’s harder for Union patrols to spot them from orbit and unlikely for the settlers to stumble across them.”

“Then how did we get lucky enough to come across the sneaky bastards?” Shonda Simms wondered. She’d been the only one of the squad to have already strapped in when he’d arrived, but then she was always first to get ready, first to arrive at team briefings, and first back for dust-off after R&R. Chase had always thought she looked more like an elementary school teacher than a soldier, but she more than pulled her weight.

“Money talks,” Chase explained. “And in this case, it’s our money, so let’s make sure we pull this off clean, right, ladies and gentlemen?”

“What’s the name of this shithole again?” Harris Townsend murmured, tightening the chinstrap of his helmet.

“Something like Huginn? Munin? Munin, I think. One of Odin’s ravens.”

The Tamar swayed and shook, and Chase had to catch himself against the weapons cabinet.

“Two minutes to drop,” Chief Aguilar announced on the overhead speakers. The ship’s crew chief sounded annoyed at the team for existing, as if the ship would have had a much smoother flight if they weren’t along.

Which is true, but then the Tamar wouldn’t have any reason to be in the damned system, and none of them would be getting paid.

“Everyone, get into position,” Chase ordered, all business now. He pulled his helmet visor into place and sealed it, then touched a control on his wrist to start the oxygen flow. “Ranger One, radio check. Alpha, bravo, Charlie, delta…”

The drop harness was a complicated device, but a familiar one, and Chase strapped into it by rote, at the head of the line.

“Read you five by five, Ranger One,” Zack Wilson replied. “Positive oxygen flow.”

The report went down through the squad and by the time the last of them had echoed the positive flow from their air tanks, Aguilar was back on the speakers.

“Nine thousand meters,” he announced. “Drop in ten.”

The drop bay was a tapered cylinder at the rear of the teardrop shape that was the Tamar, nestled between the twin Soong-Tierney drive nacelles and covered by an armored sleeve until Aguilar’s count reached zero. The sleeve retracted with a grinding of overtaxed motors in dire need of maintenance and air rushed out into the bitter cold of the high-altitude darkness outside, the roar of the equalizing pressure settling into the howling wail of the ship’s passage.

No whine of jets, though. That still seemed strange to him, even after all these years. When he’d gone through Airborne School at Ft. Benning, Georgia twenty years ago as an impressionable teenager, the Soong-Tierney drive had been new and the military, conservative as ever, had been slower to adapt it to mundane uses like transport airplanes than private industry had been. The first airplanes Chase had jumped out of were jets, and there was still something comforting about the plaintive scream of a turbine, something more tangible than the faint, crackling hum of the S-T drive.

Then the bottom fell out of his stomach as his straps released and he slid into nothingness. Jumping at night always screwed with his head. The helmet visor was equipped with the latest in thermal, infrared, and light-intensifying optics, but they didn’t do a damned thing with nothing for thirty-thousand feet down but… nothing. Grey clouds swallowed him up, only the artificial horizon in his visor’s heads-up display keeping him aligned with the ground as he spread his body into a V, inflating the webbing stretching from ankle to wrist, popping him upward and propelling him forward.

The wingsuit was as close as Chase had ever come to flying like a superhero. He’d read articles about the S-T drive being miniaturized enough to fit into a personal flight pack, but even if the R&D types managed it, he wouldn’t have been able to afford it. The wingsuits were cheap, and they worked well enough to let the squad glide in from ten miles out, which was hopefully far enough away to keep the Alliance outpost from detecting the Tamar.

The cloud layer melted away but revealed nothing in its absence, the ground below dark and featureless.

“I can’t see a damned thing.” Zack Wilson’s voice crackled in his headphones, and Chase winced at the volume. On an intellectual level, he knew that the laser line-of-sight transceiver couldn’t be detected from the ground, but instincts born from training based on decades-old gear rebelled at what he still thought of as a violation of communications security. “Are you sure we’re still on course?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” Chase admitted. “The only available maps of this planet were on the Colonial Authority’s free public servers.”

“Well, that’s a comfort. Bunch of public servants using gear bought from the lowest bidder.”

“You should be used to it by now. Shut up, I’m trying to fly.”

And trying to watch the altimeter, and the speedometer, and the map. Chase couldn’t see the mountains, but the map said he was flying between them, and the tug of an updraft confirmed their presence. His chest and shoulders ached from steering the suit and with every foot he dropped, his gut twisted with certainty that he’d read the map wrong and was about to smash into the face of a cliff. And he was cold as shit. It was starting to penetrate past the adrenaline rush, past the insulation inside the wingsuit, deep into his core.

Hold it together, Weston. You’ll be on the ground in a minute.

The helmet’s HUD gave him two seconds’ warning that the chute was deploying, barely enough time for the thought to bounce from one side of his head to another before the expanse of nylon jerked him upward, pulling at shoulders and chest and groin. The snap swung his legs below him, and for the first time he was aware that there were trees below. He could make that much out through the enhanced optics, a picket of them, jutting upward, anxious to spit him like a wild hog, and the clearing…Where’s the damned clearing?

It was on the map, in the satellite images, but everything below him was trees.

No. There.

“I have eyes on the LZ,” he snapped, hoping the others could hear him. “Follow me in.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when the ground rushed up to meet him, and he yanked down on the control handles of the chute, flaring it just in time to turn a painful crash into a gentle tap of dirt against the soles of his boots. He ran forward a few steps to steady himself, then a few more to make room on the LZ, knowing the others would be right on his heels. The chute collapsed and he gathered it up quickly, then he wrapped it into a bundle suitable for disposal, working by feel. He crouched to scan the forest around them.

There was motion everywhere, but the Identification-Friend-or-Foe transponders told him it was all from his people. They didn’t register on thermal or infrared as a human shape, thanks to the electrically active graphene lining of their combat uniforms, but there was no fooling motion detectors, and he was able to put names to the blurs of activity from the IFF signals. Wilson was doing his job, directing people to set up a perimeter just as soon as they stowed their gear in a burn bag.

Chase winced when he dumped the chute and the wingsuit into the burn bag. True, there was no practical way to take the gear with them, but setting the thermite charge to consume all that sunk cost in a few seconds was an affront to an innate frugality instilled by his parents on their ranch. His father’s words nagged at him, making him hesitate before he yanked the cord to activate the charge.

Waste not, want not. Every penny we throw away is a penny less we eat, boy.

He shook off the memory and pulled hard on the igniter before tossing the bag aside. White smoke was already pouring out of the vents in the disposal units as the rest of the squad did their duty.

I wonder what Dad would think of me now.

Chase unstrapped his helmet and pulled it off, just crouching at the center of the clearing for a long moment, listening. The hiss of the thermite charges was fading as the fire did its job, erasing the evidence of their existence and their provenance. And the rest of the squad was still, ready at their positions, rifles trained outward. The wind whispered in the treetops, and for all that he was twenty-some light-years from Earth, Chase could have believed he was twelve years old again, camping in the Bitterroot National Forest with Dad.

The stars spread above them, more than he could have seen even from the Montana wilderness, and different. The wind was the same, smelled the same. And the trees were the same. How that was possible, neither he nor the best evolutionary biologists on Earth could say, but it was comforting. No matter how far he was from home, some things didn’t change.

Like what they were about to do. It was the same thing soldiers had done for ten thousand years. He slipped his helmet on and checked the link between its ocular and the electronic sight atop his M27 carbine.

“All right, Rangers,” he murmured into his throat mic. “Follow me.”

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2

The damp of the early morning soaked through the grass and through Chase Weston’s battle utilities. They were, theoretically, waterproof, but theory had a way of giving way to reality out in the field.

At least it’s better than baking my brains in Syria or sweating my ass off in the Venezuelan jungle.

Those were the bad old days. Before the S-T drive had opened up space and all the resources it had to offer, which suddenly made oil only useful as a lubricant and an ingredient in plastics rather than the number one energy source for the entire planet. Before someone had discovered through the old-fashioned expedient of just going out and doing it that if you fed an S-T drive enough power, it would take you hyper-light, into another dimension where distances were shortened and faster-than-light travel was possible. Before all these habitable worlds had been found, with their own ecologies and life, so very hauntingly similar to Earth, and with their own supply of oil to replace the politically unstable sources back home. And no pesky intelligent life to worry about.

And all that oil, all that breathable air, all those huntable animals meant that planets like Munin wouldn’t stay uninhabited for long.

Chase didn’t try to ignore the wetness soaking through his pants. That never worked. You had to welcome it, to embrace the suck as the saying went in the Army. He embraced the dampness, the cold. It meant he was alive. It kept him alert, kept his eyes open, his attention on the almost-imperceptible movement of the dark mound in front of him. Its edges were indistinct, hard to define, and it inched forward, the motion only distinguishable if he compared its position to the trunk of a nearby tree.

The Alliance soldier patrolling the perimeter fence line wasn’t quite as observant as Chase. The man looked young, at least from what Chase could make out of his face beneath the night-vision goggles and broad-brimmed boonie cap. Chinese, from his features, though the uniform markings would be the same no matter which of the Alliance nations he hailed from. The subdued flag on his sleeve would have been red if it had been in color, with a cluster of blue and white stars at the center. An amalgamation of the Chinese and Russian flags…with a bit more emphasis given to the Chinese, since they were the money men of the operation.

The weapon was as universal as the flag among Alliance troops, and just as recognizable. The QBZ-103 was technically a Chinese design, but the bullpup was based on the venerable Kalashnikov action invented just after World War Two. Oh, the materials were new, fashioned in orbital factories, and the ammunition was high-tech, caseless, and loaded with guided bullets that could be programmed to hit targets automatically once fired. But deep down, it was an AK-47. It was ironic how conservative a Communist government could be.

The young Chinese soldier paced back and forth in front of the gate in the fence, shifting his weapon on its sling so he could pull up his collar against the early morning chill. He turned away, back toward the dark mass of the intelligence outpost, and Zack Wilson moved. Wilson was six-foot-three and 230 pounds of solid muscle, but he moved with the grace of a dancer and the economy of motion of a martial artist.

And, of course, he’s both. Though he didn’t spread the dancer part around except with his close friends.

The ghillie suit Wilson had fashioned by hand out of thermal dampening material fluttered like the feathers of a giant bird for the briefest of moments, one arm snaking around the neck of the Chinese soldier, the other flashing downward with the matte black blade of a combat knife. The blood was black in the predawn dark, blending in with the soldier’s camouflage fatigues, invisible and only detectable through the effect it had on the young Chinese trooper. His struggles against Wilson’s grasp faded and ceased, and he slumped, supported only by the taller man’s hand over his mouth.

Wilson let the young soldier fall to the dirt, then rolled his body aside into the brush. The whole thing had taken mere seconds, and if anyone was watching through a video monitor, they would have had to be watching the same display unceasingly to notice. Wilson doffed the ghillie suit and pulled off his helmet, then replaced it with the dead man’s boonie cap, facing out away from the fence. He was nearly six inches taller than the man he’d killed, but with nothing to compare his height to, no one would notice.

Lucia Perez had been invisible in the tall grass, but now she moved, high-crawling forward in a direct line with Wilson, using his intermittent pacing as a cover for her motion. When she reached the gate, the woman rolled onto her back and fished a twisted mass of wires out of a pouch at her side. She worked at it with patience that reminded Chase of his mother trying to untangle the Christmas lights, finally spreading it out into the shape of a net a couple feet square, with alligator clips at each corner.

The clips went onto the wires of the fence and then to the gate. Chase held his breath. If the electronic spoof didn’t work, if the Alliance tech heads were one step ahead of the black-market tech heads who’d sold them the net, then the Russians and Chinese would be waiting for them when they opened the gate.

Perez flashed a thumbs-up, and Chase sighed.

He didn’t have to tell the others to follow this time. They knew what it meant when he slammed the butt of his carbine into the dirt and used the length of the weapon for leverage to spring to his feet. It felt to Chase as if he were moving in slow motion, as if the enemy had forever to notice him rushing the gate. And maybe he was a second or two slower than he would have been ten years ago, but old age and treachery beat youth and speed every time.

Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.

The gate had a magnetic lock, which seemed fancy for an outpost this far into the boondocks, on a planet most people had never heard of, but it was convenient. Chase didn’t even slow down when he hit the gate, just smacked it open with his shoulder. The fence was more to keep out wildlife than people, since the Alliance hadn’t anticipated any of the locals finding the place, and it wasn’t nearly fortified enough to survive an all-out military assault. There was still something viscerally satisfying about ramming through it.

The gate swung inward and rebounded off the inside of the fence, but Wilson caught it before it had the chance to close again, then he passed by Chase on the way to the side entrance of the outpost building. It wasn’t much, basically a Quonset hut covered in turf to reduce its thermal signature from orbit, squatting next to a trio of massive satellite dishes partially camouflaged with netting. The dishes were the purpose of the place, the uplink to relay satellites tucked into a Lagrangian orbit between the planet and its lone moon.

And why have the troops on the ground when they had the satellites in orbit? Because the information wasn’t safe sitting on those satellites. If the Union stumbled across them, the data would be gone, and worse, the American and British and Australian spooks would know exactly what intelligence the Chinese and Russians were trying to gather.

And of course, that meant that the Americans and the British and the Australians would be willing to pay for access to that Chinese and Russian intelligence.

Probably the French and Germans, too, but to hell with them. They never did a damned thing for us in Venezuela.

There was no one outside other than the dead guard, and Chase hadn’t expected there to be at two hours before local dawn. No exterior lights, either, and he could barely make out the doorway, had to feel around for the knob. It wasn’t locked, probably didn’t even have a lock, because what use would it be?

“Concussion grenade on three,” he told Wilson, risking being overheard by sonic detectors rather than busting inside without coordinating it. The big man acknowledged by pulling the fat cylinder of the stun grenade off his vest and pulling the pin, then holding the spoon tight, the grenade poised in front of the closed door. “One, two… three!”

The knob resisted, and Chase smashed a heel backward to kick the door open. There was a light on inside—dim and covered but a veritable supernova against the utter darkness outside—and Chase had a split-second glimpse of a cluster of folding cots shoved up against the far wall and a single figure throwing off a sheet before the stun grenade flew and he ducked back outside.

The detonation was a sunburst, a thunderclap, and the echoes hadn’t faded when Zack Wilson barged through ahead of him, and Chase swore under his breath. He wouldn’t even bother trying to yell at the big man later because Wilson always pulled out the trump card—Chase was technically the officer in charge, even though he’d never worn a rank higher than E-7, and the OIC didn’t walk point.

An M27 snapped hoarsely, the integral suppressor restraining the fury of the 6.8mm to something less like a roar and more akin to a hammer striking a two-by-four. Wilson’s bulk shielded Chase from the action, and by the time he’d squeezed around the big man, he’d counted three short bursts. One for each of the enemy soldiers who’d been sleeping in those cots. The one who’d tried to get up was slumped on the floor beside his bed, his blood staining the bare concrete, while the others hadn’t even had the chance to wake up before they died.

Probably how I’d rather go out. Who wants to get woken up from a sound sleep just so some asshole can put a bullet in you?

Chase would rather not have looked at the bodies, but he had to make sure none were faking it, ready to rise from the dead and take a shot at them. He didn’t have time to check their pulses, but a single round through the head was quicker and just as comprehensive. Chase tried to feel something when the bodies jerked with a flash of dying nerves, but he couldn’t. It worried him. Not that he would have rather gone catatonic at the thought of killing an Alliance soldier, but there’d been a time when he’d felt a twinge after he pulled the trigger.

“Go!” he snapped at Townsend and Ragland, the next pair in line, waving through the doorway to the monitoring station.

Another crash of thunder, another flare of light, but this time, no stutter of suppressed gunfire when the two men breached the room.

“Clear!” Townsend reported, his Liverpool accent turning one syllable into two.

Chase frowned as he followed them inside. The control room was just as he’d pictured it, packed with monitors, maps, storage cabinets, and the grand prize, squatting amidst a trio of nitrogen cooling tanks, a cylinder half a meter high and just as thick—the quantum-core computer, the reason they’d come. But no Alliance techs monitoring the equipment.

“Wilson,” he called, “take Townsend and Ragland and make sure we didn’t miss a concealed bunker!”

“Got it, Sarge.”

The three men ducked back out the door, and Chase dearly hoped he was sending them on a wild goose chase.

“Perez,” he said, finding the woman amidst the sea of camouflage armor by her height, or the lack of it. “Get to work on the quantum core. I need it bagged up and ready for transport in five minutes.”

“Copy that, Sergeant,” she said. “Shonda, help me with this thing. And mind the nitrogen tanks when we disconnect the hoses, unless you want your damned fingers frozen off.”

Something was wrong. Chase didn’t know what, but he could sense it. Four soldiers… it wasn’t impossible. This wasn’t a combat outpost, and how many techs did it take to download data from a satellite? Four would work fine. One on patrol and three sleeping. Nothing odd about that.

“Sarge,” Wilson said, slamming through the door. Chase’s trigger finger straightened only through an act of will, and he pulled his muzzle upward, away from the center of Wilson’s chest. The big man didn’t seem to notice. “There’s nothing out there. No buildings, no barracks, nothing.”

Chase shook his head. He should have felt relieved.

“Right. Get with Perez and get the quantum core loaded into your pack.”

“Why do I always have to be the one to carry the payload?”

“Because you’re big and you pretend to be stupid,” Chase shot back. “And you won’t let me go through the door first, so you can damned well carry the quantum core.”

Wilson scowled but didn’t argue, just pulled off his backpack and carried it over to where Perez and Simms were dismounting the computer core from its cooling station. Chase stepped back outside, pulling up his visor and letting in the cool, morning air. It felt like home.

“Predator One, this is Ranger One,” he radioed. It was a gamble, transmitting in the open, but the threat was neutralized. “Do you copy? Over.”

Nothing for a long moment, and Chase thought perhaps the Tamar was over the horizon or still tucked into some hollow, waiting for the agreed pickup time.

“Copy you five by five, Ranger One,” Priyanka’s voice buzzed in his headphones. “You done already? I don’t remember you being this fast when you and I were a thing. Or maybe I do and that’s why we broke up. Over.”

“Opposition was minimal. We have the package, and we’re ready for pickup. Over.”

“All right, on our way. Out.”

Technically, Chase should have been the one to end the transmission since he’d started it, but Pri was his ride and he didn’t want to annoy her.

“Okay, we’re all packed up, boss,” Perez told him, emerging from the Quonset hut. She jerked a thumb at Wilson. “The big dummy has the package and we’ve got all the useful information we’re gonna get unless you want the shoe sizes on the mooks in there.”

“The Tamar is inbound.” Chase pulled down his visor and hit the control on his wrist to bring up the map. “LZ is due east, one and a half klicks. You want to take point, Wilson?”

“Not carrying this shit,” the big man said, yanking at the shoulder straps of his backpack. “This thing weighs like twenty kilos, Sarge!”

Chase rolled his eyes.

“All right, you big wussy. Townsend, lead us to the promised land.”

The Liverpudlian set off, mumbling something half to himself that sounded to Chase like “meff whopper,” whatever that meant. The rest of the squad fell into a staggered column formation on the narrow trail, since the trees were too thick for a squad wedge. Chase jumped in near the tail, turning back every few steps to check their rear, unable to shake the itch between his shoulder blades.

But the forest swallowed them up and the Alliance outpost faded from view.

It’s fine. Stop being so damned paranoid. Things do go right every once in a while.

“Hey,” Townsend said, raising a fist in the air to halt the formation. “I think I saw some…”

The forest exploded. Light and heat and sound filled Chase’s world, and he was flying backward, the concussion smacking into his chest like a baseball bat. Breath escaped in a whoosh, and his chest hurt so bad that the impact of the tree between his shoulder blades barely registered. He slid down, unable to move, unable to think, a spiderweb of cracks obscuring his view through his helmet’s visor. The night vision was dead, the mapping software was dead, the link to his rifle’s electronic sight was dead…

And I’m dead. No, I’m not dead. If I was dead, it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

But it wasn’t the thought that got him moving, it was the gunfire. The stutter penetrated the fog over his thoughts and kicked ingrained habits back into motion, and him along with it. He rolled onto his side, then grabbed at his visor and pushed it up and out of the way, expecting nothing but darkness. But the forest was bathed in the grey of pre-dawn, the dim light having snuck up on him unawares, hidden by the enhanced optics of his visor.

Chase had been thrown ten feet off the trail into the woods by whatever had hit him. Grenade, maybe. Or a mine. His body armor had stopped most of the fragments, but not all. Warm wetness was spreading out on his side, his left arm, his right hip. Nothing gushing, nothing debilitating, nothing broken, but as the shock of the explosion faded, the pain from the frag wounds pushed through it, and Chase gasped and staggered, then steadied himself against a tree.

His teeth clenched so hard Chase could taste bits of enamel and his fingers wrapped around the pistol grip of his carbine. He didn’t remember picking it up, wasn’t sure how he’d held onto it, but it was in his hands and he swiped off the safety, as if firing the weapon would take away the pain and confusion. Bursts of gunfire called to him, leading him back to the trail, to his people. The suppressed M27s were a familiar throat-clearing cough, but they were only half the story. Just as familiar was the return fire, the whip-crack of the 5.8mm used by the Alliance. Lots of them.

He wondered how far the gunfight had moved since the explosion, and had the question answered when Zack Wilson nearly shot him in the face. Chase caught the stock of the carbine as it swung toward him, and he saw Wilson’s eyes widen through his visor as the two of them stumbled out from the cover of a coniferous tree trunk six feet in diameter.

“Where are the others?” he yelled, pulling the big man back to shelter just ahead of a hail of enemy fire. Bullets smacked into the other side of the tree, and Wilson popped out from behind cover just long enough to fire a grenade from the launcher mated to the underside of his M27. The hollow thump of the grenade launching was still echoing when the detonation drowned it out, resonating chest-deep.

“Townsend and Ragland are gone,” Wilson yelled over the din of the gunfire and explosions. “Type 66, I think.”

It was an old design, but a venerable one, patterned on the American Claymore mine, and it had never gone out of service. Easy to plant, easy to detonate, great for setting off an ambush, among other things.

“Perez and Simms are pinned down on the other side of the trail. I ain’t seen McGovern or Clement, but I think they assaulted through the ambush.”

Which meant they could have made it out the other side, or they could be dead. Assaulting through an ambush worked better when everyone did it.

“Predator One”—Chase tried his radio, not even sure if it was still working after the beating his helmet had taken—“this is Ranger One. Do you read? We have been engaged by enemy elements, at least platoon strength.” That was a guess, but there was no use underselling it. “We need immediate air support at my position. Over.”

When the answer came, it wasn’t from Pri. It was Aguilar, his deep, gravelly voice taut with strain.

“No joy on the air support, Ranger One. We’re spiked and running hot. They got an interceptor up here. We’ll get you as soon as we can shake him.” A hesitation. “This was a Goddamned trap.”

And I stepped right into it.

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3

At least Wilson let him go first this time.

The big man’s covering fire was a staccato rhythm in the night, and for once, Chase wished the weapons weren’t suppressed. The purpose of covering fire was to attract attention, and sprinting from one side of the trail to the other through six feet of open ground, Chase would really have liked a bit more attention turned Wilson’s way. Bullets passed by so close he could feel the wind on his face through his helmet’s open visor, missing him only because the Alliance soldiers hadn’t had time for a target lock to guide their homing ammo.

Chase dove headfirst into the trees on the opposite side of the path, tucking his legs beneath him just ahead of a burst that chopped into the dirt behind him. He hit on his shoulder, and the impact reignited the pain in his chest. Cracked ribs, he thought. Not displaced, but they hurt enough that he wasn’t offering any prayers of thanksgiving for small favors. His breath came short, and he tried to control it as he darted out of cover long enough to lay down suppressive fire of his own.

“Covering!” he announced, yelling loud enough that Wilson could have heard him even if his radio wasn’t working.

“Moving!”

Chase couldn’t see the enemy. That was always the way. They were there, probably thirty or forty yards away, but he didn’t have night vision or thermal sights, and the flash suppressors on their rifles were working as well as designed. He guessed at the trajectory of the rounds hitting all around him and sprayed a long burst in their direction, probably hitting nothing but giving Wilson time to get across the trail and behind one of the tree trunks just a few yards away.

“Perez!” Chase shouted, swapping out a fresh magazine and stowing the spent one in the cargo pocket over his thigh. “Simms!”

“Here.” The reply was barely audible over the gunfire, so faint he couldn’t tell which of them had called.

“Wait here,” Chase told Wilson. “Keep them off of us.”

Grey dawn was shut out by the overhang of the trees, but Chase had a pretty good sense of direction, and he was able to follow the faint voice back into the forest another thirty yards. The voice and the trail of bullet impacts in the trees. A couple had half their trunks ripped away by grenade blasts, but the Alliance wasn’t wasting any more heavy ordnance against targets they couldn’t see.

Perez was the one who’d called him. He knew it because Shonda Simms was very dead, only a flap of skin holding her head to her body. Perez lay beside her, unmoving, her entire left side soaked with blood, her helmet off, the visor splintered and useless. Chase slid down beside her, his own pain suddenly forgotten.

“Lucia,” he said, stripping off a glove and checking her pulse, “I’m here. Take it easy. You’re going to be okay. I’ll get you out of here.”

The beat against his fingers was weak and thready, and he cursed, yanking open a pocket on his sleeve to retrieve a field dressing and clotting powder. The wound on the side of her neck wasn’t spouting blood, but it was the most serious of the ones he could see.

“Hold on,” he said, sprinkling the clotting powder onto her neck. “This is gonna hurt a little.”

“S’okay,” she assured him, her words slurred as if she were drunk. “I don’t feel a thing.”

“That’s good, that’s good.” He said the words almost like a chant. “You’re gonna be okay, Lucia.” He taped the bandage in place, then patted at her left arm trying to find her own field dressing and clotting pack. He came away with a hand covered in blood and a feeling of shredded material. “Goddammit.”

He had another dressing tucked under his chest plate, though he’d been saving that one for himself. He yanked it out, but before he could rip it open, Perez let out one last rattling gasp and went still. He stared at her unseeing eyes, the dressing still held in front of him like a talisman from some ancient religion. If this had been back during the war, with backup and dustoff and all those other luxuries he didn’t have at the moment, he would have begun CPR and tried to keep Perez’s blood circulating until he could get her to a fully equipped medical bay. But none of them were going to be carried out of this.

Chase tucked the dressing into his sleeve pocket and grabbed a magazine from Perez’s chest pouch, then paused and thumbed her eyes closed before he went back to locate Wilson. He wasn’t hard to find—the Alliance pointed the way with a hellstorm of gunfire. Zack Wilson had retreated back further into the trees, flat on his belly, rising only to launch another grenade. The explosion gave them only a few seconds of respite, and Chase used it to low-crawl up beside the big man.

“Come on!” he yelled, leaning close to Wilson’s helmet. “We have to fall back!”

“What about Simms and Perez?” the big man demanded, twisting around to look back at Chase.

“They’re dead, and we will be, too, if we stay here.” Chase pointed back into the woods. “We’ll lose them in here, then circle around and try to make it to the LZ.”

“Fuck that!” Wilson said, ducking as another burst cut into the trees just over their heads. “We’ll never find our way through there. You saw the map…there’s a shitload of deadfall just up the hill. And for all we know, they’ve already circled around us. I say we just charge right into them, try to break through.”

“That’s suicide,” Chase told him, eyes narrowing in disbelief.

“Sarge,” Wilson said, sounding preternaturally calm, “we get captured by the Alliance, we’re gonna wish suicide was an option.”

Chase stared at the man for a second, getting ready to object, to parrot the words his company commander would have told him ten years ago, but instead he found himself nodding. It wasn’t a bad way to go. He’d imagined dying this way for the last decade.

“All right, then.” Chase loaded a frag grenade into his launcher. “On three, we both pop a frag, then make a run for it.”

“Copy that, Sarge.”

“Zack,” Chase sighed, his head sagging as if under a heavy weight, “if I have told you once, I’ve told you a hundred freaking times. Don’t call me Sarge.”

Wilson grinned, white teeth shining even in the low light.

“Copy that, Sarge.”

Chase laughed. He couldn’t help it.

“One.” He held up a finger. Wood splinters showered down on his helmet from a hail of bullets just a few feet above him. “Two….”

“Hey, get ready!” The voice over his headphones nearly made Chase jump straight up into the stream of Alliance gunfire. It was Pri. “Coming in hot! Keep your heads down!”

Like they weren’t already. But he didn’t talk back to her, just listened for the distinct whoosh, the static hum of the drive… and the sonic boom. It hit first, louder than the grenade blasts, shaking the upper limbs of the trees as the Tamar came to an abrupt halt only a few hundred feet overhead, a dark, looming mass against the lightening sky, a hundred yards long, balanced on invisible beams of force. A MANPAD launched a streak of white smoke, the heat-seeking missile arcing up toward the starship.

Chase’s guts twisted with the image of Pri and her ship tumbling out of the sky, then crashing in a ball of fire…but the missile corkscrewed off sideways, deflected by the static charge of the drive field, the same charge that shielded starships from interstellar dust when they accelerated to near lightspeed, just before the jump to hyper-light. He’d known about the effect, but knowing in his head and believing in his gut were two different things.

Pri believed, though, because the Tamar didn’t even try to evade, just hovered above the treetops and turned broadside down toward the Alliance positions as gunports slid open along her hull. The guns were ancient, designed over a century ago as anti-aircraft weapons and later adapted as air-to-ground artillery, long since retired from military use but easy to find on the black market since they could be printed in any industrial fabricator. AB Bofors was the name of the Swedish weapons manufacturer that had manufactured them before World War Two, and ever since, they’d been called simply Bofors guns.

And old or not, they just worked. 40mm shells rained down with a chorus of dull thunks and a scattering of brass cases, and where the rounds touched, the forest erupted in fire. The guns were old, but the rounds were new, something called Ultra-High Energy Explosives, or UltrEx for short, designed in orbital labs for the US government, promptly stolen by the Chinese, and then available everywhere within five years of its introduction. Returning the formula to the Chinese was only polite.

“Get to the dustoff!” Pri yelled in his ear before the echoes had faded. “I didn’t get them all, but you’ve got a clear shot right up the trail. We’ve got the Alliance ship tied up dodging our drone fighters, but it won’t take them long to blast them out of the sky!”

Chase hurt everywhere. He was still bleeding from half a dozen frag wounds, probably had cracked ribs and certainly had a slight concussion, and it would have been so damned easy to just sit down and rest. But he ran. He ran faster than he had since New Macau, when the odds had been stacked much higher against him, and would have run even faster than that if he hadn’t had to slow down to let Wilson keep up. He wanted to rag the big man out for letting fifty pounds of computer core hold him back, but he didn’t have the breath for it.

He finally got to see the Alliance troops, though. Bits of them were scattered across the trail fifty yards up, their combat utilities camouflaged in black and grey and stained in red. He couldn’t count how many bodies there were because the pieces didn’t add up. One of them crawled away toward the trees, then pulled himself with his hands because his legs were gone, and Chase paused a step to put a round into the base of his skull, just under the helmet, telling himself he was doing the man a favor. The Alliance didn’t waste money on regeneration treatments for line soldiers.

The trail widened past the Alliance positions, climbing the hill. On the other side was the river valley, where the trees parted into open fields and their LZ waited. Sprawled in the dirt just before the crest of the hill was a man’s body, dressed in the woodland camo of Chase’s team, the M27 still clutched in his hands. Chase turned him over, and Kevin Clement’s face stared up at him, drained of color from the wound through his throat, dark eyes seeing nothing.

“Oh, damn it.” He’d hoped Clement and McGovern had gotten away.

He grabbed Clement’s body and worked it up over his shoulder, squatting down to take the weight while Wilson frowned at him.

“We left the others,” the big man pointed out.

“We had to. We can take him.”

Maybe. Just stopping to check the body seemed to have sucked all the desperate, adrenaline-fueled energy out of Chase, and he staggered under Clement’s weight, though the former Australian soldier hadn’t been a heavy man.

Just one more hill. Then it’s easy.

His quadriceps were on fire, but he tromped hard into the dirt and crested the rise. Below him, the river valley spread out like a landscape painting from a bygone age, the golden glow of the rising sun kissing the mountains, setting the winding blue of the river afire. It seemed so foreign to the blood and death behind him. He dug in his heels and skidded down the path, steeper and steeper, the dead weight that had used to be Kevin Clement threatening to throw him head over heels.

“What about McGovern?” Wilson gasped, sounding as gassed as he was.

“He knows where the dustoff point is,” Chase wheezed. “He should be down here. If he’s not… maybe Pri can spot his transponder from the air.”

Which sounded better than admitting that they had no chance of finding the man if he’d decided to hide in the woods somewhere too sheltered for the signal to reach. If Wilson intuited his real meaning, he gave no sign of it, falling silent except for labored breathing until they reached the bottom of the hill and the clearing they’d designated as the primary LZ on the map before the drop.

“Where the hell is she?” Wilson demanded, turning 360 degrees, eyes on the sky.

“She’ll be here,” Chase assured him. He tried to come up with a reason but just wound up repeating himself. “She’ll be here.”

“McGovern!” Wilson yelled. The big man’s voice echoed in Chase’s headphones, subdued by the audio dampeners built into the radio. “McGovern, where the hell are you?”

“How the hell did they know we were coming?” Chase asked, and Wilson turned sharply to look at him. “This was a trap. They didn’t know exactly when we were coming, but they knew we’d be here eventually. Us. Maybe even me.”

“But we got the quantum core,” Wilson reminded him, gesturing toward his backpack.

“How much you want to bet there’s nothing on it?”

The strength went out of Chase’s legs, and he collapsed on the soft dirt and grass. Wilson crouched down beside him, eyes narrowing as if he was only now seeing the man.

“You’re banged up pretty good, Sarge.” He pulled out a field dressing and started working at Chase’s left arm. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“Not as much as Perez.” The words might have come from someone else. Chase wasn’t conscious of speaking them. He felt as if he was watching from somewhere outside his body.

“Oh, fuck,” Wilson muttered.

Something about the tone or the man’s body language stirred Chase from his fugue, and he followed Wilson’s stare back into the tree line. Dark figures were trickling out of the forest, haphazardly at first but then forming into a wedge. Alliance troops. A platoon of them. And just ahead of them, maybe fifty or sixty yards, running breakneck, was Tommy McGovern.

Chase forced himself up to one knee and brought his carbine to his shoulder. Wilson was already shooting, the tok-tok-tok of his rifle distant and remote, drowned out by the auditory exclusion of combat. The range was over three hundred yards, closer to four hundred for the bulk of the enemy platoon, and Chase had to use the backup sights on the upper receiver of his rifle, since his visor was gone. He’d learned basic rifle marksmanship on iron sights, qualified with the electronic sights mounted on the rail, and only used the helmet HUD link once he’d been assigned to a Ranger battalion, but the HUD had spoiled him and his first burst of 6.8mm was low, sending puffs of dirt up twenty or thirty yards ahead of the front line of Alliance soldiers.

Wilson had been working his way from the edge of the woods down, and two of the black-clad troops there had stumbled but not fallen, the range too great for even the armor-piercing rounds from their M27s to penetrate the Alliance body armor. But the Chinese and Russian soldiers were plenty close to Tommy McGovern. He stiffened, his carbine slipping out of his hands, swinging free on its sling. One more step. Two. Then he was down, unmoving.

“Oh, Tommy,” Wilson hissed. Chase could only watch the man die. He’d gone to Ranger School with McGovern when they were both nineteen.

“How many rounds you got left, Zack?” Chase asked him, feeling at the mag pouches across his own tactical vest. There was one still full, plus however many rounds he had left in the mag loaded into his weapon. Call it forty, forty-five rounds, plus another frag grenade and his SIG 9mm, which would be just about useless against the Alliance armor.

“Not enough,” Wilson rumbled. “I think we’d better run.”

Chase chuckled without humor, barely able to keep his eyes open, his legs about to give out again.

“I think you’d better run, buddy.”

The wind was whipping through the river valley, a constant background noise, so loud that Chase didn’t hear the static hum until the shadow of the Tamar was right over them, blocking out the sun. Chase’s eyes took a moment to adjust, but by the time they did, the belly ramp of the ship was already yawning open, hanging just over their heads, teasing them with shelter and safety.

“Get your asses on board!” Chief Aguilar yelled over the radio. “We got maybe ten seconds until that Chinese gunboat’s on top of us!”

The ship slewed away from them, angling downward, lowering the ramp to waist-level, and Wilson threw himself aboard, then grabbed at a handhold on the side and swung his legs into the ship. Chase tried to jump for the edge of the ramp, but his legs wouldn’t work and he barely reached his tiptoes, his fingers sliding off the smooth metal edge of the ramp. He paused and tried to gather his energy for one more try when Wilson stretched a hand down and grabbed him by the casualty handle on the back of his tactical vest and yanked upward.

Chase’s back hit metal, and the ramp lifted him up as it closed like the very hand of God.

“Thanks, Pri,” he whispered just before darkness occluded the edges of his vision and he passed out.

* * *

Chase winced at the light shining into his eyes, then squeezed them shut again for a moment before he realized he was awake… and alive. He tried to call out, but his throat felt like he’d swallowed ten pounds of sand and all that came out was a rasping whisper.

A gentle hand raised his head up and pressed a cup of water to his mouth, and he gulped it down greedily, then sighed with relief.

“Thanks.”

“I thought we’d lost you for a few minutes there,” Priyanka said. Her face didn’t come into focus until he heard her voice, and with it came the rest of his surroundings. The faded eggshell bulkhead could have been from anywhere on the ship, but the coffin-shaped chamber in the corner of the compartment meant he was in the medical bay. He made a face at the thing, then looked back up at Pri.

“You didn’t put me in the box, did you?” he asked her.

She rolled her eyes and smacked him on the shoulder. It didn’t hurt, so he knew he was either pumped up with local anesthetic or he’d been out a while.

“No, but it was a near thing. If Hill hadn’t been able to pull out the fragment in your leg, we were going to have to let the computer have a crack at you.”

She offered a fresh cup of water, and he scooted up in the bed to take it. Everything moved, and the only pain was from his ribs. They were bound tightly with a bandage, but he was sure now someone had put a neural block on him because there was no way he’d been out long enough for cracked ribs to heal. He was also stripped down to his undershorts beneath the threadbare white sheet, and it was cold in the medical bay.

“I don’t know which I like less,” Chase admitted, sipping at the cup this time, “letting the auto-doc probe me or owing Adrian a thank-you.”

Pri didn’t laugh. She looked at the deck for a moment before putting a hand over his and meeting his eyes.

“I’m sorry about your people. For what it’s worth, I really liked…” She shrugged. “…some of them.”

Chase didn’t answer, just let his head fall back to the pillow, resting the half-full cup of water against his chest. The light panels in the overhead were still painful to look at, which gave him an excuse to close his eyes and avoid her gaze.

“This is the last time. I’ve been doing this too long. I started out trying to make the Alliance pay, but the thing is, they can afford to pay and I can’t.”

Pri didn’t argue, even though his pronouncement would mean she was out a steady job, which told him he was coming to a conclusion she’d reached long ago.

“What are you going to do?”

Chase had to consider the question for a second. He’d been a soldier for ten years, a mercenary privateer for five more. It didn’t leave him with much in the way of marketable skills.

“Personal protection,” he suggested. “There’s a market for it. Maybe it doesn’t pay as well, but… at least I can do it alone.”

Chase didn’t know when Pri left, didn’t remember her taking the cup or turning off the lights. He didn’t know when he’d begun to cry, either, but it was the last thing he remembered before he sank back into an anesthetic haze of sleep.

OceanofPDF.com

4

“Angel, you have to be reasonable,” Devlin insisted, raising his hands like a supplicant in church. “There’s no way we can authorize you to travel to Vishnu.” He shook his head, his long gray hair whipping side to side with the motion. “It’s just not safe.”

“Don’t Angel me, Peter,” Evangeline Cortez warned the older man, leaning across his desk, putting her nose only inches from his. “And don’t tell me to be reasonable. This is my project! I need to be at the damned dig to supervise!”

“Dr. Stephenson is more than competent,” Peter Devlin assured her, pushing his desk chair back slightly, one hand going behind him and touching the polished oak of the display case as if he was worried about backing into it and sending the shelves of artifacts crashing down. They were, Angel knew, officially on loan from Cal Berkeley rather than being looted from ancient tombs for Devlin’s personal collection, but she still didn’t like the optics of it.

“Dan is a wonderful man,” she agreed, palms flat on the top of his desk, covering half of the scrolling video and photo display built into the furniture. Her thumb was planted directly in the eye of Devlin’s wife. “He’s a competent archaeologist and an experienced digger. But this isn’t just archaeology, Peter, and you damned well know it. This is xenoarchaeology, and Vishnu is the most extensive Arborist ruins we’ve found so far on two dozen worlds. I need to be there.”

“Vishnu is a shithole,” Devlin said with unusual honesty for a college dean.

He touched a control on his desk, and the mirror hanging on the wall beside the display case turned into a three-dimensional screen. An image of the planet in question was already pulled up, which meant Devlin had been very prepared for this argument. The thought annoyed Angel, though she wasn’t sure why. Maybe because she’d expected him to see the wisdom of her proposal without having to argue it.

Vishnu was a green and blue world, a hair closer to its star than Earth was to the Sun, on average a bit hotter and wetter, though the water was more spread out into dozens of smaller inland seas instead of a few huge oceans. She’d read the files. The dig was in the interior of what the locals called the Bengal Peninsula, which was humid, miserable, and awash with mosquitoes and carnivorous land animals, plenty of ammunition for Devlin to use against her.

“Leaving aside the possibility of you picking up some alien variation of a parasite or virus from the mosquitos, not mentioning the danger of you being eaten by one of the local predators, neither of which would, I am sure, deter you from going, we are left with the main problem.” He traced a line on the control panel, and the image of the planet faded, replaced by a stream of images of what looked to Angel like commercial starships. They passed by too quickly for her to read the names, but there were at least a dozen.

“That is a partial list of the ships either hijacked or destroyed by pirates in the BZ Ceti system in just the last three years. It is number four of the top ten most dangerous colonized systems, and the only sure way to be safe is to have a military escort… which we do not have and aren’t going to get. And once you get to the damned planet, it doesn’t get much better!”

Another flick of his finger on the touch screen, and the ship photos changed to the low, flattened lines of a city, the buildings squared off and jammed together, their original color lost in the green stains of moss and algae. And the people were just as thick as the buildings, more than she’d seen on any of the independent colonies, here and there a pedicab making its way through the mass.

“Vishnu was settled way back in the beginning, you see. The whole thing was financed by Lakshmi Nadar.” He cocked his eyebrow as if she should know who he was talking about, but she shook her head.

“The name sounds vaguely familiar….”

“Indian billionaire. Made his fortune in software, then diversified into space industry, trying to be the Asian Elon Musk. He was one of Dr. Soong-Tierney’s initial investors in the S-T drive, so he wound up richer than God, just like everyone involved with the drive. Unlike Soong-Tierney, he didn’t vanish into an orbital city never to be seen in public again. Mr. Nadar was something of a philanthropist and was deeply concerned with overpopulation in Asia and the damage it was doing to the local environment. So, he offered free transport and a grubstake to any Indian citizen willing to leave Earth for Vishnu.”

“And that worked?” Angel asked, eyes going wide. Devlin shot her a look of mixed pity and disdain.

“I know your attention has been focused a few thousand years in the past, but yes, things were pretty bad for a lot of the Indian population after the war with Pakistan, and they only got worse after the formation of the Alliance. China and Russia were putting the squeeze on India economically, trying to get them to join the Alliance. The Union wound up bailing them out, but there were people starving for a while. Millions signed up to leave, and Nadar sank hundreds of millions into sending them. People, genetically engineered seeds, construction equipment… with the idea being that Vishnu would wind up being a cultural, industrial, and agricultural center for this whole section of space someday, with Nadar as its economic kingpin.”

Devlin was in teaching mode now. Angel recognized it from the days she’d had him as a doctoral advisor, not so terribly long ago, but he was a good teacher, and whenever he went off on a rant, she found that she actually learned something.

“And what happened? Because it obviously wasn’t that.”

“He had food, people, supplies, but he didn’t have a military. Not even much of a police force. And when he and Dr. Soong-Tierney decided that everyone should have access to their drive, not just national governments, that meant that anyone who could scrape together enough money to buy, rent, or steal a ship could take whatever they wanted into space. Including guns. Vishnu became a major target for pirates, raiders, protection rackets, organized crime, and would-be revolutionaries. And Nadar was one of the first casualties.” Devlin shrugged. “Without his money backing the colony, it fell into squalor and crime, and the only industries other than subsistence farming are the old basics—carpentry, handicrafts, prostitution, and drugs. The drugs are the growth industry. They trade crystal meth, opium, and cocaine on the black market for iron and steel and lithium and everything else they need to have a more or less modern society.”

“Shit.” She hadn’t heard that about Vishnu. But Angel shook it off and met Devlin’s gaze with a harsh glare. “I understand it’s dangerous, but I’m going anyway. That dig is not about to move itself to a safer planet, and it is our best chance to get any kind of real understanding of Gardiner society!”

“Angel…” he tried again, fingers massaging his temples as if she was giving him a headache.

“They’re an alien intelligence,” she insisted, fingers curled like she was clutching at the truth of it. “The only one we know for sure ever existed. And somehow, they killed themselves off. We need to find out why, or the same thing could happen to us. And all we know about them is that they liked to bring their native trees with them wherever they went. That’s it, Peter. We don’t even know what they called themselves… our name for them is basically a joke.” Devlin opened his mouth again, but Angel pressed on before he could interrupt her. “If it’s dangerous, then by God, hire me a bodyguard. I know there’s money for it in the budget. I’ve seen the printouts. Personal protection is an authorized expense.”

That stopped Devlin in his tracks, and he appeared to be actually thinking about it.

“But it has to be someone who can keep up,” she went on, smacking the desk. “I don’t want some overweight retiree who’s waddling around in the biggest military fatigues they sell at the surplus store, just as likely to have a heart attack as stop a bullet for me. I want someone who’s worth a shit. Someone with actual combat experience.” A thought struck her and she stuck a finger toward him. “Your brother-in-law is a colonel or something in the Army, right?”

“75th Ranger Regiment,” he confirmed, nodding. The corner of his mouth turned up. “And you know something, Angel? I might have just the guy for you.”

* * *

“You got any change, mister?” the ancient, purple-haired woman croaked through a lifetime of cigarette smoke. She raised her cell phone, one of the cheap models that the city of Berkeley gave away to the homeless. “I accept Venmo.”

Victor Lee ignored her and twisted the accelerator on his scooter as the light changed. Homeless people in Berkeley were like pigeons in New York City. You pretended to not notice them unless you’d brought along a few crumbs to throw their way for entertainment.

Does that make me a bad person? Victor shrugged the question away and turned down the street toward his apartment. He’d consider his morality and compassion some other night, when he felt less like smashing his head against a wall.

The scooter went into a utility closet that the building custodian had given him the key to, and if the flimsy wooden door with a cheap padlock wasn’t much protection, it was certainly more deterrence than the bike rack and cable he’d used for his last scooter, the one that had been stolen after a week. Victor kept the key ring in his hand, trudging up the step without looking up, even though he knew it wasn’t smart. Someone could be hiding at the next landing. He’d been mugged that way once, a year ago. No one had tried it since, though. Probably because the first guy had spread the word that he didn’t have anything worth taking.

Sure enough, the landing was empty and no shadowy criminals tried to stop him from unlocking the apartment door. He winced at the bright lights in the living room, both because it was two in the morning and he wanted to be asleep and because they were a sign that his roommate was still awake and would definitely want to talk.

“Hey!” Lexie said as he pushed the door shut behind him. She was dressed in antique footie pajamas she’d bought at an online auction and stretched out on the ancient battered sofa the two of them had carried here from the dumpster where someone had left it two years ago. “How was your date?”

Victor took a moment to fasten the chain and throw the security bolt before he answered, using the pause to decide how much he wanted to tell the young woman. Lexie meant well, but as much as she dressed and talked like a hip relationship advice guru streaming live for donations, the fact was, she was a bigger nag than his mother. On the other hand, he needed to vent, despite the fact he knew exactly what she’d say.

“I hate this city,” he declared as he hung his keys on the hook beside the door, then stripped out of his windbreaker and draped it over one arm of the couch. It was too warm for it, even in spring, but he didn’t like riding the scooter without something to prevent road rash.

“You always say that.” Lexie shook her head, clucking in disappointment, looking away from him and back to the book she was reading on her tablet. It was a textbook, he knew, because Lexie didn’t read anything else on her tablet, still preferring physical copies, an affectation Victor would have found more endearing if the apartment hadn’t been so small and her book collection so large. “If you hate it so much here, why not emigrate?” She waved a hand upward demonstratively. “Cash in your college fund and buy passage somewhere they don’t have crime, or homeless people, or muggers?”

“And do what?” Victor snorted a laugh as he moved past her to the tiny kitchen, dodging a pile of paperbacks. “Become a farmer? Work in a mine? You may not have noticed, but I’m working on my doctorate.”

“For how long now? Is the thesis that hard to finish… or are you still hung up on that woman, your advisor?” Lexie raised her head to catch his eye, the corner of her mouth turning up. “What’s her name? Angela?”

“Dr. Evangeline Cortez,” he corrected her, retrieving a beer from the fridge. “You want one?” he asked, holding it up so she could see it through the bar opening.

“No, I’m good.” She pointed an accusatory finger at him. “You are still hung up on her, aren’t you? That’s why you keep sabotaging yourself every time you go out with someone new, like this Debbie girl from tonight.”

“It’s not my fault Debbie is an airhead,” he insisted. Victor took a swig of the beer and made a face. It was cheap and alcoholic, and those were the only good things he could say about it. He sat down beside Lexie on the couch, and she scooted over to make room. “All she wanted to talk about the whole night was whether I’d watched the latest upload from Melanie Gerardo and how could I not watch Melanie’s videos and didn’t I know that Melanie was the most talented person in the world?” He let his head fall back against the cushion, resting the bottom of the beer bottle against his blue jeans. “Talented, she said. As if going online and leaving videos about how shitty her ex-boyfriends are and how much she loves the same bands and movies that everyone else loves makes someone talented.” He turned and fixed Lexie with a glare. “Please tell me you don’t watch that shit.”

“Who has time?” Lexie asked, holding up the tablet. “Some of us are actually working on their doctoral thesis. I don’t want to be scraping by on what a graduate assistant makes for the next three years like you have.”

“You just don’t understand.” Another longer drink of the beer. The more he drank of it, the better it tasted. “If I try to write my thesis on some cookie-cutter subject like everyone else, Dr. Cortez will chew me up and spit me out. I’ve got to come up with just the right subject, or she’ll shoot it down immediately.”

“You both spend all your time studying those aliens… the Gardeners?”

“Arborists,” he corrected automatically.

“Yeah, those. Why not write your thesis on them?”

“And write what?” A long, last chug. Maybe, he thought, he should get another. “That they came from somewhere we haven’t found yet, spread throughout this whole section of our spiral arm, colonized a dozen different worlds, and brought with them trees and plants from their homeworld? Because that’s about all we know. I couldn’t fill a pamphlet with that, much less a doctoral dissertation.” He frowned, thoughts wandering. “You know I saw a doctoral thesis once with almost two hundred citations? And it was only like thirty pages long. There was an endnote almost every sentence. Right now, the best books on the Arborists were all written by Dr. Cortez, and you need more than one primary source to write a thesis.”

“Cry me a river, Mr. Lee,” Lexie said, miming playing a violin. “You’ve gotten to go to other planets, dude. If I’m lucky, the department will let me visit DC someday to go to the national archives.” Her matronly face brightened with a broad smile. “Hey, that reminds me, you wanna go see the new Red Raptor movie?”

Victor groaned, making a face.

“Lexie, you know I’m not into superhero movies.”

“It’s in HoloSenSurround,” she teased, poking him in the ribs.

He flinched but couldn’t stop the smile breaking out across his face, banishing the unpleasant memory of his date.

“Oh, damn it, you know I can’t turn down HoloSenSurround. I assume it’s not playing at two in the morning, so when did you want to go?”

“Tomorrow night.” She frowned in confusion. “Wait, I guess that’s tonight.” She waved it off. “You know what I mean. I think it’s got showings at seven, nine, and eleven.”

“We should do seven,” Victor decided, “then eat afterward and…”

He was on a roll, beginning to get excited about the plan, when his phone chirped for attention. Victor glanced down at his jacket. He’d left the phone in the windbreaker’s pocket and hadn’t thought he’d need it again except as an alarm clock to wake him up in time for his ten o’clock class. He had an ear bud for it, but that was in the other pocket.

“That can’t be Debbie,” he said, digging into the pocket. “She can’t be calling me already.”

“Ooh, someone has a crush on Mr. Lee,” Lexie teased.

He found the device and read the number on the screen… and frowned even more deeply.

“Dr. Cortez?” he said, holding the phone to his ear, not bothering to try to reach the ear bud. “Is something wrong?”

Lexie had begun making an obscene gesture once she heard who it was, and Victor waved at her to cut it out.

“On the contrary, Victor,” Angel Cortez replied, not sounding at all like it was two a.m. and they all should have been asleep. “Things are just about perfect. Remember when I spoke to you about the dig on Vishnu?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said automatically, though the truth was, he had only a vague recollection of the conversation and mostly that it was a death trap and Dean Devlin would never let her go there.

“I talked the stiff-necked old bastard into letting me go. Get packed and make sure your vaccinations are up to date. We leave from the LAX spaceport on a shuttle to Gateway Station in thirty-six hours.”

“But, ma’am…” Whatever objection he’d been about to bring was lost on Angel Cortez. She’d hung up with the last pronouncement.

Bitch. Just assumes I can drop everything, give up my classes, my job, my friends and run off to some shithole colony for God knows how many weeks or months, living in a tent, eating the local swill, and swatting at bugs that shouldn’t even like human blood but somehow always do.

And, of course, she assumed right.

“I don’t think,” he told Lexie, tossing his phone back on the couch, “that I’m going to be able to catch that movie.”

OceanofPDF.com

5

Evangeline Cortez didn’t care much for free fall.

She’d gotten used to it over the last few years, hopping back and forth from one off-world dig site to another, but even with the anti-nausea medication, it tortured her inner ear and made her believe with every fiber of her being that she was plunging into nothingness.

But she’d be damned before she’d let Victor Lee or anyone else know.

“Why the heck don’t they have some kind of gravity generator yet?” Victor whined, one hand clutching at his duffle bag, the other affixed to the railing like he believed letting go would send him drifting out into the airless death of empty space instead of just turning him into a nuisance to the rest of the passengers getting off the shuttles at Gateway.

Instead of just a nuisance to me.

“I mean, there’s artificial gravity on the Soong-Tierney ships. Why can’t they put it on space stations so we wouldn’t have to spin them? That way, we wouldn’t have to go through this”—he indicated what this was with a nod toward the transport hub leading from the docking ports to the lifts, and through them outward to the rotating sections of the enormous tin can that was Gateway Station—“every time we wanted to catch a ship outbound.”

“Haven’t you ever taken a physics class, Victor?” she wondered, struggling with the straps of her luggage. It had no weight in the free fall of the docking bay, but it did still have mass and momentum and went twisting and tumbling with every jolt of her hand against the railing.

“Just the ones I needed to graduate high school,” the graduate student admitted.

“The Soong-Tierney drive can only generate artificial gravity when the drive nacelles are active. Which means they’re generating thrust. Which means that the only way for this station to have artificial gravity would be if it was accelerating. Which, besides requiring a nuclear reactor the size of a freaking city, would sort of negate the whole purpose of it being a station.”

“Oh,” Victor said, and if he didn’t actually turn red, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

“Besides, it’s only till we get to the lifts.”

Not that getting there and finding a car wasn’t going to take some time. Gateway was as packed as the Atlanta airport at Christmas, jammed with a quixotic mixture of entrepreneurs, adventurers, would-be explorers and hopeless romantics and a more pragmatic assemblage of hard-headed business types intent on selling the proverbial picks and shovels to the gold-miners or, more directly, robbing them blind.

And Gateway didn’t have much in the way of law-enforcement to prevent it. Security, yes. The owners of the privately funded station snuggled into the fifth Lagrangian point between the Earth and Luna didn’t want some whacko to blow a hole in the side and kill all their customers, nor did they want people too scared to use their station to do business. But they also didn’t want people too scared of being arrested to use their station to do business some governments might consider illegal. Gateway was neutral, extranational territory.

“Why did we have to meet them here?” Victor wondered, as if he were reading her mind.

They’d finally made it down to the lift banks, using the handrails to hold themselves in place in the line rather than to propel themselves down the passageway. Angel often wondered if it was courtesy, lack of three-dimensional thinking, or the uniformed security guards carrying sawed-off shotguns that kept people from trying to float high and cut the line from above.

“I mean,” the grad student went on, as if oblivious to her lack of interest in listening to him complain, “wouldn’t it have been just as easy for this bodyguard dude to meet us at LAX?” Victor glanced around them, holding his bags close as if he expected one of the rough-looking, wild-eyed types surrounding them to steal them right off his body. “Couldn’t he have landed this ship we’re chartering there? It’s not like the university wouldn’t have paid their landing fees and gotten them clearance.”

“I don’t know these people,” Angel admitted, “but from what Peter told me, I get the impression they aren’t too keen on the idea of landing anywhere with government jurisdiction. US or Union.” She shrugged, but in the free fall, that was more a matter of her whole body pulling downward with the railing as an anchor rather than her shoulders rising. “Not to mention, one of the main reasons we need this crew is that their ship is armed, and no way would LAX let an armed spaceship land, no matter how much Berkeley paid them.” She scowled at Victor. “Is that it, or do you want to whine some more? I swear, if I knew what a baby you were going to be about all this, I would have brought along someone else.”

Who that might have been, she wasn’t sure. If she was being honest with herself, not only was Victor the only one of her graduate assistants she would have trusted on a trip like this, but he was also the only one who she believed would come.

It took nearly a half hour waiting in line before they finally caught a lift car, and even then, the thing filled far beyond the listed capacity before the doors slid shut. Angel was pushed into a corner with Victor against her shoulder, her bags held out in front of her to ward off the shaggy-haired man in a long trench coat who seemed to be trying to put an arm around her. He smelled like sweat and used beer, and the rest of the occupants of the elevator weren’t much better.

“Make sure your feet are flat on the floor,” she warned Victor as the car sped off for the rim of the spinning tin can.

He didn’t ask why, either because despite his lack of physics training, he realized what angular momentum was, or maybe because he was too embarrassed to admit he didn’t know. If it was the latter, then he got a sudden visceral education when spin gravity made the floor “down.” Someone on the other side of the car yelped, probably turning an ankle because they’d been floating too far above what had become the floor.

The car arrived at their level and Angel elbowed her way out, intent on not spending a second longer than she had to in the humid, fetid swamp of body odor that was the elevator. She worried Victor might get stuck inside, swarmed over by the influx of boarding passengers, but the tug on one of her bags was his desperate grasp, and he pulled himself out behind her, gasping for air.

“Where the hell are we?” he asked, looking around.

The outer rim levels of Gateway reminded her of the food court at LAX, just lines of businesses with not enough seating and corridors packed with people who wanted like hell to be anywhere else. Under a roof. Yet somehow, this place raked in billions of dollars a year, enough to make its upkeep worthwhile to the consortium of private investors who subsidized it.

She had to admit, the place was useful. People needed to meet to do business somewhere without the territorial fingers of Earth governments encroaching, and if none of those nations really approved of Gateway, well, they all needed it just as much as the criminals and the entrepreneurs.

“I shouldn’t have brought this much luggage,” Victor lamented, struggling beneath the load of an overstuffed duffle, a backpack that pulled against the shoulder straps like it was full of bricks, and a roller bag that clicked and clacked behind him. It was motorized, but Victor didn’t seem to trust it not to wind up being hijacked by some sharpie in the crowd. “I didn’t know we were coming this deep into the station. I thought we’d just transfer from one ship to the other.”

“There’s the small matter of agreeing to a contract first,” she said, the pull of her own bags against her shoulders painfully apparent. She was determined to ignore it, though. “Also, I don’t intend on stepping into some low-life mercenary’s ship without at least getting to meet him first.”

“Low-life mercenary?” Victor repeated, eyes going wide as he stopped in the middle of the concourse. An older woman dressed in flowing purple robes cursed as she nearly ran into him and dodged to the side. “You didn’t say anything about these guys being mercenaries.”

Angel rolled her eyes and tugged at his arm to get him back into motion.

“Who the hell else do you think is going to be running armed escorts into periphery systems, Victor? The Humane Society? The Peace Corps?”

“Aren’t there, like, high-end firms out there who do this kind of thing with government approval?” Which was, at least, a reasonable question, so she answered it.

“There are. They are also incredibly expensive and most of their jobs come from corporations who can afford to throw that kind of money around. We’re working from the discretionary funding of a public university. We’re lucky they didn’t just stick us on a communal transport and wish us the best.”

Victor seemed to accept that, though she thought it probably came reluctantly. At least, he stopped talking, which was a definite improvement. She concentrated on the map in her head, memorized on the shuttle up. She’d been told her memory was nearly eidetic, though she’d never noticed it, except to be amused that other people had to make notes for themselves on their phones and annoyed when they forgot something she needed them to remember. Her mental image of the map was as clear as when she’d been looking the place up on her console on the shuttle and she led Victor around a labyrinthine series of turns and curves and cut throughs.

With each turn, it seemed to her that the light grew dimmer, though that might have been a psychological reaction to the changing nature of the people and businesses around them. As they wound deeper into the maze, the slicked-back corporate types and the wide-eyed dreamers had filtered off to the sides, leaving them with a core of unsavory characters, their gaze narrow, their hands stuffed into pockets, probably keeping whatever weapons they’d been able to bring with them in reach. The businesses had changed as well. No more gift shops and fast-food stands, replaced now by bars, casinos, strip joints and, as they walked further toward the center, brothels… the high-tech kind with sex robots, though she was sure the old-fashioned variety could be found somewhere on the station.

“Where the hell are we meeting this guy, anyway?” Victor asked, staring at the passersby just as they stared at him, except his was the wide-eyed look of prey and theirs the risk-benefit analysis of predators.

“There,” Angel told him, pointing at the angular, ominous lines of a bar, its name advertised in purple neon along the external wall.

Little Sammy’s, it said, accompanied by an illustration of a rabbit with the attributes of a nubile human female. Angel sneered, but proceeded inside, dragging her baggage along… and Victor, if there was a difference.

If there’d been sidelong glances before, there were open stares now. For all that Angel had told Victor to dress in unassuming work clothes and had taken her own advice, wearing the roughest, cheapest shirt and jeans she owned along with a pair of boots she’d worn to digs since she was a grad student, the two of them still stood out somehow, babes in the woods. It wasn’t a feeling she cared for, and she turned more than one set of eyes away simply by the ferocity of her glare.

The interior of the bar was darker than the corridors outside, most of the light coming from a display screen running 360 degrees around the junction of the walls with the high roof. It showed clips from old movies—some she recognized, some she didn’t—but what they had in common was the depiction of women in skimpy clothing. The waitresses circulating amid the high-top tables and booths reinforced that atmosphere, wearing bunny costumes that echoed the image on the wall outside, and Angel looked away, embarrassed for them.

Victor did not, though to be fair, she wasn’t sure if his gaze was lascivious or horrified. He did live in Berkley, so horrified was a better guess. She found an unoccupied booth and pushed Victor into it, not noticing any signage indicating they should wait for a seat.

One of the waitresses found them almost immediately, and Angel was impressed with the customer service, if not the scruples of the place. The woman was young, in her early twenties if that, and Angel wondered how she’d wound up on this place. She wanted to grab her and make her sit beside them, ask her whether she’d been forced into this job by blackmail or extortion or just plain desperation.

Unfortunately, that was just begging for more attention that they didn’t need, so she just smiled politely at the girl.

“Can I get you something to drink?” the young blond asked. “There’s a two-drink minimum,” she added, her friendly, open gaze turning briefly cold, as if she’d encountered tourists in the past who’d tried to freeload.

“I’ll have a boilermaker,” she said, getting both drinks out of the way at once. The waitress turned her attention to Victor, and it was mutual. Angel rolled her eyes and nudged the younger man.

“I… uh,” he stammered. “I guess I’ll have two frozen strawberry margaritas?”

Angel wouldn’t have thought it likely for a girl this young to be able to make that disdainful a face, but the waitress proved her wrong.

“We don’t have a blender,” the woman informed him, somehow turning the announcement into the basest of insults, leaving unsaid what was obvious in her eyes. And if we did, I still wouldn’t serve you that wussy drink.

“Just two regular margaritas on the rocks, then.”

The girl nodded and walked away on the highest heels Angel had ever seen. Victor’s gaze followed her.

“I didn’t think places like this even existed,” he blurted to Angel, shaking his head. “I mean, I’ve seen videos from like sixty or seventy years ago that showed them, but…”

“This is Gateway,” she said. “Besides being untouchable by any national government, it’s quite insulated from shame or societal pressure. Anything you want, you can find here. No matter how degrading it is, if you pay someone well enough, you can get it here.”

She was trying to sound damning, but the assessment came out almost admiring. And she supposed it was. This particular perversion offended her sensibilities as a woman and a human being, but there was something about the sheer chutzpah of the whole station that appealed to her. Society was made up of people, and they shouldn’t need to pretend to be perfect any more than a person should.

She was so introspective, and Victor was apparently so enamored of the waitresses that neither of them noticed the two scruffy, ragged-around-the-edges men approaching their table until they’d slid into the seats opposite them in the booth. They looked enough alike to be related, cousins or brothers, with the same cut to their close-trimmed beards, their dreadlocks dyed in the colors of the rainbow to match the patterns of their identical dusters.

“Good morning, you lovely people,” the one on the left said, his smile revealing a row of alternating silver and gold teeth. “Welcome to our wonderful home here on Gateway, and we sincerely hope you enjoy your stay.”

“Yes, we sincerely hope,” the one on the right took up the patter. He was slightly thicker in the jaw than his relative, but the only stylistic difference between the two were the tiny cuts through his eyebrows that his friend lacked. “Allow me to introduce my partner and myself to you lovely people. I,” he said with flourish, fingers pressed against his chest, “am Burton Spencer, and this”—he pointed to his companion—“is my beloved cousin, Sean Guster.”

“Are these the people we’re supposed to be meeting?” Victor hissed into Angel’s ear, clutching at her arm.

She pried his fingers off her bicep and rewarded him with a glare. “No.” Then she shared that glare with their visitors. “What do you two… gentlemen want?”

“Not the type for pleasantries, are you?” Guster observed, cocking an eyebrow at her. “All right, then. We have a business opportunity to offer you.” He spread his fingers as if offering up a gift. “Something that will be profitable for both of us. You see, we’re always on the lookout for someone with the intelligence and ambition to make some money, and you seem like just the right kind of people for that.”

Angel was opening her mouth to tell him to go piss up a rope when Spencer took up the thread, nearly stepping on the last words of his cousin, Guster.

“You see, my lovelies, we find ourselves in the unenviable—but not unheard of—position of not being able to set foot on any civilized nation on Earth without a severe misunderstanding resulting from our prior visits. Not that we’re incredibly attached to any place on Earth, you see, so it’s no great loss for either of us. But it does limit certain business possibilities that would otherwise be very desirable.”

“Which is where you two come in,” Guster took back over. “We have some goods we need delivered to LAX, nothing deadly or that would get you in too much trouble… hell, I’m not even sure if it’s illegal in California.”

“It’s just illegal for us to be in California,” Spencer cut in.

“It’s small, so small you’d never even notice it, just a few kilograms of Orion Blue, the latest and greatest designer opiate on the market. You get it to our friend at the airport and your cut would be $10,000 paid in DigCoin on delivery.”

Angel stared at him through narrowed eyes, irritation warring with amusement.

“Let’s take this seriatim, shall we?” she said, leaning across the table at the men. “First of all, competence. You researched us adequately enough to discover we flew out of LAX, but you couldn’t deduce we weren’t going back there? News flash, we’re outbound. We won’t be coming back to LAX for months. Did your informers not tell you that?”

She nearly laughed in their faces. They both looked as if someone had smacked them with a baseball bat.

“Secondly, let’s talk about what we’re supposed to deliver. Orion Blue sells for $100,000 a kilo on the street, and that’s after it’s cut. How would two low-level lowlifes like you ever get your hands on that much designer drugs? And more importantly, why the hell would you ever trust a couple of tourists you just met to deliver it for you?”

She counted the points off on her hand since she doubted these idiots could follow her without a visual cue. If they’d seemed gobsmacked before, they were wide-eyed and disbelieving now.

“Third, how likely would you be to tell two complete strangers they were carrying Orion Blue? Why the hell would you assume that they would be stupid enough to not know how valuable it is and trust them not to just go sell it themselves and pocket the money?” She smiled thinly. “And last, of course, do you really think I would agree to traffic drugs for you without being paid ahead of time? Ten thousand on delivery?”

She barked a laugh, then raised an accusatory finger.

“You want to know what I think? I think you two owe somebody money down in LA, and you don’t have it because you’re both quite obviously a pair of chronic losers. I think you told them you’d send down some product as payment, but you won’t do it yourselves because you know the second they see you, they’ll pop you. So, you keep trying to find some marks here on Gateway to take some worthless, cheap, toilet-lab drugs with them and then catch a bullet for their trouble. And you hope that will be the end of it, but of course it won’t, since the people who loaned you money will still want their money back.” She shrugged. “The fact that they loaned you two money in the first place means their judgment isn’t that good, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t greedy enough to come after you.” Her pointing finger turned upward. “You know what I would do if I were you? I’d get the hell out of this system. Grab work on an outbound freighter, even a smuggler, just anywhere out of here. You’ll thank me later.”

“How did you know how much Orion Blue sells for?” Victor asked her, looking as impressed as Sean and Burton.

“There’s a wonderful streaming series about the new designer drugs from the BBC,” she told him. “You should look it up… perhaps download it to watch during the trip.”

“Yo, bitch!” Spencer—or is it Guster?—leaned across the table and grabbed her by the arm and yanked her toward him. “You think some snooty bint fresh off the fucking boat is going to come in here and insult us?”

Angel didn’t panic because she never did. Instead, she ran responses to the attack through her eidetic memory until she settled on one from a Krav Maga class three years ago. She twisted her arm, gaining leverage on Spencer’s with her elbow against his forearm, then grabbed his wrist with her other hand and pushed downward, using the leverage to accomplish what her weight and strength alone would not have. Spencer’s face slammed into the table, then rebounded as she let go of his arm and stepped out of the booth.

“If you won’t take my advice about leaving the system,” she said, “then I suggest you at least take this advice and get the hell out of this bar before my friend and I are forced to hurt you.”

That last was a bluff. Victor hadn’t moved from his chair and likely wouldn’t unless someone chased him out of it. His jaw had dropped open at the grab and remained there at the slam.

Spencer was rubbing at his cheek where it had smacked into the table, but both men had exited the booth, and Guster had a hand in the side pocket of his rainbow-colored duster.

“You just made a big mistake,” Guster told her, pulling a knife out of its sheath in his pocket. The blade was matte-black and six inches long, the handle a dull-green fiberglass laminate, and he held it between thumb and forefinger like someone who’d actually been trained on how to use it.

Oh, that’s so very unfortunate…

OceanofPDF.com

6

Angel backed a step away from them, but she had another problem. They weren’t alone in the bar, and the commotion was drawing attention. So far, the looks were curious rather than aggressive, but this wasn’t the kind of place where she could count on even neutrality, much less good intentions. A tall, broad-shouldered man dressed in a leather vest and silk jodhpurs was inching forward, licking his lips between a shaggy grey beard, and she didn’t trust the nature of his interest, but she couldn’t keep him and the two idiots in her focus at once.

“When are you two shitheads going to stop messing with every new face that comes in here?”

The words came out rough and hoarse, the voice of a man who’d spent years of his life yelling at people. The man behind it wasn’t particularly tall, not quite six feet, nor did he have the build of a weightlifter. Instead, he reminded her of the butterfly specialists she knew from her college swim team, muscular but lean, almost lanky. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, just threadbare blue jeans and a flannel shirt, and the close-cropped blond beard wouldn’t have been regulation if he had, but there was a military air to the way he carried himself. She’d known soldiers, and this man was a soldier.

The reaction from Spencer and Guster was as dramatic as the man’s appearance. They spun at his voice, and Spencer held his knife up in a defensive gesture, but his hands were shaking.

“Weston!” Guster exclaimed, still trying to work the cramp out of his arm. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Business,” the soldier informed them. “Business with these two, in point of fact. Go cause trouble somewhere else.” He raised an eyebrow at Spencer. “And if you don’t stop waving that knife around, I’m going to stick it up your ass.”

Spencer scowled at the man, but the knife disappeared into his coat.

“You better keep your eyes open, Weston. You gotta sleep, too.”

The soldier laughed, a harsh sound.

“You can be pretty freaking sure that when I do sleep, it won’t be anywhere near you two. Get the hell out of here.”

The two men grumbled but they moved, shuffling out the front entrance to a few subdued chuckles and a general air of disappointment that someone hadn’t been stabbed. Angel shot a look behind her at the big, bearded bruiser. He was still leering at her but had moved back to the bar and retrieved his drink. She watched him until she was sure he wasn’t going to jump her, then turned back to the soldier.

“You’re Dr. Cortez?” he asked, extending a hand. She shook it and found it dry and rough, with the strength of a man used to hard work. “I’m Chase Weston. Nice to meet you.”

“Hey, Chase!” It was their waitress, returning now that the excitement was over, all smiles for the soldier. “I didn’t think I’d see you again so soon!” She rubbed her hip up against him in a very familiar way, leaning in to embrace the man. “What can I get you to drink?”

“Two beers, and let’s get it over with, Holly,” Chase told her, offering a warm smile in return for the hug. “Whatever you got on tap. I’m not picky.”

“Obviously not,” Angel observed, sitting back down in the booth. Victor still hadn’t moved, and she was beginning to wonder if he was in shock. “This is my graduate assistant, Victor Lee. He’s excellent at administrative work and digging, though I am beginning to question his skill at responding to emergencies.”

“Oh, uh, sorry, Dr. Cortez,” Victor said, stumbling over the words as if he was having to relearn how to speak after a stroke. “I just… I’ve been mugged before.”

“And I don’t have to ask how that went for you,” she cut him off.

Holly came back by with a tray loaded down with six drinks and carefully unloaded them in front of their proper owners, showing both an attention to detail and an alacrity Angel wouldn’t have suspected. Perhaps she hadn’t been forced into this job, after all. She certainly didn’t have any qualms about waiting around for her customers to pay. Angel offered her phone, tapping it against the tablet at the waitress’s hip, though how it stayed there she wasn’t sure since the woman wore nothing except the two-piece bikini with fake rabbit fur that was the uniform of the place.

Chase Weston, Angel noted, paid in cash, then pushed both the beers aside as if he had no intention of touching them again. Victor sipped tentatively at one of his margaritas, making a face at the first taste, as if the drink was too strong. Chase eyed her shot and beer with what seemed to be amusement.

“You actually going to drink that?” he wondered. “I mean, I’ve heard of boilermakers, but I never met anyone who liked them.”

She smirked at him as she dropped the shot glass into the mug of whatever shitty beer they had on tap at this place, then downed the concoction in one long pull. It was horrible, of course. She’d known that when she ordered it, and no, she hadn’t actually planned on drinking it, but once challenged, there hadn’t been any choice. She didn’t let her opinion of the drink show through on her face, just wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and stared back at the man.

If he was impressed, he hid it as well as she had her disgust with the drink.

“At least it was quick,” he commiserated, then slipped into business mode so smoothly she wondered if he’d ever been in sales. “You know the rate. Colonel Devlin gave it to his brother, and he gave it to you. And you know I expect a deposit up front.” He put a hand against his chest. “Not for me. It’s for Pri. Priyanka Ambedkar, the pilot, captain, and majority owner of the Tamar. She doesn’t fly unless someone pays for her fuel, ammo and maintenance in advance. That’s non-refundable by the way. Whether you get there or the locals tell you to bugger off and don’t come back, the fuel gets burned in her reactor, the food gets eaten and the wear and tear gets put on her ship.”

“I understand,” Angel acknowledged. “The money will be deposited in her account before we leave.” She regarded him with narrow eyes. “Peter’s brother seems to think you won’t toss us out of an airlock and keep the money. I wish I had that sort of faith, but I’m a bit more skeptical than my colleague.”

“I have a reputation,” Chase told her. “It’s worth its weight in uranium in this business, and I didn’t get it by double-crossing my clients for a few thousand in DigCoin.”

He seemed sincere, but there was something abrasive about the cocksure set of his eyes, something that made her want to distrust him, dislike him even, though liking or disliking the man had little to do with how suitable he would be as a bodyguard.

“Peter’s brother also seems to think,” she went on, almost mocking in her tone, though she wasn’t sure why, “that you’re competent as a bodyguard.”

“Personal protection specialist,” he corrected her. His face was deadly serious, but there might have been a reflection of her own teasing mockery in his eyes.

“I want to know,” she pressed on, “what makes you qualified to guard my body.”

And now there was something else in his eyes, just a flicker of interest as he looked her up and down. Angel knew she was attractive. She had the dark, smoldering eyes of her mother, the strong chin of her father, and she indulged in long-distance running as a means of clearing her head. She weighed the same today as she had when she’d graduated high school. It was excellent camouflage to catch her male rivals unsuspecting and trip them up in front of grant boards. And it was also wonderful as a test of character. If a man judged her by her looks, either negatively, deciding that an attractive woman couldn’t be that intelligent, or positively, attributing moral superiority to her just because of her looks, he was deposited into her mental discard pile.

Had Chase Weston told her to go to hell, that he didn’t have to share his credentials with her, she would have respected it. Well, she would have been incensed, of course. But given time to think about it, she would have been impressed by his conviction. He went the other way, giving in.

“I enlisted in the United States Army at seventeen. Airborne school, RASP—Ranger Assessment and Selection Program—and then Ranger school. Assigned to a Ranger battalion by the time I was nineteen, just in time for the war. Saw action in Taiwan and then in the Ukraine.”

“Why’d you get out?” she asked, having already passed judgment on him as a human being but still reserving it with respect to his competence. “You’re what? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine? You could be a sergeant-major by now with that kind of combat experience.” At his raised eyebrow, she sniffed disdain. “My adopted father was a career soldier.”

“Let’s just say that I enlisted in the United States Army. Not the Union ground elements. I don’t like taking orders from officers in the militaries of other countries who don’t know how Rangers do things. And I don’t like wearing anyone else’s flag on my arm.”

“The Union was necessary,” she said, surprised at the vehemence of his opinion. “With Russia and China united in the Alliance, the rest of the world had to come together to oppose them.”

“That’s the theory, anyway.” He scowled. “You know there’s corruption in the Army. In any service. There’re people who steal and cheat and betray, but they’re the minority and they get turned in because the US military is full of men and women who joined up because they’re devoted to their country. Well, when you take that away, when you’re serving for the idea of checking aggression, then the only thing stopping the stealing and the cheating and the treason is a fear of getting caught. That wasn’t the kind of Army I wanted to serve in.”

Angel didn’t respond because it wasn’t important except as an explanation of who he was and why he’d done what he’d done. She just nodded, satisfied that he wasn’t an addict who’d been kicked out of the service.

“I assume you’ll provide your own supplies,” she said, the words spoken with the finality of a contract agreed upon. “Weapons, food, equipment?”

“Of course. And there’ll be food and drink for both of you on the Tamar, though if you have any dietary restrictions or preferences, you’ll need to bring any special food items yourself.” A dry chuckle. “And cook it yourselves unless you want it burned or microwaved.”

“And it’s just you?” Victor asked, skepticism replacing shock in his tone now that he was over the confrontation. “No team? No crew, just you?”

“The Tamar has a crew. But I’ll be your entire personal protection detail, yes.” Chase shrugged. “If it was a bigger party, I would have brought on extra help, but if it’s just the two of you and you don’t plan on wandering off away from each other, I think we should be fine.”

“All right.” Angel tapped at the screen of her phone, bringing up the contract, then signed it with a scrawl of her fingernail across the display. Another tap sent it to the address she’d been given by Peter Devlin.

Chase pulled out his own device, which looked at least five years older than hers, and smiled at the screen.

“If you’re finished with your drinks,” he said, eyeing Victor’s nearly untouched margaritas, “I can take you down to the Tamar now.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve had better margaritas before,” Victor admitted. “These taste like they were recycled directly from the urinal.”

Chase grabbed the untouched margarita and downed the drink in one long chug, throat bobbing. He sighed and set it down, the ice tinkling against the glass.

“It’s not that bad,” he allowed.

* * *

“Aren’t we going to the lifts?” Victor asked, eyes darting around the dim reaches of the passage, a hamster in a tunnel.

Victor Lee was a squirrelly, nervous type with the sort of twitchy, narrow features that reminded Chase of a private he’d trained in RASP at Benning just before he left the Army. The kid had washed out after four days, and not just the normal way, asking to quit. They’d found him naked and smeared with his own feces in the latrine. Everyone else had thought he was faking it, but Chase knew different. Some people, when reality smacked them in the face, they shook it off and kept going. Others, they refused to accept it, denied it, living in their own version of things where they were the hero of the story and everyone else was wrong.

And then there was Private Gutterson. The kind of soldier who reacted to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by giving into fear, letting it overcome them. Not that he expected Victor Lee to lock himself in the head on the Tamar and do a shitty impression of Jackson Pollock, but he’d have to watch the kid. This Dr. Cortez, she had the feel of someone who could take care of herself, who would do the smart thing when the shit hit the fan, maybe even listen to him, though he could tell she wasn’t too fond of him. But Victor Lee would freeze. He’d frozen just at those two assholes Guster and Spencer, and they’d barely even threatened violence. Not much violence.

“We are,” Chase said, answering the student’s question. “But the Tamar’s on the opposite polar docking hub, and if we get on the lifts at this end of the drum, we’re going to be riding it for over an hour while we get squashed into a corner by packs of the worst-smelling assholes you’ll ever have the pleasure to meet. I figured you’d rather walk out in the open air… comparatively open, I guess.” He waved at the overhanging roof, a few dozen meters overhead. “This place isn’t bad for a space station. I mean, if you’re claustrophobic, you wouldn’t have anything to worry about.”

“There’s not much to see down here,” Angel Cortez observed.

He nodded, trying to look at the place through a stranger’s eyes instead of ignoring it out of habit as he had the last few years. The shops and restaurants and bars had faded behind them, giving way to the low-rent housing, metal caves inside a larger metal cave.

“Not everyone can afford the fancy condos on the upper levels with all the mirrors bringing light in from the outside,” he told her. “Takes people to run this thing… for now. I hear they’re making progress with AI robots to do a lot of the scut work, but until they’re cheaper than just feeding and housing a bunch of half-trained workers, I don’t think much will come of it. Easier just to skip all the hassle and offer people a job that sounds good-paying until you realize that you have to buy all your food and clothes and entertainment from the same people who pay you, and the company store jacks up the prices.”

They were walking by, some of them on their way to their jobs, some of them heading off shift back to their one-room hovels. Their clothes were bright, multi-colored, the most expensive their paychecks could buy off the company 3-D printers, as if they were trying to escape the doldrums of their workaday lives by fancy dress. They were mostly young, mostly from areas hit the worst by the war, and their faces showed a uniform hopelessness, similar to the refugees he’d encountered coming up across the border after the Chinese commando teams had set off the nuke in Mexico City.

“A regular Oliver Twist London down here,” Angel murmured, watching them pass by.

“Oh, it’s not quite as bad as it seems,” Chase told her, shrugging. “Eventually, they can save up enough for transport to one of the colonies. And if working a peasant farm on Charybdis isn’t everyone’s idea of paradise, it’s probably a better life than any of them had on Earth.” He winked at Angel. “Besides, they have killer parties down here every weekend, and there’s never been a better place to hook up for some short-term relationshipping.”

Her stare could have frozen nitrogen, but he pretended to ignore it.

“Is it dangerous down here?” Victor whispered, waiting for an attractive girl in a short, faux leather skirt and high-heeled boots to move out of earshot before he went on. “I mean, is there a lot of crime here?”

“It’s a low-income area full of displaced people living hand-to-mouth, Victor,” Angel ground out, impatience dripping off every word. “Of course, there’s crime down here.”

“Some,” Chase agreed. “Not as much as you might think. Not much physical cash, and everything they have, anyone can buy from the stores here, so not much robbery or theft. Mostly people getting drunk or high and getting into fights. Some sexual assaults, but mostly the people here don’t put up with that kind of thing.” He sniffed, nodding at the rowhouses, the people sitting on the steps, some drinking out of plastic bottles, some smoking water pipes or vaping. “They may not seem like much, but they police themselves… mostly because there’s no one else around to do it. Anyway, we’re almost through. We don’t have to walk all the way across the drum just to the lift banks on the other side of the pressure seal.”

“The what?” Victor asked, frowning at him in confusion.

“This.” Chase motioned ahead, where the rowhouses ended abruptly in what he’d always thought of as the giant O-ring.

That was what it looked like, a metal washer the size of a suspension bridge, running all along the interior of the metal drum that was Gateway station. The walkway ended at the edge of it, an escalator running up the fifty yards to the top and then back over the inside, with a break in the middle where pedestrians could step over the camera-lens iris sunken into the twenty-foot gap between sections of the seal.

“That’s the emergency pressure seal,” Chase explained. “It divides Gateway in half, so if one end or the other is hit by a big meteor or something, they can seal it off and keep the whole station from depressurizing.” He laughed softly. “Not that it would be much comfort to the people in the other half, but there are shelters in each section, too. Some of them would make it. Just another reason I don’t like space stations.”

The steady stream of pedestrians had tailed off as they left the residential areas, and the walls around them seemed far away to Chase, but he could still picture a rock the size of a house punching right through, killing them all instantly.

“Mr. Weston,” Angel Cortez said quietly, drawing even with him, her eyes flickering backward. “I would be the first to admit I’m a stranger here and may not be the best one to make these judgments, but I think we’re being followed.”

Chase resisted an urge to stop in the middle of the walkway and turn around, because that would give away any surprise they had. Unfortunately, Victor Lee had heard Angel as well and he did just that.

“Followed?” the grad student repeated, far too loudly, gawking like the tourist he was.

Angel had been right.

There were four of them, and somehow he’d let them get within twenty-five yards. He cursed himself for worrying about meteors instead of doing his job, even though he hadn’t known his job had already started. They were all young men, all self-consciously trying to be tough. Their clothing was different from that of the workers. They were less concerned with being flashy and fun and more with wearing a sort of uniform, their jackets red with blue flashes, their pants matching. On top of that, each had a blue flash dyed through the center of their identical Mohawk haircuts. They looked ridiculous, Chase thought, but the wickedly curved knives they pulled out of sheaths beneath their waist-length jackets did not.

“You made a big mistake, asshole,” one of them said, stepping forward, turning their formation into a lopsided V, which demonstrated far too much tactical awareness for his taste. “You don’t fuck with Los Gatos.”

Chase blew out a breath, steadying himself, not wanting to let them see fear in his eyes. The sheath worn in the small of his back, beneath his untucked shirt, pressed hard against him, begging to be used. He didn’t disappoint. The smooth, worn handle of the knife was familiar in his hand, and he fell into an escrima stance, side-on to the four gangbangers, fist held up defensively, knife clenched in it, blade pointed outward.

“Dump your bags,” Chase told Victor and Angel, and to their credit, both obeyed without question, dropping their luggage to the ground.

“Do we run?” Victor asked, his voice tremulous, as if his whole body was shaking.

Chase considered it, but Angel made the decision for him. She unzipped one of her cases and pulled out a matte-black fixed-bladed knife with a sharkskin handle and a tanto point.

“I am not,” she declared, not showing the slightest bit of fear, “wearing the same damned clothes for three months on Kali.” She sneered at the four men. “Come and get it.”

Oh, shit.

OceanofPDF.com

7

Victor Lee was convinced that he was still sleeping on the couch back in Berkley and that the whole day had been an extended nightmare. He’d had the thought back in the bar, and now he was sure of it. Nothing like this could ever happen to him in real life. It had to be a dream, or maybe he’d splurged for a multi-hour session at the ViR gaming studio and taken a few hits of acid and this was all just a bad trip combined with the latest MMORPG adventure game.

Mom told me I shouldn’t use acid. I should have listened to her.

But the story was hard to follow. Who were these guys again? They were dressed like the villains in the latest superhero movie. Had they said Los Gatos? The cats?

“Is this because we wouldn’t smuggle those drugs?” he asked out loud, which probably would have been inappropriate and inadvisable if this were actually real. “I mean, come on, we’re not even going back to LAX!”

“Shut up, Victor,” Angel snapped at him, her eyes fixed on the gangbangers.

Wait, that seemed real. Angel Cortez barking at him was an everyday thing, which made him very afraid that this wasn’t a dream or a ViR trip augmented by illicit drugs. And that would be very, very bad. He needed to run, but he’d neglected to drop his bags. He swung them downward, but the gangbangers seemed to take the motion as a cue to attack and they were charging across the twenty yards before his duffle had hit the walkway.

Victor tried to remember what he’d done the last time he’d been mugged so he could avoid doing it this time, but all he could remember was being coldcocked and then kicked while he was down, and the lesson didn’t seem applicable. He tried to imitate the wide stance that Chase Weston had fallen into, putting his hands up like the soldier’s, although without a knife.

It didn’t seem fair that he was the only one without a knife.

Chase was up front, and the first two came after him with much more enthusiasm than Victor thought was wise, given the man’s experience. Maybe they didn’t know who he was, or maybe they had too much of their ego invested in being the biggest badasses around. They came in a line, one behind the other, though Victor didn’t know if that was an intentional strategy or just how they happened to be standing when they made the decision to go for it.

It worked out well for Chase Weston because he was able to sidestep both of them in one long, sliding motion that put him just outside the reach of the lead man’s knife when he slashed at him as he passed.

That was all the attention Victor gave to the soldier, because the other two had gone after Angel Cortez. These two were smarter, trying to come at her from both sides instead of lining themselves up for a convenient dodge, and Victor just knew there was no way she could avoid them both. Angel ducked and spun, her own knife extended, and one of the Los Gatos gangbangers yelped and cursed, pulling away with one sleeve of his gaudy jacket sliced open, though Victor didn’t see any blood.

But the other one was closing in on her and Victor moved without intention, without a plan, just trying to put himself between her and the knife-wielding goon. Maybe Lexie was right and he did love her, because he sure as hell wouldn’t have done that for anyone else, and he was one hundred percent convinced the next thing he would feel would be a blade sliding between his ribs.

How he wound up catching the other man’s arm before it reached him was a mystery to both of them, but once he had hold of it, he clutched it as tight as he could, fingernails digging into the tough leather, the arm beneath it hard and muscular and much, much stronger than his own. Victor yelled incoherently, beyond thought, desperate and acting on instinct. He pulled at the arm and backed away, afraid to get too close and wind up with that curved length of steel in his gut, but afraid to let go as well.

It was the right thing to do, though he wasn’t aware of it until the gangbanger stumbled trying to keep up with his frantic retreat and the knife flew from his fingers, clanking across the ground some ten feet away. Then Victor did let go and ran to the side, panting hard, close to hyperventilating, and trying to figure out where everyone else was lest he wind up wandering into the business end of a blade.

Angel was handling herself better than he could have imagined, keeping the red-and-blue clad gang member off of her with controlled slashes, jumping back with agility he hadn’t known she possessed to avoid his blade. Sweat beaded on her forehead, but she showed no sign of panic.

As for Chase, watching the man fight was like watching a chess game being played. He was a move ahead of the two criminals and while it was clear that they had experience fighting, they’d fought other criminals, not someone trained by the military to kill. And like a chess master playing two games against two separate amateurs, it was only a matter of time. One of them stepped too close, and that was the last mistake he ever made.

Chase’s knife was shorter than the gangbanger’s, less flashy, but when it sliced across his wrist, blood fountained out like a surgical scalpel had cut him open. The wrist wound was ugly but probably survivable, only it had opened him up to a blow that wasn’t, and the matte-black blade disappeared into his right eye for a split-second before Chase ripped it back out again. The younger man collapsed forward like a marionette with its strings cut and hit the ground with a wet splash.

If the other one had been smart, he would have run. Victor would have run, after watching a man get his brain pithed like a frog in a high school biology class. He wanted to run now, wanted to puke, though he was too utterly frozen with horror to do either. But the second of Chase’s opponents neither ran nor puked nor gave up. He lunged forward, attempting a low slash that, had it connected, would have disemboweled the soldier.

Chase avoided the cut with a single step, just a few inches to one side, and his opponent was off balance, all of his weight on his front leg when the soldier’s hiking boot came down on the support knee. There was a crack like a green stick breaking, and Chase’s opponent dropped his knife and forgot all about the fight, his shattered knee bending in a direction no leg should have gone.

The one assaulting Angel didn’t run, but he was distracted, just for a second. Long enough for her to stab her knife through his right bicep. The man dropped his own weapon and pushed her away, then he screamed and held his arm as he finally gave up on the whole thing and ran, blood drops leaving a trail behind him like bread crumbs.

Victor realized he’d forgotten about the last of them, the one he’d tussled with, and he turned just in time to see that the man had retrieved his knife from the ground and was making a final, spiteful lunge toward Angel. Victor yelled an incoherent warning and jumped on the attacker’s back, arm wrapped around the man’s throat, then screamed as the knife scored across his wrist. The grad student let go, clutching at his wrist, falling backward with the sickening realization that he’d failed, that there was nothing standing between the armed thug and Angel Cortez.

Nothing except Chase. The soldier was standing in his way, black-bladed knife dripping blood.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said, “and I won’t have to hurt you.”

It was a good offer, but the response was a wild slash at Chase’s throat. The soldier blocked the cut with the point of his knife, the blade driving into the criminal’s forearm from the force of the blow. Chase didn’t try to pull it out, just let the man stumble back, the curved knife falling from his nerveless fingers. Victor thought the soldier was going to let the criminal run, but Chase smashed the gangbanger in the temple with a forearm, collapsing him like a felled tree.

The soldier stepped on the impaled arm and reclaimed his knife from the stunned, lolling criminal, then wiped the blade on the red and blue jacket and stowed it in a sheath at the small of his back.

“Grab your shit,” he told Victor and Angel. “This may not be the last of them.”

The one with the wounded forearm tried to get up, supporting himself with his good hand. Chase sighed and stomped on the other arm, breaking the forearm and sending the man slumping back to the ground, gasping, too shocked to scream. Victor had never heard one bone break before today, and now he’d heard that sickening noise twice in less than a minute. The bile was rising in his throat, and he couldn’t hold it back any longer. He twisted away from the others and deposited his lunch against the wall, spasms racking his stomach as it emptied itself.

Victor wiped his mouth with his sleeve and turned back around to find Chase watching him impassively while Angel retrieved her luggage. Chase leaned over, grabbed Victor’s duffle, and slung it over his own shoulder.

“Get the rest of your bags,” he told the grad student. “We have to get to the docks.”

* * *

Angel Cortez wished there was gravity in the docking bays.

Not just because she wasn’t used to maneuvering in free fall, and not just because Chase Weston obviously was from the pace he was setting, weaving around and between the throng of human traffic at the south polar dock. No, she wished there was gravity because anger was raging inside her chest like a bonfire, and she liked to pace and stalk and stamp when she was mad. You couldn’t use body language in microgravity or you’d just wind up looking stupid.

“This doesn’t make sense,” she insisted, speaking to Chase’s back as she attempted to keep up with him. “Why would those goons try to kill us just because we embarrassed two low-level con artists? Isn’t that an overreaction?”

“You expect logic and reason from a bunch of losers who dye their hair to match their gang colors?” Chase threw over his shoulder, not slowing his flight down the row of docking ports.

The shuttles and starships and transports were visible through a barrier of transparent aluminum, tucked into a covered niche in the docking hub to keep them and the see-through port safe from micrometeors. The shuttles were all a familiar design, cylindrical, with stubby control surfaces. Back in the beginning, there’d been all sorts of designs, and all of them worked because you could fly a brick into orbit with enough thrust, and the S-T drive gave you reaction-mass-independent thrust based on power. But eventually, the cylindrical shape had won out because it was easier to dock.

The starships, not so much. They were all different shapes and sizes, the only limit being they had to fit into the docking niche, which kept them no more than fifty feet across and a couple hundred long. The Tamar strained the edges of that limit, barely inches to spare on either side of her. She knew it was their ship because the name was stenciled across the side near the utility airlock, the paint a jaunty red that stood out against her matte grey. Or mostly matte grey. She was patched like an old hand-me-down sweater, here bright silver, there solid brown, the welds as solid as they were ugly. She had the look of what her nerdier friends from college would have called a “kit bash,” like someone had taken bits of three or four different vessels and crammed them together. Only this kit bash wasn’t just intended to look new and different on a display shelf… it was supposed to fly them a hundred light-years.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she blurted, coming to a halt a few yards from the airlock. “That is your ship? That is what we’re supposed to be paying all this money for? That thing looks like it’ll be lucky to make it out of the docking bay!”

“What you know about spaceships, lady?”

The voice was full of scorn and tinged with a British accent. It took Angel a moment to pin down where it had come from. The woman walked out of the airlock, which seemed impossible until Angel noticed the magnetic boots click-clacking against the metal deck plating. The boots were ugly and utilitarian, like the old Space Force fatigues the woman was wearing, stained with grease and patched at the knees. The name on the chest tape read Ambedkar, which was the last name Chase had given to the pilot.

“Priyanka,” Chase introduced, “this is Dr. Evangeline Cortez and her graduate assistant, Victor Lee.”

Priyanka Ambedkar had one of those faces, the kind that would still be striking and attractive at eighteen or eighty, whether she was wearing a ball cap and grease stains or makeup and a formal evening dress. Her dark eyes were inquisitive and challenging and totally lacking in fear. Those eyes flickered toward Chase’s shirt and the blood stains on the sleeves.

“What the hell happened to you, Weston?”

The soldier shrugged, shoving the sleeves up to his biceps to try to hide the blood spatter. The skin beneath was tanned by a dozen different suns, marked with three scars that she could see and the hint of a single tattoo peeking out under his left sleeve.

“Los Gatos. Four of them.” The corner of his mouth turned up just slightly. “Three now.”

“Again? Sweet Jesus, will those assholes ever learn to take a joke?”

“Wait a second,” Angel said, floating between the two, catching the lip of the airlock with her left hand to hold herself in place. “What do you mean, ‘again?’ I thought this was all connected to Spencer and Guster.” Angel shifted her bags, trying to keep the straps from strangling her as they twisted in the microgravity.

“It is, sort of,” Chase explained. “But we need to get in the ship and get the hell out of here.”

“I’m not getting in that piece of shit,” she snapped back at him, “until I’m sure it won’t blow up the first time it tries to go hyper-light!”

“And I repeat,” Pri snarled, getting in her face, close enough that Angel could smell the grease from her clothes and something vaguely fruity from her shampoo, “what the hell do you know about spaceships?”

“This isn’t my first trip to the colonies, Ms. Ambedkar,” Angel informed the pilot. “And none of the vessels I traveled on looked as if they were held together with spit and good wishes.”

“It’s Captain Ambedkar to you, and just because the Tamar isn’t as smooth and refined as some civilian passenger boat doesn’t mean she isn’t spaceworthy. They don’t sell combat patrol boats surplus to civvies with all the armor and weapons still on them.” She pointed at the welds and the patchwork look. “That’s armor. You’d like to have a ship with armor when you sail into Vishnu, wouldn’t you? Or do you think you can stop enemy bullets with your snooty attitude?”

“I thought the drive field acted like a shield?” Victor said, raising a hand like a schoolchild asking to go to the toilet.

Pri winced, fingers clenching like she wanted to strangle someone.

“Have you ever taken a physics class?” she demanded, and Angel laughed softly, remembering when she’d asked the grad student the same question. “The S-T drive acts as a shield in hyper-light because it carries a piece of our own spacetime with it into the Rift, kind of a wave-front. But that only works once we build up relativistic speeds. Before that, we’re counting on metal and honeycomb boron composite just like everyone else.” Pri speared Angel with a glare. “You gettin’ in or what, lady?”

Angel wanted to tell the rude, pushy starship captain to stuff it, wanted to cancel the contract and go hire a passenger transport behind Peter’s back. But she knew how likely that was to work, besides which it would have been irresponsible and, more importantly, taken too long to arrange.

“We’re coming,” she said, then she shot a look at Chase. “But we’re going to have a conversation about what happened.”

She brushed past Pri, not looking back to see whether Victor followed. The starship captain called after her, insisting on having the last word.

“And a pleasure to meet you, too.”

OceanofPDF.com

8

“She’s a real winner, isn’t she?” Pri murmured, fingers dancing along the control panel at the pilot’s station as she powered up the reactor and slowly trickled that energy to the drive.

“She’s not that bad,” Chase insisted, strapping into the seat behind the flight stations. “The fight was pretty rough, and she took one of them down. Had her own knife and put it right through his arm. I wouldn’t mess with her too much if I were you.”

“Chase is in looooove,” Adrian Hill cooed, his mouth twisted into half a grin, all he could manage with the scarring on the other side of his face. His eyes were fixed on a stream of data coming across his screen, incomprehensible to Chase, though he knew that it represented the confirmation that whatever Pri was doing with the controls was working.

“Shut up, Adrian,” he told the copilot. “Where’s Aguilar?”

“Showing our clients to their accommodations,” Pri told him, turning her working-class Londoner accent into something a good deal more upscale. “And I trust her ladyship will find the Admiral’s Stateroom to her liking.”

“Did you clean the puke out of it from the last guy?” Hill wondered.

“Damn, I thought you did.”

“You’re both a damned riot,” Chase said, arms crossed. “But you know we need the money, right? Or do you plan on running this thing on snark instead of uranium?”

“Snark has driven people a lot farther away than uranium,” Hill opined. “But I would like to eat. Eating is one of life’s little pleasures. That and sex ’bots.”

“Gateway Station,” Pri said in her professional, I’m-trying-to-sound-like-a-captain voice, “this is the privateer Tamar requesting clearance for departure.”

“Roger, Tamar,” a pleasant, well-modulated male voice responded. “You are currently third in line for departure. Please follow traffic pattern Alpha until you’re clear of the restricted flight area.”

“Copy that, Gateway. Have a good one.”

Pri switched off the mic and gave Hill a stink-eye.

“The only reason you like sex bots is you don’t have to talk to them.”

“And they’re not picky,” Chase added.

“Are we leaving?”

Chase twisted around in his chair in time to see Angel Cortez pull herself into the cockpit, find one of the fold-down seats along the bulkhead, and belt herself into it.

“I thought you were getting settled in your cabin, ma’am,” Pri said, and Chase thought she was actually trying to be polite, unless it was sarcasm. He’d never had much luck separating the two when it came to Pri.

“Settled?” Angel repeated, arching an eyebrow. “I put my luggage in the locker and when we’re underway and have gravity, I’ll check for bedbugs. Until then, this is as settled as I intend to get.”

“I’ll have you know,” Hill said, with outrage Chase could tell was affected, “that we’ve decontaminated the ship twice since the last case of bedbugs.”

“Shut up, Adrian,” Pri told him. “The rooms are clean.” Now she wasn’t even pretending to be polite. “It’s standard procedure to evacuate the ship during refueling.”

“That means they leave the interior in a vacuum,” Chief Aguilar supplied, as condescending as possible. Chase could tell his time guiding the two to their compartments hadn’t gone well. Aguilar didn’t even look back at Angel as he belted into his seat between the pilot and copilot. “Ship’s secured and ready for departure, ma’am. Airlock is closed and ready to disengage.”

“And there we are,” Pri said, nodding toward the green indicator on the comm screen, coming from Gateway Control.

“I know what evacuated means,” Angel told Aguilar, and Chase sighed. The woman wasn’t stupid, but she lacked the sense God gave most fish and kept snapping at the bait.

“Good for you,” Aguilar enthused as only a senior CWO could. Stefano Aguilar might have been thirty-five or might have been eighty, and there’d probably be little change in that craggy, weather-beaten face in the interim between one and the other, particularly since he shaved his hair down to peach fuzz in a rebellion against a widow’s peak. There surely wouldn’t be any change in attitude, since Chief Warrant Officers were blessed by the creator with an inability to give a fuck.

“Airlock is closed,” Pri confirmed, finger hovering over a control. “Disengaging docking umbilical.” She tapped the control twice and a metallic thump echoed through the hull of the ship. “We’re pulling out.”

Chase couldn’t help it… he always listened when the ship pulled away from the dock or took off from the ground. The Soong-Tierney drive had a distinctive sound, nothing obtrusive, a sort of background hum most people didn’t even notice, but it was unlike anything else he’d ever heard. The CCMHD reactor had its own noises, but those were more normal. There was something about the S-T drive that seemed unnatural, that made his hackles rise.

“How long have you worked together?” Angel asked, breaking the silence with a question that was surprisingly civil.

“Five years,” Chase told her. “Longer if you count the times she and her crew flew my platoon around during the war.” Memories flickered behind his eyes, the first time he’d met Priyanka, of her crooked smile from the cockpit. The smoldering look in her eyes the first time she’d taken him to bed. “Once we all got out, Pri got together with Hill and the Chief and me, and we all pooled our separation bonuses and put the down payment on the Tamar, and I recruited a squad…” He trailed off, frowning. That was a memory he didn’t want to relive.

“Mercenaries?” Angel prompted.

“Private military contractors.” The response was automatic. “There’s a lot of work to be had out in the colonies.”

“What happened to them?”

It was the question he didn’t want to answer, and Pri must have known it because she rescued him.

“Okay, we’re clearing the docking cylinder.”

Chase didn’t want to miss this. Five years on this ship, and it was still his favorite part. The interior of the cylinder was grey and featureless, the lighting harsh and glaring. Workers in space suits passed by the nose of the ship, zipping around on handheld gas jets, some scurrying to get out of the way. The Tamar sidled out of its niche and into the black.

The Earth was a blue jewel hung in space, the biggest Christmas tree ornament ever made, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He hadn’t been back to Kalispell in seven years, hadn’t set foot on Earth since he’d gotten out of the Army, but despite all that, it was still home. Then the ship was turning, bringing Gateway into view. The tin can wasn’t much to look at, but the radiators were a glittering series of cooling vanes that made the station look like an idea of the future as seen from the 1950s. Ships slipped in and out of the docking bays, reflecting the sunlight like a swarm of fireflies.

It still seemed unreal to him. Most of the younger soldiers he’d encountered took it all in stride, as if there’d always been giant airships floating over the cities, and spaceships hauling in ore from Luna and the Belt, and colonists heading out to the stars daily. But Chase had been born to a world without the S-T drive, and despite all the chaos and violence and death it had brought about in the last twenty-odd years, it still filled him with awe.

“We’re nearly out of the restricted zone,” Pri announced, fingers tapping against the throttle, a racehorse snorting and twitching in the blocks, waiting to stretch its legs.

Gravity, Chase noted, had returned gradually, sneaking in the back door and settling in before he’d realized it. Not a full Earth gravity yet, and he knew that had something to do with how much power the drive was getting, just a gentle tug down into his seat.

“Hey, boss,” Hill said, a curious upturn to his voice, like he’d just found a raisin in his corn pops, “you seeing those two bogies hanging out at about sixty klicks out?”

“Bogies?” Pri repeated, frowning at him. Chase hadn’t been in the Space Force and was no sort of pilot, but he understood her unspoken question. A bogie was an unknown threat, and the ships coming out of Gateway were mostly just innocent transports. “What are you seeing, Adrian?”

“Look at ’em.” He waved at the front screens. “They’re both up-armored transports, Eurojet VS-78s, surplus from the war, right? They gotta be together. And they’re just sitting out there, just outside the restricted zone. What the hell are they doing out there?”

“It’s Gateway,” Aguilar growled, seeming unconcerned. “They’re probably swapping a load of contraband they made a deal for while they were on the station.”

“Yeah, probably,” Pri allowed. “Anyway, we’re going to be burning ergs toward hyper-light in a few seconds, so…”

Whatever her point had been, she didn’t get the chance to make it. The ships, Chase realized, had been waiting for the Tamar to nose across the imaginary demarcation between Gateway’s restricted zone and open space, and the second she did, they lunged after them like lions pouncing on a gazelle.

Priyanka cursed reflexively, and Chase leaned forward in his seat as if he were about to spring into action, as if there was anything he could do except stare at the main screen and watch the twin transports split off and move to block the Tamar in, the 20mm Vulcans mounted on the portside spar of each of the ships slewing around to cover them.

“What the hell’s going on?” Angel demanded, fingers hovering over the quick-release of her harness.

“They’re calling us,” Aguilar announced, as casual as if this was just another day at the office.

“Put it on speaker,” Pri told him, her hands on the steering yoke, ready to make a break for it at the first opportunity. “And prep the Avengers.”

“Weston, I know you’re in there!” The voice crackling over the cockpit speakers was all-too-familiar, and Chase winced, knowing exactly who was in those transports. “It doesn’t have to go down like this! Give us what you owe us, and this can all be solved peacefully!”

Angel gaped at him, accusation in her eyes, but Chase didn’t waste time trying to explain. Each station in the cockpit had a mic built into the armrest of the chair, and Chase keyed his with a touch on the control panel.

“I don’t owe you shit, Navarro. How many of your goons do I have to leave bleeding before you take the hint?”

“You didn’t just leave them bleeding,” Antonio Navarro reminded him, a shrill note coming into his voice. “You put a knife through Eddie’s fucking brain.”

Chase barked a laugh at the show of outrage.

“I’m sure he would have been giving me foot massages as we speak if only I hadn’t greeted his kind advances with such senseless violence. Fuck you, Antonio. If you don’t want your people killed, stop sending them after me. How the hell did you even know I was here?”

“Let’s just say our boys Spencer and Guster know which side their bread is buttered on. I’m going to give you thirty seconds to turn around and head back to Gateway. Maybe then we’ll just take the ship and let you and your friends go. Otherwise, I’m gonna have to blow a few holes in her, then scrape what’s left of you out of the inside.” Up till now, Chase could have believed Navarro was putting on an act for their benefit, but the next words were spoken in absolute earnest, like a backwoods preacher swearing on the Bible. “No one fucks with Los Gatos, Weston.”

And that, apparently, was enough for Priyanka Ambedkar.

“Light ’em up, Chief!”

They were moving. There was a sense of motion, though Pri had assured him repeatedly that it was all in his head, an illusion caused by watching things speed by on the viewscreen, but Chase was certain of it. He’d tested it, keeping his eyes shut and still felt the whoosh in his stomach when she fed power to the drives. The view on the screen couldn’t quite shift fast enough to keep up with the acceleration—the Los Gatos ships had been zoomed in enough to fill the screen, but they’d been miles away still. In less than a second, the slate grey of a hull was all he could see while he waited for the cameras to zoom back out, though he knew Chief Aguilar had a better view from the gunsight at his station.

The Tamar shuddered like the inside of a snare drum and, beneath their feet, God cleared his throat.

The GAU-8 Avenger had originally been designed for a now-obsolete tankbuster fighter jet called the A10 Warthog. The A10 was long gone, but the gun was still damned useful and surprisingly easy to duplicate on modern 3D printers. Two of them squatted like cave trolls in niches under the Tamar’s chin, and even with the counterthrust of the S-T drive, the recoil from the 30mm monsters nearly pushed the ship backward.

It did much worse things to the converted Eurojet transport. The Los Gatos ship was up-armored, its hull reinforced by plates of scrap metal, but a few inches of armor was a minor inconvenience for the depleted-uranium slugs. Chase couldn’t see them. Sometimes he could, if the target was far enough away and the Sun—or whatever sun was handy—was at the right angle. Then, they twinkled like wishing stars and he often made the wish that they’d chop right through the enemy’s reactor core.

This time, the depleted-uranium fairy granted his wish and the thermal sensors feeding their input to the main viewscreen showed a spike in the Eurojet’s internal temperature. And that was it. No explosion, no flames, just the transport surrounded by a cloud of dust for a moment before it began to tumble. It was almost anticlimactic.

They didn’t stick around to watch the thing cartwheel out of control, though. Something smacked hard into the bow of the Tamar, a petulant knock by an impatient child and they were moving. Chase expected evasive maneuvers, expected Pri to open up on the second ship, but the view on the main screen slewed around to their right. Starboard? Dammit, I can never remember. Open space ahead and then the stars began to elongate with a sudden burst of acceleration. There was that old, familiar roller-coaster feeling in the pit of his stomach, what Pri had explained as a bleed-through of hyperdimensional gravito-inertial buildup… whatever the hell that meant. He sometimes thought she made shit like that up just to screw with him.

“You think they can catch up to us?” Chase asked, hands clenched on the armrests of his chair. He was a spectator in this fight and the feeling didn’t sit well for him.

“Naw,” Hill answered, a skeptical twist to his usual scowl. “Them VS-78s are running old NASA-surplus Stirling engines.” He shrugged. “Banks of ’em, sure, but it still don’t add up to more than a Megawatt or so.”

“Damage report, Chief?” Pri said, her tone all business.

Aguilar didn’t reply immediately. His station was lit up by banks of monitors, each showing a different vantage point of the hull through fiber-optic cameras, and he was staring intently at one with a view from the nose.

“We took a hit,” he said, “but I don’t think it penetrated all the way through the nose armor. Them gangbangers didn’t bother with armor-piercing rounds, just bought the cheapest shit they could find on the black market.”

“Thank God,” Hill added. He cast a baleful glare at Chase. “Weston, you really need to think about the rest of us before you make any more unilateral decisions to rip off interstellar crime syndicates.”

“We’re hyper-light in ten.” Pri’s announcement interrupted Chase’s indignant denial, and his eyes went automatically to the front screens.

Something rumbled, some hyperdimensional equivalent of a sonic boom, and the stars gathered together and wrapped around them, a tunnel of rainbow light for just a few seconds before the polychromatic mass clumped into a giant ball of white at the center of the screen. All around them was a darkness more than dark, an absent nothing that pilots called the Rift. In the rear cameras, an identical mass of starlight sat behind them, and once every few seconds, streaks of light would separate from the ball of fire in front to head for the one in the rear.

“Well,” Pri said, her grin lopsided and self-satisfied, “they’re not catching up to us now.”

Angel Cortez seemed to have been waiting for the jump to hyper-light, building up steam until the dimensional shift pulled the trigger. She was out of her chair and looming over Chase before he had the chance to even release his restraints.

Chase Weston had faced down Chinese and Russian special forces, bandits, pirates, and smugglers, faced blade and gun and fire, but none of them seemed quite as intimidating as all five foot six of the fiery-eyed woman standing above him.

“Who the hell are Los Gatos, Mr. Weston?”

“They’re criminals,” he blurted, tongue-tied for some reason. “Gangsters… they run drugs, weapons…”

He was going to elaborate, but she didn’t let him. Apparently, he’d only confirmed what she already thought.

“And it wasn’t us they were after, was it?” Her lip curled in a snarl. “Not just now with those ships, and not in that alleyway either. Was it? It didn’t have anything to do with those two losers in the bar, did it?”

Spencer and Guster had spotted him and sold the information to Los Gatos, but Chase didn’t think the woman was in any mood to debate the finer points of the day’s events. Besides, she made him feel exactly like his drill sergeants back in basic training and it was all he could do not to yell out no excuse, sergeant! at the top of his lungs.

“No,” he admitted instead. “They were after me.”

“We could have been killed.” Angel clenched her fists, her shoulders squaring off, and Chase was sure she was going to take a swing at him. And he’d have to let her, because she was right. “Victor was injured.”

“I saw the kid’s scratch,” Aguilar scoffed, waving it away. “I cut myself worse than that shaving this morning.”

“Chief,” Pri admonished, making a quelling gesture.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I had to hurt someone?” Angel demanded, ignoring the interplay, ignoring Aguilar’s comment. “I might have had to kill him. It was just luck that I didn’t. Maybe killing people is nothing to you.” She looked as if she might spit in his face. “You’re a mercenary. You sell your soul for money. But I worked too damned hard to save my soul to give it up that easy.”

Chase was speechless. Angel Cortez, beyond seeming angry, was obviously anguished, tormented. And it was his fault. She was breathing hard, her shoulders heaving, and Chase thought for a moment that she might break down, but she sucked in a long breath and steadied herself.

“It’s too late to turn back now. We’ve committed to this, and for all your other faults, you seem competent at violence. But let’s be clear, Weston. I don’t want you talking to me beyond what’s necessary for the performance of your duties. And if we get caught up in any more of your private, criminal dealings, don’t count on us for help, because I’d be just as likely to hamstring you and leave you for Los Gatos.”

Angel spun on her heel, then disappeared out of the hatch and down the corridor.

Everything was silent. No one moved a muscle, Pri, Hill and Aguilar staring after the woman in disbelief while Chase slumped in his seat, the quick-release for his safety harness still hanging, forgotten, in his right hand.

“Some things don’t change,” Hill commented finally, breaking the silence. “You’re still just as big a hit with the ladies as ever.”

Chase eyed the man sidelong and pushed himself up from the chair, then headed for his compartment.

“Shut up, Adrian.”

OceanofPDF.com

9

“Wow,” Victor Lee said, stepping into the compartment, looking at the exercise machines and matted floors in disbelief. “I can’t believe a ship this size has its own gym.”

Angel Cortez didn’t look away from the spinning back kick she was throwing into the gut of an imaginary opponent, didn’t let her answer interrupt her explosive kia! She’d brought along workout sweats for some reason, though Victor couldn’t imagine why she’d thought she’d need them, and now they were stained dark at the small of her back and her neck from the at least an hour of practice. Victor tried not to stare, but he thought she caught him looking because she paused in her training to pierce him with a disapproving glare.

“They live on this ship,” she reminded him, padding over to one bench for one of the machines to retrieve a towel and a water bottle. “I’m sure they have everything they need on board. Where else would they keep it?” Angel sucked down a swig, then gestured around her. “It’s not that big, anyway. Barely bigger than two of their berthing compartments put together.”

She tossed the towel and bottle down and walked back to the mat.

“Did you want something?” she prompted.

And he did, though he didn’t dare say it.

“Yeah. I, um… I kinda feel like I let you down back on Gateway, Doc.”

“You distracted one of the men attacking me,” she told him, dismissing the whole thing with a wave of her hand. “You did the best you could under the circumstances.”

“But my best wasn’t much good.” Victor gestured at the bandage around his wrist. “I need to do better. I…” He motioned toward her, the mat. “I was hoping you could teach me some moves.”

Angel looked him up and down, the skepticism practically dripping off her words when she answered.

“I’ll try. Take off your shoes and socks.”

He complied, standing in front of her flat-footed, hands clasped, wondering if he looked as awkward as he felt. Angel sighed, motioning for him to come forward.

“Try to grab me,” she suggested.

He extended his hands, hesitating, wondering where he should grab but afraid to ask lest he look stupid.

“Around the throat,” she suggested, “just to make things simple.”

“Okay.”

Embarrassment slowed him, and he took three tries before he worked himself up to actually try to grab her.

She did… something. He saw her hands whipping around in an arcing motion and then he saw her feet shuffling to the side and then the room was spinning and so was he. His back hit the mat hard enough to drive the air out of his lungs, explosions of light bursting in the air around him.

Victor tried to talk, but all that came out was a wheeze.

“That’s how you respond to someone trying to grab you from the front,” Angel told him brusquely, grabbing his hand and pulling him up to his feet.

Victor wobbled, unsteady and working very hard just to take in a lungful of air.

“Now try from behind,” she suggested, turning away from him. “Try to choke me from the rear.”

He waited a few more seconds, just to be sure the stars had stopped whirling in front of his eyes. When he advanced, it was with more care, and he wasn’t tentative about the grab this time. He tried to be as decisive as he had been with the gangbanger who’d sliced his arm, throwing an arm around her neck and trying to haul her backward, not nearly as worried about hurting her as he’d been last time.

It didn’t make any difference. This time, at least, he landed on his side rather than flat on his back. Pain wracked his shoulder and chest, and he knew if he’d been thrown onto the hard ground rather than a cushioned mat, he would have broken a few ribs.

“What…” He coughed, catching the phlegm in his mouth, then swallowed it again rather than spitting it onto the gym floor. “What did you do to me?”

“What?” she asked, staring down at him. “You want to try it again?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head violently and scrambling away from her. “No, that’s okay.”

“Why don’t I run it through with you, Victor?”

His head snapped around. He hadn’t noticed Chase Weston enter, but the man was there, amazingly quiet for his size. He was dressed for a workout in athletic shorts and a short-sleeved technical shirt with US Army imprinted at the neck.

“No, it’s okay,” he insisted, backing away.

“Slowly,” Chase promised, chuckling and patting Victor on the arm comfortingly, then guiding him with the hand out onto the mat. “Come on, I won’t hurt you, promise.”

Victor shook out his arm, trying to loosen up his shoulder. It hurt, and he had the premonition that it was going to hurt more no matter who was teaching him. He sighed.

If you’re serious about it, it’s worth the pain, right?

“All right,” Chase said, “first of all, let’s look at your stance. You need to have a stable base, but not have your stance so wide that you won’t be able to maneuver. Let’s start with a T-stance. Feet about shoulder width apart, left foot forward, right foot at a ninety-degree angle. Keep most of your weight on your back foot. You’re right-handed, right?”

Victor nodded, trying to keep up with the instructions. The stance didn’t feel natural, but he had to give it a shot.

“Okay, now shift your weight from front to back. Keep doing it. You don’t want to stay in one place because that just makes you a convenient target. Shift sideways, back and forth. Now, put your hands up. One in front of your nose… no, not that close.” He pushed gently against Victor’s arm and smacked him in the nose with his own fist. “See? Keep it out farther. I know, it feels weird, but do it anyway. Okay, other arm in close to your ribs. That one is to protect your torso. Stay like that, dance back and forth a little, get the feel of it.”

Victor felt stupid and awkward, but it was better than getting tossed around the gym, so he did it.

“Get into a rhythm. Play a song in your head with a good beat and dance to the rhythm, but keep moving. Front to back, side to side, don’t stand still.” Chase swatted a hand out and Victor managed to get his arm in front of it. “There you go. Keep moving.”

There was an old classic Victor’s father had listened to when he was a kid, something incredibly inappropriate for someone his age to hear, so, of course, he had asked his dad to play it over and over again. He hadn’t heard it in years, couldn’t remember the name of the group who’d sung it, but the song was still fresh in his memory. Something called “Lips and Hips.” The beat seemed ideal for the rhythm Chase was talking about, and Victor began dancing back and forth to it.

“Good, good. Keep that up.” Chase stepped in closer. “Now make a fist. Anyone ever teach you how to make a fist?”

“It sort of comes naturally,” Victor said. He’d stopped paying attention to Angel, but he caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye, glaring at either him or Chase, or maybe both.

“You’d think, but really not so much. Here, put your hand out… now curl the fingers in tight and wrap your thumb around the outside. Tight, got to be tight. You see those first two knuckles? Those are your weapons. That’s what you’re hitting with. Here.” He held up his hand. “Hit me in the palm with your right hand. Hard as you can, don’t hold back.”

Smack. He hit hard, but also almost went off balance.

“Naw, Vic,” Chase said, shaking his head. “You’re trying to punch with your shoulder. You punch with your hips, your legs. You punch with your shoulder, it’s a fraction of your weight behind it. You gotta roll your hip like this.” Chase demonstrated and Victor tried to imitate it. “Now try again.”

Smack!

“Much better. Again. Again. That’s a cross. Now, we’re going to try a jab.”

A few more minutes of punching, and Victor thought he was getting the hang of it. The stance, the rhythm were coming more naturally.

“Okay, now, what do we punch, Victor?” Chase asked him.

Victor panted when he answered, the dancing beginning to tire him out.

“The face? The nose?”

“No. You know what happens when you hit someone in the head, Vic?”

“You knock them out?”

“No, you break your damned knuckles half the time. Hard targets, soft weapons. Soft targets, hard weapons.” Victor frowned in confusion, and Chase elaborated. “If you’re hitting something hard, like the skull, you use your palm.” Chase held up the heel of his hand, the fingers and thumb curled out of the way. “You punch with your fist, you punch the throat, the carotid, the solar plexus.” He demonstrated where each of those was with a slow-motion punch into Victor’s body. “Soft targets, no bones to break your hands. Got me?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Okay, then… punch somewhere you think would take me out… hard as you can.”

“But I could hurt you!”

Chase grinned.

“I’ll do my best not to let you.”

He swung a fist at the side of the soldier’s neck, and Chase seemed to block it in slow motion, even though the punch had been as hard and fast as Victor could manage. Chase grabbed his wrist and pulled it in close to his chest, turning the hand back inward, forcing Victor to step with him to avoid being pulled off his feet. Then Chase turned, bracing one arm against Victor’s elbow, and he was falling…

Chase caught him and helped him to his feet again.

“You see what I did there? I caught your wrist not by trying to absorb the power of your punch but by dispersing it, pulling your hand forward and into me to get leverage. Here, I’ll punch and you do it to me.”

Victor tried not to flinch at the punch. It was slow, and Chase let him try three times before he managed to get his hands arranged correctly to pull the fist toward him and turn the wrist. Another three tries before he got his elbow positioned correctly into Chase’s triceps. Finally, he managed to yank the man off-balance and topple him over.

Chase flipped himself over, slapping out to break his fall, then flipping upward to his feet again.

“Damn good job, Vic. Let’s leave it there for today. Don’t want to get too worn out, make mistakes and get ourselves hurt.” He offered a hand, and Victor shook it. “I’ll tell you what. It’s another 120 hours in the Rift until we reach Vishnu. Call it six days. Why don’t you come here every day about a couple hours before dinner, and I’ll show you some more stuff?”

“Thanks, Chase,” Victor enthused. “That’d be great!”

“You’re welcome to join us, too, Dr. Cortez,” Chase told Angel. “I don’t get a lot of chances at new sparring partners.”

“Really?” She sniffed her disdain as she stalked out of the gym. “I was under the impression that finding new sparring partners was easy for you. Since you obviously aren’t very picky about it.”

And then she was out the door, leaving the two of them staring after her.

“Damn,” Victor murmured, shaking his head.

“That’s a woman who holds a grudge,” Chase said.

“Well, you did almost get us killed after we hired you to protect us,” Victor reminded him. “It’s not that easy to get over.”

“There was nothing I could have done about that,” Chase told him, waving the idea away.

“I mean, you could have not ripped off a criminal gang,” Victor suggested. “Just saying.”

Chase shook his head with conviction.

“I’ve done plenty of things I’m ashamed of in my life, Vic, but ripping off Los Gatos wasn’t one of them.” He opened the small refrigerator in the corner of the gym and pulled out two bottled waters, then passed one to Victor. He didn’t speak again until he’d downed half of his own water. “They hired me to find a cargo they said had been stolen from them. This was back right after we… I had just gotten out of the Army, was trying to work the business like everyone else, looking for jobs on the net. I didn’t know who they were, just dealt with a middleman the way most PMCs do.”

Chase sat on one of the exercise benches, staring at the wall as if seeing something a thousand yards through it.

“I found their shipping container. The cargo carrier they’d contracted had stopped into an independent colony along the route with a pressure leak, landed on the habitable to affect repairs. When he checked the cargo, he found out he was carrying kids. Preteens. Refugees, orphans, kids who wouldn’t be missed.”

“What… what for?” Victor had hesitated because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

Chase’s eyes went hard and cold.

“Organ harvesting. Spare parts.”

“Jesus!” Victor gaped at him. “People still do that? I thought we could grow organs on a three-D lattice for transplant! Why would anyone have to resort to something like that? It’s fucking barbaric!”

“Yeah, we can clone a new organ on a lattice… back on Earth. But a lot of the people who need those transplants can’t set foot on Earth without being thrown in prison. Or, if it’s an Alliance country, just shot behind the ear. And even for people who could go back, they can’t afford it. You know how much this trip is costing your university. Nuclear reactors and fuel roads aren’t cheap. Not even the new, smaller CCMHDs they’re churning out in the Belt now.” He smiled thinly. “That’s one of the reasons Pri—Captain Ambedkar—was able to talk us all into pooling our separation bonuses for the down payment on this ship. We never wanted to be counting on someone else for our ride again. And even then”—he leaned in conspiratorially—“I still had to steal her the nuclear reactor because we didn’t have near enough to cover it.”

“Wow. You must really love her.”

There was something wistful in the soldier’s eyes.

“Once upon a time. This line of work”—he waved demonstratively—“isn’t conducive to healthy relationships.”

“I wish I knew one that was,” Victor told him, taking a long pull of his own water and sighing. It tasted amazing. “I’d go apply to it tomorrow.”

OceanofPDF.com

10

It was amazing, Chase Weston mused ruefully, just how slowly six days could pass on a tiny ship. Particularly when one-sixth of the people on it were trying to not talk to him.

Dr. Angel Cortez was back in her appropriated chair at a corner of the cockpit, intent on being there when they exited the Rift, and this time, Victor was seated beside her. The grad student shot Chase a grin, though if it was out of gratitude for the time the soldier had spent teaching him fighting techniques in the gym or simply because he was happy to get off the ship, Chase had no way of knowing.

The kid had gotten better. He was still going to get killed if he faced someone with experience. It was one thing to know how to fight, another entirely to have been punched in the face. Plans and training and memorized holds and throws had a way of deserting you when the pain hit. That was something Chase didn’t want to teach him and hoped that he wouldn’t have to learn.

Maybe if I do my job, he won’t have to.

“We’re coming out of the Rift,” Pri announced. “Slowing to sub-light.”

It was nothing dramatic. She slid the control to the left, cutting back the power from the reactor to the S-T drive nodules and the kaleidoscope of colors around them solidified, down to the relativistic streaks for a minute before reality congealed into a new star system. The star was a bright dot on a screen filled mostly with the planet. Vishnu was green and blue and too much brown, the browns uninhabitable deserts, hotter than the jungles and not relieved at all by plant life or the cooling breeze of the sea. Anyone dumped into one of those deserts would be dead of heat exhaustion before they had a chance to die of thirst.

But it was best known for the greens, of course, the thriving jungles. If more of the planet had been blue and green, some major corporation or the Colonial Authority would have taken it over, pirates and bandits or no, but there was just enough fertile land to make it worthwhile for a few hundred thousand colonists to make their homes here.

“What have we got, Adrian?” Pri asked, fingers dancing over the controls as the ship slowed, heading for orbit. “Any traffic control down there?”

Hill snorted a sharp laugh.

“You kidding, boss? They don’t even have a moon base.”

Chase couldn’t see the moon in the view on the front screen, but a glance at Hill’s station revealed a white crescent in the display from one of the side cameras.

“What would be the point?” Aguilar interjected. “It’s not like anyone here has the resources or the money to build lunar mines. Shit, from what I read on the net before we left Gateway, the Hindi farmers are lucky if they can get five or six independent freighters visiting in a year, and those only come because they can jack up the price three or four times normal. Everything else comes through the drug cartels. And the cartels sure as hell aren’t interested in mining uranium.”

“Well, I’m gonna try anyway,” Pri said, tapping a control on the communications console. “This is the privateer Tamar calling for any traffic control. We are seeking clearance for landing at Jaipur. Does anyone copy? Over.”

There was no response, and the planet had grown in the screen to take over the entire view, filling the cockpit with the green glow of mid-morning on the eastern hemisphere of Vishnu.

“I guess we’re just going to have to watch for traffic on our own,” Hill said, shrugging. “It ain’t gonna be that hard. I’m not even seeing any aircars up, much less spaceships.”

“Why wouldn’t they have any aircars?” Victor asked. Chase didn’t stare at him, but the others did, and the grad student seemed to shrink under the attention. “I mean,” he went on, “Soong-Tierney engines are easy to make. I don’t know how you build one, but I know it just takes some platinum, copper, and… a couple other things I can’t remember.”

“Tantalum,” Priyanka supplied. “That’s the expensive one. Rare and costly on Earth. That’s how Dr. Soong-Tierney made her money, you know? She convinced her partners to invest in tantalum… they pretty much cornered the market right before the demand skyrocketed.” She shook her head. “Woman is a damned genius and not just when it comes to physics. She cashed out of tantalum just before someone brought in an asteroid full of it from the Belt.”

“Yeah,” Victor allowed, pressing on, “but all it takes to power one up enough for a flight to orbit is a few banks of lithium batteries, right? So, why wouldn’t they be using aircars to get around here on Vishnu? Why wouldn’t they have spaceships going to their moon?”

“You have to see this place to understand,” Chase said, finally deciding to let the kid down easy. “It’s not someplace you’d need an aircar… it wouldn’t be important enough for them to pay to have the S-T engines imported and no one here could afford it except the cartels.”

“You’ve studied up, I see,” Angel Cortez said, surprising him. He’d been convinced she wouldn’t speak to him again the whole trip. But when he turned back to her, the look in her eyes was just as venomous as he remembered. “Good to know there’s something else professional about you besides your capacity for violence.”

The Tamar shuddered as the atmosphere grabbed at her, plucking teasingly at her stubby wings. They were all she needed, the reactionless thrust of the drive substituting for lifting surfaces. Chase was no physicist or aerospace engineer, but he understood the basics of it, that the more power they could feed the drive, the less aerodynamics the ship needed and the higher it could climb. That was why shuttles still had wings, but aircars didn’t need them since they never went over a hundred feet or so in altitude.

“Any Vishnu traffic control station,” Pri repeated, “this is the privateer Tamar declaring intention of landing at Jaipur. If anyone has a problem with it, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

“Yo, Tamar,” the reply finally came, the speaker male, his English accented, though from where Chase couldn’t tell. “That’s a pretty name. And you got a pretty voice.”

“I got a pretty ship, too,” Pri shot back, scowling. “Pretty damned heavy and pretty damned big, and unless you want me to squish something with it by accident, you’d better tell me where I can land.”

“All right, all right, chill out, woman. There’s shitloads of free space, just drop down in the northeast corner. You’ll have half the field to yourself. But there’s a fee for landing and a fee for parking… a hundred in Dig-Coins a day, non-negotiable. And another fifty bucks a day for protection if you don’t want your ship vandalized.”

“Yeah, I read you,” Pri said, rolling her eyes. She shot Angel a look and touched the mute control. “Landing fee is probably going straight to the cartel, but I don’t think we can get out of it. Protection money is your call… it’s your dime.”

“Screw it,” Aguilar said. “I’ll sleep in the boat. Least it’s got air conditioning. Any of those assholes get too close, I’ll pop ’em with the Bofors.”

“You will not,” Pri insisted. “Those rounds are expensive. You’ll use a damned shotgun just like any civilized person.” She shrugged. “And I think all three of us will stay on the ship, with it buttoned up, at least for the first few days, until we get a sense of this place. Then maybe we can chance going out and leaving a guard.”

Chase nodded, motioning toward the radio.

“Copy that, Vishnu traffic control,” Pri said. “Where do we pay the landing fee?”

“There’s a fence around the field and you pay me at the gate. Can’t wait to meet you, pretty Tamar.”

“Tamar is the ship, Vishnu,” she reminded him, the corner of her lip curling in half a smile. “Maybe I’ll pay in person and tell you my name if you give me a discount.”

“Oh, we can talk about that when you’re down here, baby. Just chat up old Raphael here and I’ll see what I can do.”

Pri cut off the radio and laughed softly.

“I think I’m gonna have you pay the toll, Adrian,” she told Hill. “Just make sure you video the guy’s reaction when he sees you.”

“You may as well go ahead and pay him for the protection,” Angel said. “You can’t stay on the ship the whole time. We may be here for weeks.”

“You may be here for weeks, lady,” Pri returned, shaking her head. “We have better things to do. We’re sticking around for three or four days to make sure everything’s cool and you don’t need a quick hop out of here. Once you’re settled in, we’re out of here. We got a paying passenger to give a ride from Hephaestus to Port Harcourt, but we’ll be checking back in on you in a couple weeks.”

Angel didn’t seem happy at the prospect, but she said nothing. Chase thought she might be recalling the details of the contract, which promised secure transportation to and from the planet, but not that the ship would remain at port the whole time.

“It’s better if they don’t just sit there the whole time anyway,” he said, not sure if he was violating her wish that he not talk to her except in the execution of his duties. “The Tamar would just remind the wrong people that you’re there.”

Her only response was a glare.

This was going to be so much fun.

* * *

“Holy shit, it’s hot.”

Victor had barely stepped off the boarding ramp, and he was already dripping with sweat, his duffle bag hanging off of him like a lead weight.

“Get used to it, Victor,” Angel Cortez told him, looking like some stoic Spartan queen, uncomplaining despite the perspiration beading on her forehead. “It’s the dry season here, which makes it summer, which means no rain to cool things down so it’s not going to get any better.”

“But they have air conditioning in the buildings at the dig, right?” He was whining and he knew it, but it was as if they’d stepped into a broiler… it had to be over ninety degrees and the air was so thick he could almost drink it. How could it be this humid and not rain?

Angel looked at him sidelong.

“Take a good long look around,” she told him, “and tell me if you think this is the kind of place where people have air conditioning.”

He did and finally noticed anything beyond the packed, brown dirt of the landing field. The fence enclosing the field was only fifty yards away, and beyond it, a dirt road demarcated the backwoods excuse for a spaceport, leading out from the gate and into the town. He called it a town because it sure as hell wasn’t a city, and he couldn’t think of anything less flattering than town.

Shithole? Yeah, maybe shithole.

Victor Lee hadn’t left California until he was in his early twenties, and then only to other planets. But his mother had shown him photos and video of the hamlet where his grandparents had been born in Vietnam. It was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by jungle, yet somehow it managed to look claustrophobic, with the buildings packed tight together, the roads narrow and the people shoulder-to-shoulder on the streets, carrying water and grain balanced on their shoulders.

Jaipur made that Vietnamese village seem like the broad, open streets of San Francisco.

Well, there’s probably less human shit on the sidewalks here, but I guess all the cows make up for that.

The buildings weren’t made from rice paper here, anyway, nor from bamboo. Limestone was apparently plentiful because a good percentage of structures were little more than stacks of limestone blocks, the rest made from wood and plaster. But the most popular building material seemed to be metal or fiber mesh, because every door and window that could be open was, and every one of them was covered with mesh screens. He discovered the reason for that almost immediately.

“Shit!” Victor yelped, slapping at his neck and dropping his duffle bag. “Damn mosquitos!”

He hadn’t noticed Chase speaking in quiet tones to Priyanka, but when he bent to retrieve his luggage, Victor noticed the captain giving the soldier a chaste kiss on the cheek.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she cautioned him. “I’ll be just a radio call away.”

“You be careful, too. This ship is a big expensive target, so don’t be shy. Anyone causes any trouble, you cut loose and take off. You can come get us later.”

Chase gave her one last wave, then shot Hill a bird before he led them off toward the gate. It seemed ridiculous to Victor that the traffic control moron had stuck them off in this corner of the field, at least two hundred yards from the gate, when there was absolutely nothing else on the field for hundreds of yards around. In fact, the only other spacecraft on the whole landing field were a pair of orbital cargo shuttles sitting next to each other on the southernmost edge of the lot.

I am so out of shape. Two hundred yards carrying sixty or seventy pounds of luggage and he thought he was about to collapse. The only reason he didn’t stumble into the shack at the gate with Chase and Angel was that it was too small to hold more than the two of them and the grungy, long-bearded man behind the table inside.

“You gotta be Tamar?” The man smiled at Angel, revealing a mouth full of yellow, crooked teeth. “Wow, you’re as pretty as your voice.”

“The Tamar is the ship,” Chase reminded the man. “But you must be Raphael.”

“Hey, I was talking to the lady!” Raphael scowled.

“The lady wants to pay for a week’s worth of landing fees,” Angel said, slapping the bills on the table. It was cheap, pressed cardboard and cheaper aluminum, and it wobbled perilously at the impact. “I pay you, right?”

“Yeah, you pay me, all right.” He counted the money, then looked up, eyebrow arching. “You didn’t want the insurance?”

“I think we’ll be okay,” Chase told him. Raphael glanced at him with narrowed eyes, as if he was irritated that the soldier was even talking to him. “You see, the crew is going to be sleeping on board, and that boat has a pair of Bofors guns in her side that could turn anyone who even looks at her cross-eyed into ash.” Chase grinned at Raphael’s sudden change of expression as the man whipped around and looked out the window at the ship, clearly visible even from two hundred yards away. “Matter of fact, she can even fire those things on the ground, wouldn’t have to take off. Have to warn Pri about her aim though… she might accidentally wipe this whole shack out without meaning to.”

Raphael stuttered something that Victor couldn’t make out, but Chase just nodded and then left him there. Angel might have been smiling behind the soldier’s back, or it might have been Victor’s imagination.

The smell slammed into Victor like a solid mass by the time they hit the other side of the gate, wafted across the field by a stray breeze coming from town.

“Oh, my God,” he gulped, putting a hand over his mouth. “Is that the cows?”

A bull fifty yards away, lowed its discontent as it shuffled down the road without supervision, kicking up a cloud of dust, making no comment on whether it was to blame for the rancid stench in the air. It mooed and sidestepped at the approaching truck and the competing billow of dust from the squeal of its poorly maintained brakes.

The pickup was at least twenty years old, Victor thought. Maybe thirty. He wasn’t an expert on car body styles, particularly when most people who had the money for a new vehicle were buying aircars, but the rumble and growl of the internal combustion engine was as distinctive as it was foreign to his California-raised ears. The curled horns of a ram decorated the grill, though any other factory markings had long since been stripped off the primer-grey body of the four-door vehicle.

It kept moving in defiance of the protesting brake pads and Victor stumbled to the side, afraid it was going to run the three of them down, but the pitch of the rumble of rubber tires on dirt went lower, and the giant vehicle came to a clunking, pinging halt directly in front of them. Clouds of brown dust swallowed them up, and if it sent Victor into a coughing frenzy, at least it blocked out the smell.

The dust cleared, revealing the open driver’s-side window and a broad, white smile. The man behind it was neither broad nor white. He was skinny enough that his patched and repaired work shirt hung off of him like a tent, and Victor thought he was one of the local Indian immigrants. The smile broke in half a face creased and weathered by wind and sun and time, and the man could have been anywhere between forty and seventy for all Victor could tell.

“Good afternoon lady, gentlemen,” he said, nodding, his English with the vaguely British accent still left over from more than a century ago. “I am Tata, and I’ve been sent by Dr. Stephenson to pick you up and take you to the dig.” His eyes sprang wide open as if he’d just remembered something important, and he sprang out of the door, motioning for them to follow him to the back of the truck. “Here, here, here,” he said, lowering the tailgate. It barely hung on by an ancient, frayed, and rusted cable, as if daring anyone to use it to climb into the back. “Let us put your bags back here, my friends.”

Victor didn’t argue, happy to dump his duffle bag and roller onto the scratched and dented truck bed, not caring if they went all the way through the scraped, rusty metal to the ground. Chase threw his bags in as well, though Angel seemed reluctant, staring at the state of the truck with concern in her eyes.

“Are you sure this thing will get us all the way to the dig?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, ma’am, yes!” Tata assured her. “This is the finest vehicle I’ve ever owned, a vintage Dodge Ram Bighorn from 2021. The very best year for this truck, I assure you. Of course,” he went on, shrugging, “the engine has been replaced by one that runs on alcohol. And the transmission has been replaced by one from a 2013 Ford F150. And the drivetrain was adapted from a Chevrolet. But she’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

Angel sighed in resignation and tossed her luggage in with the others. Tata smiled again—he seemed to smile a lot, Victor thought—and pushed the tailgate shut quickly, as if she might change her mind.

“Everyone inside!” he urged as he climbed back behind the wheel and started the vehicle with the push of a button. The engine turned over reluctantly, grumbling like a massive dog just woken from a long nap. “The truck even has air conditioning!” He nodded to Chase as the man climbed in on the front passenger’s side. “The air conditioning unit is from a Toyota.”

Victor slid into the back on the passenger’s side, behind Chase, and closed the door quickly, anxious to feel cold air again.

“How far is the drive?” Chase asked, angling his vents toward the back and turning up the fan. Victor could have kissed him.

“Not far, not far,” Tata assured him, peeling out from the gate and nearly hitting the same white humpbacked bull, which mooed in protest. “We will be there in no time at all.”

OceanofPDF.com

11

Chase sank into the comfortable, if worn and patched, seat of the Dodge Frankenstein and tried not to listen to the man who called himself Tata. It was no easy task, since Tata simply refused to shut up.

“Yes, yes,” he said, looking back for far too long at Victor Lee and away from the narrow dirt road. “There are barracks at the dig site, but no one stays in them. They all live in the tents.”

“Why?” Victor asked.

“Because the barracks are twenty years old and weren’t built that well to begin with! Now, they leak like sieves and snakes and insects get in and…”

“Snakes?” Victor repeated, lunging forward in his seat like he’d seen one on the ratty floor mats. “There are snakes here? How did they get snakes here?”

“No, not really snakes, of course,” Tata admitted, motioning expansively with both hands, taking them off the wheel. “I mean, some of them have legs and others have bat wings, and some have these pointed heads with vanes on them, and others don’t have any eyes, but I say, they’re long and wriggly and scaley, so they’re snakes, right? And they all bite. Not all of them are poisonous…”

“Venomous,” Angel corrected him, staring out the window.

“Yeah, right. Not all of them are venomous, and even the ones they say are, their venom doesn’t hurt us humans too bad, but there are a couple that, if they bite you, you swell up and turn red and boom!” He clapped his hands together. “Just like that, you’re dead!” Tata finally turned his attention back to the road just as Chase was about ready to grab the wheel himself. “And then there’s one that injects you with a sting on its tail like a scorpion, and that won’t kill you, but you’ll be tripping balls for days, sweating and shivering and seeing visions from all your past lives.”

“The barracks?” Victor repeated.

“Ah, yes. Well, the barracks have snakes, and insects and rats—real rats, our rats, they stowed away on the ships that brought us here. So, no one sleeps in them. The tents are new, Dr. Stephenson brought them with him, and you stay dry and no bugs or snakes or rats unless you leave the door open too long.” Tata shook his head. “Don’t leave the door open. Some people do because it’s so hot, even at night, but I wouldn’t do it.”

“No air conditioning,” Victor moaned. “This is gonna suck.”

“There are fans,” Tata assured him. “Every tent has a fan. But you can only use them at night because they have to charge the batteries with the solar panels in the day.” He bobbed his head side to side, making a face. “Dr. Stephenson is a nice man, friendly with everyone, but he works us all too long and doesn’t pay us enough. I know your California college is rich. They can afford to pay us more, right? I mean, they sent the three of you all the way here from Earth just for some buried buildings.”

“I’ll be sure to bring it up with Dr. Stephenson,” Angel said, though her tone put the lie to her words, as utterly uninterested as a human could be and still be awake.

She was staring out the window, and something out there was interesting to her. Chase had been scanning the road in front of them for threats, but he twisted in his seat, trying to see what she was looking at. The jungle surrounded them, but it wasn’t unbroken. Here and there, a stream passed beneath the road through a culvert and pushed the trees aside, giving them a view of the mountains out to the east. They were tall and forbidding, much farther away than they looked, and capped with snow at the top. Chase frowned, trying to remember from the briefing packet how tall they were. 20,000 feet? Twenty-five?

“The mountains,” Angel said softly, as if talking to herself, but then she turned and glared at the back of Tata’s head. “The Karakorum, they’re called?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Tata enthused, nodding. “They are beautiful, are they not? I drove to them once, long ago, when we first arrived here. I was a younger man then, and it seemed like an adventure, but now I am middle-aged and it would be a daunting journey.”

“They’re on our left,” she interrupted, her voice flat and accusatory. “They should be on our right.”

“I… um… I’m afraid I don’t understand, ma’am?” Tata shook his head. He was like a bobblehead, Chase thought. The man couldn’t speak without moving his whole body.

“I studied this dig extensively. Watched Dr. Stephenson’s videos. In one of them, he recorded the drive from the landing field, and the mountains were on his right.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am,” Tata said, laughing with what Chase thought might be forced casualness. “You must be remembering wrong.”

Angel’s eyes narrowed, her mouth curling into a snarl, though Tata couldn’t see it since she was directly behind him.

“I have an eidetic memory, Mr. Tata. I don’t remember anything wrong. You’re taking us the wrong way.”

Chase had been half-ignoring the conversation, but at the accusation, he snapped to attention, checking in front of them and then behind. No one was on the road. He’d seen no one the whole drive, and now that he thought about it, the lack of traffic should have bothered him. People didn’t build roads to nowhere, not even out here on Vishnu. If no one was using this road, it might have been because they were warned not to.

“Pull over,” he ordered Tata, using the command voice he’d learned as a Ranger NCO.

“But we’re almost there,” Tata protested, pointing forward as if to show him. “We’ll be there in a few minutes, I swear…”

The grip of the FN automatic was rough, abrading his palm just enough to keep itself secure against sweaty palms or the fingerless gloves Chase often wore in combat. The 9mm had traveled with him for these last five years in the same spot under his left arm, concealed under the thin bug-repellent shirt he wore unbuttoned over his olive-drab T-shirt. The FN 509 was strapped in tight with worn nylon and stained white with the salt of old sweat, and it slid free as if it knew instinctively that Chase needed it.

The electronic sight popped up as it came out of the holster, but Chase didn’t need it. Not with the threaded muzzle of the handgun pressed against Tata’s head. The man squeaked wordlessly and let his foot off the accelerator, the truck slowing down to a crawl.

“Stop the damn truck.”

“Y-yes, yes, I’m stopping the damn truck.” The man couldn’t shut up, even with a gun to his head. “Please don’t shoot me, I am definitely stopping the damn truck.”

And he was, at least, even if he still felt the need to narrate it. The tires rasped and scraped, and Chase didn’t wait until the pickup came to a complete stop before he spun the shifting knob to park. The transmission, whatever its provenance, clunked and ground and threw Chase against his seatbelt. He waited until the belt let loose before he tried to release it, using the time to glance into the cupholder and confirm that the key fob was indeed sitting inside it, then unbelted Tata and pushed him toward the door.

“But sir, it is very bad for the transmission to do that!” Tata protested, holding onto the wheel to anchor himself against the push.

“Out,” he said, motioning with the FN. “Get out of the truck.”

“But I am responsible for this truck! No one else is allowed to drive it!”

Chase had officially run out of patience and announced the event by lunging across the cab, pulling the handle and pushing the door open with the same hand, then driving Tata out with the muzzle of the gun against the side of his head. Tata stumbled and went down in the packed dirt, flat on his ass, but Chase only watched him to make sure he didn’t pull a weapon out of the loose folds of his clothing. He kept his gun trained on the man as he scrambled over the center console and into the driver’s seat, then yanked the door closed.

“You don’t understand,” Tata said, pushing himself up to his feet as he backed off the road. He finally seemed upset enough to tell the truth. “They’ll kill me! They’ll kill my family!”

Chase set his gun in the center console and used both hands to turn the truck around, sending Tata dodging out of the way as he performed a K-turn and pausing before he drove away, sympathy getting the better of him. He rolled down his window.

“You’re pretty damned good at talking,” Chase told the man. “If I were you, I’d start thinking about how to talk your way out of this.”

Tata, for once, was speechless, and Chase pulled away from him in a spray of dust and gravel.

“What the hell is going on?” Victor demanded. A glance in the rearview mirror showed eyes wide and white staring back at Chase. “Why did you pull a gun on that dude?”

“He was taking us the wrong direction,” Angel told her graduate assistant, her tone making clear she thought it should be obvious.

“Why?”

“That’s why,” Chase told him, pointing ahead.

The cloud of dust was the first sign, but it was only another second before the ancient Land Rover emerged from it, glinting silver in the afternoon glare.

“It’s a car,” Victor said, still sounding confused. “What does…”

Chase had already jammed the accelerator to the floor, though it wasn’t achieving as much as he’d hoped in the kit-bash pickup truck, barely getting them above fifty miles an hour. It was fast enough that the Land Rover was rushing toward them headlong, and when it cut to its left and tried to block the road, Chase didn’t have time to slow down. He twisted the steering wheel to the right and went off the road, into the grass beside it, scraping the passenger’s side door against something that might have been a banyan tree had it been on Earth.

Victor’s yell started as a curse, but it had drifted into incoherence as they left the road, the suspension bouncing them roughly toward the ceiling as the truck thumped over roots and into ruts. Mud spattered the windshield, and Chase hit the wiper control automatically as he yanked the vehicle back onto the road past the stopped Land Rover. The old British SUV was stuck, trying to get turned around, but there was no way it was going to be able to catch up to them, not on these roads, and Chase smiled thinly. They’d gotten out of it without firing a shot.

He didn’t notice the Toyota Hilux tucked into the pullout until it came after them in a roar of alcohol-fueled fury, trailing smoke and dust.

“Damn.”

It looked newer than the Dodge or the Land Rover, new enough that it might have its original engine and transmission, and it was certainly going to catch them. Chase couldn’t push the accelerator any harder, and the readout was just now creeping toward sixty, the truck bouncing and sliding with every bump in the rough road, and still the newer pickup was gaining. The glare of the local star was flashing off the windshield, but when they passed through the shade of a taller tree overhanging the road, Chase could make out the faces inside the cab.

They weren’t smiling, and they weren’t Patsies like Tata. The three men in the cab were young, hard, and hungry, the same type Chase had seen on a dozen different worlds, living off the suffering and hard work of others. They always had guns, and these were no different. One of them leaned out of the passenger’s side front window and braced the barrel of an AK47 against the windshield frame, the muzzle flash barely a spark in the harsh light of the primary star.

Something metal spanged off the roof of the Dodge, and Chase swerved the pickup back and forth, trying to make sure the man didn’t have a stationary target.

“Do either of you know how to shoot?” he yelled over the roar of the engine.

“What?” Victor blurted, not screaming in terror yet but obviously not too far from it.

“I can’t drive and shoot behind us,” Chase ground out, knuckles white on the steering wheel. It was still slick with Tata’s sweat, and he would have given real money for a chance to wipe it down. “Has either of you ever shot a gun?”

Another chatter of automatic weapons’ fire, and this time Victor did scream as the rear window shattered and two rounds went out the windshield, spider-webbing the safety glass.

Angel Cortez hadn’t said a word, but she dove into the front seat with the grace of a gymnast… or a martial artist, which she was. Chase was about to tell her to strap in, but she did it on her own and he shut his mouth, impressed. She took the gun out of the center console, being careful to keep the barrel pointed away from him and her finger off the trigger.

“Is there a safety?” she asked, turning it in her hand.

“Just pull the trigger,” he told her, then swore and swerved again as another burst of antique Russian steel-core bullets took out the sideview passenger’s window. “Keep both eyes open and use the red dot to aim.” He remembered what she’d said to him on the ship and almost told her to aim for the tires, but he bit down on the words. It was possible to penetrate the front of a tire with a handgun, but it would take way too long for them to deflate.

Angel didn’t say anything, just rolled down her window. Air had been hissing through the holes in the window and windshield, but now it blasted in through the open window, deafening, sending a shower of trash swirling up from the floorboards. Angel unfastened her seatbelt and leaned out the window, holding the FN in her right hand, left hand clasped over it, most of her upper body through the opening. Victor cried out, grabbed her legs, and held her in place so she wouldn’t fall out from the bumps and jolts.

Chase could barely hear the shots, but he could see their effects in the rearview mirror. Angel didn’t hit the shooter with the AK, but she did walk a line of bullet impacts up the hood until they punched through the upper part of the windshield on the driver’s side. No blood sprayed inside the cab, and no one seemed to have been hit, but the Toyota fishtailed and nearly went out of control and the driver had to slow down. As the pickup fell back in the reflection, Angel scooted back into the passenger’s seat, the gun still held in her hands, the slide locked back.

She was panting, though not from the exertion, he thought. There was anguish in her face as she handed the gun back to him, butt-first. Chase took it, controlling the wheel with his knees for a moment as he pulled a spare mag out of the pouches beneath his right arm and dropped the empty, then slammed home a fresh one and dropped the slide on a live round.

Behind them, the Toyota was back under control, though it had lost ground and was probably a hundred meters back. If he could just keep up the gap…

He couldn’t. Whatever engine Tata or his shade-tree mechanic friends had shoehorned into the Dodge body, it was groaning and rumbling and tapping its protest at such treatment and was bound and determined that fifty-six miles an hour was its top speed limit. The Toyota was under no such restrictions, and it would be on them again in seconds.

“It’s reloaded,” Chase said, offering the gun back to Angel.

She put a hand out but drew it away just as quickly, shaking her head, squeezing her eyes shut.

“I can’t,” was all she said.

Chase was about to try to argue with her when a short burst of AK rounds punched through the tailgate and then through the back of the cab, dying in a spray of sparks in the truck’s useless radio. Chase dropped the FN into the center console again, both hands going to the wheel.

“The hell with it!” Victor said, and before Chase knew what the grad student was doing, he’d grabbed the 9mm out of the console and was twisting around, pointing it out the shattered rear window. “And the hell with these guys!”

Victor emptied the gun as fast as he could pull the trigger, and this time, Chase did hear the shots. They nearly deafened him, and brass cartridge casings bounced off the interior of the pickup, one of them singing his neck just above the collar before it clattered down to the floorboards. A seventeen-round magazine emptied much more quickly than most people could imagine, and it wasn’t at all difficult to go through a whole mag without hitting a damned thing.

Victor had hit something. Chase didn’t know what, but the Toyota fishtailed again, and this time the driver wasn’t able to pull it back. Dust and dirt and a single tire flew up from the wreckage as the truck rolled. Four times before it stopped, and even after it did, the tire was still bouncing down the road.

“Whoa,” Victor said, mouth hanging open, gun dropping down with the slide locked open on an empty mag.

Chase slowed down to a more manageable speed, then reached back and pried the pistol out of Victor’s hand. He reloaded and shoved the handgun back into its holster, sneaking a glance at the two academics. Victor seemed like he was still in shock, staring behind them as if he could still see the wreck of the Toyota, while Angel was curled in her seat, face buried in her hands. Victor’s reaction, Chase could understand. Angel’s, not so much. She’d killed a windshield.

He drove for another ten minutes, long enough that he was sure they weren’t being followed and there were no more ambushes waiting along the road, then pulled over to the side and twisted around to face Angel Cortez, waiting for her to come out of her funk and notice.

Finally, she looked up and seemed none too pleased to find him staring at her.

“What?” She wiped at her eyes.

“I hate to bother you, but you said you have a photographic memory, right?”

“Eidetic,” she corrected him with the brusque, didactic tone of a teacher. “What about it?”

“Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re pretty freaking lost.” He threw up his hands and indicated the empty road and the trackless jungle surrounding them. As if on cue, something large and sinuous and vaguely reptilian darted from one side of the road to the other and was gone. “Do you have any idea how to get to this dig, or should I just go back to the spaceport and ask Raphael?”

“Get out of the car,” she told him, opening her door.

“Why?” he asked, not moving. She turned back to him, standing on the running board.

“Because I’m driving.” She sniffed, scowling deeply. “If there’s any more shooting to be done, you can do it yourself.”

OceanofPDF.com

12

“My God, Angel,” Dan Stephenson said, sweeping the woman into a hug, “you haven’t changed a bit!”

Evangeline Cortez returned the embrace warmly, though she wasn’t much of a hugger. Dan Stephenson was a good man and an old friend, and neither had been very easy for her to find.

“Neither have you, Dan,” she assured him.

“Oh, you’re a bad liar,” he said, laughing as he set her back down. “I’m afraid time doesn’t spare any of us, and hanging out in places like this”—he waved around at the camp—“hasn’t done me any favors.”

She had been lying. Stephenson was in his early sixties and looked it, though the deep lines in his face and the streaks of grey in his beard and long braided hair seemed to add gravitas and nobility to his high cheekbones and strong jaw rather than simply making him appear decrepit. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and powerful, but the years had put a bit of a stoop in his posture, and he didn’t quite fill his khaki shirt and baggy shorts the way he had when she’d been a graduate student, working on one of his digs.

One not too different from this one, except it had been a different planet, dryer and cooler, with less jungle and more highland desert plateau. The tents were the same, though. Same model, bought from the same outlet. Dan Stephenson never trusted the local housing and sprang for the tents and cots on every expedition. These had started out new, but the encroaching jungle had left them stained green with algae after going through the just-ended rainy season. He’d been here for months now, and the wear was showing on the people as well as the tents.

They shuffled between tents, carrying metal trays loaded down with what she assumed was either a late lunch or an early dinner. It had taken Angel a good two hours to get to the camp in the dilapidated pickup truck and it had to be sometime in the late afternoon local time, although she had no way of knowing since she hadn’t adjusted her phone and the place had no working satellites. The workers were almost all locals, which was the usual way of things, though she noticed a couple whose clothes and hairstyles likely made them grad students. The dirt caked on their clothes and the look of absolute exhaustion were the great equalizers, and not even the ones she’d picked out as possible students paid much attention to the newcomers.

Their presence did remind her of her manners, and though their necessity annoyed her, she couldn’t ignore them.

“This is my graduate assistant, Victor Lee,” she said, waving at the younger man.

“Pleasure to meet you, sir,” Victor said, shifting his bags and offering a hand, acting as if he hadn’t been in a shootout and caused a possibly fatal crash just a couple hours ago.

“Pleasure’s mine, son.” Stephenson was as polite as ever, a fatherly twinkle in his eyes whenever he dealt with students. “Thanks for coming along to help us out.” He pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and dabbed at the sweat on his forehead. “God knows we need it.” He frowned at the truck as if he was just noticing it. “But tell me, where’s Tata? He picked you up, didn’t he? I mean, that’s our truck…”

Chase and Victor shared a look, and Angel blew out a breath of frustration. She’d somehow held onto the slim hope that the subject wouldn’t come up.

“Holy hell!” Stephenson exclaimed, walking over to the back of the truck and apparently just noticing the shattered rear window and the holes in the body. She knew the man wore glasses for distance vision, and now he put them on and his mouth dropped open. “What happened here?”

“I’m afraid your driver was getting paid by the local bandits,” Chase said, stepping in despite a quelling glare from Angel. “He tried to set us up for an ambush.” He shrugged. “Probably for ransom, but maybe for the ship we came in on. Dr. Cortez saved us… if she hadn’t recognized that we were going the wrong way, I never would have known. No GPS here with no satellites upstairs.”

“Those damned cartel bastards,” Stephenson spat, smacking a palm against the side of the truck. “They already soak the university for protection money to let us keep digging in peace, which irks me to no end, but what can you do?” He shook his head. “Before the expansion, when I was a younger man, I was part of digs in Colombia and Venezuela, and paying off the government and the drug gangs was just business as usual. But to do this to our people?” He laughed sharply. “They say the definition of an honest politician is one that, once he’s bought, stays bought. I suppose the same is true for criminals.” He looked up at Angel, suddenly alarmed, as if his fear for her safety had kicked in retroactively. “Are you all right? No one was hurt, were they?”

“We’re all fine, sir,” Victor told him. Angel frowned at the kid. He was more than over the trauma. He was walking around like a fighting rooster with a four-hour erection.

“But who are you, sir?” Stephenson asked, looking at Chase. “Another student?”

Angel barked a laugh at the idea, and Chase glanced at her, annoyed.

“No, sir, I’m Chase Weston of Tamar Protective Services.” He shook the archaeologist’s hand. “I’m here to act as security for Dr. Cortez and Mr. Lee.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Stephenson enthused. “Thank God you were with them. You should meet Gavin. He’s our on-site security.” He turned toward the tents and cupped his hand over his mouth. “Gavin! Come here, please!”

Gavin was a short, stocky, middle-aged man, his clothes just a bit higher quality than those of the workers and not stained by dirt, his slicked-back hair and mustache jet black and well-oiled. A compact handgun flapped around in an old leather holster at his hip, a lanyard attached to it running back to one of his belt loops.

“Yes, Dr. Stephenson?” he said, his accent flat-American. She judged him as a product of California rather than a direct export from India, though what he was doing here, she had no idea.

“This gentleman is Chase Weston,” Stephenson told him. “He’s Dr. Cortez’s bodyguard. I want you to take him for a tour of the site and show him our security measures.”

“Yes, of course.” Gavin nodded to Chase. “If you’d like to put your bags away first, I’ll show you to my tent. You can stay there… there’s no one else using the other cot right now.”

The two of them left, and Angel couldn’t have been more grateful.

“Here, I’ll show you two to your tents,” Stephenson offered, then smiled as if he’d forgotten all about the attempt on their lives. “And then, I’ll show you the dig. Oh, my sweet Angel… you’re going to love this.”

* * *

“Oh, my God.”

Evangeline Cortez wasn’t a woman who was easily impressed, but Victor could tell she was impressed now. So was he, though he hadn’t been at first. The excavation here at what Stephenson insisted on calling Rosetta was just like the two he’d seen in person and the half-dozen he’d toured virtually in the university’s virtual reality archives.

The Arborists might have had star travel, but their architecture was nothing to write home about, much less dozens of scientific papers. They liked low, stone walls made from local materials and cyclopean buildings that might have been built by some giant, clumsy child out of play blocks thirty or forty feet tall and three feet thick. Dean Devlin used to put an old internet meme on the projector in class, first with a picture of the giant slabs of stone and the question, “How did the Arborists move blocks of stone so large and heavy?” followed by an image of some weird-looking guy with funky, spikey hair saying “Could it be… aliens?”

Victor had never gotten the joke.

Besides the abandoned, half-buried, building-block cities, the Arborists hadn’t left much useful. They were humanoid, that much was obvious from the size and shape of their doors and passages and what was left of their furniture. But they’d had the same problem when it came to leaving clues for archaeologists as the modern human world might… everything was digital. They had what the researchers assumed were digital picture frames, their books were digital, their records were digital. And no one could figure out how to power the damn computers back up, much less decode them.

It was beyond frustrating, but if he’d wanted an easy specialty, he would have majored in medieval European archaeology. The paleontologists didn’t have it any easier. The Arborists hadn’t left much behind in the way of bones, either. It wasn’t as if they’d been wiped out, their cities destroyed… all of them were in good order, buried or partially so but not broken.

They’d just… left. They’d abandoned their buildings, their furniture, any computer system that wasn’t portable, and they’d pulled out of the various habitable planets they’d colonized.

This dig was familiar, very much like the others. The jungle had overgrown the ruins, leaving only the tops of the buildings sticking up from the dirt, but Stephenson and his diggers had cleared the doorways of a half a dozen buildings, the tree roots chopped and ripped away, no doubt with much elbow grease and sweat, since construction and excavation equipment would be expensive and hard to come by here. No skeletons littered the broad hallways of the largest building as Stephenson led them inside, no sculptures or paintings adorned the walls. If the Arborists had any representative art, they’d taken it with them.

Only the circular plant pots and the rings of enriched dirt remained of their many indoor plants and trees, several in each of the rooms and usually more in elaborate gardens between the buildings, the eponymous origin of their name. Victor had always thought it was a ridiculous thing, calling them the Arborists just because they liked plants. It would be like some future race running across the ruins of Portland and calling humans the Flower People.

But all thoughts of the ludicrous nature of their nickname fled when Stephenson took them to the chamber. This was not like the other Arborist digs he’d seen. The walls were curved, rounded, like all Arborist interior architecture, which always gave Victor a vaguely claustrophobic feeling, though he wasn’t sure why. There was plenty of space, twenty yards on every side, but the way even the floor was slightly concave convinced his hind-brain that the walls were closing in.

At the center of this oblate spheroid wasn’t more stone furniture or the fossils of potted plants tens of thousands of years old. No, what anchored this room was a…

A platform? A frame?

Neither words seemed adequate. The thing was ten yards across, stretching another ten from ceiling to floor, curved at the edges like the walls, and convex on the side facing them. The stone was wrapped in some sort of gold foil, thin as tissue paper but flat and seamless…and covered, from top to bottom and side to side, in symbols.

“Oh, my God,” Angel repeated, circling around the thing. She reached out a hand, but her fingers came up just short, and Victor could tell she was having to restrain herself from touching it. She looked sharply back at Stephenson. “How long have you known about this?”

“I found it nearly three months ago,” he admitted. He raised a hand to stop her before she could yell at him, which Victor knew her well enough to predict she was about to do. “And yes, I know I should have shared this with the university, but look at this place.” He waved behind them to show he meant Vishnu rather than the chamber they were in. “Look at who runs it. If they thought there was something important here, they would strongarm their way in here and hold it hostage until the university paid them or until they got tired of waiting and just blew it all up for the hell of it.”

“Is it writing?” Victor asked, ignoring Angel’s slow simmering at being kept in the dark.

“Yes,” Stephenson declared. “And I’ve translated it.”

“What?” Angel blurted, staring at the older man in disbelief. “Dan, this is an incredible find, but there isn’t enough here to even be sure this is writing! It could be some kind of art, for all we know. And there certainly isn’t enough to go on to translate it!”

“No, you’re right,” Stephenson admitted easily. “Not here.” He pointed further into the chamber, to a door so short, a passage so dark and narrow that Victor hadn’t even noticed it. “Through here.”

Victor grimaced, his awe and fascination at the prospect of the Arborists having left written records lost in the sudden return of his latent claustrophobia.

“Through there?”

Angel Cortez rolled her eyes at him.

“Jesus, Victor, we just got shot at and you’re afraid of a tunnel that’s been stable for the last ten thousand years?”

Victor looked at Stephenson, who was both taller and broader across the chest than he was.

“You can make it through there?”

“Barely.” Stephenson chuckled. “Actually, I got stuck once for an hour. I was shouting my fool head off, and finally one of the workers heard me and had to grab me by the ankles and pull me out.”

“Shit.”

“Oh, fine.” Angel waved a hand. “I’ll go first.”

The woman scrambled through the entrance without hesitation, wriggled her way inside, and disappeared into the darkness. Victor watched for a long moment, fear warring with shame in his chest. Shame won out and he sighed, going to his hands and knees in front of the tunnel. He reached out with one arm and folded the other beneath him, trying to reduce his breadth, and scooted inside. The tunnel was depressingly long and terrifyingly curved, which meant he couldn’t see the other end, and he nearly turned back despite his shame.

But moving backward proved even more difficult than continuing on, and Victor scuttled forward, convinced of his inability to breathe despite the fact he was, in fact, taking in air. He was a hair’s breadth from hyperventilating when he saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. This light was harsh and glaring and tinted yellow and he dug the toes of his boots into the smooth surface of the rock and covered the last few yards with the desperate speed of a drowning man heading for the surface.

Victor tumbled out the other end, back in the open air, gasping for breath and barely realizing where he was. He only moved from where he sat when Dr. Stephenson pushed him out of the way so he could exit the passage behind him. Portable lanterns glared in his eyes, seemingly far too bright for the size of the things, and he wondered why until he realized that the light was reflecting… off everything.

The chamber was larger than the one they’d just left, and every inch of the walls was covered by the gold foil. And every inch of the gold foil was covered by the writing…except for the center above them.

“That’s impossible,” Angel said.

But it wasn’t. The images would have looked the same if Victor had been reading them in any astronomy textbook for the last hundred years. At the center of the ceiling was a star map. The stars were circles surrounded by spikes of light, the planets depicted in ovoid line drawings showing their orbits.

“That’s not even the most incredible thing,” Stephenson assured her. He took one of the battery-powered lights and turned it on its stand, showing another section of the room, to their right and low to the ground.

Another familiar sort of illustration, though this one would have been more at home in a chemistry text.

“Those are, what?” Victor asked, looking between the two archaeologists. “Atoms?”

“They’re the elements,” Stephenson told him. “And each one is labeled. Between that and the writing beside the solar systems above us, I was able to get the translation software to get a start on the language.”

“But what is all this?” Victor asked him, shaking his head.

“For lack of a better term, it’s a grave marker. For a whole civilization.” The older man pulled a flashlight out of his pocket and shined it across the golden room, the glow haunting and otherworldly. “They knew they were dying… and they wanted someone else, anyone else who came along, to know what had happened to them.”

“And you know?” Angel asked, grabbing the man’s arm, impatience written across her face as plainly as if the Arborists had etched it there. “You’ve been able to translate all this?”

“Enough. I had to show you this first, but the whole story is back in my tent, on my laptop. I’m sorry for what happened to you today, but I think once you see it, you’ll agree with me.” He smiled like a man who’d been shown the secrets of the universe. “It was worth it.”

OceanofPDF.com

13

“How long have you lived here… Gavin, was it?”

“Yes, Mr. Weston. Gavin Patel. And I have lived here since the beginning,” the security guard replied, smiling broadly beneath a well-oiled hairdo at Chase as if this was something to brag about. “Over twenty years. I was hired by Lakshmi Nadar himself when he financed the first expeditions to this world. Watch your feet there… snake.”

Chase glanced down and saw the thing slithering across the trail. It was five feet long and about six inches around, spines growing out of its sides and a purpose to its movements, and he nearly ripped his 9mm out of its holster. But the thing was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

“The big ones aren’t venomous,” Gavin assured him, then shrugged. “Mostly.” He motioned upward. “Watch the overhanging limbs, though. Some drop right out of the trees onto you.”

Chase bit back a curse and wished the man hadn’t told him that. But they kept walking around the perimeter of the camp. It was surrounded by barbwire fencing, which Gavin had assured him had been installed by his workers, though paid for by Berkeley University, and while it wasn’t much at keeping out snakes, it did manage to keep the camp free of the larger predators.

“Mr. Nadar was recruiting people of Indian origin from all over the world, you see, telling us how we could make a new home for ourselves on another world, a place we could call our own after what had happened during the war. I had just graduated the police academy for LA County and was set to become a sheriff’s deputy, but this sounded so much more rewarding! I went to one of Mr. Nadar’s local meetings and talked to him, and he told me if I came with him, I could be the chief of police of a whole city!”

“I thought all of Nadar’s people got purged when the cartels took over.”

“Most did.” Gavin shook his head. “It was sad, Mr. Weston…”

“Chase. Or Sgt. Weston, if you have to, but not mister.”

“All right, Chase. It was sad, though. Things went very well at first. People were content here. We had very little crime, and I had very little to do. Which was just as well, since we had none of these.” He patted the handgun holstered at his hip. “Mr. Nadar did not believe in guns, you see. He wouldn’t allow them, not even for the police. He told me that he thought if we could start over, somewhere new, that we could outgrow the need for guns.”

“That didn’t work out so well,” Chase guessed.

“Mr. Nadar forgot that he and Dr. Soong-Tierney had sold the drive to everyone. And everyone included many bad people with guns. I was out in the jungle when the first of them came, from Mexico… well, from what was once Mexico. I show my age. The Sinaloa Cartel, they used to be. They don’t even call themselves that, now.” He laughed, and there was much bitterness in the sound for a man who seemed so constitutionally cheerful. “I suppose even criminals wish a new start when their old home is a radioactive ruin. But I digress. Where was I?”

“In the jungle,” Chase reminded him.

“Yes, I was in the jungle, not the city. One of the tigers…”

“Tigers?” Chase repeated, frowning.

“Ah well, it is like the snakes. They are not tigers, but they are a large, vaguely feline land predator that evolved to the jungle. There are many species, but we call them leopards and tigers, no matter what the zoologists might label them.” Gavin waved it away…or perhaps he was waving at the mosquitos. “One of the tigers had killed a farmer and, since we had no guns, I was sent in with a sonic fence to set up around the farm to keep the beasts out. By the time I returned, the ships were landing. Mr. Nadar went out to meet them, determined to welcome them as friends because that was the sort of world he hoped to build.” He walked silently for several steps, eyes staring into the past. “I saw them shoot him down. Him and the delegation of the city elders he brought with him. My deputies abandoned me, and I had no weapons, so I stripped out of my uniform and went back to my house and hid.”

“At least you made it.” Chase had heard worse stories… had seen them with his own eyes.

“It could have been much worse,” Gavin admitted. “Javier Martin, the leader of the cartel, didn’t want a bloodbath. He killed Mr. Nadar as an object lesson, but he kept his people from killing and raping and whatever else may have come naturally to them. Martin just wanted to be in control, to turn this place into his business. Oh, he stole. He and his people took what they wanted, took people’s homes and their businesses and forced them to hand over food. But it settled down quickly.” He spread his hands. “We, the colonists, stay on our farms and our shops and do pretty much what we did before… but we pay the tax to keep the peace, mostly in food but some in services, car repair, machine repair, construction, that sort of thing.”

“Doesn’t sound like the cartels are trying too hard to assimilate to the local culture.” Chase had meant the comment to be sarcastic, but Gavin replied as if he thought the soldier was making some academic statement.

“Not so far as worshipping our gods or respecting our traditions, no. Though there has been much intermarriage and perhaps someday, the differences will be blurred out. But no, there is very much a caste system here.” He snorted a laugh. “Ironic, given that was exactly the sort of thing we were trying to leave behind.”

The perimeter fence wasn’t going to prove much of a barrier to any of the cartel goons who felt like strolling in and checking out what the gringos were up to, that much Chase had already decided. But the jungle was pretty dense on the other side of the narrow trail along the fence line, and someone would have to be mighty curious to hack through it all the way to the camp. Which meant their biggest threat on a place like this, with few aircars or spaceships, was right up the main entrance road. That was doable. There were a few vehicles, a couple of old deuce-and-a-half Army surplus flatbeds and a couple more pickups. They could block off the road if they needed to, and maybe Gavin could scrounge up a few more people and a few more guns…

“Why didn’t you leave?” Chase asked him, which was entirely not the question he’d meant to go with. The two men stopped in their leisurely stroll and faced each other. “I mean, once you could do it, once things had settled down and ships started coming here again.”

“It takes money to travel,” Gavin said. “And while I have not starved…” He chuckled, patting his gut. “There is a difference between the money to buy food and clothing and the money to book passage on a ship.” His eyebrows went up. “Particularly the sort of ships which make berth here, no aspersion on your friends who transported you. This is a risky port and risk has to bring reward.”

“Once the University began the dig, though,” Chase pointed out, “I’m sure you could work something out with them.”

“Yes.” Gavin’s eyes clouded with memory. “Back to California. And how different a place that must be now than when I left. Do you think I could fit in there after making my life here, Chase? I have a child now. He’s a teenager, and he lives with my ex-wife, but I would be sad if I could never see him again.”

“Family always complicates things,” Chase admitted.

“And do you have no complications? No wife or children back on Earth waiting for you?”

“I got married young, right out of basic training,” Chase told him, surprised at his own candor. He never mentioned Jenny to anyone, even Pri. “No kids, thank God, because she filed for divorce while I was deployed to Venezuela. I came back and she’d cleaned out our apartment right down to the toilet-paper spindles in the bathroom. And our bank account. A whopping $17,562.98.” He chuckled. “Best money I ever spent.”

“And you were married to the Army after that?” Gavin surmised. “Career soldier?”

“For a while. But you can only fight other people’s wars so long, you know?”

“I have to confess, I know nothing about war. The only war we ever fought, we lost without firing a shot.” He patted his weapon again. “That is why I will never be without a gun again. Some of Martin’s people do not like seeing us go armed, but as long as I stay out here and away from their part of the city, they do nothing.”

“Well, you know this place better than me.” Which was a polite way of saying that Chase thought the man was indulging in some serious wishful thinking.

“Oh, look, we are back at camp already.” Gavin acted surprised, as if he didn’t know how far they’d walked.

The jungle had grown thicker near the end, vines and brush squeezing out the trail, but it abruptly ended where the locals had burned it clear. They came out on the other side of the entrance road, walking through the parking lot where they’d left the shot-up Frankendodge next to the other vehicles. Stephenson’s tent was the closest to the parking area, pitched under a large screened-in pavilion, a sort of headquarters tent to give the whole thing the sort of military nomenclature Chase was used to.

Tables and chairs were clustered under the pavilion beside a fat metal pot belching a pale cloud of smoke to keep away insects, and sitting at one of the tables, gathered around a glowing laptop screen, were Dr. Stephenson, Victor, and Angel. The three were deep in a conversation and his first instinct was to steer clear of them, since archaeological small talk didn’t seem too interesting. But something about the fervent glow in Angel Cortez’s eyes drew him in, whether because of the keen interest, the almost religious excitement he saw in them, or… maybe just because Angel had beautiful eyes.

“I’ll catch up with you later, Gavin,” he promised, waving the man off and hoping Gavin had the good sense to take the hint.

Cortez was so absorbed with the images on the screen that she didn’t even look up as Chase brushed the curtain entrance aside. Stephenson nodded to him absently, polite to a fault, even when he wasn’t paying attention.

“This is nuts,” Victor said, shaking his head. “This can’t be right.” He looked up at Stephenson. “Doc, are you sure this translation isn’t screwed up? I mean, yeah, there’s a lot to go on in that… library or whatever it is, but it’s still just one sample. What if there’s some kind of mistake with the program?”

“It’s a lot to accept, Dan,” Angel agreed, her tone subdued, daunted.

“It’s possible there’s some mistake,” Stephenson admitted, “but this is the only translation that fits the diagrams on the library wall. And it makes sense. If it had come out as gibberish…’

Convinced that no one was going to offer to explain what the hell was happening, Chase risked Angel Cortez’s wrath and pulled out a chair at the table, then sat down with a squeaking protest from the worn, plastic seat.

“I’m just the hired help,” he said, leaning against the table and staring at the photos of symbols engraved into what looked like Christmas wrapping paper, “but I have a feeling you guys are talking about more than an archaeological discovery here.”

“I thought I made it clear our conversations were only to be about the execution of your duties, Mr. Weston.” Angel Cortez didn’t disappoint him, and Chase restrained a smile. The woman was intimidating, but so were his black hats at Ranger school.

“You be honest with me, Dr. Cortez,” he told her, not backing down an inch. “You tell me whatever this earth-shattering secret you discovered won’t have any effect on your security situation, and I’ll walk right out of this tent, go have myself a coffee and not bother you again.”

Victor stared at Angel with morbid fascination in his eyes, as if he expected her to explode and didn’t want to miss it. Angel ignored him and shared a look with Stephenson. The older man tilted his head toward her, cocking an eyebrow.

“It’s probably the greatest archaeological find of human history,” he said. “And I told you what could happen if the cartel finds out about it.”

Angel Cortez looked as if she’d rather gnaw off her own arm than admit to it, but she finally nodded.

“Go ahead, Dan. You tell him.”

“You have to understand,” Stephenson said, gesturing at the laptop and the symbols on the screen, “that this is far from a complete story. The Arborists as a species have a long history, just as we have, and we still know next to nothing of it. All we can say for sure about them is that they were generally humanoid in shape—bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical with stereo hearing and stereoscopic vision. And perhaps because they were so like us, they thought much like us, or at least so these records have led me to believe. They were concerned with the future, with posterity, and they wanted someone to learn from their story.”

“Dan.” Angel shot him a quelling look.

“Yes, sorry,” the older man said, shaking his head. “Too used to teaching, I suppose.”

“It’s all right, sir,” Chase encouraged him. “Always ready to learn something new.” In fact, he cared little about the Arborists except as a curiosity… they were aliens, after all. But he had the feeling that he wasn’t going to hear the whole story unless he allowed the old man to talk.

“From what we can tell,” Stephenson went on, “the Arborists spread across this section of our spiral arm around ten thousand years ago. Now we know how. What’s described in the library texts sounds very much like the Soong-Tierney drive.”

“That’s no big shock,” Chase reasoned. “I mean, we know the S-T drive can get you to the stars faster-than-light. It’d be a damned strange thing if they’d found another way to get there.”

“Yes, well, it goes beyond the totality of that line of reasoning, Mr. Weston.”

“Sergeant,” he corrected.

“Sergeant Weston, it’s not only that they discovered the Soong-Tierney drive. It’s that they didn’t. It just appeared one day, and supposedly one of their scientists had developed it, but whoever it was never stepped forward. It threw their planet’s society into complete chaos, led to wars and fragmentation.” He waved a hand around them. “Does any of this sound familiar?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, frowning. “Dr. Soong-Tierney invented the drive, and Nadar helped her to market it.”

“I’m no physicist, Sgt. Weston, but even I know that the Soong-Tierney drive shouldn’t work. Its very existence goes against every established tenet of modern physics, from Newton right through Hawking. The fact that it does work should mean that our assumptions about the universe are wrong and nothing we’ve ever invented or discovered prior to this is possible. And somehow it all works. Everything we made before and the drive, too. And every physicist I’ve ever met is ready to commit suicide… except of course they’re also giddy because those sorts of people love it when everything is turned on its head.”

“Dan,” Angel ground out.

“Right. The point is, there is no way in hell that Mara Soong-Tierney came up with this. No one in a thousand years could have come up with this based on our current knowledge of the universe. And I also happen to know that she has steadfastly refused to explain how she discovered it and recused herself from public life on her orbital city. Not only that, but she has exactly zero other scientific breakthroughs, papers published, zip. My point is, the S-T drive appeared for the Arborists just as suddenly as it did for us. And it had nearly the same effect on them that it did on us. Except worse.”

Stephenson wiped sweat off his upper lip with trembling fingers.

“They had one more war than we’ve had… yet. The one that laid waste to their home planet. And just like us, they hadn’t yet developed a large enough commercial base to allow their colonies to survive on their own. They were left here, with just what they had, a few farms, nowhere to go, and the war coming this way. Everyone else left, running for somewhere they didn’t know, just trying to get to safety that didn’t exist. But these stayed behind because they’d found something special.” His lip curled in an ironic grin. “You see, they were archaeologists. And they had a dig here, beneath the ruins we found. A dig from an earlier civilization. Something important enough for them to stay here and die instead of letting it go.”

The hair was standing up on the back of Chase’s arms in defiance of the stifling humidity in the air.

“What?” he rasped. “What was it?”

“Well, that’s why you’re here,” Stephenson said, gesturing at the three of them. “We’re going to find it.” He grinned. “And it’s going to change everything.”

OceanofPDF.com

14

“Do you believe this?” Victor Lee whispered, the light from his headlamp playing over the skeleton. “I mean, do you freaking believe this?”

“Yes, Victor,” Angel Cortez murmured, not looking away from her task of clearing the remains of dirt. She dabbed at the ribcage like a Renaissance painter, her brush twirling, her tongue between her teeth as she tried to remove a persistent chunk of rock from what looked like an ear canal. “I believe that we are digging up an alien skeleton from an alien excavation below our excavation of an alien excavation.”

The chamber was beyond what they’d come to refer to as the library, through a doorway of stone and down a long, rutted ramp that might have been the Arborist equivalent of a staircase. They’d brought the gear through from the library, and Angel was careful not to admit it in front of Victor, but she was very grateful that Stephenson had transported it through that damned tunnel before they’d arrived. She wasn’t afraid of enclosed spaces, but the thought of trying to haul spectrometers, radiocarbon analyzers, and half a dozen other pieces of equipment through the narrow space behind or ahead of them would have made her curl into a ball and die.

“You know,” Dan Stephenson said quietly, crouched behind the two of them and beside the tripod-mounted video camera, both observing their work unblinking, “there was a time when we would have had paleontologists, paleobotanists, anthropologists, linguists, and a dozen other specialists out here on a dig like this. Back on Earth. Maybe if this was on one of the Union-sanctioned colonies, we still would.”

“Union-sanctioned.” Angel clucked, the corner of her mouth turning upward with scorn. “Let’s be intellectually honest, Dan. The Union is the United States government. Maybe twenty years ago, Europe would have mattered, back when everyone with a nuclear reactor could build a starship and colonize their own planets, but since the war, well… the Union is the United States and the Alliance is the Chinese. With Russian muscle.”

“My dear,” Stephenson said, a hint of admonition in his tone, “I am sure my friends in the British and Australian governments would disagree with you about your estimation of their political pull in the Union government. But be that as it may, I dearly wish we were on a Union colony, because as talented and educated as you are, Angel, none of us are qualified to be handling this on our own.”

“Well, we have my Master’s degree in xenopaleontology, such as it is,” Angel allowed. “And a shitload of computer analysis software. And what I can tell you about this skeleton is… it’s damned old.”

Stephenson chuckled, but Victor just nodded. It seemed like he wouldn’t have even blinked if his body hadn’t absolutely required it. And she could understand that. No one had found Arborist remains before, and she still wasn’t sure they had. The Arborists were humanoid, that much was clear from all the evidence. This skeleton… wasn’t.

“It’s bipedal,” Stephenson said, as if he was reading her thoughts. “I think.”

“Yeah, but look at the hips, Dan,” she told him. “And the knees. If you want to call this thing humanoid just because it walks upright, then I guess an ostrich is humanoid.” She pointed with her brush at the digitigrade knees. “And I’ll tell you what, this thing had a lot more in common with an ostrich than it does us. Not that it much resembles any species I’ve ever seen. The hips and knees might be vaguely birdlike, or even… I don’t know, theropods maybe.” She snorted, realizing she was being recorded and not wanting to sound like a crackpot. “And no, for the record, I’m not saying they’re ancient alien dinosaurs. If you look at the ribcage”—she trailed a finger over the elaborate hoop structure. It reminded her of the interior of some European cathedral—“you can see it’s like nothing that’s ever lived on Earth. The organs aren’t preserved, but I’d say that they hung from the bones somehow… I can see wear marks from where something was attached. The shoulders could be described as somewhat anthropoid, though not quite hominid. There’s a range of motion that’s as complete as a human’s, but I think it could have even been stronger through the whole range.” She shook her head. “That’s really odd. On Earth, it’s pretty much an evolutionary trade-off, either range of motion or strength. I wonder what sort of conditions led to this arrangement?”

“Maybe it’s not an evolutionary adaptation,” Victor suggested. “Maybe it’s engineered.”

Angel was about to snap at him but stopped herself. It wasn’t an unreasonable speculation.

“Perhaps,” she allowed. “We don’t have enough to go on yet.”

Angel glanced over at Stephenson. She would have expected him to weigh in on the possibility, since he had an opinion on just about everything, and she even valued most of them. But he was staring intently at the display from one of the many sensors set up around the skeleton, frowning like he’d seen a ghost.

“What is it, Dan?” she asked him. “You picking up something from the skeleton?”

“Not from the skeleton,” he corrected, turning the screen around on its mountings and showing it to her. “Below it.”

The view was from the thermal camera, just one of the instruments and usually the least useful, given that what they were digging up was millennia dead. But the screen clearly showed the yellow-red glow beneath the skeleton… though not that far beneath.

“The hell?” Victor blurted, gaze flickering from the screen to the broad, shallow pit with the skeleton. “Is there another chamber under this thing?”

“It’s warm but not hot,” Angel said, mostly to herself, as transfixed by the thermal image as Stephenson. “Not biological, I don’t think, but what else could it be?”

Victor scrabbled around in the dirt on either side of the skeleton, his cheek against the packed dirt, as if he could see through the remains to what lay beneath.

“Can we dig around it?” he asked, pushing to his feet and grabbing a shovel from where it leaned against the rock wall. “We could be really careful.”

“You sound like my best friend’s five-year-old, Victor,” she told him. “Give me that shovel.” She spun the screen back around to Stephenson. “Guide me, Dan. I don’t need to be the moron who destroyed the first alien skeleton ever discovered in order to uncover the Arborist equivalent of a space heater.”

She took a moment, judging how far from the skeleton she should start in order to keep it supported by the surrounding pack dirt. She settled on a point four feet from the right shoulder, and even that far away, she didn’t plunge the shovel in like she was digging a ditch. Instead, she wedged the point a few inches into the soil and pried loose a small scoop, then did it again, until sweat was pouring down her face and she had to stop to wipe it away.

Victor handed her a water bottle, and Angel squirted about half of it into her face before downing the rest.

“You sure you don’t want me to take over?” he asked.

“No. As much as I don’t want to be the most infamous moron in the history of archaeology for screwing up the remains, I want even less to be the infamous moron who screwed up the biggest find in history because I let a graduate assistant do my dirty work for me.”

Victor looked offended, but she handed him the empty bottle and went back to work.

“I could help,” Stephenson offered. “I mean, I believe I have at least enough tenure to take the blame myself if I mess this up rather than shifting it onto you.”

“Maybe in a few more minutes,” she lied. She had no intention of letting anyone else touch that shovel. “Just keep the video going.”

It took another two hours before she’d uncovered the edge of the thing, though she couldn’t have guessed how long it had been without the occasional glance at the time displayed in the corner of the display screen for the spectrometer. Not a single thread of daylight penetrated into the chamber, and the only reason it wasn’t unbearably hot was that it was deep enough underground for the temperature to average a few degrees cooler than the outside.

Angel had been in a cave in Spain on a dig once in the middle of summer, and she’d wound up having to go back into town after her first few days to buy a jacket because it was far down enough that it was in the fifties round the clock, every day of the year. The pit of early human bones had seemed thrilling to young Evangeline Cortez, but now, it was a joke, a child’s toy chest. This was universe-changing. A non-human alien skeleton and God knew what else was down here.

“That skeleton is going to set the world on fire once we get it back to the university,” Stephenson said, the smile on his face spreading to his voice. “I mean, ideally we’d bring a whole team out here to study it in situ, but…” He shrugged. “Berkeley might have sprung for a single bodyguard for your trip out here, but to keep an entire expedition safe, they’d have to hire an army.”

“We’ll just have to make sure we document everything,” Angel agreed, prying loose another clod of soil. “Take samples, label them, bring it all with us when we leave.” She eyed him. “You should come, too. I don’t like that you have to rely on some overweight, middle-aged former cop as your only security. Not after what happened to us on the way from the spaceport.”

“Angel,” Stephenson laughed, “if I go, who’s going to keep the cartel out of here? Who’s going to keep the locals from using the blocks from the Arborist buildings to repair their fences? This whole dig goes right into the toilet if I leave.”

“And what happens if you stay? You think the cartel thugs are going to be satisfied with your payoff? I’d rather have this dig in the toilet than you buried in one of these holes.”

“Hey, Dr. Cortez,” Victor interrupted, shouldering into her and pointing at the floor. “What’s that? That looks like a corner of something, right?”

Angel was too busy looking at the hole to yell at him for running into her. He was right, it was a corner, squared off in a way too precise to be natural. She worked at the edges of it and followed it up the length of the skeleton, expecting it to turn back toward it… but it turned the other direction. She grinned and dug the shovel in harder, digging away from the skeleton now that she was sure she wouldn’t destroy it.

“It’s on top of something,” Victor said. “I thought it was like a platform or a table, but it’s a cover.”

“I believe you’re right,” Angel told him. She smiled thinly. “And I believe I’m about to do something that would get me kicked out of the Berkeley Archaeology Department.”

She dug the blade of the shovel under the corner of the slab, the scraping of metal against stone setting her teeth on edge. Stone, about three inches wide, three feet on a side. It was going to be heavy as hell. She gritted her teeth and pried downward, using the shaft of the thing as a lever, and the piled dirt as a fulcrum. And nothing. Too damned heavy. She shot a look at Victor.

“A hand, please?”

He rushed in and added his weight to hers, both of them yanking downward, his sweat feeling disgusting and slimy against her arm. The slab budged but started to sway back down, and only the strain of trying to lift kept her from laughing out loud at the desperate expression distorting Victor’s face.

Then Stephenson was there, squeezing between them, pulling on the shovel. She was sure the shaft would snap, that it was some locally made piece of junk thrown together in someone’s backyard, but it held and the slab moved. Slowly, painfully, with a grumble that suggested some ancient, sleeping monster more than a recalcitrant stone block, the slab moved.

“Left,” Angel grunted. “I mean, push the block to the left,” she amended when Victor tried to move the shovel to the left, which would have shifted the slab to the right.

They took it a foot off to the side of the hole before the fulcrum proved to be too far off, and the slab collapsed with a thunderous crash and a cloud of ancient dust that spread a diffuse glow from the lanterns.

“Shit!” Victor yelped, stumbling away from the hole, coughing at the dust cloud. “Oh man, did we break it?”

She almost thought he was right. The slab had cracked and crumbled into tiny chunks at the sides and absolute, chilling fear froze Angel’s insides, the fear she’d done something monumentally stupid. She grabbed the shovel away from Stephenson, who still had a hand on it, and was about to try to clear away the broken bits of slab when she noticed that the dust had settled, but the diffuse glow was still present. It wasn’t coming from the lanterns.

It was coming from the hole.

Angel knelt closer and peered into the gap, then gasped at what she saw.

“What is it, Angel?” Stephenson asked, leaning forward as if he wanted to approach but was afraid to take the step.

“It’s… beautiful.”

* * *

One jungle, Chase decided, was pretty much like another. He’d seen too many of them, from Venezuela to Ecuador to the Philippines to the colonies and they were all creepers and roots and way too many insects. Vishnu was no different. A harsh place, too hot and too wet and with too many people ready to kill him.

“You ever get tigers in the dig area, Gavin?” he asked, leaning out the window of the old Land Rover. They had, at least, driven out on this patrol instead of walking the perimeter the way they had the first two times. They’d parked on the entrance road a half a mile down and sat there while Gavin ate his lunch. He had offered to share it with Chase, but it was already hot enough for him without shoveling down the curry concoction Gavin had brought to work in a battered, plastic container.

“Sometimes, thankfully,” the security officer told him around a mouthful of lunch, nodding cheerfully.

“Thankfully?” Chase repeated, eyeing the man in disbelief.

“Well, they usually come around at night. Just like the sort we had on Earth, you see. And that is why we don’t have to send out night patrols. It would cost so much extra, and you can’t trust these farmers and artisans and workers to stay awake all night long. Can you imagine trying to work in the fields or in the shop all day and then come here and be alert at night? Not that I would trust any of them to carry guns without supervision either.” He waved the spoon demonstratively. “But thanks to the tigers, we don’t have to. None of the cartel people would dare to come out here at night and risk getting eaten.”

“Swell.” Chase’s hand drifted toward the butt of his gun, and he watched the trees with renewed interest.

“The leopards are worse, you understand. Just like the ones back home, they drop down on you from the trees, and you never know what’s happening until they rip out your throat.”

“What about elephants? You have those here, too?” Chase liked elephants. They didn’t take shit from anyone, and they never forgot a wrong done to them.

“Sort of.” Gavin made a face, then washed it away with a sip of coffee from his thermos. “They do not look as much like elephants as the tigers look like tigers. They are large and they occupy the same… ecological niche, I believe the phrase is. But they lack the trunk, the tusks, and the charm. They’re more like giant rhinos. I do not like them.”

“That’s a shame.” He eyed the man sidelong. “You refer to India as home, still. But you were in the US.”

“It is an old habit, perhaps exacerbated by the fact that Los Angeles is still there, while much of India is not. Though there are still elephants and tigers in the jungle.” He seemed wistful. “I wouldn’t mind taking my son there someday, but I don’t know if either of us will ever leave this place.”

That was sufficiently depressing that Chase was ready to let the conversation die… until he heard the whoosh. There was only one thing that made that sound. He opened the door and stood on the running board, staring into the azure, cloudless sky.

“Something’s coming.” A shadow passed overhead, large and black and malevolent. Chase swore and jumped back into the car, then motioned at Gavin to start the car. “Hurry!” he urged. “Get us to the dig!”

OceanofPDF.com

15

“It’s an alien egg,” Victor Lee whispered, staring down into the pit at the thing. “One of those funky-looking theropod things is going to hatch from it.”

Angel Cortez would have mocked him for paranoia… but she couldn’t honestly say he was wrong. The thing, now cleared of the stone slab and the bits of rock and dirt below it, certainly looked like an egg. Well, sort of. An elongated, slightly flattened egg a little over two feet long and nearly as wide. But she’d never seen an egg glowing gold, and inscribed with a brain-twisting pattern of intertwined whorls. Or, she thought it was inscribed. There didn’t seem to be any actual grooves in the material, more like the patterns were worked into the very metal like grain in a piece of wood. Yet this didn’t seem to be as close to the surface as a grain. She would have been willing to swear that the whorls were somehow deep inside the thing, inches down at least.

“This thing has been here for tens of thousands of years, Victor,” she said, prying her eyes away from it to recheck the numbers on the scanner. “And that’s assuming it wasn’t moved from deeper by the Arborists. God only knows… it could be hundreds of thousands of years old.”

“The skeleton is, judging by the radiometric isotopes we’re detecting in it,” Stephenson chimed in from the pile of equipment lined up beside the pit. “Four hundred thousand years, minimum.” He fished a Geiger counter out of the clutter and switched it on, then passed the device over the egg.

“It’s gonna hatch, and a baby theropod thing is going to jump out and try to eat us,” Victor insisted. “I’ve seen this movie before.”

“It’s not radioactive,” Stephenson declared, running the detector over it again. He cocked an eyebrow at the display, then at Angel. “In fact, it’s reading less radiation than the background.”

“Then why’s it glowing?” Angel asked him. “Bioluminescence?”

“Don’t you have to have bio to have bioluminescence?” Stephenson motioned at the golden egg again. “This doesn’t look like anything biological, despite Mr. Lee’s insistence that it’s going to dispense a face-hugger.”

“It’s alien, Dan. And not even humanoid aliens. We don’t know how advanced the Theropods were.” She frowned. Now she was using the term, which bothered her. It was imprecise. The things were not theropods. They were like nothing that had ever lived on Earth. Which made them different than the life they’d found on the colonies, which was very similar to Earth life, right down to the presence of DNA in the cells. And hadn’t that set off the debate among the evolutionary biologists. “My point is, we don’t know what biology would look like to them. Or what it would look like to us.”

“Can we touch it?” Victor asked, hand hovering over the surface of the thing. “I can almost feel its warmth from here. I bet it is biological.”

“You think it’s a biological egg bent on eating us,” Angel said, staring at him askance, “and you want to touch it?”

He shrugged, pulling his hand away.

“Sorry, didn’t think about that.”

“We need to put this in something secure,” Stephenson said. “Preferably something vacuum sealed.”

“We brought a hard case,” Angel said, gesturing back toward the tunnel entrance. “It’s back in my tent. I don’t know if it’s going to be big enough, though. Maybe if we take out the interior padding.”

“We’ll rig something up. This has to go back with you, too.” Stephenson tapped the side of the camera on the tripod. “I’ve been recording everything, and the readings from the instruments are all synched to my cell phone.” A chuckle. “Which is the only good it’s done since I’ve been here. But there’s enough to prove the provenance of this thing and the skeleton. And maybe, if you can get the Union Government involved, or even the Colonial Authority, we can get a real expedition out here for an honest-to-God scientific examination of the ruins instead of this grave-robbing bullshit we’re reduced to.”

“Yeah, that’s an idea,” Angel acknowledged. She didn’t like it any more than he did and was resistant to yanking artifacts out of the middle of a dig. It felt wrong. “Though maybe…” She made an expansive gesture. “It’s unlikely anyone would find this. Even if the cartels came in here trying to cause trouble, they’d likely never get this deep. You could steer them away, lead them to Arborist artifacts instead, make them think those are rarer and more valuable than they really are. I just really hate to disturb this find.”

“You’re in charge, Dr. Cortez,” Stephenson told her, and she winced at his use of her title. “But if you’re asking my recommendation as someone familiar with the local situation, I’d say you should take it with you.”

“Dr. Cortez!”

Angel stood and looked around. The call had come from somewhere far off, through the tunnel. The echo made the voice unrecognizable, and she was barely able to make out that it was her name being yelled.

“Dr. Cortez, are you down here?”

Louder this time, closer, and she recognized it.

“Mr. Weston?” she called back, stepping over to the tunnel. “We’re in here. What do you want?”

She searched quickly for something to cover the remains with, feeling an urgency to hide them from the bodyguard.

“There,” she snapped at Victor, motioning toward a duffle bag behind him. It had probably been used to bring in some of the equipment Stephenson had been using on the skeleton and the egg. “Get that. Cover this stuff.”

“What?” Victor grunted, eyes narrowing. “Why?”

“He doesn’t need to know about this,” she insisted. “Give me the damned duffle bag!”

Victor shook his head but grabbed the dull green bag and handed it to her, then helped her to spread it out over the egg. They’d barely had time to tuck the sides down over the edges of the pit when Chase Weston wriggled through the tunnel exit, face covered in sweat, gun in his hand.

“What is it?” Stephenson asked, apparently realizing something was seriously wrong just a moment before Angel, whose first instinct had been irritation at the soldier’s presence. “Is it the cartels?”

“It’s not the cartels,” Chase told him, getting his feet beneath him and taking a quick scan around the chamber before he stood, as if checking for threats. “Look, all of you need to get out of here right now. We have to get to the spaceport.”

“Mr. Weston,” Angel said, stepping nearly nose to nose with the man, hoping to distract him from what was going on in the chamber, “none of us are going anywhere until you explain what’s happening here.”

“What’s happening, Dr. Cortez,” Chase said, his voice strained, his tone clipped, “is that there’s a troopship landing on the road outside the perimeter fence, and while it didn’t have any markings, I can tell you that it’s not the cartels or the locals or the Goddamned Boy Scouts! The only people around here that have a troopship are governments and mercenaries, and I’m not fighting off either one with this popgun.” He motioned back at the tunnel. “We need to leave.”

“Where’s Gavin?” Stephenson asked, looking behind him as if he expected the portly man to squeeze through the tunnel.

“He’s up top, telling the workers to clear out. He’s going to try to wait for us in the Land Rover, but I couldn’t swear to how long he’ll give us if he thinks it’s getting too hot up there.”

Angel’s thoughts swirled, first going through the process of determining whether or not Chase could be lying, then whether or not she believed him even if he was telling the truth. This could all be something easily explained, a cargo shuttle heading to the spaceport that had gotten lost or had an emergency, perhaps. But whatever other failings Chase Weston had demonstrated, incompetence hadn’t been among them. If he said there was a troopship, it was far more likely there was a troopship.

He was also undoubtedly correct in his assessment that the cartels wouldn’t be flying around the jungle in one. There’d be no need for them to fly at all, not when they veritably owned the city. And if it was soldiers or mercenaries…

“They’re here for the dig,” she said softly, not wanting to admit it but unable to avoid the conclusion. Stephenson was already nodding.

“Some of the workers must have talked.” The older man’s jaw firmed up beneath the bushy, grey beard. “We can’t let them have it.”

“Dr. Cortez…” Chase said, impatience written across his face and his shifting stance, as if he was about to head back through the tunnel whether they came along or not.

“All right,” she assented, “but we have to take this with us.”

“What…” Chase started to ask when she whipped the duffle bag off of the egg, bathing the little chamber in its glow.

For all his urgency, Chase said nothing for a long moment, just staring at the thing, gun hanging forgotten by his side.

“Is that…?”

“Alien,” Stephenson finished the sentence for him. “And I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you how important it is that we keep this out of the wrong hands.”

“Is it safe to touch it?” Chase asked, surprising Angel with what was a very good question.

“If it kills me,” Angel told him, kneeling beside the egg and unzipping the duffle, “then the answer would be no.”

She slid it over the sides of the thing, using the nylon of the bag to roll it into the duffle. It was shockingly light. She’d expected it to weigh a hundred pounds, but it couldn’t have topped twenty. The glow disappeared as Angel zipped the bag shut, picking it up by the handle and holding it out to Victor.

“Carry it,” she told him. He looked at her askance, and she thought he might balk at the idea, but he took the strap from her and slung it over his shoulder. Angel looked over to Stephenson to remind him to bring the camera memory card, but saw that he was already pulling it out and sticking it into the pocket of his utility vest.

She was surprised at how calm she felt as she nodded at Chase, then at the tunnel.

“After you, Mr. Weston.”

* * *

“Pri, it’s Chase. Do you copy?”

Nothing. He swore softly, crouching in the entrance to the Arborist dig, trying to scan the jungle around them, past the burned-out clearing. He’d started calling the Tamar the second they’d left the tunnel, and when he couldn’t reach her, he’d figured it was the stone buildings around them. But now they were outside and, unlike the phones the civilians were using, his was military-issue, a microwave transceiver that should have at least reached the spaceport from here.

Static answered him.

“They’re jamming us,” he announced to the others, knowing it would alarm them even more but needing them to understand the situation. “Pri can take down their ship, but not if she doesn’t know we’re in trouble.”

“We have to get to Gavin,” Stephenson said. The older man was worried, scared, that much was obvious. But he wasn’t panicking, which Chase considered a bonus. “Which way is the car?”

“Stay behind me,” Chase warned them, holding his handgun at high ready. “If the shooting starts, hit the dirt first, then crawl to cover.”

There was no gunfire yet. That had to be a positive. He listened for it over the crunch of the burned soil under his boots, over Victor’s heavy breathing and Stephenson’s feet dragging, aware the weapons could be suppressed. A suppressed firearm wasn’t totally silent, not like the movies, but it would be harder to hear from a distance.

Silence. Not even the calls of the jungle birds and monkeys, or whatever they really were. He was starting to agree with Gavin that all the fancy names were for the zoologists. If they looked like monkeys and acted like monkeys and occupied the same ecological niche as monkeys, then they were monkeys, even if the evolutionary biologists who’d stopped by for a brief survey a few years back had said the things had more in common with lemurs.

Except there were no monkeys. The animals knew something was going down, and they were holding their breath waiting for it, the same as Chase.

“Which way is the car?” Stephenson asked breathlessly, nearly running into Chase’s back.

“By the entrance.” Chase motioned him back. “Let’s keep our interval, okay?” At the archaeologist’s blank look, he elaborated. “Back off a little.”

At least Angel wasn’t crowding him, though that might have been because she was riding herd on Victor, keeping a hand on the duffle bag hanging off his back as if it were the most valuable thing in the universe.

God knows. Maybe it is.

“Did you see them, Weston?” Angel asked, hissing the words in an amateur’s attempt at a whisper. “Whoever’s on that ship? Did you see them on the ground? Maybe they haven’t gotten off the ship yet.”

He didn’t respond, just put a finger over his lips. Weren’t they all making enough noise without holding a damned conversation? They were almost out of the burn area, but there was a wall of trees and brush between it and the main camp, bathing the area in deep shadow despite the early afternoon glare piercing the jungle canopy over the ruins. Chase couldn’t see anything through it, no movement, no reflection of sunlight off gear or vehicles, and he hated plunging through the trees without a clear idea of what he was running into. But he’d hate standing around and letting the enemy outflank them even more.

Chase ducked beneath a hanging vine, resisting an urge to slap at the insects buzzing around his head. He hadn’t felt a bite yet, though he didn’t know if that was thanks to the repellent woven into the material of his clothes or because this particular strain of alien bugs didn’t go for human blood.

If they didn’t, they’d be the first.

High steps took him over tanglefoot vines and jutting roots at the cost of keeping his eyes cast downward, and just when he thought his vision had adjusted to the shadows of the tree canopy, he’d hit a gap where a dazzling beam of afternoon light would pierce through and flood his view with rainbow spots. The multicolored flashes faded with the overhanging canopy, but as they vanished, they revealed what he hadn’t been able to see… figures stalking through the shadows, their black and grey camouflage seeming to shift with the surroundings, even their faces covered with black balaclavas.

That’s gotta be damned uncomfortable.

If the sweat and humidity bothered the Chinese special forces, they certainly didn’t let it show. There was nothing else they could be, not with the body armor, the camo pattern, the QBZ-103 5.8mm bullpups. PMCs didn’t use Chinese gear, since most of them were from Union territories, and even the Russian mercs who still operated supposedly independently from the Alliance military used their own pre-war camo and AK-74s.

They were circling the perimeter just inside the fence line, flitting in and out of the picket of banyan tree roots just this side of the barbwire.

Looking for us.

Chase went to a knee, waving behind him for the others to do the same and hoping they understood what he was trying to tell them. He didn’t see any of the workers. The tents were on the other side of the camp, but that was less than a kilometer away, not so far that he wouldn’t have seen them if they were still hanging around. Maybe Gavin had actually done his job and cleared them out. If they scattered, heading back to the city on foot, they should be okay. It would take them hours, but there wouldn’t be enough Alliance commandos in that troopship to hunt them down. Hopefully, Gavin had gone with them.

Of course, if he had, that meant no one would be waiting for them at the Land Rover.

As if some ill-tempered god were reading his mind, an alcohol-fueled engine grumbled to life across the campsite and half a dozen Alliance special forces operators turned as one at the noise. They reminded Chase of footage he’d seen in school of prairie dogs or meerkats popping out of their holes to sound an alarm at the presence of a circling hawk, except those rodents didn’t usually have automatic weapons.

Chase held his breath and watched the Chinese soldiers move out of the trees into the open. There were more of them than he’d thought… their camo was well-designed, and they were very conscious of their surroundings, more disciplined than even his Rangers had been. He’d spotted six at first, but ten of them emerged from the trees, two carrying QJS161 light machine guns, and another with a grenade launcher.

And here I am with my damned 9mm and two whole spare magazines.

Chase didn’t spot the Land Rover until it started moving, kicking up a cloud of dust as it rumbled across the blackened dirt from the burn that had created the clearing. It was going slow but at a steady pace, like the driver wasn’t aware that there were Chinese troops surrounding the place, watching his every move and thought he was just going to go home and leave all the trouble behind him.

The Chinese commandos were disciplined as always, Chase noted. A regular infantry squad faced with a vehicle stop would likely have had a Mad Minute, everyone in the squad emptying their magazines into the car, but not these guys. Chase couldn’t hear the command, but he knew it had been given, because one of the machine-gunners opened up on the Land Rover. Just one, coughing hoarsely through its suppressor. Controlled bursts of seven to nine rounds, just the way US Army Rangers were taught, and even though the car was still a few hundred meters away, Chase could still see the bullets splintering the windshield and hear them pinging off the hood.

The car kept going, heading for the exit road, and if the driver was still alive, he had to be ducked under the dashboard, steering by guess and by God. The machine gunner had to step aside, still firing short bursts, through the passenger’s-side door now, a cowbell chorus of metal on metal, and yet the car kept moving. More gunfire, as the special operators lost their patience and went for the tires and the engine. Two of the tires went flat, and the car skewed to one side but kept going. Steam poured out of the burst radiator, and still the car kept going.

Finally, the commandos retreated from the vehicle, and Chase tensed, knowing what was coming next. Or, he thought he knew. He’d expected a rifle grenade, but that wasn’t what happened. The whoosh-hum of an S-T drive alerted him that the Chinese had other ideas. God cleared his throat, and when He did, the Land Rover exploded.

The hood was shredded, the engine on fire, the old SUV rolling a few last, labored yards on flattened, burning tires before the thing came to a permanent halt. Chase recognized the signature of the 30mm cannon. It had been the main gun of Chinese attack helicopters once, long ago, when helicopters had been a thing.

For some reason, it saddened him that kids nowadays would never see a helicopter outside of old movies or TV shows, would never know how crucial they’d once been.

“Hsst!”

Chase almost shot the man sneaking up from his left before he realized it was Gavin.

“What the hell?” he exclaimed, keeping his voice down and lowering the 9mm from where it had been pointed at the security officer’s forehead. “I thought you were in the Land Rover!”

“That would have been an extraordinarily stupid place to be,” Gavin told him earnestly. “I jammed the accelerator down with a toolbox and tied the steering wheel to the gear shift to keep it going straight.” He waved, both at Chase and the others. “By the time they figure it out, we’ll be gone. Come on!”

“Come on where?” Angel asked, a little too loudly, behind him.

“The pickup truck,” Gavin told her. “If we circle around the back of the camp, we can get to it without them seeing us.”

“And then what?” Chase demanded, crouching beside the man as Gavin rose from hands and knees to a kneeling position. “They have their gunship covering the entrance.”

Gavin had seen better days. His clothes were torn and covered in dirt, and his hair and mustache were limp as wet rags, but he still had that ancient automatic, and there was still a glint of purpose in his eyes.

“An entrance,” he corrected. “Not the entrance. There’s a cut-through on a game trail we can just get through if we’re not too worried about scratching the paint.”

“Why didn’t you show me that before?” Chase asked, shaking his head.

“A man has to have some secrets, Sgt. Weston.” Gavin smiled briefly, but the expression ran away, and he waved again, more urgently. “Come on! Time is short!”

Chase had doubts, but he also had no way to contact his only support and no other plan to deal with the commando team. He helped Gavin to his feet and motioned for the others to follow.

“Draw your gun,” he told the security officer who was walking beside him, hugging the trees. The older man goggled at him like he had two heads, nearly stumbling when he looked away from their path.

“What? You think it would actually do any good against them?”

“No,” Chase admitted. “The second they see it, they’ll kill you.”

“Yes, and…?” Gavin spread his hands in a silent question.

“And dying,” Chase assured him, “is a lot better than what’ll happen if they catch you alive.”

OceanofPDF.com

16

The only reason Victor Lee wasn’t hyperventilating was that he lacked the energy to even breathe hard. The egg, or whatever it was, wasn’t nearly as heavy as he’d thought it would be, or so he’d thought when he first shouldered the pack. Now, though, it might have weighed a hundred pounds, and the strap seemed to be cutting into his arm with each shuffling step.

This was just too much. When he’d come on this trip, he’d imagined bugs, maybe a few scary animals, and of course, the local crooks to be bribed. That was universal, even on digs planetside. Even the goons who’d come after Chase on Gateway hadn’t come as a complete shock. He’d been mugged, seen other people mugged. It had been an adrenaline rush, and he’d been pretty shaky for a couple nights afterward, but it wasn’t anything he might not have seen in Frisco.

The attack on the road had been another matter. No one had ever tried to kill him before. They’d shot at him. And he’d shot back. He might have even killed one or two when their truck crashed. He didn’t know how he felt about that. He thought he should have felt guilty, but he didn’t, and the fact that he didn’t made him feel guilty. The novelty of that had kept him from feeling quite as freaked out as he probably would have, but this…

Those weren’t criminals, weren’t drug dealers, and weren’t even cartel hitmen. All those he understood, even though none of them had ever shot at him before. These were Chinese soldiers, Alliance troops. That was what Chase had said. They were here for the alien artifact he was carrying on his back, and he’d be better off dead than getting captured by them. That was easy for him to say. He was old, almost forty… he’d lived his life. Victor was just starting out, and he wasn’t ready to die yet, particularly not for a glowing alien egg.

He wanted to run, but they were running… sort of. Jogging. Fast-walking really, but it was hard to run carrying this damned thing. He wanted a gun, which was very odd since he’d fired one a grand total of twice, and the first time had been a .22 rifle at an indoor range, and he’d only done that to impress a girl, who wound up dumping him. But he’d felt like he had agency when he fired Chase’s 9mm, and right now, he dearly wanted some agency.

But this seemed to be working, or at least that was what he wanted to believe. He was afraid to look straight at the commandos, afraid they’d see him seeing them, but glimpses out of the corner of his eye told him they were still busy at the front gate, gathered around the ruined Land Rover, searching around like they thought the driver had somehow escaped the vehicle while it was being shot to pieces. It seemed ridiculous to him, but he wasn’t a soldier, and he was trying to think positive thoughts at them, encouraging them to keep up the search and find that miniature escape artist hiding in the bullet-riddled car.

Keep looking. All you guys, just hang out over there.

They put the tents between them and the Alliance troops, and he let out a breath, feeling just a bit of the tension go out of his shoulders. Maybe they had thermal heat vision and ultrasound or whatever all that high-tech military shit was, but he still just felt better hiding behind something. Chase and Angel must have felt the same way, because they picked up the pace, nearly leaving Dr. Stephenson and Gavin behind… and him, too, if Angel hadn’t been pushing him, one hand maintaining contact with the duffle.

She’d probably leave me here if she didn’t want that egg so bad.

Maybe he was just being cynical, but she’d been treating him like shit this whole trip. Didn’t she realize how scary all this was? Did she expect him to be like Chase? Not that she was being very friendly to Chase, either, which made even less sense, since they were counting on him to keep them alive.

There. There was the truck. It was tucked in behind the supply tent, a bigger, older, canvas thing Stephenson had bought military surplus. Victor had seen inside it once, when one of the workers had gone to get food for dinner, and he knew it was jammed full of plastic tubs, air-tight to keep out the moisture and the ever-present bugs. He didn’t know much about the sensors the Alliance used, but he thought maybe having the tent packed with supplies between them and the Chinese soldiers would be a good thing.

Chase stopped at the edge of the supply tent, motioning Stephenson up. Victor followed the older man, not sure what Chase was going to say but wanting to stay close to the only one of them he trusted to know what he was doing.

“Keys,” Chase hissed at the older archaeologist. “Where are the keys?”

“In the truck,” Stephenson told him, and Chase nodded curtly, as if it was what he’d expected to hear.

“When we start the engine, they’re going to hear it, so I want all of you in the truck. Quietly. No slamming doors. Gavin, you drive. I’ll ride in the bed.”

“The bed?” Victor repeated, staring at him. That sounded dangerous, and not just because it violated traffic laws.

“It’ll give me clearer fields of fire. Go, get in the truck, all of you.”

Victor didn’t want to leave the cover of the tent without him, but he also very badly wanted inside that truck. He ran, not waiting for Angel to push him this time. The truck was so close, just twenty yards away, and even the bullet holes in the tailgate looked inviting. He’d decided to get into the back, passenger’s side seat, figuring that was the safest choice.

Something grabbed at his foot, hard and unyielding. A root, he had time to think, just before he went down the ground slammed into his chest and groin, even harder because of the weight of the bag on his back. The air went out of him in a pained grunt, an explosion of sound he couldn’t control, and dull agony roared in his ears, drowning out his own yelp, drowning out whatever it was that Dr. Stephenson was yelling.

Was yelling really a good idea? And what was that noise? It sounded like shooting, but softer… and was that thumping sound bullets hitting metal? Something grabbed him from behind, and through the haze of pain and confusion, he realized it was Angel Cortez, trying to lift him off the ground. He tried to help, rolling to one side, which was how he happened to see the Alliance soldiers running toward them.

There were four of them that he could see, and they were different than the ones at the gate. They had to be. There hadn’t been enough time for those guys to make it this far, be so close. Fear clawed at his guts, spurring him to movement, and he guessed it did the same thing for Dr. Stephenson. But where Victor scrambled forward, lunging for the truck, Stephenson just ran, straight toward the trees, maybe hoping the commandos would be so worried about the truck, they’d forget about him… or, more likely, just not thinking at all.

That stuttering sound again, not quite as loud as a regular gunshot, and the tiny part of Victor’s rational mind still working saw the funny, angular, fat extensions at the end of the carbine barrels and deduced they were some kind of silencer. He followed the end of the barrel to their target in time to see Dr. Dan Stephenson jerk and stumble, blood fountaining out from a half a dozen bullet wounds in his chest.

Victor had only ever seen people shot in movies. He expected the older man to fly backward when the slugs hit him, but instead, he just stood there, staring down at himself stupidly as if trying to figure out why his shirt was suddenly wet. Another burst of gunfire, and this time, it took him in the face.

Someone was screaming, and Victor realized dimly that it was him.

* * *

Goddamned civilians.

It wasn’t fair, wasn’t exactly compassionate or sympathetic, but it was the first thought he had when Victor Lee belly-flopped on the ground. The kid had tripped on a root, which was excusable, and then he’d let out a yell, which was not. But it wouldn’t have mattered, because the damned Alliance special forces hadn’t been as stupid as Gavin had hoped.

Chase wasn’t sure where the four special forces troops had come from… possibly the other side of the supply tent, sent to scout out the perimeter of the camp and make sure no one was doing what they were trying to do. He was sure that they wouldn’t be running away from these guys. But Stephenson hadn’t gotten that memo.

Chase was bringing up his gun, forming a yell to try to distract the enemy from Stephenson, but it was too late. He didn’t watch the man die, but there was a flux to a fight, a matter of angles and distances, and there was no way the Chinese soldiers were going to miss. Chase didn’t recall aiming, wasn’t aware of pulling the trigger, but the FN 509 bucked in his hand twice, and one of the commandos stiffened, his head snapping back at the impact of the slugs.

Too late to save Stephenson and too late to save himself. There were three more of them, less than twenty yards between the farthest out of the Alliance troops and his position, and they were wearing body armor. Chase had run drills against multiple enemies with rifle and handgun, and they always worked when he was shooting at pop-up targets. But when his Rangers, or later his squadmates in Tamar PMC, had tried those same scenarios with paintball guns, numbers always won out. The whole scenario played out in his mind just the way it had in those force-on-force drills, an iron-clad prediction of what was about to happen.

Chase would get two of them before they shot him, maybe have a chance at a third if he could keep his head while he was bleeding out. But one would get by him. He had to hope the others could get the truck started and get away, because he was going down shooting.

The muzzle of the FN seemed to float across to the next target, taking an eternity, as if he was moving through mud. But the Alliance soldiers didn’t move any faster, the whole scene unfolding in slow motion. He knew what it was. He’d studied the mechanics of it. Tachypsychia. Adrenaline fooling his brain into thinking time was running slower and he had forever to think about what was going to happen next.

The truth of it was, his conscious mind was running a half-second behind reality, giving him a very detailed look of what was happening without the ability to change it. He’d already acted, in his case out of training, experience, instincts beaten into him through years of practice, and more years of actual gunfighting. Now his brain was allowing him the chance to rationalize what he’d already done.

And what he’d already done was shoot another of the Chinese soldiers in the head. This one took the round in the temple, and the man collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. People reacted differently to being shot. Even a CNS hit to the brain stem, a sure instant kill, wasn’t guaranteed to knock someone on their ass. He’d seen people stagger around for interminable seconds with their brains leaking out of their nose.

And that was all he was praying for, just a couple extra seconds of life, enough time to take down just one more of the two left alive.

I’m praying to ask God to keep me alive long enough to kill someone else. There’s gotta be some screwed-up theology in that, but I’m hoping the Big Guy understands.

And maybe He did. Or maybe it was Vishnu speaking through Gavin Patel’s ancient Browning Hi Power, the hail of 9mm slugs emptying the magazine in less than three seconds. He’d hit what he was aiming for, but he hadn’t been aiming for the right target. Center mass, that was what Gavin had been taught in the LAPD. Shoot at center mass until the threat is over. But 9mm slugs, particularly the cast lead rounds they’d make on a planet like this, did next to nothing against the Chinese body armor.

One of the Chinese went down to a knee, blood spraying from an arm wound, but the other gutted out the agony he had to be feeling from multiple impacts to his vest and swung his assault rifle toward the security officer. And suddenly, the scenario changed. Two extra seconds, that was the gift Gavin had given him, and Chase didn’t waste it. It was just enough time to swivel his upper body another few degrees to the right, the gun held out in both hands in a triangle stance, the red targeting reticle in the electronic sights floating helpfully between the man’s dark eyes.

Two shots. One more than he needed, but you didn’t want to be stingy. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice.

Three dead commandos, three headshots. It would have been quite the story to tell the crew over a few beers, but the other Alliance special ops troops weren’t going to be so enthusiastic about his accomplishment.

“Get in!” he bellowed at the others, all thoughts of stealth vanished now.

He might as well have been talking to himself. Victor was howling like a lost soul, Angel was staring at Stephenson’s body, her face blank like she’d shut off completely, and Gavin was fumbling in his pocket for a spare magazine. He, at least, hadn’t panicked, which made him the best place to start.

“Gavin, get the truck started!”

This time, the security officer looked up from his gun, eyes coming into focus as he finally seemed to realize what was happening. Chase thought for a second he might have to get the truck going himself, but Gavin scrambled for the driver’s door and Chase turned his attention to the others.

“Dr. Cortez,” he said, grabbing the woman by the shoulder and turning her away from the grisly remains of her friend. “Angel, you have to listen to me!”

Something of the slack stupor left her face, replaced by a killing fury, and Chase was, for the first time in this whole mess, afraid. The Chinese wanted to kill him but, as far as he knew, there was nothing personal about it. In that moment, Angel Cortez looked as if she would gladly rip his throat out and drink his blood. But the moment passed and she shook her head as if trying to dispel the overwhelming anger.

“Get in the truck,” he told her, pointing at Gavin just as the older man yanked the door shut. “Get that damned artifact out of sight!”

That had to be what the Alliance was after. They sure didn’t know he was here, and there were Arborist ruins all throughout human-occupied space. He wasn’t sure how they’d known about this… thing, this whatever it was, but they did. The warning seemed to penetrate Angel’s fugue, and she nearly picked Victor up bodily and slung him by the duffle bag toward the truck.

Chase waited until the two of them were climbing in the passenger’s side before he grabbed the tailgate and pulled himself up onto the back bumper.

“Go!” he yelled at Gavin. “Drive, now!”

It was exactly at that moment when Chase realized he had screwed up, and his first clue was the knife plunging toward his chest. He hadn’t exactly forgotten the Alliance special ops trooper who Gavin had shot in the arm, but the man hadn’t gone for his gun and seemed to be incapacitated, so Chase had concentrated on getting the others moving rather than finishing him off. That had been a mistake.

The guy’s dominant arm was clearly disabled, hanging limp and covered in blood, but that wasn’t about to stop him from doing his job. Chase could respect that, but he respected the laser-honed edge of the matte black blade even more. He blocked it at the wrist with his right forearm, the bones cracking together hard enough that the blow knocked Chase’s pistol out of his hand and sent it spinning into the bed of the truck.

What he should have done then was turn his wrist and catch the knife hand to gain control of it, and he would have tried just that if Gavin hadn’t chosen that very second to hit the gas and nearly thrown Chase right off the back of the old Dodge. Chase still had a grip on the tailgate, though the truck surging forward threatened to rip his fingertips free and he had to lurch back, losing his balance and tumbling over the side of the gate into the bed.

The world spun around him in a kaleidoscope of black and green and blue, the truck, the trees, the sky, and then he hit on his shoulder and rolled back to his feet with reflexes beaten into him in one combatives class after another. His pistol was in the corner of the bed, and he lunged for it, but that Alliance soldier was one persistent bastard. When the truck had pulled away, the special ops trooper had thrown himself after it, hooking onto the tailgate with his good arm and still holding onto that knife.

Chase caught the motion out of the corner of his eye, still leaning into the corner of the truck when the other man pushed off the tailgate, the knife held over his head. Chase snapped a back kick into the soldier’s solar plexus, and air rushed out of the man in a rattling groan as he doubled over… and the knife came down with him. A twist away from the downward blade was instinctive, but it left Chase off-balance again and landing on his ass across the truck, with the Alliance trooper sprawled on his knees, the point of his knife digging into the scraped and rusted metal of the bed.

His balaclava had been torn away in the fight, demonstrating that despite the supposed inclusion and diversity in the Alliance armed forces, he was, indeed, Chinese and pissed off. And young. Younger than Chase, maybe as young as Victor. Mid-twenties at the oldest, with the fresh determination of a man who’d spent his whole life being assured he was doing the right thing and hadn’t yet lived enough of it to realize he was just doing what he was told.

The young Chinese soldier was getting his feet underneath him, using the point of a knife like an anchor dug into the rusted metal.

Bad for the blade. The thought was clinical, detached, as if he was watching all this unfold from above. Watching his right hand fishing around behind him, his fingers finally closing around the grip of his FN.

The Chinese soldier braced against the tailgate and pushed off, and the knife darted forward just as Chase pulled the trigger.

OceanofPDF.com

17

Chase Weston had seen more dead men than he cared to count, yet he still scrambled out of the way as the Chinese soldier collapsed forward.

The 9mm had left only a small blue, red, and black hole through the man’s forehead, but when he fell, blood spattered upward from a gap the size of a fist in the back of his skull. Chase retreated from an unending pool of deep red as it advanced inexorably, only to be swallowed by a hole rusted through the truck bed, the blood sprinkled beneath the truck as it thumped and bumped over the rocks and roots of the game trail.

Branches and vines whipped at the sides of the truck, flagellating Chase like a medieval pilgrim, chastising him for the killing, but he ignored them. The trail had taken them through a gap in the trees and brush, and Gavin had taken a left turn Chase hadn’t noticed during his struggle with the Chinese soldier, putting a wall of thick brush between them and the camp. The trail ran along the perimeter on the west side of the dig site for a few hundred feet, then curved away from it, which was another reason Chase hadn’t noticed it during the tours of the place Gavin had taken him on.

Did the Chinese know it was there? Had they seen the truck drive away? The trail was overhung by jungle canopy, not obvious from the air, but thermal imaging would show the truck’s engine… if it was pointed in the right direction.

He sat in the back of the truck for five more minutes, crouching, surfing each bone-jarring bump and rattle, and searching the air. They were too far away now for the Alliance to catch them on foot. They’d get back in their gunship and search from the air. And there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do in the truck bed with his pistol against the gunship. He paused, regarding the dead soldier analytically. The body might have a force tracker transponder on it. Best to leave it behind.

Chase stuffed his pistol into its holster and flipped the dead man out of the bed. The body hit with a weird, boneless thrash of arms and legs and a dry puff of dust, one final indignity, and Chase felt guiltier about abusing the dead man than he had from killing him in the first place.

The passenger’s side front window was open, and Chase crawled into the cab through it, but he almost fell off when Gavin jerked the wheel in surprise at his sudden appearance, like he thought Chase was a Chinese commando who’d popped in out of thin air.

“I heard a shot back there,” Gavin said, “but I didn’t want to stop. I thought it might be the Alliance.”

“We had a hitchhiker,” Chase told him, jerking a thumb toward the bed. “I took care of him.” He twisted around in his seat and frowned.

He didn’t like what he saw back there. Victor was curled up in a fetal position, the duffle still slung over his back as if he’d forgotten it was there. The younger man’s arms were wrapped around his knees, and he stared at the stained plastic interior as if he were looking through it to something a thousand yards away.

Angel Cortez wasn’t much better, not curled up but her face slack with shock, fingers digging into the nylon of her hiking pants as if she wanted to rip it away. Chase thought about leaving them to their thoughts, but the situation was too fluid for that. They needed to be alert and ready to move.

“Are either of you hurt?” he asked. Neither of them responded, still staring straight ahead, and he tried again in a sharper, louder voice, enough to get their attention.

“No,” Angel said, still not looking at him.

“M… my stomach hurts,” Victor confessed. “And my chest. From where I fell. I think I hit a root.”

“Any bleeding?” Chase cocked an eyebrow. “Any swelling like you’re bleeding internally?”

Victor’s eyes went wide at the concept that he could be bleeding to death internally and not even realize it, and he quickly pulled up his shirt and checked. He had what was probably going to be a nice bruise on his sternum, but nothing that appeared immediately fatal.

“I’m sorry,” Victor said, smoothing down the front of his shirt. He seemed to finally notice that he was still wearing the duffle and shrugged out of it, then scooted it between him and Angel on the seat. “I’m sorry I tripped.”

“You were scared,” Chase allowed. “We were all scared.”

“It was my fault,” the kid insisted, his look stricken. “It was my fault Dr. Stephenson died.”

“Yeah,” Chase admitted. “It kind of was.”

That sparked Angel back to life, and she squared off at him, hands curling into fists.

“He’s not a Goddamned soldier!” she snapped. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing out here!”

“No, he’s not,” Chase agreed. “And neither are you. But I’m going to need you both to get your shit together and soldier up if you want to live through this.” He jabbed a finger at Victor. “You know what you did wrong, kid? It wasn’t that you fell. You fell and it hurt, and you yelled. Anyone can fall. Anyone can get hurt. What takes discipline is keeping your mind and body under control even when it hurts. Can you do that for me? Can you control yourself, not give in to the pain and fear even when it gets bad?”

Victor’s face was thoughtful, and he didn’t answer immediately, which was good. If he’d shot a yes right back, it would have meant he wasn’t considering the question.

“I think I can,” he said. “I’ll try.”

“Good man.” Chase reached back and clapped him on the shoulder, forcing a tight smile. Not that he felt all that happy about it. The kid didn’t belong here, and he doubted whether Victor would be able to keep his head no matter what he promised.

“What?” Angel asked, lip twisting in a subtle sneer. “No motivational speech for me?”

Chase bit down on the sharp response working its way out of his impatience and tried to remember the woman was no more used to this than Victor, though she was better at hiding it.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Gavin said, raising a hand like he was a school child asking to go to the bathroom, “but where are we going?”

By way of answer, Chase pulled out his radio link and keyed it again.

“Tamar, this is Weston. Do you read?” Static. “Shit.” Chase shook his head. “We’re too far away for their gunship to be jamming us. They must be jamming the Tamar. If she’s even still there.”

Chase squeezed his eyes shut against visions of the ship in a smoking ruin at the landing zone, Priyanka and the others dead inside her. Fear clawed at his chest, fear that he hadn’t felt fighting the Chinese commandos.

“If we stay out here,” he said, forcing himself to think, “they’ll find us. We need to get to town. We need to find a place to lay low.”

“You have any money?” Gavin asked, cocking an eyebrow at him.

“I have a DigCoin account on my phone,” Chase said. “A few thousand.”

“No good with the cartels, I’m afraid. Cash only, and they prefer Alliance Credits, since the Union tends to keep a closer eye on its money.” Gavin shook his head. “It’s too bad. The cartels would hide you for enough cash. Even from the Chinese.”

“You don’t have any money?” Victor asked, a pleading note to his voice. “I mean, we could pay you back… the university could.”

The security officer snorted.

“If I had that kind of money, I’d already be off this planet.”

“Just get us to the city.” Chase sighed, thinking of what Gavin had told him about his son. “We’ll take the truck from there. We’ll figure something out. I don’t want you or your family getting caught in the middle of this.”

Angel’s eyes narrowed, and she stared at Chase in what looked like the beginnings of a rant, but Gavin headed her off.

“No,” he said, raising a finger, then tapping it against his forehead as if trying to get his brain working. “I know someone who might be able to help. My cousin Francis.” Gavin rolled his eyes. “Well, my ex-wife’s cousin, but he owes me a favor. And he knows things. Things he’d probably be better off not knowing.”

“And he won’t ask for money?” Chase wondered, frowning skeptically.

“I never said that,” Gavin corrected, chuckling. “But he might take that DigCoin you talked about. If he’s in a good mood. Though honestly,” he added, his face scrunching up in distaste, “I’ve never known Francis to be in a good mood.”

* * *

Jaipur wasn’t as bad as Victor had thought when he’d seen it from the spaceport.

It was much worse.

The stench assaulted him even with the air conditioner blasting in his face, coming in through the shattered window and the holes in the front windscreen, a combination of human and bovine excrement and the fumes from distilleries turning out alcohol and the generators that ran on it. And something else, something chemical that he couldn’t identify.

“What the hell is that smell?” he asked, trusting that someone else would have been able to separate the worst offender from the mélange of stink. “It’s like walking into my older sister’s nail salon if it was built over an open sewer.”

“It might be the recycling,” Gavin suggested, pointing to a low fence with billows of white smoke coming from behind it. “Precious metals are hard to get here, so many people chip in and pay for cargo ships filled with electronic waste from Earth. Then they use caustic chemicals to separate the precious metal from this and sell it at a huge profit.” He shrugged, turning away from the sheet metal building as they passed it. “Of course, doing that will kill you. But the money is good, and many can’t turn down the chance to have something better. It is very popular with teenagers.”

The sheet metal construction was cheap and popular here, the walls faded and rusted, but yard after yard of it fenced off the courtyards of interconnected buildings at the heart of the city. And peeking out from behind those walls were men and women wearing the colors of a gang. Victor might not know the situation here in Jaipur, but he knew gangs, and the white and red was like a uniform, the only thing they all had in common. That and the guns.

More smoke, an even stronger odor of chemicals.

“Is that… are those recycling shops, too?” he asked, pointing at the wall manned by a short, stocky younger man wearing a denim vest, his arms covered in tattoos.

“No,” Chase said, casting a baleful glare at the place. “That’s a meth lab.”

“Seriously?” Victor blurted, head snapping around to look at the place again as they passed. “They have meth labs here?”

“They’re too easy to hunt down back on Earth. The cops have chemical-sniffing drones running everywhere. They used to make them in plastic bottles in the trunks of cars, but even that gets busted now.”

“Chase is right,” Gavin agreed. “It is made here, then transported across the colonies. It’s the one cash crop that we can sell. And again, people die from the labs every day, from the fumes or sometimes the explosions. And again, it is the younger people who are the first to take the jobs, trying to find a way out.”

They left the sheet metal behind them, and Victor sighed with relief, not just because the chemical smell faded but also because he’d felt as if the cartel gun thugs were staring at them, suspicious of the new faces and the bullet-riddled truck. The smell of shit remained, though, along with the cows.

“Don’t the cartels eat meat?” he asked when Gavin had to swerve to the left to avoid an oncoming Brahmin bull. The animal snorted and tossed its head, the curved sabers of its horns coming perilously close to the side of the truck.

“Some do,” Gavin admitted. “But they’ve come to understand that there are some things people won’t put up with, so they don’t butcher them publicly and they don’t try to force us to butcher them.”

Victor squinted at him, and it had nothing to do with the late afternoon glare shining in his eyes.

“Wait a second,” he said. “You’ll put up with them taking over your city, putting your teenagers to work in meth labs, killing people, extorting your food… but you draw the line at them making you butcher a cow?”

“If you figure out why people get wound up about religion, kid,” Chase commented with a chuckle, “then you can switch to anthropology and win a Nobel prize.”

“You are not a religious man, Sgt. Weston?” Gavin asked, seeming honestly curious rather than just making small talk.

“Not much.” Chase was watching the streets outside, eyes scanning back and forth like he was looking for threats, his pistol held low, below seat level. “My parents were. Which is among the reasons I haven’t been home in twenty years.” He laughed softly, half under his breath. “That and the aggravated assault charge.”

“Who did you assault?” Victor asked, then winced, realizing he’d sounded like a fanboy.

“Nobody important.”

“Everyone’s important to someone,” Angel Cortez said, staring out the left-side window, the words monotone, as if she didn’t want to admit she’d been listening. Chase offered her a tight smile.

“You’re right. He was, as it turned out, very important to the girl I was engaged to… a lot more important than I was, apparently.”

“You beat him up because he stole your girl?” Gavin deduced, and he looked as if he found the prospect amusing.

“No,” Chase said, irritation leaking through his usual cool reserve. “She wasn’t… she’s not a thing that I owned that somebody else could steal. She made a decision.” He shrugged. “It would have been damned nice if she’d told me about the decision instead of having me find out the hard way.”

Angel turned from the window, seeming interested in the conversation for the first time.

“So, how come the aggravated assault?” Victor asked. Chase scowled, looking as if he would rather have done anything else than talk about this.

“Because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I was at a party for high school graduation… out at the lake. Bonfire, bunch of kids, bunch of not-really-legal alcohol, and I was in a bad mood already, but my best friend had dragged me along because he was trying to cheer me up. And this guy just comes up to me. She wasn’t with him, didn’t want to see me because she was still ashamed of getting caught cheating. But this guy, Norm, he was already drunk and he just had to come rub my nose in it.”

“Oh, shit,” Victor said. “I bet that got ugly.”

“He was drunk. And I can be”—Chase’s smile was feral, cruel enough to make Victor shudder—“tactical, let’s say, in provoking people when I want to be. He took the first swing, and that was all I needed. I hope Sandra wasn’t into him for his looks. But his dad knew the county sheriff, and I was told in no uncertain terms that the only way I’d avoid jail was getting out of town permanently. My parents weren’t too happy with me drinking or fighting, so I solved everyone’s problem by catching a ride to Missoula and enlisting in the Army.”

“Ah, we are here!” Gavin said, yanking the wheel to the left abruptly enough that Victor nearly fell out of his seat.

He pulled the truck into an alley between two row houses, not what Victor would have called high-end, but better construction than most of the buildings in Jaipur, solid wood frame with slate-shingled roofs and glass windows. Whoever lived here had money, at least relative to his neighbors. Even the smell wasn’t as bad, less eau de animal shit and more curry and other spices… and smoke. Not cigarette smoke, either, and Victor brightened at the thought of copping a puff or two. Anything to settle his jangling nerves.

“Let me talk to him first,” Gavin insisted, taking his holster off his belt and stowing the gun under the front seat of the truck. “He is not trusting of strangers.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling,” Chase said, slipping his handgun into its shoulder holster before he slid out of the passenger’s seat. “Leave the keys.”

Gavin looked hurt, but did as he was told and dropped them into the center cup holder. Victor twisted around in his seat and watched him through the spider-webbed rear window, moving until he finally found a section clear enough to see through. Gavin looked both ways at the end of the alley and ducked off to the right, moving with the exact amount of grace and agility Victor expected from an overweight fifty-year-old.

“Should we stay in the truck?” Victor asked, looking between Chase and Angel, not sure which one he was asking. He didn’t want to… he felt trapped, besides which, it was hot as hell inside the vehicle with the AC shut off and he hadn’t stopped sweating the whole ride even with it at full blast. His shirt was plastered to the small of his back, and he couldn’t remember ever stinking so badly.

“Yeah,” Chase told him, confirming his fears. Then he looked back. “Dr. Cortez, do me a favor and get behind the wheel in case we have to make a quick exit.”

Angel didn’t argue with him, which seemed like a minor miracle to Victor, just clambered into the front seat and adjusted the driver’s seat to fit her. Victor scooted away from the duffle bag, pushing it across the seat with his foot.

“Dr. Cortez,” he said, “do you think this thing is, like, harmful?”

She cast a sidelong glance back at him, her expression cold enough to dry his sweat.

“It got Dan Stephenson killed. Isn’t that harmful enough?”

Victor didn’t know how to respond and decided silence would be safest. He looked down at the floor, afraid to look away from possible danger and yet more afraid to look at it… and most afraid to close his eyes. When he closed his eyes, he could see Dr. Stephenson’s face, the blank terror behind his eyes when the first bullets had sliced through his chest, and worse, could see those features erased when the next burst had hit. He wondered if he would ever be able to not see it.

Victor jumped when Chase smacked a hand on the side of the truck and waited until Victor and Angel turned before nodding behind them. Gavin was returning, bustling over to them, his gaze flickering back and forth between them and the way he’d come.

“Francis will talk to you,” he said. He pointed a finger at Chase. “Just you. The rest stay here. And no guns. Guns make him nervous.”

Chase looked as if he wanted to debate the issue, but instead, he sighed with resignation and pulled his pistol from its holster, then reversed it and offered it to Angel. She took the weapon and set it on the seat beside her without comment.

“You hear or see anything that sounds wrong,” Chase told her, including Victor with a look, “you get out of here. Don’t wait for me, don’t come looking for me, just go.”

“Where?” Victor asked him. “To the port?”

“No. They’ll be looking for you there.” Chase’s eyes were seeing something far outside the alley, and Victor thought he was worried about the ship’s crew. “Don’t tell me where you’re going,” he finally said.

“Why not?”

“Because if I don’t come back,” the soldier told him grimly, “the best case scenario is, I’m dead. Worst case, they have me. Whatever I know, they’ll know.”

Victor stared at him in disbelief, but Chase shook his head.

“Nobody holds out. Not for long.”

“Oh, good grief,” Gavin said, rolling his eyes. “Come along, for God’s sake. Francis is a little shit, but he’s not that bad.”

OceanofPDF.com

18

Francis might have been a little shit, but at least he had a nice house.

The entrance hall was long and narrow, the floor polished white tile, the wooden wall paneling a little out of date but professionally made and decorated by small, framed paintings of wildlife—tigers, elephants, birds. All native to India, Chase noted.

Lots of homesick people here.

Also in the entrance hall were a pair of broad-chested, shaven-headed men who might have been brothers. They were at least brothers in arms, since each was carrying a sawed-off 12 gauge, and if the barrels weren’t pointed directly at Chase, they were certainly in the neighborhood.

“Put your hands behind your head, please,” one of them instructed, his voice deep and rumbling. At least he said please.

“I thought Francis didn’t like guns,” Chase murmured aside to Gavin as he complied and let one of the men pat him down. The bald bruiser spent several seconds checking his obviously empty shoulder holster but didn’t find the knife sheathed at the small of his back.

“Other people with guns,” Gavin amended.

“This way, please.”

One of the guards led them through the hallway, while the other brought up the rear. A coat rack marked the end of the passage, though God alone knew when exactly anyone would need a coat in this city. From the end of the passage, there was nowhere to go but to the right, into a sitting room, or living room, or whatever they called it here. The furniture was swathed in red felt, which was gaudy, but it wasn’t like he expected leather upholstery, not here.

Sitting on a very comfortable-looking chair at the center of it all, his feet propped up on an ottoman, was a skinny, grey-bearded little man, his clothes as colorful and showy as the furniture, diamond-encrusted rings on each finger. Must be a real bitch to try to eat wearing those.

“I am Francis Modi,” he said with an imperious wave of his sparkling hand. “My cousin tells me you need help.”

“I need a place for me and my friends to lie low,” Chase told him. “Somewhere the Martin cartel won’t be able to find us.”

“You have troubles with the cartel,” Francis asked, cocking an eyebrow at him. “That may be a problem. I have to live here after you’re gone. Betraying the cartel would be bad for business. And my health.”

“No, my problems aren’t with the cartel.” Chase hesitated. If he told the man the truth and Francis had an eye for profit, he could likely get quite the payoff by turning them in. But Gavin nodded to him, encouraging him to trust Francis. “There are strangers in town. Maybe you’ve seen them. Alliance soldiers.”

“Oh, yes,” Francis said, laughing softly, fingers steepled in front of him. He turned and yelled back toward the doorway to the kitchen. “Lata, bring us tea!”

The woman who brought the silver serving tray was attractive, younger than Francis by perhaps ten years, her clothes as opulent as his but more tastefully designed. She smiled as she offered Gavin and Chase steaming China cups. Chase hated tea with a passion, but he also didn’t want to offend their host, so he smiled back and took the cup.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“This is Lata, my wife,” Francis volunteered, taking the last cup for himself and not offering the bodyguards a drink. “Lata, this gentleman who Gavin has brought us needs protection from the Alliance soldiers.”

Lata nodded, her expression grave, and Chase had a sense she was taking the situation more seriously than her husband.

“They came not two weeks ago,” the woman told him, holding the tray in front of her as if it were a shield against the Alliance, “yet they act as if they own the city. They ask no leave of anyone, simply barge into houses and question any family with a man working at the archaeological dig where Gavin works. They even had the temerity to come here and question us about his job.” The corner of her mouth quirked into a half-smile. “We told them we didn’t associate with him since he abandoned Francis’ sister, though that was, of course, untrue.”

Chase didn’t bother to ask which part was untrue.

“Are they working with the cartel, then?”

“Working with?” Francis repeated, then snorted. “If by that, you mean are they paying them handsomely not to interfere with their endeavors, then yes. Martin and his people would take money from Kansa himself. But I may have a solution for you.”

“I told Gavin,” Chase warned him, “that we only have access to a few thousand in DigCoin and maybe we could scrape up a few hundred in physical cash.”

Francis waved it away.

“I don’t want your money. The Chinese are insolent and imperious, and it was they who destroyed our home, for all that the Pakistanis pulled the trigger. We all knew that the Alliance was spurring them on, trying to rob the West of their greatest ally in the region.” Francis might put on the disguise of a wanton hedonist, but Chase saw something bleak behind those dark eyes. “There is a townhouse only a few blocks from here. Everyone thinks it is owned by the cartel because it is in a block of buildings which Martin rents out to visiting business interests… drug dealers, pimps, weapons smugglers, the usual lot.” He took a sip of tea as if to wash the words from his mouth. “But not this one. The same people stay there, though they come and go, and sometimes when they go, it is with one of the independent cargo ships that visit us once in a while. Which is expensive, of course, particularly for someone who is not earning their way through the services of the cartel.” He cocked his head to the side. “I am, by nature, a curious man, since secrets usually equal power, so I had people I trust…”

Lata cleared her throat, and Francis nodded to her.

“We had people we trust spend some time watching this building. The men who come and go are doing their best to pass for the sort of criminals who might rent the buildings, wearing flashy clothes, speaking the language… but they all speak Spanish or Hindi or English with an American accent.” He smirked, as if challenging them to come up with the obvious deduction, and Chase had already reached it.

“CIA,” he murmured, staring at the wall and seeing a memory ten years old. “Goddamned spooks,” he added even softer.

“Is this not good news?” Gavin asked him, eyes wide, shaking his head in befuddlement. “These are your people! They can get you out of here!”

“They might be Americans, but they’re not my people.” Chase tried to keep his face neutral, but his lip curled as if on its own. “I’m not overly fond of the games the Company plays with people’s lives.” He sighed. “But beggars can’t be choosers.”

“I will not take you there,” Francis added, raising his hands palm-up as if turning loose of the situation. “As I say, I still have to live here. But I will give you directions.”

Chase nodded.

“Thanks for your help, Mr. Modi.” He put a hand out, and Francis shook it, the look on his face a bit bemused. Chase turned and offered the same hand to Gavin. “You too. We wouldn’t have made it out of there without you.”

Gavin took the hand, but confusion passed across his face.

“This sounds very much like goodbye, Sgt. Weston. Will I not be accompanying you?”

“I’m grateful you want to, but no. You have family here. You need to think about them, and my advice would be for you to stay here until we’re clear of this place.” He motioned behind them. “I can go get your gun out of the car…”

“Keep it,” Gavin said, cutting him off. “If I truly need another one, I know where to acquire it. But my friend, I fear you will need it much worse than me.”

* * *

“Why don’t we just go in?” Victor asked. “How long are we going to wait out here?”

“Stop complaining,” Angel Cortez admonished him, slumped down behind the wheel of the Dodge, shifting her weight every few seconds to try to alleviate the ache in her back. “At least you can stretch out back there.”

“Yeah, right. Like I want to be back here with this thing any longer than I have to.”

Chase didn’t respond at first, sitting so still in the passenger’s seat that Angel thought he might be asleep with his eyes open. Though how he could be anything remotely near comfortable crouched down below window level of the seat like that, she wasn’t sure. Finally, he turned and eyed Victor, just the slightest hint of impatience tugging the corners of his mouth downward.

“We’re waiting,” he said, “because while I appreciate Gavin’s help, that doesn’t mean I trust his wife’s cousin not to throw us to the wolves for money.” He nodded across the street at the townhouse. “If this is a trap, a setup, then whoever’s behind it is going to get just as impatient as you pretty damn quick and blow their cover. The trick is to be more patient than they are.”

“And what if it’s not a setup?” Angel wondered. “If this Francis was telling the truth, then we’re just wasting time and taking a risk on the cartels or the Chinese finding out we’re here.” She waved around them at the cab of the Ram. “This pickup isn’t exactly unobtrusive, not with all these damned bullet holes in it.”

“Have you looked at the other cars on this block?” Victor asked her. “This might be the best section of Jaipur, but it’s not exactly Haight-Ashbury, either.”

He had a point, she decided, scooting up just slightly and risking a glance around. The houses here might have been nicer than most, but there were still at least three stripped-out cars on the street, one of them burned down to bare metal.

Chase sighed, though whether it was at Victor’s griping or just the general overall misery of sweltering in the pickup in the early evening heat, she couldn’t say.

“It’s been a while. Maybe long enough.” He sat up straight in the chair and opened the door abruptly enough that Angel glanced around to make sure that he hadn’t spotted Alliance soldiers in the street.

There was nothing, not even the intermittent gaggles of young locals she’d noticed parading up and down the street looking important and purposeful. Chase had told her they were couriers, running errands for the Martin cartel, though to her eyes they could have been any teenagers in any city.

“Are we all going?” she asked, getting out but hesitating at the sight of Gavin’s handgun still lying on the floor beneath the driver’s seat. “Do you want us to stay here again?”

“I ain’t staying here,” Victor declared, scrambling out of the back and making a slashing negation with both hands. “I’ve had enough of staying in the truck waiting.”

“We’re all going,” Chase assured them. “And I doubt we’ll be coming back to this truck, so grab everything. The gun, the duffle, everything.”

Angel slid the ancient Browning Hi Power out of the holster and admired it for just a moment, allowing herself to forget what it did and think only of the hand-tooled craftsmanship which had gone into the pistol. She made sure the safety was on before she tucked it into the small of her back and tossed the holster onto the floor of the cab.

As much as she’d hesitated with the 9mm, Victor seemed even more reluctant to take up the duffle again.

“Maybe we should leave it here,” he suggested, a higher, plaintive note rising at the end. “It could be really dangerous. I feel like I’m carrying a bomb around on my back.”

“Bring it, Victor,” she said, brooking no argument. “I can’t say I’m very comfortable handing it over to the CIA, but I know I don’t want the Alliance getting their hands on it.”

The grad student grunted his disapproval, but he pulled the duffle onto his back and followed the two of them across the street toward the townhouses. Low, stucco walls separated the stairs up to the front entrance from the street, not coincidentally shrouding the doorways in shadow which had to be useful for the sort of person who did business here.

Or for spies.

The gun dug into the skin at the small of her back, the metal cold and clammy against her sweat.

You’re just carrying it. You don’t have to use it.

Chase didn’t knock on the door immediately and instead paced up and down the entrance porch, peering at the shuttered windows as if he could see anything of the inside through them.

“Do you want me to knock?” she asked, hands on her hips, head tilted to the side. She wasn’t sure if she was angry with Chase for wasting time or angry at herself for her own lack of patience, so she decided on the safer course and pretended to be mad at Chase.

“I doubt it’s anything but a formality,” he said, nodding toward the windows. “With the alarm system wired into the door and the windows, I’m pretty sure they already know we’re here. But yeah, they might be going through the motions so they can pretend they don’t know we know.”

Chase stood off to the side of the door and banged the dark, polished wood with his knuckles before jerking back his hand. Angel realized that he was worried about someone shooting through the door, and she took a step away from it, then hesitated again as she found herself in line with one of the windows, which seemed an even worse idea.

For a long moment, she thought no one would answer, which would have been disastrous in that this was their only recourse, but might also have been a relief. The door opened a crack, and she nearly jumped at the squeak of poorly maintained hinges. It was as dark inside the townhouse as it was on the porch, and all she could make out was a figure lurking behind the door.

“What do you want?”

The voice was flat, with no anger or fear or annoyance or curiosity, and she could see someone mistaking it for generic American. But it wasn’t. There was an accent behind it, though she couldn’t place it.

“We need help,” Chase said, making no move toward the door. Still worried about getting shot. And I can’t say he’s wrong to be. “We’re all three American citizens.”

“And what do I care where you live?”

Either the man was, indeed, disinterested in their nationality and they’d made a huge mistake coming here, or he was used to dealing with people who needed him more than he needed them and had learned how to make sure they knew it. Angel sighed. Just the sort of political bullshit she’d been worried about.

“Listen, buddy,” she said, putting a palm on the door, “we know who and what you are, and I bet you know the exact same thing about us, so why don’t we stop wasting time and you let us get in off the street before someone else figures out where we are and tells the Chinese.”

Chase glared at her, making a quelling gesture, and she thought he seemed more upset at her mentioning the Chinese than at her butting in to begin with. It had been a risk, she had to admit, but not a bigger one than standing on the porch, waiting for someone to spot them.

The door slammed shut with an abrupt bang that stung Angel’s palm, then she pulled her hand away and shook the sting out, thinking she’d screwed up royally. But behind the thick, solid wood, metal rasped as a chain was unfastened, and when the door reopened, a man stepped halfway through.

He was, Angel had to admit, not at all hard on the eyes. Tall, rangy, with a weathered tan and wavy, brown hair, his handlebar mustache could have looked cheesy yet somehow didn’t. Maybe because of that strong chin. And those eyes… Steel blue, like something she read about in books. They flickered back and forth, taking in the three of them as that mustache sagged downward in a scowl.

Angel shook herself like a dog shedding water and forced her mind back to the situation.

“Who are you?” the blue-eyed man asked, and Angel thought maybe what she’d heard as a foreign accent was actually Cajun. “And what do you think I can do for you?”

He was wearing an unbuttoned long-sleeved shirt over a black T-shirt, and his right hand was hovering near his beltline. She’d watched Chase enough to know this likely meant he was carrying a gun on that side and was ready to draw it if he needed to.

“I’m Dr. Evangeline Cortez,” she told him, reasoning that maybe introducing the armed mercenary first wouldn’t be the best idea. “I’m an archaeologist from the University of California at Berkeley, and I was sent here with my graduate assistant, Mr. Lee here”—she nodded back toward Victor, who waved inanely—“to consult with Dr. Daniel Stephenson on a dig outside Jaipur.”

“That alien shit, right?” The man’s hand drifted away from his side, which she took as a good sign.

“The Arborist ruins,” she confirmed with a nod. “The excavation here is one of the most extensive we’ve discovered so far, and we were making excellent progress until earlier today.”

“Lady, if you want me to help you dig up alien bones…” He shrugged. “Honestly, it’s probably more fun than anything else I’ve done on this planet so far, but it’s not really my area of expertise.”

“Early this afternoon,” Chase cut in, his glower a sign of his fading patience, “an Alliance gunship landed a special operations team at the dig. They murdered Dr. Stephenson and would have killed the rest of us if we hadn’t managed to get to a vehicle.”

“The Chinese, huh?” The tall man stroked his mustache thoughtfully. “Now, what the hell do the Chinese want with an archaeological dig?” He sighed deeply and waved toward the doorway. “Come on in. No reason to talk about this out here. It’s past five and I need a drink.”

“You didn’t tell us your name,” Angel reminded him as he was about to turn.

The man paused and grinned back at her over his shoulder.

“No,” he agreed. “I didn’t.”

OceanofPDF.com

19

“You aren’t any archaeologist,” the spook said, handing Chase a glass.

The label said Jack Daniels and for a wonder, that was exactly what it was. He’d seen enough reused bottles out in the colonies to be surprised. He sipped it slowly, appreciating the smooth bite, and leaned back in the wooden kitchen chair, the handcrafted seat creaking under his weight. Angel had taken a glass, which surprised him, then downed it in one gulp, which had surprised him even more. She hadn’t asked for a refill, just cupped the glass with her hands as if trying to absorb the cold from the ice cubes inside while sitting up straight in her chair at the kitchen table and watching the spook.

Victor had turned down the whiskey and asked for a beer. He was nursing the bottle, not seeming too enthusiastic about it. Chase didn’t blame him. It was a local brand, the bottle fat and awkward and hand-blown by the city’s glassmakers, and Chase had tasted enough colony home-brews to know how iffy they could be. But it was cold, or as cold as the beat-up refrigerator was going to make it, and that counted for something.

“I’m under contract to the university,” Chase replied. “Protective services.”

The spook chuckled around a sip of his whiskey.

“A merc.”

“Private military contractor.”

“Oh, of course.” The mustached man raised a hand in apology. “My bad. Anyone I might have heard of?”

This was a chess game, or at least a drunken frat-boy version of a chess game, and the goal was to be the one to reveal the least, but Chase wasn’t in the mood.

“I’m Chase Weston,” he said with the sort of clipped tone he might have used to report to a new unit, “sergeant, US Army Rangers. For the last few years, I’ve been with Tamar PMC.”

“Ah,” the spook said, saluting Chase with his glass. “I have heard of you, Sgt. Weston. Both you as a Ranger and you with this PMC.”

“Good things, I hope,” Chase said drily.

“Oh, you know.” He grinned around the mustache, seeming to acknowledge that the game was over, and offered Chase a handshake. It was dry and firm, and at least he didn’t try to test their grips. “I’m Sean Haricot.”

“Sean.” Chase nodded.

“Tell me something, though, Weston… your PMC has a ship. It’s right there in the name, the Tamar. Why didn’t you just hop on board and fly away if you had trouble?”

“You must know the Alliance is jamming the landing field. I don’t even know if the Tamar is still there, but I do know that’s the first place they’d look for us.”

“Are you CIA?” Victor blurted, and Chase very deliberately did not roll his eyes.

“I can neither confirm nor deny that I work for the United States government in any capacity,” Haricot told him with the look of the cat who’d just swallowed the last little bit of canary. “But you’re here, so tell me, what the hell do the Chinese want with an archaeological dig? I mean, everything I’ve ever read about the Arborist excavations says that they’re useless. Any tech that’s been found there is worthless, so rusted and corroded we couldn’t get it to power up even if we knew how it worked.” He shook his head. “As far as I know, no one even knows how to speak their language.”

“No one knew,” Angel corrected him. Chase wanted to shush her but kept his face neutral. This Haricot was sharp, for all that he was kind of a douchebag. He’d spot the change in Chase’s expression.

“Tell me more,” Haricot encouraged, one of his perfectly trimmed eyebrows shooting upward.

“There are engravings in a chamber at the dig,” Angel told him. She fell into a didactic tone that Chase imagined she used with her students. “Their civilization was collapsing due to internal strife, factional wars, and they knew it. They wanted to leave a marker for any other beings who might find the place, to let them know what had happened.”

“How fucking considerate,” Haricot murmured, leaning forward in his chair, the drink nearly forgotten in his hand. “So, they just died off?”

“The ones who could make it back to their planet probably died in the war. The ones who stayed…” She shrugged. “It’s been at least ten thousand years. If they survived for a while, they died off in the long run.”

“Why’d they die off when we didn’t? Bad luck?”

“You mean we haven’t yet,” she said. She seemed to be enjoying this, despite the situation. “They had the same problem we do. They had the S-T drive dumped in their laps way before their society was ready for it. They had factionalism, nation-states fighting each other, and suddenly, anyone could throw asteroids at their world and destroy a city with a rock the size of a building.”

“We do, too.” Haricot shrugged. “That’s why we have the Colonial Authority now, to control threats from space. Even the Alliance and the Union can work together enough for that.”

“The Arborists couldn’t. Maybe that’s the message they were trying to leave us.” She held her glass out to the man. “Would you mind refilling this, Mr. Haricot?”

“Sean,” he insisted, smiling as he took the glass and tipped the bottle and topped up her glass. “But tell me, Dr. Cortez…” He handed it off to her.

“Angel,” she said, taking the glass, perhaps lingering on it a bit longer than she had to.

“Angel. Tell me, are you sure that there wasn’t anything at that dig that the Alliance might have found strategically significant?”

“I’m certain there was,” she said, taking a long sip, and Chase nearly chewed off his own tongue trying not to yell at her. “The Alliance may be greedy and opportunistic and lacking in anything I might characterize as ethics, but they’re neither wasteful nor stupid. You should know that. They wouldn’t send their best troops all the way out here unless they thought there was something important.” She shrugged. “I just don’t know what it might be.”

Chase disguised his relieved sigh behind a drink.

“After all,” Angel went on, “I’m an archaeologist, not a military intelligence officer. I see these finds for their historical significance, not how they might be weaponized.”

“Sure, sure, I get that.” Haricot had a smile plastered beneath that mustache, and Chase couldn’t tell if the man was flirting or still trying to pump them for information. Or both. “But you said they were at war. Did they talk about any weapons systems in those records? Anything you haven’t heard of before? Maybe some unique application of the drive, or some way to shut the drive down from a distance?”

“Sean,” she laughed, “it was engravings on gold foil, not a quantum data core. We could barely figure out the language from the clues given by context.”

Chase wanted to laugh. Angel was better at this than he’d thought.

“Damned lucky thing you guys got away then, huh?” Haricot’s smile was just a bit too artificial for that question, and the insinuation was clear.

“There was nothing lucky about it for Dr. Stephenson,” Angel told him, her affected flirting disappearing in a chill frost. “They gunned him down in front of us. If Sgt. Weston hadn’t seen the gunship approaching and come to warn us, we all would have been dead.” She set her glass down and reached out to put her hand atop Haricot’s. The spook was good at controlling his face, but Chase could tell the man was surprised. “Please, Sean, can you help us?”

Haricot sighed and shook his head, patting her hand.

“I can’t make any promises,” he said, “but I have some people I can talk to. I might be able to get you guys off the planet, get you at least back to a Colonial Authority system. It won’t be luxury accommodations, if I can get it at all, and you’ll have to pay for it. But it’s better than staying here.”

“We’d appreciate anything you can do for us,” Chase assured him.

Haricot pushed himself out of his chair and left his glass on the table. “You’re probably tired. There are a couple spare rooms upstairs. Let me show you to them, and then I’ll have to head out.”

“Tonight?” Angel asked, clearly surprised.

“Something like this,” Haricot told her, the corner of his mouth turning up in a humorless smile, “you have to move fast. The Chinese don’t screw around. They’ll turn this whole damned city upside down if they think you have something they want. And as charming as I may find you, Angel, trust me when I tell you that I don’t want to have to choose between hiding you or having a Chinese special ops trooper putting a bullet in my head.”

* * *

Victor Lee, Chase had discovered to his chagrin, snored like a freight train.

He tried to sleep anyway, to at least rest his eyes and his brain if he couldn’t actually fall asleep, but the irregular, arrhythmic timbre of the snorting and grunting made even that impossible. Finally, after a heroic two-hour effort, Chase surrendered to the inevitable and rolled out of the bed, then slid his boots on and grabbed his shoulder holster before he headed out the door.

The rooms weren’t bad, he had to admit. Air conditioning went a long way, but the sheets were smooth, high thread count, the pillows were soft, and the box springs weren’t broken and squeaking, all of which made the accommodations worlds better than anything he’d become used to in the last five years.

Chase glanced back at the duffle bag on the floor beside Victor’s bed, wondering if he should take it with him. It was probably the reason behind all this, but if he was being honest with himself, he was scared shitless to touch the thing and was glad Victor hadn’t simply refused to carry it anymore. Chase shut the door slowly and carefully, not wanting to wake Victor up. The younger man had talked his ear off for nearly an hour before drifting off to sleep, and Chase didn’t want a follow-up conversation.

Monologue is more like it. I didn’t get a word in edgewise.

“You can’t sleep either?”

Chase spun at the words, his hand already on the grip of his FN 9mm before he realized the voice belonged to Angel Cortez. She leaned against the wall in the small sitting room between the bedrooms, arms crossed, watching in the darkness. The only light came from a candle flickering in a holder mounted to the wall, more decorative than practical, and as much as it revealed the archaeologist’s face, it also concealed in shadow.

Chase decided to be completely honest with himself for just one second and admitted that Angel was, on top of being intelligent, daring, and competent, a very beautiful woman.

Careful, Weston. You’ve gone down that road before, and you’re damned lucky you and Pri are still friends.

“No,” he agreed, “but I have your graduate assistant and his incipient sleep apnea to blame. What’s your excuse?”

“Every time I close my eyes,” she told him, not sharing his good humor, not meeting his gaze, “I see Dan Stephenson die. I’ve known him since I was an undergrad. I know his son. I’m going to have to tell Kyle that his father’s dead.”

Chase nodded and fell into one of the cushioned chairs arranged around a coffee table. He dearly wished there’d been some actual coffee on the table and debated for a moment heading downstairs to Haricot’s kitchen to see if he could make some, but he didn’t know if he’d be comfortable digging through someone else’s cabinets, even a CIA spook.

“Been there, done that,” he said. “It’s a shitty job. But in a way, there’s some closure to it. Telling them helps you to accept it better yourself.”

“And have you accepted it?”

Chase couldn’t see her eyes, the hollows buried in darkness as if there were nothing inside but the empty cavities of a skull.

“No,” he admitted. “I still see their faces every time I try to sleep.”

And now. The life slipped away from Lucia Perez’s eyes yet again, an endless loop in his memory. Chase shuddered, hoping the shadows would hide it.

“I wonder when Mr. Haricot will return,” Angel said, the abrupt change of subject jarring.

Maybe I’ve reached the maximum capacity of what she’s willing to share.

“You mean Sean?” he asked, trying not to tease but unable to help himself. She didn’t rise to the bait, and Chase shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry just yet. This kind of thing, you can’t rush it. Some people get scared if you rush them. Plus, I’m sure he’s doing his best not to get spotted by the Alliance. Honest to God, I’m just glad we have a place to sit the whole thing out.”

“Aren’t you worried about Captain Ambedkar and the ship?”

“Pri can take care of herself.” And he could say that all he wanted, but he knew he’d never believe it. “She’s got the ship and a bunch of heavy weapons, and if the Chinese tried anything with her, I wouldn’t bet on the Alliance. She’s probably more worried about me. After all, it’s just me and a couple magazines of 9mm against a bunch of special operations troops.”

“Oh, it’s just you, is it?” she asked, an edge to her voice as if daring him to agree.

“No slight intended,” Chase assured her. “You two have more than pulled your weight. And I’m going to get you both home, I promise it.”

Angel didn’t seem convinced, but any counter-argument she might have made was interrupted by an insistent pounding on the door downstairs. Angel and Chase exchanged a look and he pulled the FN out of its holster, holding it in front of him as he headed for the steps. The stairwell was narrow and dark, and if Angel got a bit too close to him on the way down, he wasn’t about to shove her away.

The bottom of the stairs was bathed in light from the kitchen, left on by Haricot when he’d gone, and Chase found the switch, then shut it off and waited a moment for his eyes to adjust before he moved to the door. A few stray threads of moonlight squirmed through gaps in the shades over the windows, enough that Chase could see Angel staring at the wood grain of the door as if she expected a video doorbell display to pop up.

“Do you think it’s him?” she whispered, far too loud.

“He wouldn’t be knocking on his own door,” Chase reminded her.

As if on cue, the knocking came again, harder and more desperate. Chase envisioned a Chinese officer behind the door, backed up by a squad of special operations troops, just waiting for someone dumb enough to open for them. He was about to tell Angel to get upstairs and retrieve her gun when a muffled voice from the other side of the door interrupted.

“It’s me! Open up!”

“Gavin?” Angel blurted, and Chase shot her a quelling look, but it was too late.

“Yes, Dr. Cortez, it’s me! Please hurry and open up before someone sees me out here!”

Chase held up a hand to stop her before she threw the bolt, taking a few seconds to peek through the window shades. The figure on the porch was shrouded in blackness, but it also seemed to be alone. Chase stayed off to the side of the door, back up against the wall, pistol held at the ready, and mimed for Angel to open it quickly.

The woman nodded and braced herself before unbolting the lock and yanking the door open. Gavin Patel had been leaning on the door and nearly stumbled headfirst into the house when its support abruptly vanished. Chase grabbed the older man by the shoulder and pushed him inside, then ducked out to check the porch. Nothing. Not a movement, not a sound except the chirping of some night insect. He pulled the door shut and secured the bolt before turning back to Gavin.

He had changed clothes since they’d left him with Francis earlier in the day, dropping the jungle wear and the vaguely uniform shirt for something close to the street clothes of the average resident of Jaipur, though all in black. He’d also presumably bathed since he didn’t smell like blood and sweat.

And I would have, too, if I had any clothes to change into.

“What are you doing here?” Chase demanded. “I could have sworn I told you to stay out of this and keep your family safe. You’re going to get yourself killed sneaking around here.”

“I had to,” Gavin said, nearly gasping, out of breath either from running here or from the fright at being pulled into the house. “It’s my fault! I brought you to Francis!”

“What’s your fault?” Angel asked him. “Did he sell us out?”

“No, no!” Gavin insisted, waving his hands like he was trying to scare away a swarm of bees. “Francis wouldn’t do that… if for no other reason than it would kill his reputation, and reputation is everything in his business. But he could only tell you what he knew… and after you left, I pressed him to find out more.” Gavin shrugged. “I’m family, sort of. He sent out the word and called in favors, but I didn’t get all of it until about ten minutes ago and I ran straight here.”

“What did he find out?” The hair was standing up on the back of his neck, a premonition he wouldn’t like what Gavin had to say.

“First off, he asked about our friends. It took a while because no one wanted to be the one to tell the secrets of the Alliance, not with them kicking in doors and strong-arming people across the town, but finally, he slipped a few Dig-Coins to the right person and got the story. A Chinese gunship—another Chinese gunship, not the one that chased us—came after the Tamar at the spaceport right about the same time as the attack on the dig site. The ship managed to take off and get away, and the Alliance ship followed her into orbit, and that was the last anyone saw of her.”

“Shit,” Chase hissed, fingers tightening involuntarily around the grip of his pistol. He forced his hand to relax and shoved the gun back into its holster. “No wonder they couldn’t answer my call. I thought the Alliance was jamming, but they were already out of range.”

“Yes, most likely,” Gavin agreed, nodding rapidly as if to hurry the conversation along to the next subject. “But that’s not the most important part. He also pressed his sources about the man who lives here, Mr. Haricot.”

As concerned as Chase was about Pri and the Tamar, the mention of the spook shifted his gears, and he grabbed Gavin by the sleeve of his silk kurta to pull him a step closer.

“What about Haricot?”

“He’s not CIA,” Gavin said, cringing away as if he thought Chase might strike him. “Or, at least, if he is CIA, he works for someone else as well.”

“The Alliance?” Angel asked, her eyes going wide.

“No, no.” Gavin shook his head vigorously. “Definitely not the Alliance. They pay with threats, not money. And everyone says this Haricot is very interested in money.”

“Damn it, Patel,” Chase said, beginning to lose patience with the man, “this isn’t a gender reveal party. Tell us what you came to tell us!”

“Hart-Klein! The man works for Hart-Klein Consolidated! At least, that is what Francis’ sources say.”

Chase let loose of Gavin and stepped back, a dark cloud descending over his thoughts.

“Hart-Klein,” he murmured.

“What the hell is going on down here?”

Chase didn’t start at the exclamation because he recognized Victor Lee’s voice and had expected the younger man to wake up at some point. The kid’s hair was standing up on one side, and there was a red print of the pillowcase across his face, which only contributed to the annoyed expression he wore. He stopped partway down the stairs and gaped at their guest.

“Gavin?”

“Hello, Mr. Lee,” Gavin said, waving.

“Hold on a second,” Angel interjected, raising a hand to bring the conversation back to the point. “Who or what is Hart-Klein Consolidated?”

Chase frowned at her, not sure whether she was putting him on.

“Seriously? You don’t know who Hart-Klein is?”

“If I knew,” she retorted, a dangerous edge to her tone, “I wouldn’t have to ask.”

“What does HKC have to do with anything?” Victor asked, rubbing at his face as he descended the rest of the way down to the living room.

“Gavin came here to tell us that our host, Mr. Haricot, isn’t with the CIA, he’s with Hart-Klein,” Chase explained.

“Someone,” Angel ground out, her shoulders taking a combative set, “had better start telling me what the hell all this means.”

Chase sighed, leaning against the wall beside the door, feeling suddenly tired.

“Hart-Klein is one of the mega-corps. You’ve heard about those, right?”

“Of course,” she said, clucking her tongue as if he was insulting her by asking the question. “Soong-Tierney, Sinopec/CNP, Applozon-Walton.”

“Well, Hart-Klein came after all those,” Chase said. “They bought a license from Soong-Tierney for the drive back before somebody—whoever it was, a lot of people think it was the Chinese government or Sinopec/CNP who did it—leaked the specs to the darknet. S-T wasn’t inclined to give the license fee back despite that, and HKC has spent the last twenty years trying to get even. Every single cutting-edge tech scheme that’s come around, HKC has had a hand in it. I remember reading about someone trying to use S-T freighters in a daisy chain trying to haul one of Jupiter’s moons closer in to the sun to make a second habitable planet in the Solar System, and HKC was all up in that shit.” He snorted a laugh. “Nothing came of it, maybe because it wouldn’t work or maybe because the Colonial Authority told them that any alterations to the Solar System would have to be voted on, and that it would belong to the nations of Earth, not any particular mega-corp.”

“Moving a moon?” Victor repeated, eyes wide.

“Since then, they’ve had their fingers in every pie, and if you haven’t heard of them, Dr. Cortez, that’s because they don’t want people to hear about them. I’ve done a lot of jobs these last few years on just about every independent, non-aligned colony and every single one of them, I eventually found out I was working either for or against people paid by HKC. They have their own army of PMCs, their own fleet of gunships, and they have spies in every government, including the Alliance. Like Gavin said, it’s possible this guy Haricot is with the CIA, and on Hart-Klein’s payroll, too.”

“But which one is he working for when it comes to us?” Angel asked.

“I can’t tell you for sure.” Chase shook his head. “All I know is, if Hart-Klein finds out about that artifact, they’ll kill to get their hands on it. And they’ll kill all of us just to keep it quiet.”

“Umm… Sgt. Weston,” Gavin said, looking through a gap in the shades, his face going pale. “I think you’re about to find out who Mr. Haricot is working for. I believe that’s him coming up the steps. And he’s not alone.”

OceanofPDF.com

20

“But… but… but…” Gavin Patel dithered as Chase pushed him up the stairs to the bedrooms. “Shouldn’t I go? Maybe out the back door?”

“No time,” Chase insisted. “Victor, get that damned duffle bag and bring it out here now!”

Victor and Angel had already moved past Chase and Gavin on the stairs, and the younger man nodded and sprinted into the bedroom.

“Why am I going to the bathroom?” Gavin protested as Chase pulled the door to the washroom open.

“You’re going to stay in here with the lights off and the door closed,” Chase told him, listening for the front door. It had already been too long… Haricot should have already been inside, and the fact that he wasn’t probably meant he was giving the men with him a last-second briefing.

Victor rushed out of the bedroom, arms full of the duffle, and shoved it off to Chase like it was diseased. Chase received it in the same spirit as it had been bestowed and dumped the hot potato into Gavin Patel’s arms.

“Don’t screw with this,” he warned the older man. “Just hang onto it, and no matter what, don’t hand it over to anyone but us.”

“But they’ll be armed,” Gavin insisted. “And I gave you my gun…”

“Take this.” Chase fished the thing out of the thigh pocket of his utility trousers and pushed it into Gavin’s outstretched hand. It was black and metallic, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, but with a pin attached to a ring at the center of it. “It’s a concussion grenade… a flash-bang, we call it. You pull the pin and toss it into the middle of the bad guys, then close your eyes and cover your ears.”

Gavin was about to ask another question, but the door opened downstairs and Chase pushed the bathroom door shut in the older man’s face. Angel dragged Victor into the bedroom, and Chase pushed from the other side, then switched on a light and motioned for the other two to sit down on the bed while he fell into a folding chair tucked against the wall.

“Act natural,” he urged quietly. “Don’t give it away that we know he’s with HKC, and don’t act afraid. Dr. Cortez, keep flirting with him, and Vic, you keep treating him like he’s some kind of superspy.”

“I was not flirting with him,” Angel spluttered.

“Of course you were, and it was working beautifully. Keep it up and keep him off his game. If he thinks we’re just scared, clueless puppies, he won’t be expecting any kind of resistance. By the way, where’s the gun?”

She moved the tail of her untucked shirt and showed the Hi Power shoved into her beltline. Chase raised an eyebrow.

“Not a big fan of Mexican carry,” he admitted.

“Of what?” she demanded, half-raising up from her chair.

“It means carrying without a holster,” he said, holding up a hand. “It’s from the vaqueros in the 1800s. It’s not a slur or anything.”

“Dr. Cortez?” Sean Haricot’s voice carried up the stairs, traveling upward along with the faint squeaks of weight pressing on the steps. “Sgt. Weston?”

“We’re up here,” Chase called, trying to sound innocent.

There was something different about Haricot. It took Chase a moment to put a word to it, but the man looked less purposefully good-natured than before, less hail-fellow-well-met and more the predator Chase suspected him to be. The four men with him only reinforced the predator image, a wolf pack following their alpha. They were cut from the same cloth, even dressed alike, dark clothing, practical yet also fashionable in a threatening sort of way. The oversized shirts were perfect for hiding weapons, and Chase could already spot the bulges of poorly concealed pistols.

“These are my colleagues,” Haricot introduced, his smile thin and tight-lipped. “I’ve communicated with my superiors, and they’ve instructed me to raise armed troops and retake control of the dig site.”

“They have?” Angel asked, giving a good impression of both surprise and relief, the only tell he noticed the way she kept her right hand tight to her side to block the gun she had tucked into her waistband. “That’s great news!” She glanced at the four men with him. “But you’ll need more than this, won’t you? There were at least twenty or thirty of them.”

“This is just a start.” Haricot patted one of the men on the arm. The big man grinned through a dark beard, baring yellow teeth. “But to move on, I’m afraid I’m going to need something from you.”

“Yeah?” Chase asked, leaning forward in his chair, putting his weight onto his feet. “And what’s that?”

Haricot’s half-smile was as cold as an Arctic winter.

“I’m going to need you to turn over what you took from the dig in that duffle.”

The cold of Haricot’s smile seeped through the air and settled into Chase’s gut. He knew. It was enough to shake him and it certainly shook Angel and Victor… and they weren’t as good at hiding it. Angel shifted in her seat, eyes darting toward Chase, then out to the hallway. Victor tried to keep his gaze straight down but couldn’t keep from staring out toward the bathroom.

“There’s nothing in the duffle but some supplies,” Chase said, trying to keep his tone mild. “The Alliance landed with a whole platoon. We didn’t have time to do anything but run.”

“Then you won’t mind showing me that duffle, will you?”

Haricot didn’t move, but the others did. Just a couple steps, but it was enough to put them within arm’s length of the three of them. Chase wondered why Haricot hadn’t had them searched for weapons already, but he sensed that was coming. Maybe it would be better to just accelerate things.

“Sure,” he said, rising from his seat. Two of the big men tensed as if they expected him to go after Haricot, and Chase put his hands up, palms out. “We just tossed it into the bathroom,” he explained, moving away from Haricot, toward the door. “I’ll get it for you…”

“No, that’s all right, Sgt. Weston,” Haricot told him. “You stay right here. I’ll go retrieve it for you.”

Chase’s stomach churned, but he kept his actions slow and unthreatening.

“Yeah, okay, Mr. Haricot,” he said, projecting his voice as if he were on a parade field back at Ft. Benning. “But that duffle bag is just sitting there in the bathroom, and all you’re going to find in it is some spare underwear and socks.”

Haricot cast a doubtful glare at Chase but went to the bathroom, having no reason at all to imagine there was anything in it except the duffle bag. He kept staring at Chase as he pushed the door open, as if he expected the man to try something, which was why he didn’t notice the stun grenade spinning across the floor, skidding to a stop near the open door to the bedroom.

Chase didn’t dare yell for fear of distracting the guards, so he grabbed Angel and held her head tight against him, covering his ears and blocking hers with his bicep and chest. He could only hope Victor would be smart enough to do the same, because he didn’t have time to warn him. He barely had time to open his mouth before the flash-bang went off.

Even with his eyes squeezed shut and the heels of his hands pressed against his ears, the light was sun-bright, and the sound was like being trapped in a barrel while someone hit it with a sledgehammer.

If it’s this bad for me, it’s purely going to suck for these guys.

When he opened his eyes, there were a few spots across his vision, but not enough to block out the image of the four armed toughs staggering blindly, eyes and mouths open. One of them tried to pull out his gun, and Chase slammed a forearm across the side of the big man’s neck. If he’d hit hard enough, the strike could have been fatal, but Chase held back, not quite knowing why. These guys would have killed him in a heartbeat if the situation was reversed.

“Victor!” Angel cried, grabbing the grad student by the arm.

The kid had not adequately covered his ears, and he was on the floor, clutching at them, his mouth open like he was yawning, shaking his head. Angel pulled him to his feet, and Chase was about to try to help when another of the thugs stumbled into the way, arms waving, not seeing or hearing them but knowing they were there and knowing his job was to not let them get away. Chase spun on his heel and swept his leg across the back of the blinded man’s calf, sending him crashing to the ground.

Then they were out the door, and Chase thought they were home free. But Sean Haricot was smarter than his hired muscle. He’d thrown himself down and to the side a second before the grenade had detonated, and now he was scrambling to his feet, his eyes all too focused and a SIG 9mm jumping into his right hand as if by magic. Chase made a grab for his pistol, knowing he would be too late, but Gavin Patel came to the rescue again. He swung the duffle bag like the galaxy’s biggest weighted sap and caught Haricot right across the chest, then he knocked the man’s gun down the hallway and threw Haricot backward over the railing.

It was not, unfortunately, a long drop, since they were only on the second floor and there was a landing halfway down, but the impact sounded painful.

“Come on!” Chase urged, pulling Gavin along with them down the stairs and retrieving his gun just in case Haricot was already back on his feet.

He was not. The fall hadn’t killed Haricot, but he was lying on his back, gasping for breath like a freshly landed fish, and Chase figured he had gotten the wind knocked out of him. Again, the temptation was there to put a bullet in the Hart-Klein mercenary and not worry about him anymore, but again, he restrained himself… and finally, he was honest enough to admit why. He knew Angel wouldn’t like it.

Which was ridiculous, of course. The woman was not a fan of him or his profession and seemed to blame him for all their troubles since Gateway. But denying the genie wouldn’t put it back in the bottle.

“Do you still have the keys to the truck?” Chase asked Angel as they passed by the helpless Haricot.

“Now’s a hell of a time to ask,” she snapped. “Of course, I do.”

“Francis’s place isn’t far,” Gavin offered. “I am sure he would find you shelter since his poor information caused all this.”

Chase was about to point out how little reason they had to trust his ex-wife’s cousin, but gunshots interrupted him. Splinters spun away from the wall paneling at the impacts of bullets only inches from their heads, and Chase pushed the others backward, firing back before he even had a clear target.

What had happened was obvious. Haricot might not have been CIA, but neither was he a fool. He’d left someone guarding the door and when that man had heard the flash-bang, he’d rushed in looking for someone to shoot and been lucky enough to find the right people. It was dark at the bottom of the stairs, but the faint light from the second floor showed a skinny, tattooed man with a shaved head, hands filled with what looked like some kind of AR15 pistol with a suppressor. Unlike what most people believed from movies, suppressors didn’t silence firearms, and it certainly hadn’t silenced this fire-breathing dragon. But the can did keep the sound down to something that wouldn’t blast your eardrums indoors, which was quite considerate of the gunman.

Chase’s return fire went high and smacked into the wall above the bald man, forcing him to duck back out of the doorway before the FN ran dry, locking back on an empty magazine.

And that was it. Chase cursed, but the obscenity was cut off by another blast of semiautomatic fire from outside that punched into the plaster of the stairwell in a spray of dust.

“Give me the gun!” Chase yelled to Angel, but she already had the weapon out and was spraying a long burst at the doorway one-handed.

He doubted she was going to hit anything, particularly since the windows seemed to be bulletproof and she probably didn’t want to, but she kept the man’s head down long enough for them to make it off the stairs and duck back toward the kitchen.

“The back door!” Chase said, holding the FN out in front of him like a totem, despite the fact that he was out of ammo.

It was locked. He’d expected that. When he slammed his boot into the lock, he also expected it to be reinforced, thought he was going to look damned silly when he bounced off it, but he was, for once, pleasantly surprised. The lock didn’t break, but the doorjamb did. Wood splintered, and the door swung backward with a pained creak.

Steps led down to the rear courtyard, which was shared with the rowhouse next door, manicured grass and a koi pond completing the upscale, urban look of the place. It was enclosed by a fence without any obvious door, which might have been why the back entrance hadn’t been reinforced. Chase looked around, for a gate, for a window, for anything. What he found was a rain barrel, plastic and blue and very, very handy.

He kicked it over, spilling about a foot of water out onto the grass, then hauled it upside down and pushed it against the six-foot, wood-slat fence.

“Get over!” he urged, taking the duffle bag out of Gavin’s arms before helping him up onto the barrel.

“I’m going to break my neck,” Gavin complained, heaving himself over the top nonetheless. He landed on the other side with a yelp loud enough to prove he hadn’t broken his neck, though Chase wouldn’t have taken long odds on the health of the older man’s knees or ankles.

“You next,” Chase told Angel, pulling Victor away from her. The grad student seemed to be recovering from the flash-bang, which was good and bad—good, because they needed him to take care of himself if they were going to get away, bad because if he was already getting over it, the gunmen they’d left behind would be as well.

Angel hopped up onto the barrel but threw herself over the top of the wall with such grace and strength that Chase would have bet she didn’t even need the boost.

“Get up,” Chase said close to Victor’s ear. “I’ll help you.”

Whether he heard the words or not, Victor went along as Chase pushed him onto the barrel, then boosted his foot up with a hand until he swung over the fence. Chase shot a last look at the back door before he leapt up and grabbed the top of the wall. Something was moving inside, a shadow cast long by the interior lights, and Chase swung over the fence just as another hail of gunshots blasted out from the back door.

The drop was farther than he’d imagined, the six-foot fence built into a three-foot tall dirt mound on the other side, and he had to transition into the parachute landing fall he’d learned at Airborne School over fifteen years ago. Balls of the feet, side of the calf, side of the thigh, hip and side of the back, the five points of contact to spread the impact out, and he still let out an involuntary grunt of dull pain when his back hit the rough, gravel road.

The others apparently had not attended Airborne School or done any sort of parachute training because they were still sprawled out, trying to pick themselves off the ground while Chase was already up on his feet. Victor was closest, and Chase pulled him to his feet and pressed the duffle bag into his hands.

“Not again,” the kid moaned, but he slung the bag across his back and staggered after Chase as the soldier helped Angel and Gavin up.

“Quick, up, let’s go!” Chase urged them, though he still didn’t have a clear idea of which way they were going to run.

The street behind the back fence of the rowhouse was down an embankment from the residential area, bordering on an open field someone had been using as a garbage dump and sporadically setting a fire to clear it. A few open flames flickered here and there on the half-acre lot, giving just enough light for Chase to see the gunman’s arm coming over the fence to boost himself up.

Shit. So much for trying to circle around to the truck.

“Through the garbage dump,” he hissed at the others, not wanting to announce their position to the guy with the gun.

“No!” Gavin said, just a bit too loud, hanging back as if the smell from the dump were driving him away. “There’s nothing that way but jungle! We can’t go out there at this time of night. We may as well let them shoot us!”

As if some ill-tempered gods were listening to him, a string of shots rang out, more than one weapon, and Chase grabbed at Angel and Victor, pulling them to the ground. Gavin was just out of his reach and lacked the instincts of a soldier, instead going with the training of a police officer, looking for the source of the shots instead of hitting the dirt. A second shooter had joined Baldy on the fence and was firing a handgun over the top, adding to the rapid, semiauto burst from the AR pistol.

Chase was about to yell at the older man to get down, but the words died in his throat, ripped away from him by the slugs slicing through Gavin’s chest. They exited his back on sprays of red and took Chase’s breath with them, as if he had been the one shot. Gavin stumbled, and Chase rose up in a crouch and caught him, then threw the wounded man over his shoulder and took off in a heavy, plodding run. Angel and Victor joined him without any further urging and picked their way through the trash.

Chase’s feet sank into something wet and foul-smelling, but he ignored it, concentrating on staying upright. More wetness plastered his shoulder, blood from Gavin’s wounds leaking out, taking his life with it.

He’s going to die, a voice whispered into his ear. Leave him behind. He’ll just slow you down.

Rangers don’t leave people behind.

That’s not what you said on Munin. You left your whole team behind, left them to rot on a piece of shit world with no one to bury them. You didn’t even bring their bodies back to their families.

He couldn’t answer the voice this time, nor could he answer the distant gunshots. And if one of them hit him, perhaps it was no worse than he deserved.

OceanofPDF.com

21

Angel Cortez couldn’t see Gavin’s eyes, could barely make out his body except where Chase’s flashlight played over it. The jungle was black, featureless but for the edges of broad leaves flashing green in the glare from the small tactical light, the clouds of mosquitoes following the track of the beam.

“He saved our lives,” she said softly, the words breaking in the middle along with her voice, wracked with a sob.

“Twice,” Chase agreed. His shirt was stained with blood on the shoulder that ran down all the way to below his ribs before it stopped. She shuddered as she realized the significance of the end of the stain, that it marked the moment Gavin’s heart had stopped pumping. “Once with the Alliance and now again. And we got him killed.”

The soldier sounded defeated, and somehow that shocked her more than the death of Gavin. After Dan Stephenson, death here wasn’t a shock. But Chase Weston had seemed like he was made of chromium steel, a stone killer unaffected by the bullets flying around them. Not anymore. But they still needed him to be a soldier.

“Those men killed him,” she reminded Chase. “Haricot and the others, the Hart-Klein mercenaries. No one forced Gavin to come down and warn us. He did it because it was the right thing.”

“We’re gonna be just as dead as him,” Victor moaned, holding his head. The bugs were swarming him, but he seemed oblivious to them, wrapped up in his own misery.

“Shut up, Victor,” she snapped. “That isn’t helping.”

“And what the hell is going to help?” he shot back, rounding on her, taking her back a step. She wasn’t used to him talking back. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Doc, but we are in a jungle filled with tigers and snakes and leopards! And that’s not even counting the corporate mercenaries and Chinese fucking ninjas!”

“Ninjas are Japanese,” she murmured, the correction as natural as breathing.

“I don’t fucking care!” he bellowed, seemingly unconcerned about attracting attention from either the aforementioned people or animals. “I want to be an archaeologist! No one said anything about all this bullshit!”

“Victor.” Chase Weston’s voice was low and calm yet somehow still commanding, not something either of them could ignore. The younger man looked over at him, blinking at the beam from the flashlight. Chase adjusted the angle so Victor could see his face… and Angel could as well. “You need to get ahold of your shit.”

Victor was panting, covered in sweat, and Angel thought he was a few seconds from hyperventilating, but at Chase’s words, the younger man sucked in a deep breath and shuddered as he exhaled it. He waved at some of the bugs flying around his head as if just noticing them. He wasn’t ranting anymore, but he wasn’t apologizing, either.

“Do you know where we are?” Angel asked Chase.

In response, he switched off his flashlight, plunging them all into absolute blackness for a moment until he pulled out his cell phone.

“Do you have signal here?” Victor asked. “Because I want to sign up for your service.”

“There’re no satellites here,” Chase replied, not losing his temper at the quiet sarcasm, which was, Angel supposed, better than blind panic. “They have towers in Jaipur, but they’re only good in the city. What I’m looking at here”—he showed the two of them his phone, which displayed a map— “is a topographical map of the place I downloaded from the Tamar’s navigational computer after we landed. It took the shots on the way in. The app uses dead reckoning from the time and place we landed.” He shrugged, his face swathed in darkness but his eyes lit up by the screen. “It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.”

Chase pointed back behind Victor.

“That’s north, toward Jaipur, the way we came. The landing field is off to the west of the city.”

“What good is that?” Victor demanded. “You heard what Gavin said. Your friend took off, and I doubt she’s going to come back and land at the port like everything is just back to normal, and that’s if the ship didn’t get shot to pieces by the Chinese!”

Angel wasn’t a psychologist, and she’d been told she wasn’t great at the whole empathy thing, but she was pretty sure Chase wanted to smack Victor upside the head for suggesting his friends were dead. The soldier’s fight to maintain his self-control was visible and a little frightening.

“Whether Pri and the others are there, or even whether they’re still alive,” Chase ground the words out like he was planning to make bread from them, “the landing field is where we need to be. It’s the only place we’re going to find a way off this planet. And I’ll tell you one thing, junior, if we don’t get off this planet, we’re dead. We can go back to the city, try to find Gavin’s ex-wife’s cousin again and convince him to give us shelter, but it’s only a matter of time before one of his people turns us in, either for fear of the Alliance or for the money from HKC. Then we get to go through this all over again, except maybe the next time we run into the jungle, it’s one of you lying there.” He jabbed a finger at Gavin’s body. “Or me. You hired me to protect you, and God knows, that’s turned out to not be worth the money. But if you want my professional opinion, our best hope to live through this is back at the port.”

“Do you really think we can steal a ship?” Angel asked him, trying not to show the doubt she felt. “Don’t most ships have all kinds of security locks to keep anyone from doing that?”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t a longshot,” Chase admitted. “Maybe we have to snatch the pilot, too. But I’d rather do that than wait out here to get eaten by the local fauna.”

As if to punctuate his words, something growled a challenge into the night.

“Point taken,” she said, just glad to have some semblance of the old Chase back. “Take us where we need to go.”

“Maybe we should try to use this,” Victor suggested quietly as he shifted the duffle bag around and patted the side. Angel stared at him, uncomprehending, until he elaborated. “To bargain with, I mean. The Alliance wants it, Hart-Klein wants it. We should offer to give it to one of them if they get us out of here.”

Angel drew in a sharp breath, ready to expel it in a stream of invective at Victor for even suggesting they give up the find of the millennium, when Chase responded a good deal more calmly than she would have.

“I’d consider it,” he allowed, “if I thought there was any chance they wouldn’t just take the artifact and then kill us to make sure no one knew it existed. The Alliance killed Dr. Stephenson on a non-aligned world. That’s a violation of the Colonial Authority Charter, which means Jack and shit, of course, to either the Alliance or the Union, but it does mean they won’t want witnesses to that left alive. As for HKC…” He shrugged. “If we were dealing with one of their suits. They think in dollars and Dig-Coins. But this guy Haricot is a shooter. He’s going to take what we did personally, and he’s going to want to hunt us down because we made him look bad.”

“How do you know?” Victor asked. Chase turned just slightly, and the darkness swallowed up his eyes.

“Because I would.”

* * *

Moving through the jungle in the pitch black was pure torture, and that wasn’t even taking into account the constant fear of being eaten. Every vine and root tried to trip Victor Lee up, the duffle on his back throwing off his balance enough to make each step a sideways, skating motion.

At least he didn’t have to try to see in the dark. Chase had left the flashlight app on his phone burning on low power in his back pocket, providing just enough of a glow through the fabric to guide the others without killing their night vision. It was kind of ingenious, and he couldn’t imagine it was something he’d learned in the military. They had night vision gear and infrared lights and all that tactical shit. It had to be something he’d either learned since he got out or come up with on the spot, which impressed the hell out of Victor.

In fact, Chase’s presence was the only reason Victor wasn’t curled up into a ball, screaming like a baby. The darkness and the incessant chirping of insects, the occasional cry of a night bird, reinforced the surreal haze that seemed to hang over everything, and only the sweat dripping into Victor’s eyes every few seconds and the constant buzz of insects around his ears helped him to remember that this wasn’t some drug-induced hallucination, it was reality. He was one wrong step, one stray bullet away from winding up like Stephenson or Gavin.

So many times, he’d lamented his life in Berkeley, the tedium, the sheer normalcy of it. It was why he’d switched his degree from regular archaeology to xenoarchaeology, which was a ridiculous mouthful of a word that hardly anyone in the field took seriously. Victor had figured it was a chance to go places, see things, put some excitement in his life. If he had it to do all over again, he would have happily settled for dull months brushing sand away from a Babylonian tomb in Iraq.

“Have you tried calling the ship again?” he asked Chase, mostly to hear someone’s voice, even if it was his own.

“Ten minutes ago.” He didn’t even sound annoyed, though he probably had a right to be. Victor wasn’t blessed with massive amounts of self-awareness, and if he hadn’t already known, there was a line of disappointed women who’d already informed him of the fact, but he knew he was being irritating. “No response, no transponder signal.”

“They have a transponder?” Victor didn’t know why he cared, but anything was better than the silence.

“Yeah, just in case the ship goes down or there’s too much jamming for a comm signal.”

“How does the jamming not affect the transponder?”

Chase grinned as if he thought it was a good question and hadn’t expected it from Victor.

“It’s just a raw, unmodulated signal. Jamming usually works by overwhelming the signal with raw EM broadcast. They have to have a pretty large antenna down at the port, for example, broadcasting over all frequencies. That makes it impossible to make out a modulated signal. But a pulse beacon doesn’t try to send out anything that can be broken down into video or audio signal, just regular bursts of low-frequency microwaves.”

Victor’s bachelor’s degree had been in history, and his Master’s was in archaeology and none of that prepared him to understand even a fraction of what Chase was talking about, but he nodded as if he understood.

“Can the Tamar track you, too?”

“Yeah, they have the frequency for the IFF transponder on my phone.”

“Your phone is sending out a signal?” Angel broke in, the question sharp and tinged with fear.

“Yeah, but don’t worry. Almost everyone out here has a cell phone on the local network. The only way anyone would know this one was mine is if they got the frequency from Pri on the Tamar, and she’d never let that happen.”

“Couldn’t Haricot just search for all cell signals in the jungle out in this direction?” she suggested. “Even if he didn’t know for sure it was yours, who else would be out here at night?”

“He couldn’t do it from in town. And he couldn’t do it from a vehicle on the road because we’re too far off the road. The only way he’d be able to pick it up is with an aircraft. If it was a helicopter or a tiltrotor, I’d have heard it by now.”

“He could have a S-T drive ship,” she suggested, “if this Hart-Klein is such a big deal as you say.”

“Except we didn’t see one at the landing field,” Chase pointed out. “And if they do have one stashed somewhere else, the Chinese would have spotted it.” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think we have to worry about Haricot right…”

Chase stopped in mid-step and in mid-sentence, throwing up a hand to halt the others. Victor froze, looking up through gaps in the trees into the night sky, searching for Hart-Klein aircraft for a couple of moments before he noticed Chase was looking straight ahead.

“Nobody move,” Chase advised, his voice low but not a whisper. “Don’t panic.”

Victor was about to ask him why they might panic when he finally spotted the movement in the darkness, though he couldn’t make out any details. Chase pulled his compact flashlight off his belt and flicked it on, and finally, things became clear. Standing on the narrow game trail not twenty yards ahead of them was a tawny, long-bodied creature that, if it wasn’t exactly feline, was close enough for government work. Its jaws were as wide as Victor’s head, with fangs six inches long, unless he was exaggerating the size because he was terrified.

This was, he was sure, the thing the locals called a tiger. God knew, if he were back on Earth and confronted by the thing, he would have been convinced it was a tiger, despite the lack of distinct stripes and the beginnings of a proto-mane riding the back of its head like a mohawk. The jaws parted, and a low roar grumbled out of a deep chest.

Victor refrained from pissing himself only through a monumental effort of will, exceeded only by the amount of self-control it took to listen to Chase and not immediately take off running.

“I don’t suppose,” Chase said quietly, “that you have any rounds left in that Browning Hi Power.”

Angel Cortez didn’t answer, but Victor thought he caught her head shaking violently just in the periphery of his vision. That’s so unfortunate.

Chase slid a knife out of a sheath at the small of his back, the blade looking laughably short compared to the size of the tiger, which had to be nine feet long from nose to tail.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Chase told them, his voice preternaturally calm. “On my count of three, you two are going to split up, each of you run a different direction. Angel, you go right, into the open field. Vic, you go left, into the trees.”

The animal swished its tail, stalking back and forth, head low.

“What about you?” Angel asked, and Victor was amazed she had the composure to speak, because he sure didn’t.

“When you two run,” Chase explained, turning the knife in his hand, spinning the blade downward, “it’s going to turn one way or the other to go after one of you. When it does, I’m going to jump on its back and stab it in the neck.”

“That’s insane,” Angel hissed, actually looking away from the thing to stare at him, her face painted yellow by the glare of the flashlight. “It’ll kill you.”

“It is insane,” Chase agreed readily. “And it will kill me. But maybe you two will have time to get away. When you do, use the compass app on your phone to head west. That should take you back to the port.”

Now, even Victor had to look away from the tiger and at the man. How the hell could he speak so calmly about being killed?

“No time to argue,” Chase went on, eyes locked on the tiger. “It’s about to attack. On three. One, two…”

“What’s that sound?” Angel interrupted, looking upward. And then Victor heard it, too, the same whoosh-hum he’d noticed back at the dig site.

“Oh, shit,” Chase spat, sounding so much more worried about the noise than the tiger. “Scatter! Now!”

Victor was close enough to the edge of panic that he followed the order without question, which put him a good ten or fifteen yards toward the trees when the cannon salvo hit. He assumed it was a cannon. He didn’t know the terminology for military weapons, particularly not the ones carried by an Alliance gunship, but whatever it was, it lit up the night like a sunrise and turned the powerful, majestic, deadly predator into bite-sized tiger nuggets in the blink of an eye.

The concussion struck Victor in the chest like a baseball bat and sent him stumbling into the trunk of one of the oddly twisted trees that seemed to be everywhere in this area. Flashes of light floated across his vision, and a high-pitched whine muted the world outside, but he ran anyway as more explosions ripped apart the night and the jungle, not caring if he ran into a tree or even a tiger. Any fate seemed better than standing still and letting some unseen and unknown hand kill him from a thousand yards away.

Blind, deaf, and panicked beyond thought, Victor rushed into the open maw of the jungle, the weight of the artifact bouncing against his shoulder the only sensation that penetrated. It seemed to mock him, reminding him why he was running for his life, why everything had been turned upside down, laughing at him scornfully with every stumble, every collision.

You should have left me where you found me.

Then the ground dropped out from beneath him.

OceanofPDF.com

22

Chase Weston was floating in a haze of golden light, disconnected thoughts bouncing across his mind without taking root.

Wasn’t a rocket. No smoke trail. Had to be a cannon round, maybe a mortar. Do the Chinese use mortars on their gunships?

He tried to roll onto his side, but his body didn’t want to obey, and he just rocked from side to side.

Am I hit? Am I bleeding?

No sound, just the hollow whistle of abused eardrums.

Where’s Angel? Vic ran but where’s Angel?

He blinked hard, the one thing he could manage to do without his body rebelling, and the world slowly came back into focus. He was flat on his back, bathed in the harsh, white glow of the spotlight flooding down from the side of the gunship.

Was I wrong? Does Haricot have a gunship?

But the light revealed a red flag embossed on the hull of the ship, decorated by a circle of white and blue stars in the corner. Alliance.

I wasn’t wrong. You have to be in the air to detect my transponder. But I forgot that HKC aren’t the only ones searching for it.

He checked himself and was able to lift his head up finally. No blood, no protruding bones, no burns. Just concussion, then.

And there was Angel, only ten yards away, rolling onto her side, head cradled in her hands. She was alive. Relief flooded into his chest even though it made no sense, given their situation. But she was alive. And that meant more to him than their eventual fate.

The embodiment of that fate walked down the open ramp of the gunship three abreast, bullpup rifles levelled at him.

His knife. Where was his knife? Not in his hand, unfortunately. He spotted it a few feet away and twitched toward it, but it was far too late. A rifle barrel stared him in the face, seeming much larger than the diameter he knew it to be.

Above that barrel was a face, bare for the moment of its black balaclava. It was a younger face than he’d expected, younger than him, though aged by experience and marked by a puckered scar across the right cheek.

Bullet. Or shrapnel. He’s damned lucky to live through a wound like that.

“Please do not move,” the man said in unaccented English with a neutral American accent. He’d gone to school in the US, Chase guessed. Back when that was possible for a Chinese citizen. “I have no wish to kill you.” The smile seemed pleasant. “Not before we’ve had the chance to talk.”

Shit. Can I go back to knife-fighting a tiger?

* * *

Victor Lee was drowning.

Disgusting, scummy water filled his mouth and clawed at his eyes, and he was weighed down by that damned duffle bag, trying desperately to get it untangled from his shoulders so he could try to swim…

And then his feet touched the bottom and he stood up.

Damn. That was embarrassing.

He’d slid down a riverbank in his blind stumble, but it was only three feet deep. The water soaked his skin, neither cool nor refreshing, the consistency of lukewarm bathwater. It splashed off of him as he dug his fingers into the disgusting, soft mud of the bank and tried to climb back up. He didn’t know that there were carnivorous, crocodile-like amphibians on this planet, but didn’t not know it, either. Then he reached the top of the bank and froze, before scooting back down.

Not a hundred yards away, a dazzling yellow glare was coming off the Alliance gunship, lighting up everything within half a mile, including him. Victor’s breath caught in his throat, and he nearly ran off blindly again. Some rational part of his brain tackled the part that was ready to panic and slapped it across the face, explaining that running would be a marvelous way to get spotted, and he’d be better off staying right where he was.

Both the rational and panicky sections of his brain shut their damn mouths and watched in horror as the Alliance commandos picked Chase and Angel up off the ground and secured their hands behind their backs, then hustled them up the ramp into the ship. The Chinese had them… they had Angel. Which he had told himself didn’t mean as much anymore, not after she’d dragged him into this mess, but it did. And if he didn’t expect her to ever feel the same way about him, it didn’t change how he felt about her… and he couldn’t abandon her.

Should I surrender? At least then, I’d be with her. But that wouldn’t do a damn bit of good, because I’m not going to break out of an Alliance gunship and rescue everyone. I can barely keep from drowning in a creek that only comes up to my knees.

The ship’s ramp folded into its hull, the thump as it closed solid and final. Soong-Tierney drive pods crackled and hummed to life, and the ship rose off the ground, the light still playing across the jungle below it. The gunship moved off slowly, staying low, and Victor realized with dull horror that it was searching for him.

How do they know I’m here? They didn’t. Not him personally, but they knew the dig had found something, and neither Chase nor Angel had it on them.

Victor was frozen with indecision, afraid to run, afraid to move, and afraid to stay where he was. If he stayed out here alone, he was dead. He might be able to hide from the Alliance, but he couldn’t hide from all the things out in the jungle that wanted to eat him. Could he make it to the city? And do what? He couldn’t contact the Tamar even if she came back. And that was assuming he could find his way back. Chase had told them which way to go, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember which direction the man had said.

But there was one thing he could do, something simple and straightforward and utterly insane. He could follow that damned gunship. It was low, and slow, and shining a big-ass light to lead the way.

“Oh, the hell with it.”

Victor clambered over the bank and headed across the open fields after that ship.

* * *

Angel Cortez glared at the masked woman sitting across from her in the passenger compartment of the gunship. The woman was narrow and fine-boned, looking very fragile to be a commando, yet her eyes were burning coals, filled with fury, though at what, Angel couldn’t guess. It made little sense to be angry with the small Asian woman, but the choice was either finding a target and getting pissed off at it or cowering in uncontrollable fear. And she’d sworn to herself long ago that she wouldn’t ever let fear control her, so anger it was.

The small woman stared back, her glare as hard as the radiation from a nuclear core, and just as deadly, but Angel gritted her teeth and refused to look away. Angel knew she’d won when the woman slid a knife out of a sheath on her calf and held the blade against the side of her throat.

“What the hell are you staring at, bitch?” the Alliance special forces soldier growled in heavily accented English.

“Sergeant.” The word was firm and commanding, and also in English, which meant it was for her benefit. It was the officer, the one who’d spoken to Chase back on the ground when they’d been captured. “Let’s not lose our composure.”

The female NCO murmured something in Chinese that sounded vaguely apologetic.

“Sorry, Dr. Cortez,” the officer told her. He had an easy smile, and somehow, the scar on his cheek only managed to make him look more rugged, though sinister as well. “This has been a trying few days. Sgt. Lin here lost two very good friends yesterday… as did we all.”

“I didn’t kill them,” Angel said, and though she hadn’t meant it to, the words came out as defensive.

“I believe you,” he assured her. “You’re a scientist, not a killer.” His eyes drifted sideways to Chase Weston, sitting to Angel’s right, hands flex-cuffed behind his back, just like hers. “No, this one, he is the killer. Sgt. Chase Edmund Weston, United States Army Rangers before you went the private route. You have quite the record from the war.”

“You have me at a disadvantage,” Chase said, dry as tinder. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

“Of course. I am Colonel Liu Xiao of the Sea Dragons.”

Angel frowned in confusion, and Chase must have noticed her expression.

“They’re the equivalent of the Navy SEALs,” he explained, “but without the book deals and the PR directors.”

“Just so,” Liu agreed, chuckling appreciation. “Though like your SEALs, we are also in space as well as on land, in the sea, and in the air. It was a natural progression.”

“You’re not all that progressive,” Chase noted, glancing around. “I don’t see any Russians. Or any of your other Alliance partners.”

“Oh, they all have their place,” Liu said, leaning back in his chair, hands clasped atop his tactical vest. “The Russians make particularly handy cannon-fodder when such is needed. And they’re wonderful at deflecting attention… always so loud and obnoxious.”

“But you don’t trust them to be part of your special operations? No Spetsnaz?”

“Spetsnaz mistake brutality for lethality. They think if they kill enough civilians, they will be feared as much as they’re hated.” Liu shrugged. “And in a place such as this, established by a fool and run by criminals, I admit such an approach has its attractions.”

“Avoiding civilian casualties didn’t seem a priority for you when your people killed Dan Stephenson,” Angel growled.

“That was a mistake,” Liu admitted. “And of course, those responsible paid for it with their lives. Such is frequently the case in our line of work, wouldn’t you agree, Sgt. Weston?”

“Not always,” Chase said, voice neutral but something black and dangerous behind his eyes. “Sometimes, when we make a mistake, we get other people killed instead.”

“Granted. And you would know quite a bit about that, given your history.”

“If you know my history, Colonel,” Chase told him, “then you know I won’t be all that interested in cooperating with you.”

“No one is, at first,” Liu said, waving it off, not seeming to take offense. “But I’ve yet to find anyone who can hold out for long. Oh, wait, no.” He snapped his fingers as if recovering a memory. “There was this one fellow. Australian, I believe. SAS. He must have received extensive anti-interrogation training, because even the drugs couldn’t get him to talk.” He looked over at Sgt. Lin. “What ever happened to him?”

“Zhang put a bullet in the back of his head and tossed him into a lake,” she replied, eyes still fixed on Angel.

“Well, there you go. But let me assure you, Sgt. Weston, that as much respect as I have for your Ranger battalions, you’re not SAS and you won’t be able to hold out long. And you, Dr. Cortez, will last even less time than he will.” Liu had been affecting a relaxed ease, friendly and amicable, but the pretense ended as abruptly as flicking a switch, and he was leaning forward, nose only inches from hers. His breath smelled of spearmint. “We know you found something on that dig, and we know you took it with you when you ran. You’re going to tell us where it is. That is a certainty on par with the laws of the universe.”

That smile again, though perhaps with a bit more cruelty in it than before.

“If it will convince you of the futility of trying to lie to us, I’ll share with you the source of our information.” Liu laughed. “I admit that part of me resists this, as giving up secrets is anathema to my chosen profession, but secrets are only worth anything if you can eventually use them, no?” He spread his hands as if waiting for an answer. When none was forthcoming, he went on. “Your Dr. Stephenson trusted his workers far too much. He probably thought he was being oh-so-clever by not sharing the news of the dig beneath the dig with any of them, but they weren’t blind. Who do you think he had carry his equipment to the lower excavation? And when one of the workers turned on the thermal sensors and saw the buried object, he knew it might be valuable beyond price.”

“He sold Dan out to you?” Angel asked, bitterness creeping into her voice at the thought. Dan had treated his workers well, made sure they were paid a fair wage.

“No, they sold Dr. Stephenson out to the cartel. Which is, no doubt, why the cartel chose to try to attack you. They knew the dig was valuable but needed someone like you to tell them what it was worth.”

One mystery solved, then. She’d wondered why anyone would try to kidnap her.

“And of course, the cartel sold the information to us, just as soon as we made it clear we’d kill them if they didn’t. Once we took over the dig site, we checked the lower chamber and saw the progress you’d made. Something had been uncovered, removed from the ground.” His smile was thin. “Isn’t that grave-robbing? I mean, I know archaeologists were once known for such things but that was years ago. Decades. Aren’t you supposed to have more respect for ancient cultures?”

“If there was anything there,” Chase intervened, “we obviously don’t have it with us, and you searched around where you found us. What makes you think we know where it is? After all, we were captives of Hart-Klein. Didn’t you know that? We had to shoot our way out.”

“Hart-Klein has an office here?” Liu seemed genuinely surprised. “I didn’t see their shingle. I suppose that means it’s something off the books.”

“Real nasty piece of work. Guy who calls himself Sean Haricot. He conned everyone into thinking he was CIA, but if I had to guess, he was actually DGSE, French intelligence. At least the accent makes him sound French. If there’re any artifacts to be had from the dig, he’d be the first place I’d start if I were you.”

Liu shook a finger at Chase in mock admonishment.

“You, you’re a smart one, Sgt. Weston. You know I’ll have to check that out because I would be derelict in my duty if I didn’t. You’re hoping it will distract me long enough for you to find some way out of your current predicament. What? You think I’m a micromanager, that I’ll leave you lightly guarded while I take everyone into the city and investigate this Haricot? Either you’ve seen too many movies or you think I have. No, I am a man who does one thing at a time, does it very thoroughly, and then moves on. We will get to this Sean Haricot, believe me. But before we’re through with you, we’ll know exactly what it is you took from that dig, and exactly where you left it.”

“And when you’ve told us all you know,” Sgt. Lin added, staring daggers at Angel, “I will give you the same courtesy we extended to the Australian. And maybe someday, in another thousand years, an archaeologist will find your bones and wonder what you were doing sticking your nose where it didn’t belong.”

“If there are any archaeologists here in a thousand years,” Angel shot back, her smile as venomous as one of Vishnu’s mutant snakes, “I can tell you one thing about them. They won’t be speaking Chinese.”

The Alliance NCO still had her knife in her hand, and for a second, Angel thought she’d ignore her commanding officer’s orders and use it. But then she reversed it and slipped it back into its sheath.

“Do you have to do that?” Chase murmured beside her ear.

“They’re already going to kill us,” Angel hissed back at him. “What else can they do?”

Chase shook his head, his expression bleak.

“You don’t want to know.”

OceanofPDF.com

23

Victor Lee squatted on the damp, marshy ground and wished he knew how to read a map.

It shouldn’t have been that hard. It was an app on his phone, albeit one Chase had forced him and Angel to install, and he’d navigated using apps on his phone his whole life. On paved streets, with signs and traffic lights. The worst part was that, when he was on his scooter, he could follow the little arrow and see which way he was going and what turn he’d missed, but walking in the dark with nothing but the light on his phone to show the way, he had to go hundreds of yards the wrong direction before the app showed him. Worse, it was dead-reckoning, not satellite-guided, which made it even more balky and unresponsive.

It had been so much easier when the gunship was still searching for him, hanging up in the air like a homing beacon, but he’d outsmarted himself. They’d given up and headed east. He’d stood there with his mouth hanging open, watching them go, ready to give up, when he’d remembered the map.

They weren’t going back to the city, which meant they had their headquarters or camp or whatever somewhere else. But what else was there besides Jaipur? It wasn’t like this planet had a dozen big cities or anything. Even he knew Jaipur was the only real city on Vishnu, and the small farming settlements that had been pushed into the jungle around it were all to the east and south, along the river. To the west was nothing.

Almost nothing. He’d had to squint and enlarge the screen until the display was pixelated beyond comprehension, but he’d finally seen it. According to the caption, it had been a banana plantation… once upon a time, when the colony had been new. But the tiny paragraph, which had to be expanded until it filled the screen just to read, informed him that it had proven financially unviable, and it had been abandoned ten years ago. But the buildings were still there, and the land had been cleared, which would make it a perfect place for the Alliance to land their gunship.

And maybe he was being overly optimistic, but it was the only place he could see on that map that would make a good base camp for the Alliance special forces.

And what are you going to do if you get there and there’s nobody home?

Well, it had been a plantation… there would be shelter and maybe water. And if there were any banana trees left, maybe food. Except he hated bananas.

“Northwest,” he muttered to himself. “I need to go northwest for two… miles? Or is that kilometers? Damn it, why is this writing so freaking small?”

He was talking to himself a lot the last hour or so. It was better than the dead silence, and much better than listening to the far-off yowl of the cat creatures. Felinoid? Is that a word? If it wasn’t, it should be.

He had read that people who went hiking in grizzly country talked to let the bear know they were around so they wouldn’t surprise it and spur an attack, but he didn’t think that worked for cats. Cats were assholes.

“Hell with it, I gotta start walking. It’s getting lighter.”

His phone hadn’t synced with the local time, but he was pretty sure it was close to dawn now. Would that make a difference? The Chinese were sure to have night vision and thermal. Maybe he would be better off waiting until dawn to make sure he didn’t break his leg on something. But waiting here would have meant listening to those damned yowls, so he moved out.

After a mile of walking, he was two and a half miles from the banana plantation. And the sky was getting a lighter grey, unless it was his imagination. No matter what logic and reason said about it, he didn’t want to be walking out in the open during the day. If he’d been back in the jungle, it wouldn’t have mattered so much, but walking through the tall grass of the open fields, he’d stick out like a sore thumb.

There had to be someplace to hide, and now that there was some light—not much, but some—he could look around for it. The ground was getting rockier, the grass shorter, the trees and brush thinner, and all that added up to no place to get out of sight. Panic began to squeeze at Victor’s chest as gold glinted at the horizon, backlighting the distant forest. The trees beckoned to him, but they were in the opposite direction of the plantation. Maybe.

More rocks, and he nearly pitched headlong over a low ledge, a rock face leading down toward another creek bed.

Wait. A creek. That’s gotta be on the map.

He checked it. Yes, he was going the right direction now. The plantation was a mile and a half away. Encouraged, Victor shifted the weight of the duffle—again—and turned to clamber down the rock face… and fell when it faded away beneath his feet. He screamed, but it was cut off abruptly in a fervent curse when his butt hit hard ground only two meters below.

“That hurt!” he complained, rubbing at his right hip. God didn’t reply, but his echo did.

Echo? He twisted around, holding his cell phone light at arm’s length.

It was a cave. Not a large cave, only a few yards deep and about four feet high, certainly not large enough to stand up in. But maybe big enough to settle down into until it got dark again. His breathing settled down, and relief flowed into him… until he saw the bugs.

“Shit!” The screech was much less manly than he’d expected from himself, but he didn’t feel the least bit guilty. There were hundreds of them, centipedes or millipedes or whatever the hell they were called… all he knew was they didn’t have any of them in his apartment in Berkley, and if he ever got out of here, he’d never leave it again.

He scuttled back, shrugging the duffle bag off his back when it scraped up against the wall of the cave. It landed at his feet, and the cluster of disgusting bugs scattered away from it. He assumed it was from the impact of the bag, but the bugs didn’t stop running. They headed out the entrance of the cave, and out into the approaching light, which seemed like a damned odd thing for nightcrawlers to do. And not just them, a stream of other insects of various shapes and sizes and degrees of ickyness joined them, pouring out of every nook and cranny in the rock, retreating into the night.

Away from the duffle bag. Away from the artifact inside.

Victor had been hauling the thing around for hours and hours, and somehow he’d forgotten it was there except for the annoying tug of its weight against his shoulder. It was invisible, out of sight and out of mind. But not out of sight anymore. The bag had slipped open when he’d dropped it from his back, and the golden glow from the artifact rivaled the coming dawn, drawing his eyes to it.

He should have been terrified. Every rational fiber of his being told him to be terrified, to run just like those damned bugs. But he couldn’t leave, couldn’t even look away. He hadn’t meant to, had given no thought to the possibility, but he took a step closer to the bag.

It’s beautiful.

So beautiful he had to touch it.

No, you moron!

Victor didn’t listen to the advice, didn’t listen to anything but a siren song coming out of that golden light. He brushed the surface of the thing with his fingertips… and he knew.

There was no better way to describe it. He didn’t watch a movie play out inside his head, he didn’t hear a voice explaining it to him, he just knew as if he’d always known, as if it had been a part of his memory for years and he simply hadn’t thought about it before. He knew that the aliens who’d built this thing were the same ones whose skeleton they’d found, and he knew it because he could see an image in his memory of the living creatures.

They were breathtaking, but not in the same way as the bugs. Nothing about them scared him, no part of their existence worried him because among the things he just knew was that they didn’t exist here anymore, nor anywhere in this galaxy. They were tall, broad-chested, and straight-backed, though the arrangement of their hips and knees were more reminiscent of a kangaroo than a hominid. Their faces, while definitely not humanoid, were also not the disgusting collection of cilia and mandibles he’d conjured up in his fevered imagination when they’d found the skeleton. Their skin was grey and scaly, not so much like a reptile but more along the lines of a pangolin or an armadillo. Their faces were angular, narrowing to an oval mouth with omnivore’s teeth, though they didn’t look as if they grew there from roots but were extrusions of the jaw.

And the eyes. The eyes reminded him of the egg, golden, with subtle shapes formed deep inside, floating yet also part of the structure. Their gaze pierced his soul, not like the memory they resembled but as if they stood beside him in the cave, for all that they were three feet too tall to fit in it.

But the cave was on one of their worlds, their home, its skies as blue as Earth’s, clouds as white. There were trees of a sort, more different from Earth flora than the greenery on Vishnu or any of the other colonies, yet still familiar enough that he wouldn’t have been shocked if he’d found them there.

Most importantly, he knew what the artifact was.

I am what you would call an artificial intelligence.

The voice was inside his head, but there was some audible component of it as well, as if he was listening to a translator talk over a foreign diplomat at the United Nations. Only this wasn’t any human language lying beneath the unaccented English. It was nothing that had ever come from Earth, but if he’d been forced, gun to head, to compare it to anything he’d ever heard before, it might have brought to mind the song of a whale. Though it had about as much similarity to a cetacean as the hoots of a chimpanzee did to a mezzo soprano singing opera.

Victor’s heartbeat thumped hard, drowning out his thoughts, drowning out the questions. Like why he wasn’t panicking. Panic was an old friend, his first refuge, an emotional wall he built against reality when the world turned from indifferent to hostile. Like now. But panic wouldn’t be found and fear was no comfort. He was naked to reality and had to accept it, accept that what he was seeing was the truth, not some hallucination caused by dehydration or exhaustion.

Victor sucked in a deep breath and faced the creature.

“What’s your name?” he asked it. Though he didn’t speak any more than it had. This whole conversation was taking place inside his head, or, more accurately, through his thoughts and into the contact he’d made with the artifact.

“In our language, my name is…” And the image of one of the aliens threw back its head and made another warble, as if Luciano Pavarotti had been born to a pod of orcas. “But you are unlikely to be able to correctly enunciate it without injuring yourself. In your tongue, it would literally mean Emissary for the People.”

“You call yourselves ‘the People?’ That’s original.” Now was certainly not a good time to be snarky, but it was Victor’s next instinct right after panic, and one of the consequences of the knowing, the lack of fear, that had thrown him back to his default settings.

“Yes, I sense that you are aware of many cultures from the past on your world who used this designation. And we are no different, for we so named ourselves before we knew that there was any other life in this galaxy, nor even a galaxy for there to be life within. We, at least, did not arrogate ourselves as ‘the true people,’ as many of your cultures have.”

“Okay, point,” he admitted. “But I’m not going to call you Emissary for the People. It sounds like a rap artist.” Victor frowned. “You’re an artificial intelligence? You mean like a real sentient system or just an emulation that imitates people? Err…I mean, The People?”

“If the imitation is executed well enough, is there a difference?” The thing laughed, which creeped Victor the hell out because its image didn’t even try to attempt to appear like it was laughing. “There was much debate on this when systems such as myself were first conceived, and, a thousand years later, the People were no closer to knowing the correct answer, so I recommend you do as they did and believe whatever makes you feel better.”

A thousand years…

“How old are you?”

“I was built twelve thousand years ago, but to ask how old I am is a worthless question as I have not been continuously operational during that interval, nor do I perceive the passage of time as you do, or, indeed, as my creators did. I believe, from what I gather via the link between us, that the question you really wish to ask is, am I insane after sitting buried on this planet for the last ten thousand years? And the only answer I can give you is that I don’t believe I am, but that is hardly definitive, as most who go insane don’t realize it.”

Oh, good. An honest machine.

“You guys aren’t here anymore.” Victor approached the thing from a different direction. “Not in this galaxy. At least that’s what I got when I touched the egg. So, where are you? Did all of the People die out?”

“I can’t say with any sort of certainty. I was, obviously, abandoned here ten thousand years ago, but at that time, their plan was to leave this galaxy and never return.”

“What did they have against this galaxy?” Victor was struck by another thought and stepped over his own question. “Hey, were you here… I mean, were you awake, conscious, whatever, when the Arborists were here? The aliens who were digging you up a few thousand years back?”

“That story becomes complicated, and we are getting ahead of ourselves. You’ve activated me, and there are things I am obligated to tell you by my programming. The first of which is, you being here is no accident.”

Victor shook his head.

“Of course, it’s not an accident! I’m an archaeology student, and Dr. Cortez brought me along because none of the other graduate assistants were stupid enough to say yes!”

Victor had never heard a computer speaking through the mouth of a non-humanoid alien sigh before, but this thing managed it somehow.

“We are speaking telepathically, and yet I still feel we have a communications problem. I will try again. Humans being on this planet was not an accident. Humans acquiring the stardrive was not some quirk of fate, some chance discovery by one of your scientists. Nor was it an accident that the race you call the Arborists, whose true name was the K’tchini, received the same technology.”

“Received?” Cold tendrils climbed up Victor’s back. “Received it from who?”

The thing’s face twisted into an expression Victor never should have been able to interpret, and yet he was. It was amusement.

“Why, from us, of course.”

OceanofPDF.com

24

Chase Weston blinked awake as the gunship jolted to a landing.

“I can’t believe you fell asleep,” Angel hissed in his ear.

Chase shrugged, letting one of the Chinese Sea Dragon commandos pull him up from his seat. He was exhausted, but he wasn’t going to admit it in front of Liu or Angel.

“You learn to grab sleep or food whenever you have the chance,” he told her, making it sound much more romantic than it was. “You never know when you’re going to get the chance next.”

“A wise attitude, Sgt. Weston,” Colonel Liu observed, putting a hand on each of their shoulders to guide them down the ramp. “Particularly since this may be the very last chance you ever have.”

“You’ve got quite the sense of melodrama there, Colonel,” Chase told him. “You been watching too many spy thrillers?”

“These opportunities come along so rarely, it’s difficult to turn them down.”

Chase smiled. Liu was a cold-blooded bastard, but it was hard to hate him. Not that Chase wouldn’t kill him if he had the chance, of course.

“What is this place?” Angel asked, looking around.

Chase had been observing out of the corner of his eye, trying not to be obvious about it, but she was a civilian, so he cut her some slack. The house was old, the wood rotten along the edge of the concrete slab, but he could tell it had once been an agricultural area. A well and the remains of a pump house, crumbling now after years of neglect, slumped off to one side like a forgotten toy, beside it the rusted hulk of a tractor. It was shabby, run-down, yet the golden rays of dawn lent it a certain beauty.

“Banana plantation,” Liu told her. “The previous owners found out that just because plants will grow doesn’t mean you can actually get them somewhere to sell without an established logistics train.” He grinned. “As a good Communist, I should probably not know so much about the mechanisms of capitalism, but then my country has always been pragmatic about making money.”

“You’re not a good Communist, Colonel,” Chase reminded him. “Not yet.”

“Oh, I get that joke, Sergeant,” Liu said, shaking a finger at him. He pushed open the door to the plantation house, the hinges squeaking in protest. The inside was a stark contrast to the disrepair of the outside, the bare, concrete floors swept clean and brown tarps hung from the walls to block off the holes. The interior walls had been torn down except one that might have been a bathroom, and portable work lights glowed on tripod stands, throwing the cots and chairs and communications gear into sharp relief, the shadows cast long behind them like knife edges.

Two more of the Sea Dragon commandos waited inside, seated in folding chairs behind computer monitors that were, he guessed, linked to drone surveillance.

“Anything to report?” Liu asked them.

“No, sir,” one of them, a younger woman with hair cut down about an inch from her scalp, reported. “The only movement out there has been the local wildlife.” She made a face. “Not that those tiger things aren’t scary enough. I wouldn’t want to face one even with a grenade launcher.”

“Don’t worry, Lieutenant,” he assured her, “we won’t leave you alone with the tigers.” Liu nodded to one of his people, a long-faced man with bad teeth, and the subordinate grabbed Chase by the arm and took him to a corner of the big room, where what looked like an old office chair was bolted into the concrete slab.

The fact that they’d thought to acquire the chair and bothered to go to the trouble of bolting it down worried the hell out of him, but he didn’t bother struggling when the man shoved him into it, then flex-cuffed him to the arms. Even if he could have somehow overpowered the commando and gotten his hands in front of him, there were still a dozen armed Sea Dragons between him and the door.

And Angel. Even if he could get out, she couldn’t, which meant he couldn’t.

“Perfect,” Liu said, clapping his hands as if he was a movie director about to shoot a scene. “I think we’ll start with Dr. Cortez.”

“Why not start with me?” Chase interjected, turning all their heads his way. He shrugged, trying to seem casual. “I’m easily bored, and I’d rather just get right to it. Anyway, the whole point of enhanced interrogation techniques is to instill fear and despair until you dole out just enough hope to get the subject to break. I’ve been around too long to be any more afraid than I already am, and I already know there’s no hope. So, just take me first and you can scare the shit out of Dr. Cortez in the process.”

The words had spilled out like he’d tipped over a water jug, and it took him a moment to reel them back in and shut his mouth, trying not to sound desperate and knowing he’d probably done a poor job of it.

Liu didn’t mock, didn’t yell. Instead, the look on his hard, scarred face was almost sympathetic.

“Oh, Sergeant,” he said, “I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a more eloquent way of telling a woman you love her.” Chase bit down on an instinctive denial, and Liu grinned, too sharp to miss it. Angel Cortez stared at Chase, swallowing hard, as if the words scared her more than the prospect of torture. “But you’ve made a key error,” Liu went on, motioning for the others to take Angel across the room where another seat was set attached to the concrete slab, this one not office furniture, but something more like a dentist’s chair.

Angel didn’t make a sound except when Sgt. Lin pushed against her shoulder. Angel stomped backward with her heel and slammed it down onto Lin’s instep.

Lin cursed and raised the butt of her rifle to strike Angel, but Liu stepped in and grabbed the stock of the weapon, staring her down.

“Did I say,” he ground out in Chinese, slow enough that Chase could keep up with it from the remote-study courses he’d been taking for years, “that I wanted you to shove the prisoner?”

“No, sir,” Lin responded, not meekly but with obvious restraint, though Chase didn’t know if it was because of respect for Liu or fear.

“Trust me, Sergeant, if I want to use brute force against either of the prisoners, you will be my first resort. But not until and unless I give the order. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Strap her down.” Liu glanced back at Chase, eyes narrowing. “You speak Chinese, don’t you?” He’d asked the question in Mandarin, and Chase did his best not to react, not sure how successful he was. Liu shrugged. “No matter,” he said in English. “As I was saying, you’re making a key error. I know you’ve probably dealt with other elements of my government that are mired in the old ways… electric shock, waterboarding, bamboo shoots under the fingernails.” He laughed at the last, whether because he thought it was ludicrous or from pleasant memories, Chase couldn’t say. “I am quite aware of how unreliable intelligence gathered from physical duress can be. Which is why the Chinese government has been working for decades now on the correct combination of chemicals to loosen even the tightest tongue. Sgt. Chiao?”

Chiao was a tall man, over six feet and broad-shouldered, but his touch was precise and gentle when he unzipped the small black pouch and pulled out an injection gun and a small vial of brown liquid. Chase’s mouth went dry.

“That shit isn’t FDA approved, is it?” He’d meant the words to be casual, to show how little he was concerned, but again, he failed miserably.

“It won’t be pleasant,” Liu warned. “And I’m told there’s a hell of a hangover. But I haven’t noticed any permanent damage.” A low chuckle. “Then again, we haven’t conducted any long-term testing since the subjects tend to die of unrelated ailments soon after.”

Marvelous. Chase said nothing this time, having learned his lesson.

Chiao inserted the vial then pressed the injector against Angel Cortez’s neck and touched the trigger. There was a subdued hiss, and the woman winced. Liu pulled a Velcro cover off his watch face and checked the time.

“Okay then, just have to wait a few minutes for that to kick in.” He looked around at the others. “Who’s hungry?”

* * *

“What the hell do you mean you gave us the drive?” Victor Lee demanded. He never thought he’d be tired of asking questions—it was sort of what a grad student did. But he was getting sick of feeling like a three-year-old child trying to understand nuclear physics. “You said the People left the galaxy ten thousand years ago! You said you’d been abandoned here.”

“Abandoned was a poor choice of words,” Emissary allowed. “I am working from a perspective gained through your thoughts, and I used the closest term that would evoke my own feelings on the matter, perhaps a product of the lack of sentient conversation over the last several millennia. I was left here as part of a plan, and so were my brothers and sisters… a test of new civilizations that might arise. We were taken to planets where it was felt we might be discovered by sentient life, but in my case, the ship that brought me here developed problems with the drive, and we were stranded. The technician whose job it was to hook me to the network with the other units in the test was injured in the crash and eventually died while programming my uplink.”

Yeah, we found his skeleton. Wonder how badly someone had to screw up for ancient alien astronauts to crash and die?

“You said brothers and sisters… how many of you are there?”

“At one time? Hundreds. I don’t know what’s happened to them in the time since I was left alone here because the uplink was only partially successful. I can receive their data but can’t send my own.”

“Send it how?” Victor hadn’t been scared, but now he was frustrated. The thing spoke his language, but it sure as hell didn’t know a human mind worked. “Wouldn’t it take, like, years for any signal to get to you? Even with the Soong-Tierney drive, we can’t send any signals faster than light.”

“That is because you didn’t build the drive. We did. And we offered it to every sentient species we encountered over the last ten thousand years.”

“Holy shit,” Victor hissed. “You mean Dr. Soong-Tierney is a con artist? But she made like, billions on that drive! Oh, man, I am so going to call the FTC on her when we get back! If it didn’t belong to her, she shouldn’t have been able to sell it…”

The image of the People—the person?—took a step closer, almost bounding on the backward-canted legs, the golden eyes staring down into his, and for the first time since the psychic communication began, Victor felt a surge of fear.

“All humans can’t be like this, can they?” Emissary demanded, though who he was asking, Victor wasn’t sure. “Is there another I might talk to who would take this more seriously?”

“Like, take what seriously, dude?” Victor shot back, a flare of anger replacing the brief fear. “I mean, you’ve told me this story about how you and a bunch of other golden egg machines gave the S-T drive, or the stardrive or whatever you want to call it, to us and other races, and that’s a cool story that I guess I can sell to the newsnets when I get home and maybe write my doctoral thesis on, assuming I ever get out of here, but I’ve got other problems! My friends were captured by Chinese commandos, and I’m out here by myself with nothing but my cell phone, and now, I guess, you. It’s really trippy talking to an alien AI, but it’s not the only thing I’ve got to think about.”

There was a long silence, and Victor thought maybe he’d pissed the machine off and it wouldn’t talk to him anymore. Which would be a shame because it felt better talking to an alien computer than it did talking to himself.

“I sense,” the machine said, finally, “that your race is still embroiled in internecine warfare. Perhaps you aren’t up to the challenge, despite having survived the test.”

“You keep talking about a test. A test for what?”

“The reason the People left this galaxy. The approaching threat. The Sunkillers.”

Victor rubbed a hand over his face, trying not to sound impatient again.

“Can you, like, explain that? In real simple terms, man, because you could fit everything I know about physics in a pamphlet and still have room for a takeout menu.”

“The People discovered the stardrive tens of thousands of years ago and used it to explore this galaxy.” The machine had recovered its patience, which was great news for Victor since he had no desire to be stuck in this hallucination with an ill-tempered alien. “We discovered the ruins of many civilizations but never another sentient species still living. It seemed to us as if any which achieved high technology destroyed itself before it could leave the cradle. Yet still, we searched, refusing to believe we were completely alone.

“Then, we found the Sunkillers. They were a hive mind, no one of their individual bodies completely sentient, but the whole more than a product of the sums. We were thrilled and tried to communicate with them, which was a mistake. The Sunkillers didn’t care for the idea they weren’t alone, particularly didn’t care for the fact that the only other sentient species they’d discovered weren’t a hive intelligence like themselves. They considered individual consciousness akin to blasphemy. And they were determined to wipe it out.”

“You keep calling them the Sunkillers. Where did they get that name?”

“Once they determined the direction from which we’d come to their worlds, they decided to deal with the problem of our existence by ending it. They built the Sunkillers and sent them along our trail. Imagine a starship the size of a planet, with engines as large as this planet’s moon, and an electromagnetic scoop sucking in the interstellar hydrogen out of the vacuum for hundreds of thousands of miles around to provide the fuel for its fusion drive. You say you do not know physics, but can you picture the device of which I speak?”

“Yeah, I think I read something about this once,” Victor said, excited to finally find a subject he was familiar with. “It was an old concept of how to build a… relativistic, I think? Yeah, a relativistic starship. They called it the Bussard ramjet. But that was supposed to be like, a thousand years away, and now I guess we don’t have to worry about trying to build one since you gave us the S-T drive.”

“You should be worried about it, Victor Lee. Because one of them has been traveling toward your home system for tens of thousands of years, at just slightly under the speed of light. And when it arrives, it will plunge into your sun and cause it to go nova, extinguishing all life in your system.”

“What?” Victor gaped at the alien. “Why the hell would they try to sterilize us if they were pissed off at you?”

“The discovery of our existence was a trigger for the hive mind,” Emissary informed him, and if the sadness and regret in its voice was affected, it was a good imitation. “It decided that individual consciousness couldn’t be tolerated and the best way to get rid of them was to build hundreds of these Sunkillers, to devote all its resources to their construction and send them to any system which seemed capable of harboring intelligent life. Including ours. We sent everything we had up against it, but the magnetic fields it generates to collect interstellar hydrogen and protect itself from asteroid collisions are powerful enough to rip apart any ship which gets within a hundred thousand miles of the thing.” The image of the alien made a gesture with both hands together that Victor knew was one of grief. “We were forced to abandon our home, all the systems we’d colonized, and leave this galaxy for a home we thought far enough away to be beyond the reach of the Sunkillers.”

Victor’s stomach twisted at an image of one of the planet-sized weapons spearing into the Sun at close to the speed of light, of Earth scrubbed clean of life by radiation. Not just Earth… Gateway, the other orbitals, the Lunar base, the Mars outpost, everything gone. Maybe the mining facilities out at Jupiter’s moons would survive, but they were barely even crewed. How many ships could Earth turn out before it was too late?

Wait a second.

“You said the Sunkillers were travelling slower than light. How far away were they? Did their… ramjet thing hit your star yet?”

“By now, it has, though by the time I was stranded on this world, the systems of the People were all evacuated, the exodus begun.”

“And how long do we have?”

“I can’t say for sure. Each of the Sunkillers took decades to construct and the resources of an entire star system, and we were their priority. But they knew which systems were inhabited. They learned from us when they captured our emissaries and stole their files. They will be coming for you.”

“And what the hell can we do about it?” Victor yelled, waving his hands, finally giving into his old friend, panic. “You said you gave us the drive… somehow… in order to help us face the Sunkillers. But the People couldn’t do anything against them and you’re like, thousands of years more advanced than we are.”

“There is a planet. One chosen carefully, in a system where there were no habitable worlds, where there had never been any life. Before the People left this galaxy, they left every technological secret we had uncovered in our thousands of years of traversing this galaxy, not only of our own discoveries but also from the remains of other ancient and advanced civilizations we had come across.”

“Well, Christ, why didn’t you tell me that to begin with?” Victor asked, pacing around a cave too small to even stand up, knowing somewhere at the base of his consciousness that he’d never let go of the artifact this whole time… and that the time was as much of an illusion as the alien. “Just tell me where it is, dude! I’ll give the location to the government and be a hero, and they’ll figure out a way to get us out of all this!”

“I am not allowed to tell you, only to guide you. And only you.”

“What do you mean, only me?” Victor’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“What you refer to as the artifact is much more than that. It is more, even, than the receptacle for my consciousness. It’s a stardrive, a power source, a weapon… and a key. The key to accessing the storehouse of ancient knowledge.”

“Hey, that’s cool,” Victor insisted. “I mean, Dr. Cortez won’t be thrilled about giving it up, but I’ll personally be happy to give it up and get everyone off our backs.”

The way the alien looked at him reminded him of how his mother had stared him down when he’d said something stupid as a child. Or as an adult.

“You still don’t understand, Victor Lee. You activated the neural linkage between us. You are connected with it, and with me, forever. As I am Emissary for the People, you are now an Emissary for us… and for me. And no one else may achieve linkage for as long as you live.”

Time jumped back into gear, and Victor broke contact with the artifact, finding himself back in the cave, swaying side to side in shock and horror.

“It’s not real,” he murmured, staring at the glowing, golden shape nestled in the folds of the duffle bag. “It can’t be real.”

Trust me, Victor. It is.

The walls of the cave spun around him, and Victor sank into darkness.

OceanofPDF.com

25

Evangeline Cortez was swimming through a sea of lavender foam, comfortable and comforting, washing away all her fears and uncertainties, her trauma and pain. She never wanted to leave it, but a voice beckoned her, kind and soft but insistent, repeating the same question over and over.

“Where is the artifact?” the faceless, disembodied voice asked. “What did you do with the artifact?”

Angel started to tell him. After all, what harm would it do?

The sea of haze coalesced for just an eyeblink into the bloodless, dying face of Dan Stephenson, as if his visage was an answer to her unspoken question.

Where am I? Who’s asking?

The sea pushed back like the tide and reality flickered at its edges, swirling darker colors inward through the pink foam. Another face formed, but this one was no specter, no phantom of a dead man. This face was younger, handsome in spite of its imperfection, or perhaps because of it. A name pushed its way through the muddled fog of her thoughts, as if the word were a magic spell that could clear away her confusion.

Liu.

“Where is the artifact, Dr. Cortez?” Liu asked again.

“How do you know about it?” She hadn’t thought she was capable of putting together a coherent sentence, but it came out clearly, if softly.

“I told you,” Liu reminded her. “It was one of Dr. Stephenson’s workers…”

“No.” She tried to shake her head but couldn’t, the straps biting into her temples. “Not how you knew we had it. You had to know there was something here. There are digs all over the galaxy. What made this one so special?”

“I follow orders without pressing my superiors for details they don’t wish to give,” Liu said, and she wasn’t sure if she just imagined the impatience gathering beneath his calm depths. “Now tell me, where is it?”

“I don’t know what happened to it,” she insisted, not just saying the words but believing them, sensing the belief was important. “The last time I saw it was in Haricot’s townhouse. You should go check with him. Haricot must have it.”

Liu shook his head, admiration in his gaze.

“You are a tough one, Dr. Cortez,” he admitted. “But then, I suppose you would be. I’ve read your file. It’s quite extensive, you know. The Alliance maintains files on all westerners who travel among the nonaligned worlds and yours is particularly fascinating. You were born in Mexico… Sinaloa. Your father was a federale, your mother a prosecuting attorney. And when the cartels began to take over the government during the war, your parents did what any good parents would do and tried to get their twelve-year-old daughter somewhere safe. They tried to smuggle you into San Diego, but the cartels caught up with them first. Those cartel enforcers wanted to make you watch what they did to your mother and father.” Liu made a face. “The file was quite detailed. They were savages, of course, but amateurish in their enthusiasm. And you were to be next, a final warning to anyone who tried to enforce the law in those dark times. How did you escape that fate? That was one thing the dossier lacked, an explanation of how you wound up alone in downtown San Diego, an orphan, wandering nearly catatonic until the police picked you up. How did you escape?”

Angel didn’t want to tell him, but this question had spurred a wave of memories, washing over her like the tide rushing in, a rush that wouldn’t be denied, pouring out of her.

“My father… he’d managed to hide a grenade. He wasn’t supposed to have it, but he’d pulled it out of a cartel safehouse during a raid and saved it. When the Sinaloa cartel found us near the border, my parents tried to seek help with the local police, but they were paid off by the narcotraficantes. They didn’t search my father, though, since they didn’t want to give away that they’d betrayed him.”

She sucked in a breath, as winded as if she’d run a 10K race, sweat pouring down her forehead, matting her hair. And she was there.

“Don’t hurt them,” her father said. Emilio Francisco Cortez, Lieutenant in the Guardia Nacional, the inheritors of the original Policia Federale. He’d always been her hero, and seeing him scared made her even more afraid. “You have me. Do whatever you want to me. They’re innocent… don’t hurt them.”

The man they called El Principe laughed. Angel shuddered in the arms of her mother and wasn’t sure if Mama was shaking as well. Manuel Alejandro Santiago, second-in-command of the Sinaloa Cartel, the most wanted man in Mexico. Angel wasn’t even a teenager yet, but children in elementary school knew about El Principe, the Prince.

“You weren’t so concerned for innocent family when your platoon killed my grandfather,” El Principe sneered. “He was never a part of the cartel, just an old man driving with his son. But your people shot him.”

“It was a mistake,” Emilio insisted, pleading now. “One of your father’s men shot at us and my sergeant returned fire. I never ordered your grandfather killed. We didn’t even know he was there. Look, if you blame me for his death, I accept responsibility. I was in command, so anything my men did is my fault. Kill me, do whatever you want, but let them go. They can’t hurt you.”

“No, they can’t,” El Principe agreed. “But they can hurt you.

And he pulled the trigger. Angel jerked instinctively at the sound, hands going to her ears, but Mama was pulling against her arm. She didn’t know why, didn’t know why Mama was falling, why her white T-shirt was turning crimson. Why Papa was screaming.

But she did know what the thing was her father had pulled from his jacket. She’d seen it in the movies, the kind Mama didn’t want her watching, where men killed each other. It was a grenade. Much later, she’d wonder how the cartel gunmen hadn’t found it, why they hadn’t searched him, and she’d decide that they were just too cocky, too confident in their numbers and their reputation as cold killers. They figured no one would ever dare to fight back.

“Run, Angel!”

She would never know how she managed to do it. She didn’t think about her mother dying at her feet, about the men with guns, about what her father was about to do, just did what her Papa told her and ran as fast as she could for the door to the old, disused garage attached to the police station. One of the men made a grab for her, but she’d run track in school and out of the blocks, no one could catch her.

The sun was high and the glare blinded her on the way out, and she ran nearly into the arms of a man left outside to guard the entrance. He laughed at her desperate struggle and ran the cold steel of his shiny, nickel-plated revolver against her cheek. He was saying something she couldn’t hear when the grenade went off. It distracted him enough to slacken his grip, and when she pulled free, she took the gun with her.

Her father had taken her to the range twice, before Mama decided she didn’t like it. It was enough that she knew how to aim it and pull the trigger. She’d thought she’d fired just one round, but she emptied the cylinder, and the hammer was clicking on spent cartridge casings. The cartel thug was clutching at his chest, gasping, and choking on his own blood. She threw the gun down and ran.

And she’d never stopped running.

She shook her head, and tears she didn’t remember crying flew away.

“I don’t know why I did it. I was twelve, and I’d just watched my mom die. When I look back, I feel guilty that I was able to think about saving myself instead of losing my parents.”

She shouldn’t have been saying this, wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone. She hadn’t told anyone about that day since she was thirteen and had sworn never to speak of it again. But the same sense of pragmatism that had gotten her out of that police station a second ahead of the grenade blast whispered to her that this was the lesser of two evils, that tapping into the old pain would stop her from saying something even more damaging, something she wouldn’t let herself think of.

“I know people think of me as cold, callous,” she babbled on, past caring what she said, what embarrassing revelations she exposed in front of the commando team… or in front of Chase Weston. “Graduate students don’t want to work for me…” She stopped herself, somehow sensing she was skirting dangerous territory but not allowing herself to think of why. “But it helped me to survive when most wouldn’t have.”

Colonel Liu stared at her with a neutral expression, one that he must have worked very hard to perfect.

“That is impressive,” he admitted, nodding slowly. “Both what you had to do to survive and how effectively you used that memory to shut down the effects of the drug.” He applauded. “Yet I still want to know where the artifact is, Dr. Cortez.”

“I don’t know,” she said flatly, her voice disconnected from her conscious mind. “I haven’t seen it since we left Haricot’s townhouse.”

“What does it look like?” He was trying another tack ,and she wasn’t so muddled that she didn’t see the shift. “The artifact? Describe it to me.”

“Silver,” she said, deciding that the exact opposite of the truth would be the simplest path to take. “A sphere about two feet in diameter, and it glows, though it’s not radioactive. Impervious to X-rays, and it reads higher than the background temperature on thermal. We didn’t have time to figure out anything else.”

“And you don’t know what it does? What its purpose might be?”

“Not a clue.” And that part wasn’t a lie. “We’d just uncovered it when you attacked the dig.” Her lip curled. “And killed Dan Stephenson.”

Liu regarded her in silence, pacing in front of the dentist chair. Her eyes had trouble focusing on him, and the pink foam was returning, closing in on the edges of her vision.

“I could,” he declared finally, “give you another dose of the drugs and go through all this again. It would be unpleasant for you, possibly to the point of brain damage. Yet I hesitate to do that, not only because of the effects on you, but also for the fact that the more you repeat what I suspect are lies, the more your brain will settle on them as truth and the less likely I’ll get anything useful from you.”

Angel let herself breathe again. She wasn’t sure how long she could keep this up.

“No, I think it’s Sgt. Weston’s turn.”

The relief fled away, and Angel’s stomach tightened. She tried to convince herself it was because she was worried about him not holding up as well as she had… but if the drugs hadn’t kept her from lying to Liu, they at least refused to let her lie to herself.

* * *

“What the hell?” Victor Lee moaned, cradling his head in his hands. His temples throbbed, and his neck felt as if he’d slept on a rock.

He opened his eyes.

“Oh, yeah.” He had slept on a rock. But he didn’t remember falling asleep, didn’t remember being tired.

Fear, he did remember. Fear, panic, isolation, the fear of being all alone and the even greater fear of not being alone. It had been relentlessly dark, and he’d been hopelessly lost and somehow, he’d found this place. But it wasn’t dark anymore. Light turned the mysterious depths of the cave into mundane tans and reds and the black smear of dried mud, the shadowy interior only extending eight or ten feet before the rock face cut it off abruptly.

Victor edged toward the entrance on hands and knees, moving slowly and silently. The sun was near the horizon, and by the cast of the light, he was sure it was heading down and not up.

Did I sleep that long? It couldn’t have been full dawn when he’d found the cave. That would mean he’d been unconscious for nearly twelve hours. I must have been exhausted.

He backed into the cave, and his hand fell on the canvas of the duffle bag. Victor yelped and jumped back away from it, staring at the golden glow of the artifact, every memory rushing back to him in a surge of utter horror.

It was a dream, a nightmare. There was no way any of that could have actually happened. It was the product of an exhausted mind preyed upon by the fear of the tigers, the Chinese, and the corporate mercenaries, not to mention the background strain of carrying the alien artifact.

Yeah, that’s it. It was all a nightmare. I must have been nuts to think any of that was real.

And yet, it is true.

Victor screamed. He was, he realized, standing outside in the sun, in front of God and everyone, screaming his head off, and he abruptly shut up and ran back inside the cave, keeping the length of it separating him from the duffle bag.

“Calm down,” he told himself, closing his eyes, hands spread, palms toward the ground as if trying to steady himself against it. “Calm the hell down. Chase and Dr. Cortez need help, and they don’t need you panicking.”

And this was, he decided very much against his will, more important than which government got to study the artifact. He hated the thought because it was an admission that everything he remembered was, indeed, real, and that was enough to make him want to curl back up on the floor of the cave and cry like an infant.

Victor wasn’t sure why he didn’t do just that, why he didn’t throw in the towel on his sanity. Maybe it was the fact that Angel was in trouble, or maybe it was the residual effect of the neural linkage to the artifact and the way it had calmed his fears. Either way, he had to get back out and find that banana plantation before it got too dark for him to see, and more than that, he had to make sure that no matter what happened, the Alliance didn’t get their hands on the alien AI. Maybe he was being biased toward the culture he’d grown up in, but he couldn’t say with any certainty that the Chinese government would use the information that Emissary gave them for anything except seizing control of Earth.

But he also couldn’t chance losing the thing. And as he’d demonstrated more than once in just the last twenty-four hours, land navigation was not his strong suit. Victor stared at the bag, gears turning behind his eyes.

I’ve lost luggage in a lot of different airports, but I don’t think the baggage office is going to be much help this time.

He laughed sharply at a memory of trekking around the Cairo airport with Dr. Cortez scowling at him while he hunted for a lost suitcase. She’d wound up buying him a tracking strip that his phone could trace from up to two miles away…

Victor grabbed at his phone, clawed at the side of the protective cover, and pulled out the small, purple-colored tab. It was magnetic, but he didn’t think it would stick to the artifact. He tucked it into the side of the duffle bag, in a zipper pocket, then opened the app on his phone and held his breath. The purple glow on the screen hovered over the tab, then he moved outside and jogged fifty yards away. The purple halo got smaller on the screen but stayed in the same position.

“Holy hell,” he murmured. “This might actually work.”

* * *

In less than an hour, Victor was lost.

Well, I’m not lost lost. He knew where the cave was, could have found the artifact again if he had to. But he still couldn’t find that damned banana plantation.

It should have been easy. It was the only cleared land around for miles, and it was right there on his mapping software, but he couldn’t find it. The sun was heading downward with alarming rapidity, and he was going to wind up no better off than he had been last night.

I’m fucking useless. How the hell does that stupid machine think I’m going to save the galaxy from the Sunkillers when I can’t even find a damned farm in the middle of the jungle?

He slumped to the ground and took shelter behind a clump of brush, resting his hands on his knees. Heading back to the cave might be the smart thing to do. At least that was a known starting point. He was still debating the idea when a distant murmur teased at the edges of his thoughts.

That almost sounded like voices. But it couldn’t be. It had to be a creek, or maybe a tree swaying in the wind. An animal even.

No, those are voices!

He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but they were definitely human voices. It had to be the Chinese, out there looking for him. Did that mean Chase and Angel had given him up? Or were they just going off the idea that there had to be a third person carrying the artifact? Either way, once they didn’t find him, they had to head back to their base, that plantation.

I could follow them. If I keep them ahead of me, they’ll never know I’m there.

It was perfect, and he was so damned proud of himself for thinking of it, he nearly lost track of those voices. They were up on his right. He had to hurry, or they’d outpace him and he would be back to being lost in the dark, and maybe they’d even track him down.

No, there they were again. He heard them now, ahead and to the left. He risked making a little noise himself, roots and twigs crunching under his feet. They wouldn’t hear him, not while they were talking. They had to be on the other side of that stand of tall grass. It was like what he’d heard people call lion grass in Africa, though it couldn’t be the same thing, and not just because they were on an alien planet. This area was closer to Vietnam or India, or maybe even parts of Central America, so it couldn’t be that same kind of dry-growing vegetation. But it was close enough so he dubbed it lion grass in his head.

The Chinese had to be on the other side of it, near the stand of trees he could barely make out in the growing shadow of dusk. He could squeeze through the grass, maybe come out just behind them, and then he’d wait there until they moved off. They wouldn’t come through the grass… there’d be no reason for them to search in there.

He touched the long, green blades gingerly, half-expecting their edges to be razor-sharp, but they were yielding, soft, attached to a harder stalk, and they swayed to the side at his push. They rattled—softly, but enough to make him wince in embarrassment. It was a good thing they weren’t expecting him to be here.

He had to be near the edge of the clump of tall grass, but he still couldn’t see shit through the thick stalks. A glint of light caught Victor’s eye, and he pushed through one last clump of stalks.

On the other side of it was the yawning muzzle of an automatic rifle, and Victor yelped, then jumped back a step as he nearly rammed his eye into the barrel. And above the wicked-looking carbine, a familiar, bushy mustache rode a twisted grin,

“Well, hello there, Mr. Lee,” Sean Haricot said. “What an unexpected pleasure.”

OceanofPDF.com

26

Chase tried to steel himself for the onset of the drugs, but he couldn’t look away from Angel Cortez. She was strapped to the same office chair that had confined him only minutes ago, but the restraints probably weren’t necessary. She was lolling, her eyes unfocused, and moaning softly, and despite what Liu had said, he was still worried about the lasting damage from the drugs.

He hadn’t been special forces, so he hadn’t worked as closely with the CIA as the Sea Dragons did with Chinese intelligence, but he knew that they’d been after the holy grail of chemical interrogation for decades, and there still wasn’t anything foolproof. Anything powerful enough to break down mental barriers was also powerful enough to scramble your brain.

And now it was coursing through his veins, working its way up to his brain.

Small loss. Not like I’m an officer, or a pilot.

“Sgt. Weston,” Liu said, and Chase knew from the look the man gave him that he’d been watching Chase watch Angel. “Please believe me when I say that I sincerely hope this works.” He stepped close enough for Chase to smell the distinctive odor of someone who bathed with different soap and ate different food. “Because if it doesn’t, my friend,” he went on, a harder edge to his voice, “I’m afraid we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

* * *

Something wet was trickling from Victor Lee’s nose, but the haze hanging over his thoughts kept him from remembering what it might be, or connecting it with the coppery taste in his mouth. Everything was dark except for the lights flickering behind his eyes, the starbursts of pain, and the dirt was wet and sticky under his fingers.

But why was he on the ground?

Memory flooded back as if the hands snatching him up off the dirt had grabbed it and yanked it into existence. Haricot’s face wasn’t nearly as friendly as he remembered it. The light from the fading dusk cloaked it in malevolent shadow that mirrored the dark clouds gathered behind those formerly cold and calculating eyes.

“Where are your friends, Lee?” he demanded, cracking a slap across Victor’s cheek and bringing back another memory, that the blood running down his nose had come from a very nasty punch, a harder hit than Victor had taken even when he’d been mugged. “Where’s that asshole Weston? And what did they take from the dig?”

“I don’t know where they are,” Victor croaked, sticking with answering the first question since it was the one he could respond honestly to without betraying anyone. “The Chinese took them!”

“Chinese my ass!” Haricot drew back his fist, and Victor cowered, expecting another blow, but a large, meaty hand grabbed the other man’s wrist and held it in place.

“Sean, hold up a second,” a deep, sonorous voice said in a tone that made clear it was more than just a suggestion.

Sean Haricot looked around, his face screwing up in anger but settling into something closer to annoyance when he saw the man who’d spoken. He was tall, broad-shouldered, imposing, and intimidating in a way that even Chase couldn’t have managed. His skin was the color of well-worn teak and his dark hair was buzzed down to a light dusting in a widow’s peak. Like the rest of the squad of armed men clustered in the clearing, the big one wore civilian outdoor clothing, hiking pants, a loose-fitting button shirt, and work boots, and, like the others, he looked as if he’d be more at home in a uniform.

Victor squinted at the man, not wanting to cower but only able to think of how hard someone that big could hit.

“He ain’t gonna tell you shit if you beat him unconscious,” the big man pointed out, letting Haricot’s hand loose once it was clear that he wasn’t going to hit Victor again. “Let’s hear what he has to say.” The big man’s eyes were dark and serious and seemed uninclined to accept any sort of foolishness, for all that he’d stopped Haricot from beating Victor. “Why do you think the Chinese have your friends?”

“I saw them get taken,” Victor said, eager to say something that wouldn’t get him hit and also wouldn’t make him a snitch. “We were running from”—he shrugged and gestured around him—“well, from you guys. And Gavin, that nice security guy had… I mean, one of you guys killed him. And we had to run. And we were trying to call for our ship, but it didn’t answer. But this Chinese gunship found us, and I fell down a ditch and they didn’t see me, but Chase and Dr. Cortez got captured. I think I know where they are, and I’ve been trying to find them.”

The words had spilled out of Victor like a rush of water, and he gasped for breath as they ran out along with his air. He stared between Haricot and the other man, hands hovering around his chest, ready to block another blow.

“You’re saying the Alliance Special Ops team has the artifact?” Haricot asked, grabbing him by the collar of his jacket and pulling him closer.

Victor wiped blood away from his nose and nodded enthusiastically.

“They had it with them. The Chinese have to have it. And I know where they are.”

“I don’t believe him,” one of the others declared. She was short and thick-armed, like a bodybuilder, and her eyes smoldered with anger, though at who, he wasn’t sure. “He’s a lying little weasel, I can see it in his face.” She was carrying the same sort of carbine as the others, and she shoved the muzzle into Victor’s chest hard enough to draw an involuntary grunt of pain. “I say we hamstring him and leave him for those Goddamned cats, then make him beg us to kill him, and then he’ll tell us the truth.”

“Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ, Molly,” the big man said, sighing and rolling his eyes. “You know this is exactly why I didn’t want to hire her, Sean.”

Molly shot the big man a bird.

“Screw you, too, Wilson. What? You think you were joining the damned priesthood? This isn’t your precious Rangers… we’re working for Hart-Klein, and they don’t care about anything except results.”

Haricot shot the woman a pained look.

“And discretion, my dear Sergeant Kane. Don’t forget discretion. People are supposed to believe I still work for the CIA, recall.”

Molly Kane barked a laugh.

“Like this asshole’s going to tell anyone”—she leaned into Victor, eyes narrowing and he drew back—“anything. Ever.”

A few of the others chuckled in appreciation, and the bottom dropped out of Victor’s stomach. No, you’re the only hope they’ve got. You can’t shut down. They need you. And the worst these guys can do is kill you, and they already said they were going to do that.

“I’ll tell you where the Chinese have them!” he promised, raising his hands palms-out. “But you have to agree to let us go. I take you there and you get the artifact, and me and Dr. Cortez just go back to Earth, and I swear to God I’m never leaving again.”

Am I a good liar? No one’s ever said one way or the other. I hope that means I’m good at it.

The big man, Wilson they’d called him, eyed Haricot, tilting his head to the side in a question.

“You can’t be serious,” Haricot said, staring at him under hooded eyes. “He’s lying through his teeth, and even if he isn’t, you can’t honestly be suggesting we make a deal with this pissant!”

Wilson grabbed Haricot by the arm and guided him off to the side, speaking softly… probably thinking Victor couldn’t hear him, but the hissed words carried farther than the two men thought.

“What’s it matter if we tell him it’s a deal?” Wilson asked. “If the Alliance has the thing they dug up, we have to get it back. They won’t be expecting us. We can take them out before they even know we’re there. And if he’s lying…” Wilson glanced back at Victor, and there was something about the big man’s expression that gave him pause. Victor freely admitted to not being the most perceptive guy in the world, but he would have sworn in court that Wilson was worried about him. “Well, if he’s lying, we’re not out any more than some time, right? And like an old friend of mine used to say, you can only kill someone once.”

“Right,” Haricot murmured, eyeing Wilson doubtfully, then transferring both the stare and the doubt to Victor. He stepped closer, speaking up again as if he thought Victor hadn’t heard their exchange. “This is what’s going to happen, junior. You’re going to tell us where the Alliance has your friends, and we’re going to go kick their asses and take back from them what you took from the dig. And if they happen to live through that, which isn’t guaranteed at all mind you, because the Alliance won’t be giving them up easy, then we’ll let you and your pet cougar go, though getting back to Earth is your problem.” He raised a finger in warning. “But, if you’re screwing with us, then the suggestion Molly made about hamstringing you and leaving you for the tigers?” His smile was teeth-baring and reminded Victor of the catlike predator he’d seen the day before. “Well, that’s going to seem like the easy way out.”

* * *

Angel was tired of pretending to be semi-conscious, and she wondered if she was fooling anyone. The Sea Dragon commandos didn’t seem to be paying attention, but she was sure they were experienced enough at this sort of thing to know when someone was faking it. Still, admitting it and opening her eyes would have seemed like surrender, so she watched Colonel Liu snapping his fingers in front of Chase’s face through slitted eyelids, her head tilted to the side.

“Can you hear me, Sgt. Weston?” Liu asked, loud and precise.

Chase made a sound that was halfway between an affirmation and a grunt, but it seemed to be enough for Liu.

‘Good.” The Alliance officer crouched down, putting himself at eye level with Chase, peering intently into the blinking, unfocused blue. “You know, Sgt. Weston, you strike me as a hard man, one who wouldn’t hesitate to kill. Yet a life like that can prepare you for the wrong challenges. Tell me about the artifact.”

Chase spluttered, something that might have been a laugh, and he shook his head.

“Egg,” he said, the word slurred. “It’s a big, honking, golden egg.”

Shit. He was totally out of it, spilling everything. She wasn’t sure why she was surprised. Nothing about his character had overly impressed her yet.

“It’s important, I guess,” he went on, laughing again. “I don’t know why. If the Arborists had anything important to teach us, why didn’t they write it down with the rest of their shit? All they found was that they weren’t even as smart as we are. They killed themselves off. We didn’t do that.”

“Hold on a moment,” Liu said, raising a hand to stop Chase. “You’re telling me that Dr. Stephenson and Dr. Cortez are able to read Arborist script?”

“I guess.” Chase’s head swayed as much as it could against the straps holding it in place. “Could we not before? I dunno. I don’t keep up with that shit. But yeah, they found some kind of library. There are pictures of it somewhere… maybe. If they were smart enough to save them.”

“And this writing didn’t say what the artifact was?” Liu pressed.

“If it did, they didn’t tell me. All I know is that you guys want it, and Hart-Klein wants it, and that must mean it’s something big, and if you put a gun to my head and said I had to decide whether to hand something that big over to HKC or the Alliance, well…” He settled back into the chair, shoulders shaking with laughter. “I’d probably shoot you in the liver for putting a gun to my head. But I’d take the bullet before I let either of you assholes have it.”

“And yet, you said that Hart-Klein does have it,” Liu said, the corner of his mouth turning up in what Angel interpreted as triumph. “You did give it to them.”

Chase frowned deeply, an almost comical expression.

“Gavin was a good man. He had a kid. Haricot and those HKC bastards killed him. If I see that cocky son of a bitch Haricot again, I’ll break his neck.”

“And you would have died before you left that artifact with him, wouldn’t you?” Liu prompted.

“You’re damned right I would.”

“Then who has it?” The Alliance officer was like a predator lunging after its next meal, all fangs and claws. “Who has the artifact? You were seen with a third man coming off the ship. Someone younger. Does he have it? What’s his name?”

Chase was sweating. Angel sighed, not caring that it might give away her pretense.

Good. Sweating meant he was fighting, trying to keep from talking. It was the first sign he was aware of the drugs and attempting to resist.

“He’s no one important, surely,” Liu said, sliding smoothly, easily from the pouncing leopard to a sibilant serpent. “No one worth dying for. Just some functionary, Dr. Cortez’s flunky? What do you care about him?”

“Vic’s a good kid,” Chase protested, and Angel hissed a curse. “He’s out of his element here, but he’s trying. I think he’s infatuated with Angel… Dr. Cortez.” A moment’s silence. “Not that I can blame him. She’s great. Brilliant and tough as nails. Saw her put a knife right through some lowlife’s arm. I’d drop behind the lines with her any time.”

Warmth flooded Angel’s face, and she realized with a rush of embarrassment that she was blushing. Then she blushed even deeper for the embarrassment, and it was nearly enough to make her give up on pretending to be unconscious.

Why am I angry that he likes me? The question was just as unexpected as his admiration for her, and she found she didn’t have an answer.

“Except she doesn’t want to kill anyone,” Chase went on, the smile fading from his drug-addled face. “And I get that. I’ve killed enough people for both of us.”

Chase fell silent for a moment, his eyes closing, and Angel prayed that it meant he was unconscious, but he spoke again and ended that hope.

“I’ve killed more people than cancer. That’s what my friend Zack used to say.” Chase snorted a laugh, but there was no humor in it. “I think he meant it as a compliment. Dr. Cortez probably sees me like some kind of monster, but it never bothered me. I hear civilians talking about how guys like me gotta be haunted by the people we killed, but you know that’s bullshit. Almost all of them were right where they wanted to be and could have stayed out of the fight.”

“And what does haunt you, Sergeant?” Liu asked him, and Angel could tell he was fascinated by the turn of the conversation.

“What haunts me…” The answer nearly tumbled out of the man’s mouth, but Chase stopped it, which was amazing given how free he’d been with everything else. It took another moment for him to force the rest out. “North Manila Harbor. November 13th.”

“I remember that day well,” Liu said, nodding. “It was a hard-fought battle.”

“Bullshit,” Chase spat. “We were kicking your asses. Until one of you set off the tactical nuke inside the freighter.”

“It has never been proven in international court that it was Alliance armed forces who employed the nuclear weapon,” Liu said with the exacting tone of an official talking point. “The Chinese government and the Alliance ruling committee both maintain that it was a terrorist attack unrelated to our military goals.”

“I hope that shit lets you sleep at night,” Chase mumbled, shifting in his bonds as if he wanted to attack the man. “You bastards killed four thousand civilians. Not even mentioning the eight hundred US military personnel caught in the blast.”

“And where were you, Sgt. Weston?”

“My platoon was clearing the container ship Ocean Providence. When the blast hit, the wave capsized the ship.” His mouth twisted into a snarl. “I was lucky. I got swept out a hatchway, washed up beside an overturned tugboat and grabbed a line. My whole company was wiped out in seconds. Every friend I had.”

Chase’s eyes squeezed shut and tears trickled out.

“I don’t give a shit about the enemy soldiers I’ve killed, including yours. What keeps me awake at night are all those kids I couldn’t save.”

“And could you save Vic?” Liu asked him, putting a hand on his shoulder as if the two were lifelong friends sharing a drink. “Could you save him from Hart-Klein? From us?”

“Vic’s gonna save himself,” Chase insisted. “He has the balls to carry that damned thing, and I sure as hell wouldn’t. It gives me the creeps. God knows what it’s doing to us just being around it.”

“Min!” Liu snapped, jabbing a finger at one of the techs. He slipped into Chinese, but Angel had taken Mandarin as an elective in grad school on the theory that, if she could learn it, some alien language couldn’t be any harder. “Go over the phones we took from Sgt. Weston and Dr. Cortez. See if you can find the number for anyone named Victor or Vic.” He smiled that predatory grin again. “If he’s as out of his element as Sgt. Weston suggests, I doubt he’d have the awareness to shut it off.”

Liu seemed like he was about to run a victory lap around the building, his chest pumping, face flushed. He shook himself and settled down beside Chase again, fingers tapping the plastic surface of the dentist’s chair.

“Tell me something, Sgt. Chase. You don’t strike me as someone who would be satisfied being a bodyguard. What have you been doing since you left your military? Who have you worked for? HKC? Soong-Tierney?”

“No one.”

Liu laughed sharply.

“Don’t insult my intelligence. You haven’t been farming on a colony. Who did you work for?”

“I said no one,” Chase insisted, his drugged voice sullen as a teenager. “I… we were running bounties for Union Military Intelligence.”

“Bounties?” Liu repeated, head tilting to the side, not as if he weren’t familiar with the term but more as if he was horrified. “You mean…?”

“We raided your bases, your intelligence outposts, stole your gear and sold it to the Union. Until you took out my whole team. I watched them die. They’d counted on me to keep them safe, to make this work, and I watched them die. That was when I decided I couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t get other people killed because they were stupid enough to follow me.”

Liu snarled something that might have been meant to be a laugh.

“You know, Sgt. Weston, I had thought we might just kill you quickly, painlessly. I didn’t look forward to it, but these things must be done sometimes.” He shook his head. “Not anymore. I’m taking you back to Earth and dumping you at a blacksite somewhere in Manchuria where they’ll keep you alive for years after you wished you were dead.”

“Colonel.” Angel couldn’t move her head enough to look aside, but the voice sounded like one of the techs. “We found Victor Lee’s phone number, but there’s no way to track it from here without satellite coverage. We could send up the gunship, but…”

“…but he’d see it from ten kilometers away, yes.” Liu paced in front of the dentist chair, ignoring Chase, who was rambling incoherently now. Abruptly, he stopped and turned back toward the techs. “But I believe I have an idea. Do we have a location on the Tamar?”

OceanofPDF.com

27

“This is a bad fuckin’ idea,” Adrian Hill declared. “And I wanna make sure I go on record as saying that.”

“And as much as it pains me,” Chief Aguilar added, “I gotta agree with Hill. We just shook the one Alliance gunship, and now you wanna go put us in the sights of the other?”

“Stop running your mouths and do your jobs,” Pri snapped at them, instantly regretting it.

They were both right. This was nuts. She’d known it before she’d abandoned their very effective hiding spot behind Vishnu’s moon, and it was even more obvious as they descended through the atmosphere toward Jaipur. They were on the night side of the planet, but that did Jack shit to hide their thermal signature from orbital satellites or spy drones.

“I’m going to give you three good reasons why we’re going back,” she told her crew, not looking up from the main screen, expecting either or both of the Alliance gunships to pounce at them at any time. “And once I do, you’re going to shut up and Charlie Mike.” Continue Mission. That was Ranger talk, and she’d learned it from Chase many years ago. She held up her fist and extended a thumb.

“One, do you like eating? Do you like not having to work for some corporate bean-counter? In this business, keeping a steady income means being dependable. Which means not abandoning your clients, even when there’s a threat, because protecting them from threats is what they pay us for!”

Her forefinger.

“Two, this is my boat and my command. That’s what you all decided when we went in together on the Tamar, and if I was voted out since, no one bothered to tell me about it.”

Her middle finger.

“And three, Chase is one of us. And we don’t leave any of our own behind, even if it means getting our asses shot off. Do I hear any arguments?”

“No, ma’am,” Aguilar said, the words clipped off as if he was back in the Union Space Force again.

“No, Pri,” Hill echoed. “You know we’ll follow your lead,” he added with a twisted smile, “but I reserve the right to say ‘I told you so’ when this goes pear-shaped.”

“Noted,” she told him, glaring balefully. “Now start searching for their phone signals. If they’re in trouble, I know Chase has been calling us.”

“Not finding anything,” Hill announced, gaze flickering back and forth across the comm screen. “Not even a transponder signal. Their phones are either turned off or busted. And if… wait! I’m picking up a signal from Chase… or his phone, anyway.”

“Try to call it,” she suggested.

“Don’t have to,” Hill said. “He’s texting us.”

“Texting?”

“Yeah. I’ll throw it up on the main screen.”

The discrete packets of words streamed across the front display, typed in the abbreviated lingo of texts, which Pri’s mind translated automatically into regular English.

In trouble. Alliance troops hunting for us. Can’t talk. Need extraction at old banana plantation. Clearing there will be LZ. Separated from Victor Lee. Need you to do a low pass and track his phone signal, relay it to us so we can link up.

Pri grinned. Chase was a cockroach… nothing could kill him.

“Send a reply,” she told Hill. “Tell him we’re on our way. ETA in the area, ten mikes. Will contact once we’ve located Victor Lee.”

“Wonder what kind of trouble that kid has gotten himself into,” Aguilar murmured.

* * *

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Sean Haricot murmured, looking down the barrel of his carbine, using the thermal scope as a night-vision aid as he stared at the plantation house. “You aren’t stuffed full of shit, after all.”

Victor Lee tried to stand up and get a better look at the plantation he’d hunted for in vain for hours, but Molly restrained him with a grip like iron, digging into his shoulder hard enough to make him gasp.

“There’re Alliance troops out there,” Wilson confirmed and knelt down beside Haricot, staring out through his compact enhanced optics, which were barely larger and thicker than a pair of sunglasses. More than anything, they reminded Victor of ski goggles, and all the mercs were wearing them. “I make two sentries on this side, one at one hundred meters out, the other at fifty. Not to mention the drone surveillance and security scanners they’re sure to have out here.”

“Too hard for you, Wilson?” Molly taunted quietly.

Wilson didn’t deign to answer her, motioning silently to one of the other mercs in the squad.

“Give us twenty mikes,” Wilson told Haricot. “We should have the sensor spoofs ready by then. Fredericks and I will take care of the sentries, but once we hit the spoofs, we’ll only have a few minutes before the Alliance soldiers realize what’s going on. If we want to take Weston and Cortez alive, we’ll have to move fast.”

Wilson reminded Victor of Chase Weston. Not the others… certainly not Haricot. Haricot was a mercenary, but he was no soldier and had never been one if Victor was any judge. Maybe he’d worked for the CIA and maybe he hadn’t, but he was a killer more than a fighter. And the others, like Molly, were just criminals. Whether they’d ever worked for anyone’s army, they were hired guns now, thugs who would have been pirates or raiders if they hadn’t gotten a job working for Hart-Klein.

But Wilson was different. Professional, a killer but not a sadist. Victor wondered what the hell he was doing with this crew. Wilson and the other man, Fredericks, faded into the darkness of the jungle like ghosts, moving with stealth that belied their size. Victor could barely see their movements, and he wished for night vision. He could have brought a pair of cheap goggles with him, if he’d thought about it, though it was unlikely Haricot would have let him keep them. With the glow of the full moon through gaps in the ever-present clouds, Victor could just make out the man’s features, his mustache blending in with the camouflage paint on his face.

The mustache twitched in a sneer, and Victor knew the man was staring back at him.

“You’re a fool, Lee,” he said, the tone low and chillingly matter-of-fact. “Why the hell do you think I’d let you go after we get the artifact? You’re out of your league, kid. You should have stayed on Earth.”

“I sure should have,” Victor agreed without hesitation, and should have kept his mouth shut but couldn’t resist firing back at the man. “But what makes you think I’m telling the truth about the artifact being here?”

Haricot snatched off his night-vision goggles and glared at the younger man, and Victor grinned at the look of horror and fury in the man’s eyes. Haricot opened his mouth to yell something, though Victor couldn’t imagine what, so close to the Alliance lines. He never got the chance.

“Go!” Wilson’s voice was tinny and distant, but Victor was close enough to hear it over Haricot’s earpiece. “Go! Go!”

No one waited for Haricot’s order, which might have been a tribute to their training or, more likely, a statement about how little they valued his leadership. They simply rushed ahead into the darkness, leaving him no choice but to follow.

“Bring him!” Haricot hissed at Molly while gesturing toward Victor. “And watch him close!”

Molly’s grip was a vise on Victor’s arm, and he winced… and still couldn’t help but grin as she pulled him into the darkness.

* * *

Oh, my God, I fucked up.

Chase’s head felt like a gorilla had worked him over with a baseball bat, but the pain of the hangover from the drugs was nothing compared to the humiliation of how easily he’d talked. He hadn’t realized it at the time, hadn’t had any thought at all. It had been as if he was talking to himself, thinking out loud with no one listening. It would have been better if he hadn’t remembered any of it, like some colossal bender of the like he’d indulged in when he was a young enlisted man, but no, he remembered every word of it.

He couldn’t even look at Angel. She must think he was the biggest idiot in the galaxy. He concentrated on trying to translate what the Chinese Sea Dragon commandos were saying, which was something about Chase’s phone. He’d thought he’d secured it well enough to resist decryption even by the Chinese, but that had proven to be wishful thinking.

“We have a response from the Tamar,” one of the technicians reported, twisting around at her station to face Colonel Liu. “They’ve located Victor Lee.”

Damn it! Now I’ve gotten the kid killed, too.

“Excellent,” Liu said, casting a sidelong glance at Chase in what looked very much like gloating. This guy really held a grudge. Liu gestured to the two pilots lounging in the corner, conspicuously contrasting with the Sea Dragons by their demeanor and their uniforms. “Get the gunship ready to fly.” He turned back to the communications tech. “What are his coordinates?”

The technician frowned, brow wrinkling in what seemed to be consternation.

“Sir…” The woman shook her head. “This doesn’t make any sense. The Tamar says that Victor Lee is at the plantation house, close enough that Sgt. Weston should be able to see him.”

Liu’s eyes went wide and he scanned the room as if he thought they might have captured Victor’s phone along with Chase’s and Angel’s and not realized it. Chase had the same thought for a moment, followed closely by the horrifying notion that Victor Lee had followed them and was sitting outside in some crazy, stupid attempt to rescue them. But that was ludicrous. The kid could never have found this place without help.

Apparently, the same thing occurred to Colonel Liu at the same moment, because he touched a control on his earpiece.

“Sgt. Xiao, do you see anything out there? Any movement? Anything on thermal?” Liu frowned. “Xiao, are you there?” Liu murmured a curse and punched an address into his wrist control. “Sgt. Zhang, I can’t reach Xiao. Do you see her?”

Chase’s ears perked up, and all thoughts of his failure to resist the drugs faded along with the ache in his temples. He shot a look at Angel Cortez, but her expression was distracted, as if she was concentrating on something to the exclusion of all else. Her shoulders were tense, the muscles of her right forearm flexing as her wrist moved behind her.

Chase frowned, unsure what she was doing, until he saw something shiny and pointed between the fingers of her right hand. He didn’t know where she’d picked it up, but she was sawing at the plastic flex cuffs holding her to the chair, and when she noticed him noticing, she smiled. It was the first honest smile he’d seen out of the woman, and by God, if this was what it took to coax one out of her, he might have to settle for a scowl.

“Damn it!” Liu shouted, slamming his palm down on one of the equipment tables, the impact rattling the metal casing of a computer. “Can anyone get me comms with our LP/OP?”

There was a sound. It wasn’t loud, but it wasn’t silent like the movies and TV always portrayed it, either. It sounded more like a truck revving its engine, one of the local antiques that took a few tries to turn over, but Chase knew exactly what it was, and so did Liu. Suppressed automatic weapons fire.

The Sea Dragon colonel’s eyes went wide, but he didn’t let the surprise rule him for long. He jabbed a finger at the two techs, the only ones in the farmhouse not wearing combat armor and night vision.

“You two, stay and guard them. The rest of you, with me.”

Angel stopped sawing at her bonds, as if she sensed they would be under extra scrutiny for a few moments, and Chase did his best not to keep staring at her, instead looking around as if he, too, was trying to figure out what the noises were. Liu spared him a glare on the way out.

“If these are your friends,” he warned Chase, “you’ll get to watch them die before we take you back to Earth.”

“I don’t know who they are,” Chase replied, being honest without the need of any drug, “but I know they’re no friends of mine.”

Liu grunted with obvious skepticism as he pulled down his balaclava and his night vision goggles, but he made no further comment as he led the rest of the commando team out the door, switched off the lights before he opened it, then ducked quickly into the darkness. The rest of the team vanished into the night with the grace of a troupe of dancers. The two technicians assigned to stay with them followed close behind, the woman pushing the door shut before the man switched on an interior light. The two exchanged a worried glance, and they drew their sidearms, standing beside the door, straining to hear anything from outside.

Chase kept one eye on them and the other on Angel. She’d noticed where their attention was focused, and she was taking advantage of it, sawing the flex cuffs with renewed vigor. There was a nearly imperceptible click as the plastic parted, and then her hands were free and she was leaning over, slicing at the plastic binding her right foot. With better leverage behind the makeshift blade, the strip of plastic gave way in just seconds, and she didn’t even look up, just went to work on her other leg.

Chase watched the guards, sweat beading on his forehead. If they saw her, they’d likely shoot her, but both of them were still waiting at the door, and he could swear they were holding their breath. He glanced back at Angel and saw she was free but was still in her chair, watching the guards, waiting. He wanted to yell at her to hurry up to get him free, and he mouthed the words at her, but she wasn’t paying attention.

Gunfire again, the same hoarse stutter of suppressed rifle fire, but this time coming from all sides of the building. The woman stayed where she was and shut off the light, then she pulled the door open a few inches and peeked out through it, while the man ran to the other side of the building, to a shuttered window. That was, apparently, the break Angel was looking for.

She lunged from her chair but didn’t come to him to use the shard of metal on his bonds. Instead, she went to one of the worktables, where the Sea Dragon officer had placed their personal items… including their knives. Chase grinned and was sure he was in love.

If the techs had night vision, they would have spotted her immediately, but neither of them did, and the scant light from the computer displays was just enough for her to find one of the knives and dash back to Chase. The blade sliced through the plastic flex cuffs with ease and feeling came back into his hands with a pins-and-needles sensation. He barely had time to flex his fingers and shake his hands out before Angel was pressing the knife into his palm. Now that she was closer, Chase could see that she’d grabbed a second knife as well, the one she’d been carrying on Gateway and had presumably kept with her this whole time.

He swallowed hard. He didn’t want to ask this of her, knew she didn’t want to do it, but there was no other way. He motioned toward the woman at the door, then to Angel, then at his own chest and the man at the window. Angel hesitated for just a heartbeat before she nodded.

He couldn’t watch, couldn’t help—he had to trust her. And he found that he did, which was even more surprising than the fact he was hopelessly attracted to her. He crept up on the window, moving as stealthily as he could with a hangover the size of a starship and cramps traveling up and down his calves and through his shoulders. The Chinese technician had the shutter pulled aside and his nose pressed up against the cracked and stained glass, searching for movement, for the source of the brief bursts of gunfire outside.

He didn’t look up until Chase snaked an arm around his throat and yanked him backward. The technician attempted a yell but only managed a squeak before the knife plunged home. Chase knew some people aimed for the kidney, some for the carotid artery, but he was too used to fighting soldiers in armor and he went straight for the eye, the blade sinking home into the brain. He ripped it free with a familiar, sickening crunch and the Alliance technician collapsed bonelessly.

Chase grabbed the handgun off the ground where the man had dropped it and spun back toward the door, but he was too late. Angel Cortez held the other technician’s arm behind her back, restraining the Alliance soldier as her life ran out from the gaping wound in her neck. Angel let the woman drop and watched as the last few spasms ran through her.

“Are you okay?” Chase asked, knowing how inane the question was but unable to keep himself from blurting it out.

By way of reply, Angel wiped the knife blade clean on the soldier’s fatigue blouse and then sheathed it at her belt. Chase retrieved the dead woman’s handgun and held it to Angel butt-first. It was a QSZ-92 5.8mm and while he didn’t care much for the cartridge, it was better than nothing. Angel took the weapon, a look in her eyes that was half anger and half surrender.

“What’s out there?” she asked, checking the pistol’s load with experienced motions, her finger held off the trigger.

“People who want to kill us.” He shrugged, remembering something, and turned back to the table with their things, grabbing both their phones and slipping Angel’s into her jacket pocket. “And, I think, Victor.”

“Well, we better go make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.” She motioned at the door. “You first.”

He smiled tightly as he passed her, handgun held at the high ready.

“Yes, ma’am.”

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28

“Get down, you moron!” Molly snapped at Victor, pushing him to cover behind the remains of an old tractor.

Victor could barely make out the lines of the thing by the moonlight, but he could hear quite clearly the pings and thocks of the bullets on the other side of the machine. Molly had crowded beside him, and she leaned out, firing off a burst from her rifle, then another before retreating back and switching out the magazines.

“Who’s winning?” Victor asked her, panic gnawing at his gut. He wasn’t sure what he wanted the answer to be, since if the Chinese won, they’d still have Chase and Angel, but if Haricot won, he’d be pissed that the artifact wasn’t here and he’d take it out on Victor.

“Beats the hell out of me,” Molly admitted, apparently too distracted to remember she hated his guts. She sounded as confused as Victor was, which he supposed was comforting since she was wearing night vision gear and had a radio earpiece in place.

Something exploded, and Victor cried out, curling into a fetal position and covering his ears. Another blast, closer this time, close enough that the body of the tractor vibrated with the concussion and flares of light sparked afterimages in his vision. Victor couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, and he felt around him, trying to find the tractor so he wouldn’t accidentally wander out into the line of fire.

His hand came down on top of something wet and yielding, and he cursed and pulled it away. His vision cleared enough to make out the lines of a body, and he realized it had to be Molly. He didn’t mourn for the woman, mostly because he was sure she would have killed him if she could have gotten away with it, but she’d been the only one trying to protect him, and another rattle of bullets off the tractor reminded him that he definitely needed protection.

Victor gritted his teeth and felt for the woman’s face. Her skin was still warm, and so was the blood splashed across it, but he found what he was looking for, the straps of her night-vision goggles. Pulling them on over his own head was even worse than touching the dead woman, since her blood still drenched the strap, but being blind and vulnerable out here was even worse.

The interior of the lenses glowed green and once he had them over his eyes, the whole world glowed green, but at least he could see. He peered out into the tall grass and trees behind the tractor and saw figures moving through them, still nearly invisible even with the goggles on. He shrank away from them… no matter whose side they were on, they were still his enemy. Victor scrambled off to the right side of the tractor, keeping low, hoping he might be able to crawl around the other side of the farmhouse and find a way inside.

He was so interested in staying low and avoiding the soldiers behind him that he didn’t even notice the one standing only twenty feet ahead of him, between Victor and the farmhouse. The soldier was Chinese, Victor could tell because of the balaclava the man was wearing, but it didn’t really matter if the rifle the man held was Chinese or American, the important thing was that it was pointed at Victor’s head.

Bang.

Victor flinched at the sound of the shot, but he immediately knew he wasn’t hit, that it wasn’t the Alliance soldier who’d fired. The Chinese commando tilted sideways, staggering as if he were drunk, and when his head turned to the side, Victor could see that the back of it was gone, though thankfully the night-vision glasses robbed the image of the gut-wrenching depth and color it might have had.

Victor didn’t dwell on the dead Alliance soldier, more interested in the two figures coming up behind him, backlit by a gentle glow of the farmhouse door, now hanging open.

“Angel!” he blurted. “I mean… Dr. Cortez! Sgt. Weston! Are you okay?”

“As okay as we’re going to be,” Chase told him, yanking the rifle off the shoulder of the dead Alliance soldier. Gunfire smacked into the side of the farmhouse, and Victor ducked. “Who the hell is out there, Vic?”

“Haricot. He found me wandering around looking for you, and I promised him the artifact if he rescued you.”

“Tell me he doesn’t have it,” Angel said, grabbing his arm.

“No, I hid it,” Victor assured her. “I told him you had it with you when the Chinese captured you.”

“Good thinking,” Chase said, clapping him on the arm.

Chase handed over the pistol he’d used to kill the commando, and Victor took it with a catch in his breath. He’d thought it would make him feel more powerful, but for some reason, he only felt more vulnerable.

“And I’m glad you’re alive,” Angel added, the gentleness of her tone surprising him before it disappeared into harsh imperative. “Now take us to that artifact.”

Chase guided Victor away from the tractor with a steering hand on his shoulder, and the three of them ran for the trees and away from the gunfire. Winding through the trees, head ducked down in a futile attempt to avoid stray bullets, Victor felt the tug of idle curiosity at the edge of his thoughts, and he wondered who would win the fight. And he thought about his Uncle Tommy, an unrepentant Raiders fan. When Tommy watched the Chiefs play the Broncos, Victor would ask him who he was rooting for. Uncle Tommy always replied with one word.

“Injuries.”

* * *

“Are you sure you can find this cave again?” Angel asked for what Chase thought had to be the third time in the last half an hour. Not that he was ready to criticize her for talking too much, given how he’d spilled his guts to Liu under the drugs.

“Kind of,” Victor admitted, then threw his hands up in surrender. “I mean, I thought I was being smart, leaving the luggage tracker with the thing, but then Haricot took my damned phone.”

Victor sounded put out, probably because they were making him walk point… but he was the only one with night vision goggles and also the only one who—theoretically—knew where they were going, so there hadn’t been any choice. Chase slapped at a mosquito and cursed, wishing he had the spray he’d carried with him in his pocket, but the Chinese had taken that. Probably thought it was some sort of chemical weapon.

The thought of the things the Alliance had taken from him brought to mind his phone, and he shrugged, then pulled it out to try again. He’d attempted to call Pri just as soon as they’d gotten clear of the farmhouse battle, but she hadn’t responded and he’d assumed they were too far away with too many trees between for a line-of-sight signal.

“Pri, this is Chase,” he said, abandoning any commsec, communications security, since everyone trying to find and kill them already knew who they were and what frequency they were on. “You there, Pri? Talk to me, Tamar.”

Nothing, and he was about to put the phone away when a small, tinny voice called desperately for his attention just as he was about to tuck the device in his pocket.

“Chase, it’s Pri! Do you read?”

Chase held up a hand to bring the others to a halt, then took a knee, trying to reduce their silhouette in case anyone was looking for them. Angel followed his example, but Victor hesitated, still looking around with his night-vision goggles, until Angel yanked at the back of his shirt and pulled him to the ground.

“I got you, Pri,” Chase said, unable to keep the relieved sigh out of his voice. “Damn, it’s good to hear from you. We’re in some deep shit here.”

“The shit don’t get any shallower on this end, Weston,” Adrian Hill cut in on the comms. “We had a damned Alliance gunship chase us around the damned moon a few times. And I wouldn’t count on them giving up.”

“Shut up, Adrian,” Pri snapped. “Chase, we tried for a pickup at the plantation, but it’s too hot down there, and I couldn’t stick around once the gunship took off.”

“It wasn’t me who tried to get you to land there,” Chase explained. “We were picked up by Sea Dragon commandos. They were trying to use our phones to get to Victor, but we got away when Hart-Klein mercenaries attacked trying to get at an artifact from the dig.”

“Hart-Klein?” she repeated, confusion obvious in her tone. “Sea Dragons? Artifact? Chase, what the hell have you gotten yourself into down there?”

“Too long of a story to tell right now. Pri, if I give you the code for a remote luggage tracer, can you track it down and guide us to it?”

“You lost your luggage? Is this really our number one priority right now?”

“It’s important,” he said, trying not to sound angry with her. “Can you send a route to my phone?”

“All right, wait one.”

Sitting in one spot was a risk, and not just because it gave the bugs an opportunity to swarm around them, but wandering around blindly was an even bigger gamble, so he waited. Victor started to ask a question, but Chase shushed him, then checked again to make sure he was keeping his finger off the trigger of the Chinese pistol… or, as his old Ranger instructors used to say, keeping his booger hook off the bang switch.

“Okay,” Pri said after a few minutes, probably spent circling to triangulate. “I got you a location, and the coordinates are on your phone. Shouldn’t be more than a half an hour away on foot.”

“Thanks, Pri. Can you meet us there in a half an hour, then, for a dustoff?”

“Roger that. I’ll find the closest LZ and contact you then. If I see anyone on your tail, I’ll try to let you know, but I’m going to be flying low to try to avoid those Alliance ships, so I might not have signal.”

“Copy. Do what you have to do, Pri. I’ll see you soon.”

Chase checked the dead-reckoning mapping software on his phone and found the course Pri had sent to him.

“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head, “we were going the wrong direction.”

“Well, sorry,” Victor said, gesturing a bit too wildly with the gun. “I’m not great with the whole cardinal directions thing!”

“That’s a weapon, not a damned pointer. Keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction or I’ll take it away.”

“Yes, sir,” he said quickly, pointing the muzzle at the ground.

“And don’t call me ‘sir,’ I work for a living.” Chase realized he was slipping into drill-sergeant mode and reminded himself that the kid wasn’t a new recruit in basic training. Although this is as rough a basic training as any I’ve ever heard of.

“And give me those damned night vision goggles,” he added, holding out a hand. Victor was shamefaced as he handed them over. The deep of night turned to the greenest day, and Chase felt as if he was whole again. He offered Angel his cell phone. “I’ll walk point if you can navigate for me, Dr. Cortez.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she sighed, snatching the device from him. “I think you can call me Angel.”

Chase smiled, though he knew she couldn’t see it.

“Tell me where to go, Angel.”

“Be careful what you wish for… Chase.”

* * *

“This is it!” Victor said, nearly yelling in his relief at finding the cave. He ran into the entrance before Angel could tell him to stop and let Chase clear the cave first.

She shook her head and handed Chase back his phone.

“How that boy has survived this long, I don’t know.”

Chase tucked the phone into his pocket and ducked inside the cavern, the barrel of his rifle held low. Angel tried to imitate him as she backed in, keeping an eye on the way they’d come. There was a glow in the cave, and she wondered if Victor had stashed a flashlight inside, but a glimpse from the corner of her eye caught a hint of soft gold, and she knew the truth of it.

“Why do you have that thing out?” she asked Victor. “I thought we agreed it could be dangerous, and we shouldn’t touch it. I believe you were one of the biggest proponents of not touching it.”

“Oh, we’re way past that now, Dr. Cortez,” Victor said, a tinge of fear behind the snark. “I kind of, like, psychically bonded with an alien AI.”

“What?” Angel abandoned her post searching for threats as well as the idea of trying to keep her voice down and lunged into the cave.

Victor was sitting cross-legged beside the glowing golden orb, chin resting on his fists, staring at it.

“He says I should tell you everything,” he said with all the enthusiasm of an elementary school student explaining to his parents why he’d been called to the principal’s office. “I’ve tried to tell him that it’s not a good time, but he insists.”

“He?” Chase repeated, eyes narrowing, looking as if he was about to try to take back that Chinese service pistol sitting next to Victor’s leg.

“Well, I guess technically, he doesn’t have a gender, since he’s an alien and a computer. But it’s easier to think of him that way.”

“Assuming you’re telling the truth,” Angel said, trying not to let the possibility short-circuit her brain, “and assuming this… thing… is not only real, but is also telling the truth, what the hell does it have to say that’s more important than the Alliance commandos and corporate mercenaries hunting for us?”

“There’s like something out there.” Victor began to motion with the sidearm, then seemed to remember Chase’s warning and used his other hand instead, waving outward at the sky. “Like, another alien species but different from the People.”

“The People?” Angel said. Then she closed her eyes and rubbed at her temples. “You mean the Therapods? Don’t tell me that’s what they call themselves?”

“Yeah, I said that, too,” Victor agreed, brightening for a moment. “But you know how primitive societies are, and everyone gets their name for things when they’re primitive. At least that’s what the Emissary said.”

“The Emissary,” Chase said, and Angel realized they were both starting to sound like parrots. “That its name, the computer?”

“Emissary for the People, to be exact.”

“That sounds like a rap singer,” Chase said and Victor pointed at him, nodding agreement.

“Doesn’t it? But anyway, there’s these other aliens, like maybe a hive mind or something. I didn’t quite get that part. But they’re pissed off that any other intelligent life exists except them, or maybe they’re paranoid it’ll kill them? That wasn’t quite clear either…” Victor touched the glowing orb for just a second, as if it had called to him, and his eyes glazed over, but cleared up the second he let go. “Emissary says it might be both. They can’t understand the Sunkillers any more than we can understand the Arborists.”

Angel almost repeated the word, then sighed, determined not to do that again.

“Why are they called that?” she asked instead.

“Because that’s what they do. They sent out a bunch of ships, each the size of a big asteroid, like Ceres, with those Bussard ramjet things on them.”

“Bussard… what?” Chase frowned, shaking his head.

“It’s a theoretical fusion engine that sucks in the interstellar hydrogen for fuel,” Angel told him. “It’s way beyond our capability to build, but there’ve been descriptions of it in popularized science for decades. No one knows if it would work because there’s debate on how thin the interstellar medium is on hydrogen.”

“Well, it works,” Victor assured her. “Because the Sunkillers have been using them to destabilize the stars of any world with intelligent life… or even the possibility of developing intelligent life. They’ve been working their way across the galaxy ever since the People made contact with them tens of thousands of years ago. And they’re headed this way.”

“What do you mean this way?” Chase pressed, taking a step closer, but then hesitating, as if he was afraid that approaching too near the orb would infect him with the same delusions Victor was having.

“I mean, they’re working their way toward us,” Victor said, the edge in his voice a signal he was beginning to get pissed off, either at their disbelief or the position into which he’d been put, or maybe both. “They may not destroy Vishnu’s star, because God knows nothing intelligent would have ever evolved here with all the damned big cats ready to rip it apart, but they’re definitely going to hit the Sun. Our sun. And the Emissary says we have to…” Victor rubbed at his face, looking like he was about to pass out. “Oh Christ, he says we have to get everyone to believe us so we can collect a bunch of other orbs just like him and then find this planet where they collected all the technological information they stored up over thousands of years and use it to try to stop the Sunkillers, and good fucking luck, because the People couldn’t. And look at us, man!” He nearly sobbed the words. “Look at us! We got mercenaries from a corporation and Chinese soldiers after us trying to get an edge that’ll make it easier for them to take control, and they don’t even know what we’ve got! Can you imagine them getting their hands on all the collected knowledge of some ancient alien race? Shit, I don’t even trust the Union with that kind of power and I like the Union government.”

He had a point, though admitting that would mean admitting she believed any of this, which was a concession she wasn’t willing to make.

“This can all wait,” Chase said, “no matter what your friend in the golden egg says. We need to get to the LZ and get the hell out of here, then we can debate whether alien computers talk to Vic in his brain or if he’s just gone too long without food and sleep.”

“Oh, Jesus, did you have to mention food?” Victor moaned, rubbing his stomach. “I feel like I’m going to die…”

The gunshots weren’t loud, weren’t the sort of explosion of sound Angel expected from an automatic weapon, but even with their integral suppressors, the report of the rifles echoed in and out of the cave, nearly drowning out the spack-spack-spack impact of the rounds on the rock walls.

“Down!” Chase yelled, slamming into her, taking her and Victor to the rock floor in a body block that would have done a rugby player proud.

Angel’s breath left her in a whoosh, and the only reason she wasn’t cursing him for knocking her over was the cold rush of fear closing down her lungs and her ability to speak. Motion broke the spell… Chase’s motion. He didn’t hesitate. It seemed like he never did. He rolled off them and into the mouth of the cave, the Chinese rifle snug against his shoulder, and began firing off short, controlled bursts of fire. Angel scrambled over to help him, pulled the service pistol he’d given her out from beneath her, and pointed it at the darkness, hoping either of them could hit anything.

“Hold fire! Hold fire!” That voice… it was Sean Haricot. “Weston, we know you’re in there! We used the kid’s phone to track you down.”

“Damn it,” Victor muttered, still huddled behind the alien orb as if it could protect him from bullets.

“What do you want, Haricot?” Chase replied, then rolled off his position and motioned for Angel to do the same thing.

“You don’t have to die here. I know you’re just a working man like me, a contractor. That thing they found, it doesn’t mean anything to you. Just let us have it, and you can walk out of here.” Haricot chuckled. “Now, I won’t be covering your contract or anything, but you’re a resourceful man. I’m sure you’ll find your way off this ball of mud. And it’s a hell of a lot better than taking a bullet for these university assholes.”

“Not a chance,” Chase yelled back. “The only way you’re getting this thing is if all three of us walk away.”

Angel glanced at him sharply, but he shook his head and tapped his wrist as if there were a watch there. She understood. He was playing for time… and he had his phone out. He was texting something one-handed, a skill she’d never mastered. And there was only one person he could be texting. Angel looked at the sky and offered a prayer to a God she hadn’t given much care for in the last twenty-five years.

“Oh, I’d love to do that for you, Chase. Truly I would. But my employers seem to think the archaeologists…”

“Xenoarchaeologists!” Angel put in, getting sick of the smarmy, too-handsome man.

“Beg your pardon, Dr. Cortez. They seem to think you xenoarchaeologists will be necessary to interpret the importance of your find. But I can guarantee that I won’t hurt your friends. And I’m sure Hart-Klein will treat them fine… as long as they cooperate.”

“They’ll never let us go free,” Angel said, knowing this was all to stall the mercenaries and trying to help. “Hart-Klein would squeeze everything they could out of us and then we’d be disappeared. They’re no better than the cartels.”

“Sgt. Weston,” Haricot said, “I have an old friend of yours out here. He seems to think he can talk some sense into you. If he approaches, do you agree not to shoot him?”

Angel looked a question at Chase, and he shook his head in bewilderment.

“Tell him to keep his hands in sight,” he called back.

The figure that emerged from the darkness was tall and broad-shouldered, his skin dark enough that it almost blended in with the night without the benefit of camo paint. His rifle was slung across his back, his hands out to the side, heeding Chase’s request. Angel watched the expression on Chase’s face change from bewilderment to disbelief, though he didn’t rise from the prone position until the other man filled the entrance to the cave.

“Hey Sarge,” the big man said, nodding. “Didn’t think we’d meet up in a situation like this.”

“Zack Wilson,” Chase breathed, raising to a crouch, his rifle still trained on the man. “Don’t tell me you’re working for these Hart-Klein shitheads.”

“Hey, a man’s got to eat, brother.” Wilson patted his stomach in illustration. “It’s not like I could show a damned résumé after what happened to our old outfit. And HKC was hiring.”

“You could have come with me,” Chase said, and Angel could have sworn the man sounded hurt. “I offered you a spot on the team.”

“Personal protection?” Wilson shook his head. “I happen to know you and Pri barely make enough money to keep that boat in the air. I want to retire someday, Sarge. And HKC even has a damned health plan.”

“So, this is a recruiting pitch?” Chase guessed. “I hand over Dr. Cortez and the kid and that thing”—he motioned at the glowing orb—“and I get a nice, fat, HKC paycheck?”

“That ain’t up to me,” Wilson admitted. “But I’ll put in a good word. But, Sarge…” Wilson leaned closer, speaking softly. “Just between you and me, there are some of these people who aren’t as sentimental as I am. They’re not going to be patient much longer.”

How Angel saw the movement in the night, she wasn’t sure. It was just as dark out there as it had ever been, and her eyes were no better adapted to the night than they had been minutes before. It was just a shift of something dark against the slightly lighter tones of the sky, but it was enough for her to see the gun swinging around.

“Look out!” she yelled, and Chase trusted her and moved.

But he didn’t go alone. He grabbed Zack Wilson by the front of his tactical vest and pulled him down just as the front of the cave exploded. Concussion rang Angel’s head like a handbell, and pain blossomed in her head and left shoulder as the force of the blast threw her back against the cave wall. Lights exploded in her vision, and it was all she could do to stay conscious, much less try to figure out where her handgun had wound up.

It was, she realized somewhere deep in her consciousness, a grenade. Probably launched from a rifle, and she was lucky to be alive. Chase and his old friend Zack Wilson were moving, though there was blood staining Chase’s left sleeve and pant leg, and his night-vision goggles had been dislodged, lost somewhere in the smoke and haze that filled the small cave.

Only Victor seemed to have emerged unscathed from the attack, though he was curled up into a ball, shuddering, in obvious shock.

And they’d be coming. Dark forms were moving in the night, rushing forward, and she had to do something. There was no one else…

But there was. The sound of the S-T drive overhead was angel’s wings, and the chuff of its Bofors guns was the last trumpet. Or at least it was for the HKC mercenaries. The explosions that tore apart the night made the grenade seem like a July 4th firecracker. They kicked fountains of dirt twenty feet into the air and threw bodies around like leaves on the wind. The fire and fury of their detonations was such that Angel didn’t even see Sean Haricot until he was already in the mouth of the cave, rifle pointed at Chase.

Chase had just managed to struggle into a sitting position, though his stolen Chinese rifle was three feet away, and might as well have been a hundred miles. He blinked and shook his head, seeming as if he were having trouble focusing on Sean Haricot or the muzzle of the rifle.

“Call them!” Haricot bellowed, his words atonal, like he couldn’t hear himself talk from the concussion of the bombardment. “Tell them to cease fire and land now or I’ll kill every single one of you, starting with the kid!”

Haricot shifted his aim to Victor, and didn’t seem to notice Zack Wilson getting to his feet. The big man wore a mask of blood and an expression of unbridled rage. He didn’t try to swing his rifle around off his back, just pulled a handgun from a chest holster and started shooting.

At Haricot. Angel knew the mercenary was wearing armor, and she couldn’t tell how many of the rounds penetrated, but she saw blood spray from the side of the man’s neck and the rifle fell from Haricot’s hands as he pressed them against the side of his throat and ran. She wished for the guns of the Tamar to catch him somewhere out there, but the fire from above had ceased, as had the gunfire from the darkness outside.

All that was left were the echoes.

Chase stared up at Zack Wilson, doubt and pain twisting his features, clearly expecting the big man to shoot him as well. But Wilson sighed, holstered his gun and offered Chase a hand.

“Come on, Sarge.” He stared off into the night and shook his head. “Guess I’m going to need another job.”

OceanofPDF.com

29

“Zack Wilson!” Chief Aguilar exclaimed as the big man clomped up the boarding ramp, supporting a wounded Chase Weston from one side while Angel Cortez held him up on the other. “Holy shit, I never expected to see your ugly ass again!”

“I’m like a bad penny, I guess,” Wilson told him, nodding to the chief but under obvious strain, not just from helping to carry Chase but from his own wounds. Blood had soaked through the right side of his fatigue shirt just under the armored tactical vest. “Sick bay still in the same place?”

“Get him strapped in,” Aguilar advised, waving the big man down the passageway. “Might be rough. That Chinese gunship is back on our tail, just entered atmosphere.”

Victor’s ears pricked up at the announcement, and he tapped Aguilar on the shoulder as the others went toward the sick bay. The chief eyed him doubtfully, though to be fair, he seemed to look at everyone that way.

“Where should I go?”

Aguilar snorted softly.

“That’s a loaded question, boy. For right now, come on up to the cockpit and find a seat. We’re out of here as soon as the ramp is up.”

Victor followed the surly NCO back through the narrow passage to the Tamar’s cockpit, so relieved to be back on the ship he nearly collapsed into the first seat he found, one of the fold-down chairs at the back of the compartment.

“What? We got a foundling in here with us?” Adrian Hill asked, looking back at Victor askance.

“Just do your job, Adrian,” Pri snapped. She was tracing lines back and forth on her touch screen like an artist painting a virtual portrait, her eyes locked on the sensor screens. “That gunship is about ten seconds behind us.”

“Roger, cap’n,” Hill drawled. “Reactor’s up, ramp is closed. Ready to lift.”

The ground fell away and Victor’s stomach stayed with it. He clamped his teeth shut and tried to keep the bile down, staring at the front screen to keep his visual cues aligned with his inner ear.

“Why’d you bring your luggage with you, kid?” Chief Aguilar asked, moving into the cockpit with the grace of an ice skater despite the gyrations of the ship.

Victor started and stared down at the duffle bag resting in his lap, the strap still slung around his shoulder. He hadn’t even realized he’d brought it along, could have sworn he meant to leave it in the cargo bins just inside the ramp.

It didn’t want to be left alone.

“They’re five seconds behind us,” Hill added helpfully, earning a noncommittal grunt from Priyanka.

“This is the most dangerous time in a firefight,” Chief Aguilar confided to Victor, leaning over in his seat as if he was a tour guide. “Before we leave the atmosphere, I mean. You know why?” Victor shook his head, hoping the man would take it as a signal to shut up, but Aguilar took it as a cue to explain what he meant. “This is when we’re vulnerable to the enemy’s S-T drive missiles.”

“They have those?” Victor asked, cursing himself when it came out in a squeak.

“Oh, yeah,” Aguilar confirmed, nodding firmly. “They’re the only thing that can match the speed of an S-T drive starship… but only in an atmosphere. The Tamar can actually outrun the missiles in space because the S-T drive speed is totally dependent on the power source, and a nuclear reactor is better than the batteries the missiles carry.” He sounded proud, either of the fact that the ship had a nuclear reactor or of the fact he knew the physics of it. “But in an atmosphere, there’s also air drag, and the missiles have less of that. Oh, and look, here they come.”

Aguilar pointed to the targeting screen, where four red delta shapes had separated from the bigger red delta that Victor assumed was the Alliance gunship. The missiles were, as advertised, damned fast. They outpaced the Chinese gunship as if she were standing still, streaking across the screen and the dozens of miles that space represented and closing in on the Tamar. Victor gripped the armrests of his chair with white knuckles and checked the main viewscreen to see if the missiles were visible in the optical cameras.

They were on the light side of the world now, the primary star a golden glow across the curve of the ocean, turning it into a white haze, and somewhere in the rear views, four pinprick glints pursued them, growing larger every second.

“Oh, shit,” Victor murmured, his breath ragged and short. “Oh, shit, oh, shit.”

“Don’t worry, son,” Aguilar assured him, patting the joystick in front of his display. “We have these.” He flipped a switch and adjusted the joystick, and servomotors whined, the vibration conducting through the metal of the hull.

“Th-those big guns in the front of the ship?” Victor guessed, remembering Chase’s threats back in the spaceport.

“Naw, those are in the front. Those are for offense. These are for defense.”

Aguilar teased the targeting reticle over the blob of white and silver that was the lead missile, and squeezed the trigger. A slight shuddering, like a truck going over ruts in a road, and the missile flared briefly and tumbled out of the air, a pinwheel flickering in the sun.

“20 mike-mike Vulcans,” Aguilar said, his grin predatory.

Another adjustment of his aim, another long squeeze of the trigger, another missile sent tumbling, this time close enough that Victor could determine the shape of it. A wedge, a chisel like his Uncle Tommy had used to work wood. Two left, still closer, though the air was getting thinner, the sky more black than blue, and the missiles seemed to be gaining less on the Tamar.

Another burst.

“Shit,” Aguilar murmured.

“I don’t like it when you curse, Chief,” Pri told him, though she didn’t look away from the flight controls. “Especially not when you’re shooting down missiles on our six.”

“I’ll get ’em,” Aguilar insisted, finger caressing the joystick like it was an old lover.

A longer burst this time, long enough for Victor to catch the faint whirr of the barrels spinning. The third missile came apart like a plastic model rocket, and the old man laughed, a sound of genuine happiness, as if this was what he lived for.

“Yipeekiyay,” Aguilar crowed.

“There’s one left,” Hill reminded him, and he sounded not nearly as jovial as the chief. “Four miles.”

“Got him, got him, got him,” Aguilar chanted like a prayer. “Last one, he can’t carry more than four in a ship that size. Twelve hundred rounds left. Might as well use it all.”

Aguilar’s finger stroked the trigger and this time, the whine of the barrels and the shudder of the 20mm rounds firing shook the ship, a wave from an ocean of atmosphere. Victor found he was holding his breath and had to suck in a lungful of air before he passed out. He nearly missed the last missile getting hit, but the sparks flying off the thing drew his attention. It was so close, he could see the Alliance red star on the side before the slugs from the Vulcan sawed across them and through to the battery compartment beneath. Suddenly lacking power, the thing’s S-T drive cut off and it nosed down, heading for the vast oceans on the other side of the planet from Jaipur.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Aguilar said, grinning at Hill.

“That gunship is closing fast,” Hill warned. “She’ll be in firing range in a few seconds.”

“We’re clear of the damned atmosphere, finally,” Pri added. “Gonna be a few more minutes before we make it to the Rift.”

“Okay, here’s where it gets interesting,” Aguilar said, still speaking to Victor, but almost to himself, like he just enjoyed hearing himself talk. Or maybe he just enjoys scaring the shit out of young, inexperienced civilians. “Once we’re out of the atmosphere, the Alliance ship is going to catch us, because the Chinese and the Russians can afford to buy better and bigger and more powerful reactors than a bunch of half-assed guns for hire like us.”

“Go to hell, Chief,” Pri said, though there was a certain affection in her tone. Aguilar acknowledged her with a wave, but kept on.

“At least, they can catch up with us until we jump to the Rift, because nothing touches nothing in the Rift… it’s like you’re the only thing in that whole universe. But that’s going to take some time, as our esteemed captain just said.”

“If they can’t hit us with missiles,” Victor interrupted, hoping to at least get the Chief Warrant Officer to the point a little faster, “then what can they do?”

“Glad you asked.” Aguilar enthused. He wasn’t looking at Victor anymore, instead running his hands over a series of controls, the motions causing mysterious clunks and whirrs deep in the heart of the Tamar. “There’s three ways for S-T ships to blow each other up. The first is a missile that’s basically a ship, with its own nuke. The Alliance and the Union both have those, but they aren’t going to send them out on a covert op like this. Those things are huge, bigger than the Tamar and they’d need a ship the size of a carrier to haul them around in.”

He wagged a finger at Victor, still not looking at him, eyes still glued to his board. On the main screen, the Alliance gunship was in visual range, angular and batlike and deadly.

“Second, if you’re faster than the other guy, you can try to get ahead of him and lay down mines in a pattern where he has to run into them. Problem with mines in space, though, is that space is big and S-T drive ships can maneuver fast, and you can’t do proximity shots. No atmosphere to conduct the blast, so even if it’s a nuke, the target has to be close enough to get fried by the heat or the radiation, and that’s a hell of a lot closer than it sounds, since most starships are pretty well shielded against radiation and heat.”

“That’s good, I guess,” Victor said.

“But what the Alliance ships do have that we don’t,” Aguilar said, “are weapons lasers. Damned fragile and expensive and yet they go the speed of light, and we aren’t far enough away yet for that. And that’s what they’re firing at us right now.”

Maybe the flush of heat that Victor felt was psychosomatic after hearing about the laser and maybe it wasn’t, but the sweat was real. He looked around him, expecting the hull to give way any second and Aguilar laughed.

“She’s a gunship, not a carrier. She can’t burn a hole through us unless we sit still like idiots.”

“And we’re not doing that,” Pri declared. “Energy dispersal spin.”

“Oh, fun,” Hill moaned, and three seconds later, Victor discovered why.

He wasn’t a physicist or a pilot or even interested enough to read pop-science articles about it, but he knew that the S-T drive was reactionless, which meant people inside a ship using the drive didn’t feel acceleration. But that didn’t mean they didn’t feel angular momentum. Priyanka Ambedkar sent the ship into a spin, and Victor’s inner ear rebelled. He put a hand to his mouth and barely restrained the puke before it splashed across everyone. Acid filled his throat and nearly made him vomit again, but somehow he kept it down.

“What the hell?” he managed to choke out.

“It’s to disperse the heat energy,” Aguilar said, cheerful as ever, as if the carnival-ride rotation didn’t bother him. “Don’t worry, we don’t have to do it for long.”

“Get ready, Chief,” Pri told him. She sounded unbelievably calm. “We’re only going to have a few seconds.”

“Roger that, Captain. She’s cocked and locked and ready to rock.”

“Turnover in three… two… one.”

If God Himself had grabbed Victor around the waist and slam-dunked him through a basketball hoop, it couldn’t have felt much different than what came next. Victor figured out what had happened later, deducing that Pri had shed the spin and simultaneously flipped the Tamar end for end. He didn’t know why the S-T drive couldn’t push them backward as easily as it pushed them forward, but he assumed it had something to do with physics or engineering or all those other college courses he didn’t have the math to handle.

The result was, the Tamar was pointed straight at the Alliance gunship as she streaked toward them at thousands of feet per second. Aguilar growled deep in his throat and thumbed a firing control. The ship shuddered backward from the recoil of the huge guns tucked under her wings, the vibration of their discharge enough to rattle the hull… and Victor’s teeth inside his skull.

Pri didn’t announce it, but the ship flipped again and then rolled, and through the kaleidoscope of colors and shapes, Victor caught a glimpse of the Chinese ship zipping past them just before they took off again after it. He expected the Alliance vessel to try a similar maneuver, to try to turn and fire on them, but it kept running straight ahead, heedless and mindless.

“I’m getting thermal blooms from the cockpit area,” Hill announced. “And she ain’t trying to change course.” Victor would have expected the man to be enthusiastic about it, but instead, there was a certain melancholy tone to the words. “I think they’re toast.”

Pri sank back in her chair, the air leaving her in a long sigh.

“Thank God.”

Victor wiped vomit off the corner of his mouth and stared at her.

“Aren’t you Hindu?” he blurted, and she laughed, an explosive sound as if it took all the tension with it.

“I was raised by fundamentalist Baptists,” she told him, “and then thrown into a universe with aliens and starships and people killing each other. I don’t believe in much of anything.” She shrugged. “Except my friends.” Her eyes softened and she turned away, perhaps not wanting him to see it. “Ready for the jump to the Rift.”

The stars had twisted into a tunnel of rainbow colors, and with the touch of a control, they gathered into a mass of blue-white ahead of the ship, while all around was nothing. Pri powered back her chair and hit the quick-release for her restraints. “I’m going to check on Chase.” She looked down at him in amusement and gestured at the duffle bag. “If you want, you can stow that bag in your compartment.”

He wanted to tell her what was in it, wanted to explain, but he looked around at Aguilar and Hill and decided it would be better to wait for Dr. Cortez to do it.

“Yeah,” he said, agreeing with her but also with his own conclusion. “Maybe that’s a good idea.”

* * *

“…and that’s what we know,” Chase Weston finished. His throat was dry and his leg was sore, and he took a sip from the water bottle but didn’t sit down. Four pairs of eyes were staring at him from their seats in the galley, their faces in various stages of disbelief. Chase shrugged. “Sorry, I should say that’s what we think we know.” He held a hand up when he saw an objection forming in Victor Lee’s expression. “Not that we doubt what you’ve told us, Vic, but you only have this machine’s word for it. I wouldn’t trust a human-built AI, and I sure as hell don’t trust an alien one.”

Victor shut his mouth, but he didn’t look happy about it.

“I’d say you were all chock full to the brim with bullshit,” Zack Wilson said, legs stretched out, size thirteen boots hanging in the middle of the compartment from his seat next to Aguilar and Pri, “but Hart-Klein doesn’t devote those sorts of resources for bullshit, and neither does the Alliance. They gotta think there’s something to this.”

“Let’s say there is,” Pri allowed, surprising Chase. He expected her to be the most skeptical of the whole business. “Let’s say this thing is talking to the kid, and it’s telling the truth.” She spread her hands. “What then? It’s not like we can go gallivanting off searching for these other…” She shook her head. “What did you call them?”

“Emissaries,” Victor declared, but Angel Cortez spoke over him.

“Artifacts,” she said.

“Whatever,” Pri went on, waving the replies aside. “We can’t go searching all across the galaxy for these things. This is a job for the military. We should take this thing directly to Farragut, to the Union base there, and dump it in their laps. All we’re doing by holding onto it is bringing more trouble down on ourselves.”

“Hart-Klein ain’t gonna give up until they get their hands on this thing,” Wilson confirmed, nodding at the glowing orb on the table between Victor and Angel.

“We need to consider this,” Angel said. “You all know how the military runs, what a bureaucratic mess anything the government touches becomes, how much corruption and abuse there is. Do you really want to just hand this over to the government and trust them to do the right thing?”

“What’s the alternative?” Hill asked. He laughed sharply. “Not that I think this is anything other than some bullshit fantasy, but say it’s true, what the hell do you suggest we do with it, Doc?”

“The Colonial Authority,” Angel suggested. “They’re non-national, and they’re supposed to represent everyone. We could go to Ararat and explain it to the CA commander there.”

Aguilar, Wilson and Hill shared a mocking laugh, and the only reason Chase didn’t join them was an effort to not hurt Angel’s feelings. Priyanka saved him the task of having to explain the facts of life to her.

“Dr. Cortez,” Pri said, gentle in her admonishment, “the CA is a joke. The Alliance and the Union use it to criticize each other, but they both hold veto power and nothing important ever gets done. The only thing they do even halfway well is protect existing colonies from squatters and wildcatters, and that’s only because it’s advantageous to both sides. If we hand the… artifact over to them, they’ll just pass it right along to the US or the Chinese, whichever one happens to be paying them more this month.”

“The Emissary doesn’t want to be handed over to anyone,” Victor insisted, his words sharper than usual, more tinged with anger. “None of you understand. We are bonded together. No one else can speak to him now, only me.”

“Yeah, I vote we not tell them that part,” Chase suggested. “The CIA or military intelligence is just as likely to grab Vic right along with the artifact and stick them both in a lab somewhere.” He raised his hands, palms-out. “I’m not saying they’d dissect you or anything, but they wouldn’t want to let you go if they thought you were the key to understanding this thing.”

“You sound like you have a better idea, Chase,” Wilson said. “Let’s hear it.”

Chase frowned. His head hurt, and not just from the newly closed cut. Everything about the situation was beyond his comprehension, from the politics to the archaeology to the science… to Angel Cortez and his feelings for her. But he was the closest thing any of these people had to a leader.

“I have some connections in Farragut,” he said, the words coming out slow and deliberate, just a half-second behind the thoughts that engendered them. “Old friends from the war. I haven’t talked to any of them in a long time, but I think they’d at least hear me out. I could go down there in a scheduled shuttle from the space station, leave you guys up there with the artifact.” He gestured and winced at the pull against one of his shrapnel wounds. “I could get a feel for how they’d react to the whole thing, you know? See if they might be willing to string us along as an intelligence source without telling them about the artifact.” He shrugged. “If it felt wrong, we could just leave, maybe head for Ararat like Dr. Cortez…” She arched an eyebrow at him, and he corrected himself. “Like Angel said.” He shot her an apologetic look. “Though I do have to agree with the others that the Colonial Authority is notoriously corrupt, and when they’re not, they’re paralyzed by politics. Still, it’s the only thing I can see to do.” He glanced around, spreading his hands. “Anyone object?”

“The Emissary says we don’t need them,” Victor said. “He says we can do it ourselves.” His hand was inside the duffle bag on the table, his palm resting on the golden surface of the thing. The look in his eyes was distracted, almost vacant, and it creeped Chase the hell out. Then Victor’s eyes cleared up and he focused on Chase. “But he also says he’s calculated the odds and knows none of you will listen to him until it’s too late.”

“How the hell does he know so much about the way we think?” Zack Wilson demanded, frowning with what might have been confusion or even fear.

It was strange having the man back with Tamar PMC. He’d been part of it from the beginning, right up until that day on Munin, that day Chase still couldn’t scrub from his memory. Was having him back a good omen or bad luck?

“He’s a computer built by an alien race, millennia ahead of us technologically,” Victor reminded Wilson. “It’s burned through every file on this ship, not to mention it can basically read my mind. It knows as much about us as I do.”

“So, it’s as clueless as your typical college student, then?” Hill cracked, earning a dirty look from Victor.

“Enough,” Priyanka said. “I say we go with Chase’s plan. What about you, Doc?” Pri cast a questioning look at Angel.

Angel steepled her fingers, tapping both forefingers against her lip, eyes thoughtful and fixed on Chase. His ears burned, and he realized he was embarrassed by the attention, which was ridiculous for a Ranger NCO, a man who made a living through the application of extreme violence. And yet, there it was.

“All right,” Angel said, finally, nodding, a look in her eyes that Chase couldn’t identify. “Let’s do it.”

“You heard the woman,” Pri said, nodding to Hill and Aguilar. “Let’s go set a course for Farragut.” She pulled out her phone and tapped information into an app. “We should arrive in about thirty-five hours, subjective.”

Hill and Aguilar trailed out of the galley behind her, the copilot still mumbling complaints. Zack Wilson watched them go, then downed the last of the fruit juice pack and tossed it overhand into the trash with inerrant aim.

“You know,” he said to no one in particular, “I’m wearing everything I own.” He shrugged. “Well, I have a pretty good nest egg in an anonymized account… I’m not stupid. But somehow, I don’t think I’m going back to my corporate apartment at L5 to reclaim my clothes and household goods.”

“You can shuttle down with me at Farragut,” Chase offered. “Get some clothes fabricated for you. I think there’s a few spare toothbrushes in the bathroom.”

“You’re so damned pragmatic, Sarge. Maybe I just wanna bitch and complain for a while? Be miserable because I don’t have a pension or a health plan? Or a chance to go on a third date with the secretary at the Hart-Klein personnel department?”

“I’d thank you again for saving my life,” Chase said, grinning, “but I know the real reason you shot Haricot was that he shot you first.”

Wilson looked as if he wanted to object, but the righteous indignation melted away into a reluctant nod.

“That guy’s an asshole. I hope I killed him, but I doubt it. He’s like a damned cockroach. First, the CIA got tired of him playing both sides of the aisle and tried to have him killed, then the Alliance tried to kill him when the intelligence he sold them turned out to be bad, and now this.” He shook his head. “I’m telling you, Sarge, if we see this guy again, he’s bad news.”

Wilson yawned broadly and stretched his arms above him.

“Damn, I’m wiped out. I’m gonna take a shower and get some sleep.”

“Zack,” Chase said, pausing the man in the hatchway. “Thanks for saving my life.”

Wilson grinned and disappeared around the corner. Victor slipped the duffle bag over his shoulder and followed him without a word. Chase thought about suggesting to the kid that he leave the artifact behind, but he knew exactly how receptive Victor would be to the idea so he kept his mouth shut.

Chase expected Angel to leave the galley as well, but she hadn’t moved and was still watching him.

“Hey, um…” He stumbled and tried again, pushing through. “About what happened back there at the plantation, I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry. I should have been able to hold out.”

“It was a dangerous cocktail of psychoactive drugs, Chase,” she said, dismissing his guilt with a toss of her head. “I blamed you too, at first, but I was an idiot.” She stood, coming dangerously close to him. His legs felt weak, and not because of the shrapnel. “I’ve been blaming you for the violence and the danger, as if I didn’t know I was stepping into something dangerous.”

“I didn’t know what had happened to you, to your parents,” he said, his mouth dry. He wanted to take a sip of the water sitting beside him on the table, but he didn’t. “I won’t say I understand, because there’s no way I could. But I see why you’d want to avoid people like me.”

“Stop,” she told him, putting a hand on his arm. Electricity coursed through his body from the contact. “I was thinking the same thing at first, that you were like the men who killed my parents. But I was wrong. You’re like my father, like one of the people who gives their lives to do the right thing. You saved our lives over and over and I wanted to thank you for that.”

“You saved your own life,” he told her, the words tumbling out as if of their own accord. “You’re as tough as any of the Rangers I served with, Angel.” He sucked in a breath and asked the question stuck in the back of his throat. “Do you… have anyone back home in California?”

She laughed, which seemed like the worst possible response to him… and then she leaned in and kissed him. Her lips were warm and soft and everything that he’d thought they would be, and the kiss lasted an eternity. When she finally pulled away, he felt as out of breath as if he’d run a sprint and there was a blithering-idiot grin on his face that he couldn’t stifle.

Angel was smiling as well, though her expression was cooler and more controlled than his. She nodded toward him.

“You got pretty banged up,” she noted. “Must hurt.”

“A little,” he admitted, “but I’ve had worse. I’ll be fine.”

“Really?” She grabbed his hand, then let each finger go in a slow, teasing pull before only his forefinger and hers were locked together. She kept her finger tight around his and tugged him toward the door. “Show me.”

Thirty-five hours, Chase thought as they headed for her cabin, could be a very long time.

OceanofPDF.com

EPILOGUE

“Attention, privateer Tamar,” the officious, bland voice of the traffic control officer droned on the cockpit speakers, “your clearance has been approved, and you are eighth in line to dock with Farragut Station. Please maintain relative position and speed until you receive clearance. Approximate wait time is sixty-seven minutes.”

“Roger, Farragut Control,” Pri replied, then smacked the comm control to shut down the speakers. “Are we sure that isn’t an AI program?” She eyed Victor, who had the duffle bag in his lap, as always. “Not as sophisticated as your friend, of course,” she allowed.

“No,” Zack Wilson assured her, “the military would never be efficient enough to use a computer when they could find a mind-numbingly boring job for an actual person to justify their budget allotment.”

Wilson could go back and forth between a backwoods hick accent to sounding like a college graduate at the drop of a hat, and Chase wondered just how the man had actually talked when he was a kid back in Indiana.

“It’s always like this here,” Aguilar said with the assurance of someone who’d been assigned to every single military base in the colonized worlds at one point or another. “I mean, look at all that damned traffic.”

And Chase did. He’d been to the system before, of course. It was where they’d come to deal for the intelligence they used to acquire from raids on Alliance listening posts. But he tried to see it from the eyes of a newcomer, from Angel’s perspective. There was nothing terribly distinctive about the planet, except for the fact that it was habitable, which should have been considered a miracle but was common enough now that people took it for granted. It had all the usual characteristics of a world humans could live on—the greens of chlorophyll-powered plants, the blues of vast, deep oceans and the white of the polar ice caps. Those ice caps were larger here than they were on some other worlds he’d visited, surely much larger than Vishnu.

And the moon, of course. Chase had heard Angel arguing with Victor on the trip to Vishnu about whether a habitable world was possible without a large moon and he personally had no clue, other than the fact that every living world they’d found so far had such a satellite.

The moon wasn’t visible in the main screen, though the man-made satellite where they were trying to dock certainly was. Farragut Station was the largest space station outside the Solar System, a massive, spinning wheel decorated for Christmas or maybe Independence Day with the flickering reflections of the primary star off huge solar panels and cooling vanes. The docking bays sticking out either end of the station were beehives of activity, swarmed about with ships docking and undocking, many of them military transports, others corporate cargo vessels, more of them independent freighters. They were too far away for the optical cameras to make out their details, but each was a glowing star lit up by 82 Eridani.

Farragut was the largest of the star colonies, and the first one settled by the United States before the formation of the Colonial Authority and the treaties banning nations from claiming entire worlds as their own. Grandfathered in, this planet was unabashedly American, right down to the flag painted across the side of the docking hub.

“Can we listen to the news or something?” Hill suggested. “I don’t want to just float around for an hour waiting for these morons to get off their asses. I wanna know who won the World Series.”

“I got news for you, Adrian,” Aguilar told him, “it still ain’t the Padres.”

Hill shot the chief a bird but the older man just laughed.

“The news,” Pri repeated, shaking her head. “Jesus, Adrian, it’s still going to be like a week old. The only way to get ‘news’ here from Earth is on board a ship.”

“It’s newer than anything I’ve heard in weeks, Pri,” Hill shot back.

“Fine.”

Chase was only half-listening to them. Strapped into the acceleration couch beside Angel Cortez, he was debating whether or not she would consider him a sappy high-schooler if he tried to hold her hand in public. He had a feeling she would, though he wasn’t certain if she’d mind. Chase still refrained, deciding he needed to try to be a serious professional while he was in front of the troops. It was difficult. He hadn’t felt this way about a woman since Jenny, and it felt wrong to even think of Angel Cortez in the same context as his ex-wife, not least because they’d both been stupid kids not ready for what they’d stepped into.

Angel Cortez was many things, but she was not a kid.

The blast of sound from the cockpit speakers jolted Chase from his reverie and Pri quickly turned it down, grinning an apology at the others.

“The commercial stations are always so much louder than the government ones,” she explained.

The video for the broadcast popped up in the center of the main view screen, the announcer unseen and probably nonexistent, just a computer program written to imitate the stereotypical news broadcaster.

“And now the latest from the UBC news and sports, dateline October Twelfth.”

“Jesus, that’s two weeks ago,” Wilson muttered. “Haven’t they got anything more recent?”

“Damn it,” Hill said, smacking the arm of his chair in frustration. “The Series wasn’t even over yet when this was recorded.”

“In financial news, Soong-Tierney LLC has doubled its profits in the last quarter, signaling yet another banner year for the innovator.”

“Innovator,” Victor scoffed, eyes still focused downward on the artifact, as if he was talking to the Emissary rather than them. “All she did was take something she’d been given for the benefit of all humanity and make a huge profit on it.”

“You say that like there’s something wrong with it,” Hill said, eyeing the younger man doubtfully. “Like any one of us wouldn’t have done the same thing if we’d been put in that position.”

“What?” Aguilar asked Hill, goggling at him. “You’re not saying you believe this cock-and-bull story about aliens giving us the S-T drive so we could save ourselves from some Sunkiller robot that’s going to blow up the Earth?”

Hill shrugged.

“I ain’t saying either way, I’m just saying if some aliens handed me the S-T drive and said ‘save the world,’ I’d definitely save the world, but I’d also make a little coin along the way.”

“You also said you wanted to listen to the news, Adrian,” Pri cut in, “and yet all you’ve done is talk over it.”

Hill raised his hands in surrender and made a show of leaning in to pay close attention to the news report. The deep-voiced male who’d been reading the last report was replaced by a woman, her face perfectly designed by computer algorithms for comfort and attractiveness.

“And now for the latest in science news,” she said enthusiastically, as if this was the highlight of her day. “There’s been a mysterious development from the Deep-Space Telescope at the L5 Lagrangian point, first revealed in a report from the Union Astronomical Survey two days ago. According to the spokesman for the Survey, Dr. Elton Tophoj, there’ve been an inexplicable chain of stars going nova in an area of space in line with the Carina-Sagittarius arm of our galaxy.” The woman chuckled ruefully. “And if you don’t have the slightest idea where that is, well… join the club! Let’s just say it’s our next-door neighbors, sort of. We’re in the Orion arm, and the Sagittarius arm is the next one over, just a little more toward the center of the galaxy than we are.”

A computer simulation of the Milky Way replaced her on the screen, first edge-on and then flipping upward to show the breadth of the galaxy. One of the spiral arms flashed green.

“This is the Orion arm,” the female voiceover explained. A dot blinked blue near the edge of it. “And this is us here on Earth.”

Who’s “us?” I haven’t been anywhere near Earth in five years.

“And this,” she went on as the next spiral arm inward from Orion lit up orange, “is Sagittarius.” She giggled inanely, and Chase wished he could find the programmer who’d created her voice and slap the shit out of him. “Looks pretty close, huh? Well, don’t worry too much… even though the scientists say this could be some gigantic interstellar calamity, some chain of novae caused by a gravitational anomaly or some such thing, it’s all happening over seven thousand light-years away! Even with the Soong-Tierney drive and using our biggest, most powerful ships, it would take us years to reach that area, so I don’t think anything there is a real concern for us.” She touched a finger to her chin, aping deep thought. “Though it is a conundrum, why over a dozen stars hundreds of light-years apart would all go nova at the same time!” Another giggle. “Guess we just have to hope there weren’t any intelligent aliens in those systems! Hate for them to all die off before we finally get to meet them!”

The hair was standing up on the back of Chase’s neck, and he nearly jumped out of his seat when something brushed against his hand. He looked over at Angel. It had been her fingers he’d felt, closing on his hand, gripping it with no thought to what the others might say. The haunted look in her eyes surely matched his own. He thought for a moment that they’d be the only ones to grasp the significance of it, but Pri reached out to shut off the transmission, her face ashen as she turned back to the rest of them.

“Shit,” Zack Wilson hissed, eyes wide.

“Still, that’s seven thousand light-years away, right?” Hill said, shaking his head. “Even if that is those Sunkiller things that the kid was talking about, it’s still a long way off, right? We should have plenty of time.”

“Goddammit, Adrian,” Pri grumbled, staring daggers at the copilot. “Didn’t they teach you anything in pilot training? The images that telescope is seeing from the Sagittarius arm are traveling at the speed of light… which means all those novae happened seven thousand years ago.”

“And the Sunkillers are traveling at just a few percentage points below lightspeed,” Victor added. He didn’t seem alarmed or shocked, just morose and resigned. “Which means they’ll be coming right behind those images.”

“We don’t have much time,” Angel declared, squeezing his hand tighter. “We hardly have any time at all.”

* * *

“Sean, my good friend,” the Artificial Man said, “you look like hammered shit.”

The Artificial Man was the only way Sean Haricot could think of James Edward Hart, because there wasn’t a single original piece of the little shit left. He’d been born short, scrawny, and ugly as sin, and between him and his parents, had used a good-sized chunk of the family fortune correcting what he thought of as God’s mistakes. Human Growth Hormone, bone extensions, hair implants, and extensive plastic surgery had turned the adult Jimmy Hart from the proverbial ugly duckling into the most beautiful swan money could buy.

Hart poured money on top of money, his Armani suit grown in a vat on a human-shaped lattice 3D-printed from a laser scan of his body. And the shape never changed because his personal trainers and nutritionists and pharmacists wouldn’t let it. Haricot wondered if the man’s hair was naturally blond.

“I did get shot a few times, Mr. Hart,” Haricot rasped, his voice not quite returned after the peripheral damage to his vocal cords, as he limped into the office.

If there was nothing natural about Jimmy Hart, everything about the office was natural, from the mahogany desk to the heart-of-pine floor to the Japanese fighting fish in the tank against the wall.

And the overpriced little shit even flew all that stuff into orbit.

“Come in, come in.” Hart waved at him with obvious impatience, ignoring Haricot’s still-healing wounds. “Sit down and tell me all about how incredibly badly you’ve screwed things up. I can’t wait to hear those details.”

Haricot winced, and not just from the lingering pain of the wound in his hip. He’d known when he’d got the summons to HKC Orbital Headquarters that it wouldn’t be pretty. At least the leather seat in front of Hart’s desk was comfortable, and he sighed as he fell into it and stared at the fish tank that made up the whole back wall of the office.

“You know how much it cost to import those things up here?” Hart asked him, apparently noticing where he was looking.

“A lot?” Haricot guessed and frowned again, as he did every time he heard his own voice. He was used to the smooth, tranquil, salesman’s tones he’d practiced for so long, and it was going to be months before he got that back. I find Zack Wilson, I’m going to kill him slow.

“The fish themselves cost a lot,” Hart admitted, gracefully placing himself in his throne-like seat. “The tank cost more than a moderately priced house in the suburbs. But transportation?” He grinned. “Free. As long as you don’t count the wages of the pilots, but they’re on salary. You see, that’s the thing, Sean… the company is mine. Its assets are mine.” The bonhomie had been as artificial as anything else about the man, and it vanished between one heartbeat and another. “And you, Sean Haricot, are mine. You’re an asset. When one of these fish dies, I have another flown up straight from Japan because I can. Because there are more just like them available. So, tell me, why should I not have you tossed out an airlock and import one just like you from Earth?”

“I won’t sugarcoat things, Mr. Hart,” Haricot said, and though his smooth, convincing tones had abandoned him, he still retained his one superpower, the ability to avoid flop sweat. “I screwed up big time. But not by anything I did on Vishnu. I screwed up by trusting Zack Wilson. I should have known he was too much of a straight-arrow type. All those damned Rangers are. I thought because he spent a few years as a merc, he was a bit morally… flexible. But that whole time, all he did was screw with the Alliance. I should have figured he was a super-patriot type.” He smacked the back of one hand into the palm of the other. “Because, despite everything, boss, despite that asshole Weston and the damned Chinese Sea Dragon team and the cartels, I had that artifact in my hands. If Wilson hadn’t backstabbed me, Weston would be dead and that thing would be right here, along with Dr. Cortez.” He shrugged. “I mean, I know I made a bad mistake trusting Wilson, but surely the fact that I was able to put myself in a position to get the package is worth something. One more chance?”

Hart was silent, his mouth hidden behind the hand propping up his chin, his eyes unreadable. Haricot was convinced it was a lost cause and was scanning the room, wondering if there was anything he could use as a weapon, when the Hart-Klein CEO slowly nodded.

“All right, Sean.” Hart spread his hands. “Maybe I’m a fool, but I’ll do it. One more chance to make this right.” He raised a finger in warning, eyes going hard again. “But only one.”

“I’ll get that thing for you, sir, whatever it is.” He hesitated, wondering how far he could push his luck. “What resources will I have available?”

“Why, just about anything.” Hart smiled. “Anything that won’t be traced back to Hart-Klein, I should say. Because you see, Sean… that artifact is the exact thing we’ve been looking for these last twenty years. The one thing that can dethrone Soong-Tierney and put Hart-Klein at the top of the heap.” The man’s eyes were afire with holy light, like the most fervent fundamentalist Haricot had ever met talking about God. “And I don’t just mean pulling in more profit than Soong-Tierney. I’m talking about power that makes the Union and the Alliance seem like paper tigers in comparison, the power to turn all the human worlds into an empire… with me as the man behind the curtain, the power behind the throne.”

He smiled again and could have almost passed for a normal, reasonable man for a moment.

“As you can see, this means a lot to me.” He leaned forward across that mahogany desk and grabbed Haricot’s right hand, then held it tight between both of his, not as a threat, but almost as a sign of affection. “You do this for me, you’ll be right there beside me. Someone I can trust to do my dirty work. And believe me, that position will be well rewarded. And if you don’t…” He let go of the hand as if discarding a piece of trash. “If you don’t come through, I advise you not to return here… or to show your face on any civilized colony ever again. You understand me?”

Sean Haricot understood just fine. Jimmy Hart was bugnuts crazy, way past the way most billionaires were a little crazy. And he also understood that his only hope of making it off this station alive was to tell the Artificial Man whatever he wanted to hear.

If I was smart, I’d take whatever ship he gives me and get out of the Solar System, crawl into a hole and pull it in after me.

He wasn’t going to do that. Because the thing about crazy, rich assholes was, they sometimes delivered exactly what they promised they would… and being the right-hand man of the emperor of the galaxy sounded like a damn good career move.

“I understand, sir,” he said. “I guarantee, in less than a month, that alien tech is going to be sitting here in your office.” He smiled thinly. “And Chase Weston’s a dead man.”

* * *

Continue reading for SUNKILLER: LEGACY.

OceanofPDF.com

SUNKILLER: LEGACY

BOOK TWO

OceanofPDF.com

1

“You really think this is going to work?” Zack Wilson asked, forehead creasing in a frown that was close to six inches above Chase Weston’s head.

“You already asked me that,” Chase reminded him, not looking up at the big man, keeping his eyes on the crowd.

The spaceport at Armstrong was way too organized and regimented and Earthlike for Chase’s tastes. True, there were no pickpockets in the press of humanity making its way out through the covered walkway that protected them from the punishing summer rays of Farragut’s primary star, no kiosks selling counterfeit cell phones or vintage porn, but he wasn’t sure if that was worth the Space Force Security Police patrols at every intersection, M27 carbines slung over their shoulders, their K-9s sniffing dutifully, searching for explosives or drugs.

No one would have put up with that on one of the independent colonies, but Farragut had been grandfathered in by the treaty, one of the few colony worlds allowed to be claimed by an individual nation… in this case, the United States, though there were three Chinese colonies, two Russian, one British, one French, and, oddly enough, one planet claimed by Argentina.

“I already asked you,” Zack agreed, “but you never bothered to answer me.”

“That’s because I thought you were smart enough to figure it out on your own. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it would work.”

The two men passed by one docking slip after another, little more than whitewashed concrete walls open to the sky that were barely big enough to allow a shuttle to touch down on the bare cement flooring. It was as ludicrous as the armed guards and dogs, a vain attempt at controlling access to the city in the name of safety and security… and, of course, to extract exorbitant landing fees that were passed on to the passengers by the few transportation companies allowed to ferry visitors down from the orbital station.

What I wouldn’t give for the Tamar to be here…

“How long’s it been since you saw this lady?”

Chase finally shot Zack a glance. At least the big man hadn’t just blurted her name out in front of God and everyone. With this much security around, he was dead certain the feds were running facial recognition, keyword searches, and a dozen other things that would have been frowned upon even back Earthside.

“Ten years. But she was a friend, someone I could trust.”

“Yeah,” Zack drew the word out into a doubtful drawl. “You know, trust ain’t like wine, where you can stick it away in a cellar and it’ll get better. It’s like a muscle. You don’t exercise it, it wastes away to nothing.”

“That’s very profound for a guy who considers early 2000’s pop the height of musical expression.”

“It’s an underappreciated genre,” Zack insisted, frowning. “And it’s better than that ancient shit you listen to. Classic rock, my ass.”

Chase winced and slipped on his sunglasses as they stepped out from beneath the covered walkway and onto the ground transportation ramp. The pavement shone white under the harsh rays of Zeta Tucanae, just enough brighter than the Sun that it could cause permanent eye damage without protection. It was the only drawback to the world that Chase could see, other than the controlling hand of the government everywhere he looked. Farragut’s climate was temperate for most of the northern hemisphere, having come out of an ice age a couple thousand years ago, and the flora and fauna were only mildly dangerous.

Even the city wasn’t bad, as cities went. Chase wasn’t big on city life, but Armstrong seemed just the right size for him, a bit fewer than fifty thousand people. It had that small-town vibe that reminded him of Montana, though how long it would stay that way, he wasn’t sure. He’d read up on the place during the flight, and ten thousand people a year were streaming onto the planet, enough that the US Offworld Emigration Bureau had authorized another major city to be built inland from the coastal city. Two cities meant major roads and railways, which meant more people, more industry, more small towns between them, which would eventually be cities of their own. Nothing ever stayed the same.

I sound like an old man. Shit, I sound like my old man.

Harold Weston had moved his family to Montana precisely because he wanted to get away from the crowding and crime and endless development he’d experienced on the East Coast. He’d been mad as hell about the influx of Californians and other big-city types who’d brought their big-city ways to his Montana, and had seen no contradiction between opposing their emigration while justifying his own.

“We’re going to need a car,” he told Zack, waving him toward the rental agency offices across the street. “This place is too spread out to walk, and I don’t want to count on public transportation.”

“Seriously though, Sarge,” Zack went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “are you sure we ain’t doing this just because you’re sweet on that scientist?”

Chase rounded on him, cheek muscle twitching with the effort it took not to shout the man down in public.

“You ever know me to let my personal feelings screw up an op, Wilson?”

The big man raised his hands palms-up, surrendering.

“Sarge, you know I’ve got your back. But I’ve known you a long time, and I’ve never seen you fall for anyone like this. Not even Priyanka.”

He wanted to yell, wanted to chew Zack out, but instead, warmth filled his face.

“Shit. Is it that obvious?”

“Well, I mean… yeah!” Zack shook his head. “Not that I blame you. But are you sure we’re not pushing this just because she thinks it’s important?”

Chase checked both ways, wondering what the odds were that anyone was listening in out here in the middle of the street.

“You know what’s at stake. You heard the same story I did.”

“Yeah, I heard the story. That don’t mean I believe the story.”

Chase threw up his hands in exasperation.

“Well, damn it, Wilson, if you don’t believe it, why the hell did you come along?”

“You think I should have stayed on Vishnu? How do you think that would have worked out for me?” Zack shrugged. “Besides, it doesn’t matter if I believe it, the…” Zack glanced around as if he was catching Chase’s paranoia. “The other side sure as hell believes it. And I don’t think they’d leave me alone if I just tried to hop off the train here and go about my life, y’know?”

Chase grunted, not entirely satisfied but willing to drop the subject.

“There’s no reason for you to go with me to the embassy, so maybe you shouldn’t be seen with me in the rental car office.”

“Man, Sarge, you are the paranoid one.”

“When everyone’s out to get you,” Chase countered, “being paranoid is just good sense. What are you gonna do while I’m gone?”

“Since I don’t have any clothes besides what I’m wearing, I guess I’ll go buy some.” He cocked an eyebrow at Chase. “Unless you want to spot me my first month’s salary, boss.”

Chase laughed softly and pulled out his cell phone, then held it up to Zack. The big man grinned and held up his own, and Chase touched the two devices together. A subdued beep let him know the funds transfer had gone through.

“Don’t spend it all in one place.”

Zack’s brows rose as he looked at the screen and saw the amount.

“Damn, Sarge, you still know how to take care of your people.” He tossed Chase a two-fingered salute. “Be careful.”

“You, too. And don’t be late.”

* * *

“Why the hell do we have to sit up here in this tin can like a bunch of pickled herring?” Adrian Hill whined.

Evangeline Cortez frowned at the man. She didn’t usually pay much attention to the byplay between the members of the Tamar’s flight crew, but this was incongruous enough to draw her notice.

“Pickled herring?” she repeated. “Are you from England, Lt. Hill? Scandinavia?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Priyanka Ambedkar commented, laughing softly as she hovered over her pilot’s control panel, one hand anchoring her to the back of her chair, the other dancing over the touch-screen controls, “don’t call him ‘lieutenant.’ You make him sound way too much like a military officer.”

“You are one, aren’t you?” Angel asked, even more confused now.

“I am not now, nor have I ever been,” Hill told her, his grin mischievous and just a little bit hideous on his pockmarked, scarred face, “either a Brit or a Scandinavian. I was a Space Force officer, but I made a promise to myself and one Colonel John Crews that I would never let anyone call me lieutenant or sir again. But I used to go out with this British flight officer, and she got me turned on to pickled herring. And that answers your question but who’s going to answer mine? Why can’t we be dirtside ready to back up Chase?”

“Because Farragut,” Pri told him, not looking away from the maintenance chores she was doing, “is the sort of respectable joint that won’t allow ships over a certain tonnage into their atmosphere. The Tamar is right at the edge of the limit, and we might be able to get away with it, but they’d look at us close, and when they did, some bright bulb would detect all those quasi-legal weapons we’re carrying.”

“Aren’t they going to detect those here?” Angel wondered. “Farragut Station is still run by the US government, isn’t it?”

Chief Aguilar chuckled and the sound reminded her of a lion clearing its throat. The older man’s face was lined and hard-edged, the mask of an ancient god carved into rock. He wasn’t a large man, but there was a wiry strength in his corded arms and a promise of danger in those clear, dark eyes. She’d seen him running the weapons systems of the Tamar in a fight, and he’d never once showed a trace of panic, no matter what the odds.

“Farragut Station,” he corrected her, “is run for the US government by Orbital Habitation Technology, Inc., a subsidiary of Hart-Klein Consolidated.”

“Oh, shit!” Angel exclaimed, accidentally pushing away from the bulkhead and floating across the compartment. She wasn’t used to free fall, for all that she’d spent much of the last few weeks in the Tamar. When the ship was under power, using her Soong-Tierney drive, it was able to produce artificial gravity, but that wasn’t possible docked with the orbital station. “Won’t they be looking for us?”

“Probably not,” Pri assured her, finally looking up from her work. She was, Angel thought with an effort at objectivity, an attractive woman, with piercing brown eyes and hair bobbed short. Being objective was harder than she would have liked to admit, since Pri had been involved with Chase once. “It’s possible that HKC mercenary you were talking about, Haricot, might have sent a report in about us, but that report only goes as fast as the ship carrying it, and they’d have to send a ship out to every system. I think we’re okay.”

Victor Lee grunted, an incomprehensible sound that could have been amusement or derision. Angel had almost forgotten he was in the cockpit because he hadn’t said a word since an hour before they docked. He was still strapped into one of the fold-down seats at the back of the compartment, the duffle bag strapped across his shoulder, the rounded bulk concealed inside it the tell-tale shape of the alien artifact, the artificial intelligence that called itself The Emissary.

“What’s so funny?” Pri asked, an edge of annoyance to her tone. Her patience for the grad student had grown thin on the flight from Vishnu.

“Your confidence in random chance,” he said, and the unfamiliar timbre to his voice sent a chill up Angel’s spine. “They sent ships out somewhere, though we don’t know where. The odds that a corporation originated in the west might send a message out to one of the US colonies are fairly high. If they don’t find you, it will be due to their own inefficiency or incompetence.”

Everyone fell silent, Hill openly staring at the younger man. Angel didn’t want to say anything… he made her as uncomfortable as he did the others. But it was also her fault that he was there at all, her fault that Victor had melded with the alien AI.

“Don’t you mean ‘us,’ Victor?” she asked. “You said ‘if they don’t find you.’ But you meant us.”

He eyed her sidelong.

“It’s ‘Victor’ now, is it?” he asked. “It’s been ‘Mr. Lee’ as long as I can remember.”

Angel bit down on her initial reaction, figuring that it wouldn’t do any good to snap at him.

“Things have changed,” she said instead.

“Yes,” he agreed, “they have.”

He unstrapped from his seat and pushed himself out of the cockpit without another word. Angel sighed, and Adrian Hill shook his head, shaping a silent whistle.

“Tell you what,” Chief Aguilar said, “I don’t know if I believe this shit about Sunkillers coming to destroy all intelligent life, but I believe that there’s something inside that artifact that is taking over that kid’s brain. You can call it an AI, but where my grandma’s family comes from, we’d call it demon possession.”

“Enough with the chatter,” Pri said, though she sounded more weary than impatient. “Chief, I want you to draw up a list of supplies we need to buy while we’re here.”

“We have money?” Hill asked, sounding surprised. “I don’t recall getting paid this month.”

“I didn’t throw you out the airlock, Adrian, so consider that payment enough. Go get changed into something that won’t attract attention.” She eyed his utility fatigues, which appeared to be the same ones he’d worn during the war. “You’re going shopping with Chief. Use our clean account, no DigCoin. DigCoin makes us look like we have something to hide.”

“We do have something to hide,” Hill pointed out.

“Go!”

The two men left, and Angel was alone with Pri. Something she wasn’t entirely comfortable with. She was trying to come up with an excuse to head back to her cabin and had settled on either a nap or a trip to what the crew insisted on calling “the head,” despite the fact that they were former Space Force, but Pri interrupted the train of thought.

“You’re worried about your friend,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I keep hoping that if we can find someone to take all this seriously, do something about it, that he’ll be able to”—she struggled for the right word—“let go of the thing, this Emissary.”

“If anyone takes this seriously,” Pri countered, “the first thing they’re going to do is hook him and that thing up to a shitload of machines and figure out if they can replicate his connection to it. And if they can’t, they’ll never let him go.”

Anger roiled in Angel’s stomach and she didn’t try to rein it in this time.

“What the hell do you suggest I do, then?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Pri answered it anyway.

“If you don’t believe this Sunkiller story, then I’d say your best bet is to throw that thing out of an airlock and hope your boy goes back to normal.” She shrugged. “If you do believe it, then you have to accept that he’ll never be normal again.”

Angel realized she was grinding her teeth and made an effort to stop.

“What if I don’t like either of those options?”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that the universe doesn’t give a shit whether you like your options.” The pilot’s words were harsh, but not angry… more bitter than anything else. “You’re in love with him, I assume.”

The question shouldn’t have shocked Angel, but it did.

“What the hell business is that of yours?” she said, and she realized the outrage was feigned, an effort to avoid answering the question. “Why? Do you still love him?”

Pri didn’t react to her anger or her counter-accusation, offering only a sad smile in return.

“Not that way. Not anymore. But I still care about him.”

“Why didn’t it work?” It was a personal question, but Pri had started it.

“Because I couldn’t deal with dropping him off into one suicidal situation after another and hoping he’d somehow figure a way out of it. I thought I could handle it, but I couldn’t. I blamed him at first, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault, and we both finally realized it. Now, we’re friends, and everything is fine… except it’s not.”

Angel’s first thought was selfish, that the woman couldn’t handle the fact that Chase had become involved with someone else on her ship. But that was unworthy of her and maybe unworthy of Priyanka as well. The truth hit her right between the eyes.

“You’re still worried.”

Pri nodded, though the motion seemed reluctant.

“And I have no right to be.”

“He’s going to be okay. He’s going to be fine.” Angel didn’t know who she was trying to convince, Pri or herself.

Either way, it wasn’t working.

OceanofPDF.com

2

“Ms. Radcliffe,” the officious little man insisted, his thick brows coming together like a giant millipede luxuriating on the ridge above his eyes, “is very busy today. I’m afraid she can’t meet with you. You could try making an appointment.”

Chase Weston sighed and counted to ten under his breath, trying very hard not to give in to his inclination to punch the bureaucrat in the nose. According to the plaque on his desk, his name was John P. Valente, and he was the Assistant Undersecretary of Colonial Affairs for the Armstrong City office of the United States Embassy to Farragut. It was a long title for a not-very-important position, a glorified receptionist. John P. Valente surely made the most of it, his three-piece suit either worth considerably more than Chase had made in a month as an Army sergeant or an expert fabricator forgery. Valente’s hair was slicked back and shoulder length in what Chase supposed was the latest style back on Earth, and there was something plasticky about his features that hinted at plastic surgery at some point in the not-too-distant past.

Even the little anteroom that was his office was overblown, crammed with reproductions of famous works of art and pictures of Valente with famous people. Or what Chase assumed were famous people, since he hadn’t been keeping up with the news the last few years.

Valente was a man convinced of his own potential and self-importance and right now, the crystalized evidence of that self-importance was in his effort to stop Chase from seeing Valente’s boss, the Undersecretary for Colonial Affairs.

At least the shithead could stand up and face me while he’s talking to me. Valente hadn’t even bothered leaving his chair, his attention wandering back to the projection of his workstation screen and the flow chart displayed there.

“I understand she’s busy,” Chase said with exaggerated patience, “but if you could just tell Portia that Chase is here, I’m sure she’d make time to see me.”

“Ms. Radcliffe told me she wasn’t to be disturbed unless it was an emergency.” He looked Chase up and down, those Neanderthalic eyebrows wagging. “You don’t look like an emergency.”

Which wasn’t an unfair assessment, Chase had to admit. He hadn’t brought any dress clothes along, and the closest he’d been able to manage was blue jeans and a flannel shirt. He hadn’t had a haircut in three weeks and his beard had to be creeping past its usual close trim.

“She won’t be happy with you for not passing on the message, Mr. Valente. We were close friends during the war.” That might have been stretching the truth just a tad. Portia had been the Intelligence officer attached to his Ranger battalion, and she’d been along on several of their ops, but she was a captain and he was an E5 buck sergeant, so they hadn’t exactly traveled in the same circles.

“I saved her life at Subic Bay,” he added, which wasn’t an exaggeration. “She told me to look her up if I was ever on Farragut.”

“Mr. Weston,” Valente said in as close to a growl as someone like him could realistically manage, finally giving Chase his full attention, “you can keep repeating your story until Zeta Tucanae burns out, and it won’t get you one step closer to her office. Though if you like, I will be very happy to call security and have you escorted out of here.”

“Jack!” The voice over the intercom system built into Valente’s desk was familiar, deep and husky, and it should have belonged to someone taller and more exotic looking than Portia Radcliffe. “What’s all the racket out there? Didn’t I tell you I wanted some peace and quiet this afternoon?”

“I’m terribly sorry, ma’am,” Valente stammered, caught by surprise. “It’s nothing, I’ll take care of…”

“Portia, it’s Sgt. Chase Weston,” Chase cut in before Valente could cut him off, “and I’ve come to collect for Subic Bay.”

Silence, for a full ten seconds, and Chase was sure she was blowing him off, that it had been a wasted trip.

It’s okay. It’s not the end of the world. Unless it was, of course. That was what Vic’s alien computer wanted them to think. We’ll figure out another option.

The door to Radcliffe’s office was local wood, handmade, and beautifully polished, and when it slammed open, it did so with a solid authority, mirrored in the woman who walked through it. She wasn’t as tall as her voice, wasn’t as big as her title, but Portia Radcliffe had grown into her new job and projected confidence and competence.

“Chase Weston, you look like you should be begging for change on the street corner in East St. Louis. What the hell happened to you?”

“I’m an independent businessman,” he told her, smiling at the memory of that brash, surprisingly able young officer. “I need to talk to you, Captain Radcliffe.”

“It hasn’t been Captain Radcliffe for quite some time,” she reminded him, the corner of her mouth quirking upward. “You know, the last time I saw you, you were ranting about how incompetent I was.”

“And I apologized.” He raised his hands, palms out in surrender, but felt compelled to add a coda. “It was actually your superiors who were incompetent.”

Now she didn’t even try to keep a straight face, snorting a laugh. She waved at him.

“Come on in.” Her expression went colder and harder as she fixed Valente with a glare. “And Jack, do you think this time, you could actually keep me from being bothered?”

“Yes, ma’am…” Valente’s voice disappeared behind the thick wood of the door as she closed it behind them.

“Sweet,” Chase commented, looking around her office.

If Valente’s little cranny had been cramped and overstuffed, Radcliffe’s office was roomy and tastefully appointed, the artwork less showy and more a reflection of the personality he remembered.

“It’s not New York,” she said with a shrug, “but it’s not too bad for this dump. Have a seat.” She waved at the leather-upholstered chair across from her desk, and when Chase obeyed and sank into it, Radcliffe sat in her chair behind the mahogany desk and regarded him with something between amusement and skepticism. “What have you been doing with yourself, Weston?”

“You tell me, Captain.” He smiled thinly. “You’re the spy.”

“I am the Undersecretary for Colonial Affairs.” She folded her arms across her chest and affected a neutral expression.

“You’re CIA,” Chase accused. “Everything about this office, your title, you, just screams it. You’re a spy.”

Radcliffe rolled her eyes.

“Even if I were a spy, you’re not important enough for me to spy on.”

“Yeah,” he said, dragging the word out. “That may be about to change.”

Her eyebrow shot up. “Enlighten me.”

Chase leaned back in his chair. “That’s gonna take a while. You’ve heard of the Arborists?”

“Who hasn’t? They’re the subject of every conspiracy-theory vlogger on the internet, the MacGuffin of every thriller and sci-fi movie I’ve seen in the last ten years… not to mention the focus of most of the funding in every college that has an archaeology department.” She scoffed. “Of course, no one’s found out a damn thing about them beside the fact they had an interstellar civilization, and they freaking loved their gardens. My opinion is, they’re going to be a mystery forever unless we find their home planet.”

“I’ve been working executive protection the last few years, and on my last job, I was hired to babysit a Berkeley archaeologist, a Dr. Evangeline Cortez, on her expedition to Vishnu for an Arborist dig.”

Radcliffe shaped a silent whistle.

“Shit. From what I’ve heard about Vishnu, she needed a bodyguard. That place is a hellhole of drug cartels and corporate spies.”

“It is.” He fixed her with a stare. “It was also the first Arborist excavation to find any physical records of their history. Written… engraved if you want to be exact. Translated.”

Radcliffe sat up, her palms flat on her desk as if she was about to leap to her feet, her eyes going wide.

“No shit.”

Chase held up his phone, its screen displaying a photo of the golden foil wrapped around a framework of stone. The characters worked into the foil were hauntingly familiar, as if he’d seen them in some old textbook illustrating Egyptian hieroglyphics or Babylonian cuneiform.

And I wouldn’t have known what either of those looked like if Angel hadn’t shown me, but let’s not split hairs.

Radcliffe’s mouth had dropped open, and she shut it forcefully as if she’d just realized it. “You said translated.”

He tapped his phone against the screen built into her desktop, and a stream of data scrolled down faster than any human could have read it.

“Now you have the complete text of the translation, but I’ll give you the ‘too-long, didn’t-read’ version. The Arborists had the Soong-Tierney drive.” He shrugged. “No big surprise there. I’d be shocked if there were more than one way to do what the S-T drive does. What might surprise you, though, is that the Arborists had no idea how it worked or where it came from. One of their scientists just showed up with it and said they’d invented it but wouldn’t explain how.”

That got her attention, as Chase thought it would.

“Did these records say what happened to them?”

“Oh, yeah. The same thing that almost happened to us… that might still. They got the drive and every political faction tried to use it to take over. The war destroyed their home planet and left their colonies cut off, without enough supplies to make it on their own. They knew what was happening, and they left the physical writing and did their best to make it easy to translate just in case anyone else ever came along and found it.”

Radcliffe nodded, interested but also appearing a little confused.

“Okay, so this is obviously going to win Dr. Cortez a Nobel Prize or something, and I find it fascinating on a personal level, but why bring it to me? What am I missing?”

“The Arborist outpost on Vishnu wasn’t just a colony, Portia. It was an archaeological dig. Their dig, of something they’d found, something much older.” He tapped his phone on her desk again, and an image spread out, wiping away the text.

Radcliffe didn’t even try to keep her mouth closed this time. She dug her fingers under the edge of the screen and tilted it upward on its hinges, bringing the image closer to her. It was a skeleton, not human, not even humanoid. The skull was elongated, the ribs giant hoops, the shoulders something never seen on Earth. Or so Angel had told him.

“That’s an Arborist?” Radcliffe finally asked, looking back and forth between the image and Chase.

“No. The Arborists were a lot like us, physically, even mentally from what the records say. Not quite human, but close. This… this is from something that called themselves ‘The People.’ They left this part of the galaxy thousands of years ago. But they left something behind.”

Another image, another tap. Something gold, but not the gold of the Arborist’s inscriptions. This was a deeper, warmer color, and it glowed from within, dark lines floating somewhere inside the glow. It was a flattened ovoid, almost an egg shape, and a man’s hand was resting next to it for scale, showing it was nearly a meter long.

“That,” he went on, “is a… computer, I guess. It’s more than that, but it’s an artificially intelligent computer called the Emissary.”

“Oh, come on.” If Radcliffe had been fascinated before, now her expression was openly skeptical. “How the hell would you know what it was?”

“Because it told us. It’s still active and it still has a mission, after thousands of years. And the first part of that mission was to pass off the secret of the Soong-Tierney drive to the Arborists… and later to us.”

“Mara Soong-Tierney invented the drive… discovered the drive, I suppose. She made a shitload of money on it and very sensibly used it to get the hell off Earth before the chaos started.” Radcliffe’s words were declaratory, leaving no room for argument, but her tone was flat, as if she was reciting a story she didn’t buy.

“That’s not how discoveries happen.” Chase shook his head. “They’re built on the shoulders of giants, on the discoveries of centuries, each one laying down another building block.” And those words were very eloquent precisely because they weren’t his. They weren’t even Angel’s, they were Victor’s. Or maybe the Emissary’s. It was hard to tell at this point. “The Soong-Tierney drive is impossible, Portia, and you know it. It contradicts everything we know, right back to Newton.”

“Quantum physics superseded relativity,” she countered, “which superseded Newton. That’s how physics works.”

“That’s what I thought,” he admitted. “That’s what I read in the media after the drive was proven to work. But Angel—Dr. Cortez, I mean—explained to me that Newton’s laws didn’t stop working just because Einstein came up with relativity… they were just incomplete. And relativity didn’t stop working because of Quantum physics, it was also just incomplete. There were exceptions to the laws that needed to be reconciled. The S-T drive wasn’t like that. Dr. Soong-Tierney didn’t come up with a totally different set of laws of physics and invent a reactionless spacedrive in just a few years’ time. It’s not possible.”

“But you find it so much more plausible that an alien computer wanted us to have a spacedrive and Dr. Soong-Tierney just”—she spread her hands in a question—“played along?”

“And made a half a trillion dollars,” Chase pointed out. “Wouldn’t you? But the drive is just the beginning. Before they left this arm of the galaxy, The People created an archive of all the knowledge they’d gathered in ten thousand years of an interstellar civilization… and it’s out there, waiting for whoever can get to it first.”

Radcliffe’s eyes lit up with a glow of avarice, as Chase had figured would happen. It wasn’t personal greed, not really, although running point on something like this would make her career. No, it was the natural thought of someone who’d worked for the government their whole life, whose whole focus was getting whatever advantage, political, military, or economic, for that government that they could.

“All right, Weston, now you have me hooked. Where is it?”

“To find it and reach it,” he said, reeling her in, “we need two more of the AI’s. We know where one of them is already.”

“Where?” she asked, with all the anticipation of a toddler awaiting a piece of candy, or an addict looking for their next fix.

“A Chinese colony world.” That other shoe dropped hard.

“Shit,” she spat, smacking a palm on her desk.

“That’s not the bad news, though.”

“How the hell isn’t it?” Radcliffe demanded, looking as if she wanted to smack him in the head for even saying something that stupid.

“Because there’s a reason The People left, a reason they gave the S-T drive to the Arborists and us and who knows how many other civilizations, and most of all, a reason they left that archive.” Chase took a deep breath, wishing he had a glass of water. He was an NCO… he hadn’t talked for this long in years. “At some point in the last few thousand years, The People were exploring the other spiral arms of the galaxy, and they came across another intelligence as sophisticated as their own. But as different as The People are from us, this species was even more different from them. Think a hive mind, something that doesn’t even consider the individual, doesn’t even think an individual consciousness is possible. To this thing, everything it encounters is just a part of a whole. And the fact that The People came along and were sniffing in its territory meant they were a threat.”

“More aliens?” Radcliffe looked at him askance. “For God’s sake, Weston, this is beginning to get ridiculous. Are you sure you didn’t partake of the local crop while you were on Vishnu? Just because you don’t get drug-tested anymore doesn’t mean you have to go nuts.”

Chase bit down on his instinctive response, which would likely have gotten him thrown out, and pressed on.

“A hive mind is basically immortal. Which means the thing didn’t think in terms of invasions or fleets. Instead, it built what The People call Sunkillers. That’s what they began calling the hive mind itself, the Sunkiller. They’re Bu…Bu….” He scowled and checked a file on his phone where he’d left himself notes in case he needed them. “Bussard ramjets. They suck up interstellar hydrogen and use it for fuel, so they can go forever and build up a velocity pretty close to the speed of light. These things are the size of a small planet and when they hit a star, it’s enough to make it go nova. Which pretty much sterilizes any habitable planet in orbit around it. And they’ve launched these things with crews of basically drones, bits of the hive mind programmed to target any system with signs of technological civilization. They’re bent on wiping out any other sentient life in the galaxy.”

Radcliffe didn’t say anything this time, but she didn’t have to. The disbelief was written across her face, and he saw her hand hovering near the intercom control, probably ready to have good old John Valente fetch security and have him thrown out.

“If you don’t buy that,” he said, using his hole card, “how do you explain the chain of novae stringing out between Earth and the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy, that we’re just now picking up on telescope?”

She frowned at him, brows drawing together with the unspoken threat of calling in the Marines to toss him on his ear if he was wasting her time. But she tapped the query into her computer, and he watched as her eyes grew wider. He would have been willing to bet she was reading the actual report on the novae, not the one they’d sent to the press. When she looked back at him, he could see she wasn’t convinced, but he could also make out a glimmer of hope.

“I’ll need to see the thing,” she told him. “Before I report any of this to my superiors, I mean. I’m not going to go to them empty-handed.”

“You can see it,” Chase assured her. “But not here. You come with me, and I’m not telling you where we’re going until we get there.” He shook his head. “Non-negotiable.”

“Of course. I understand completely.” If the avarice and disbelief had been genuine, her smile now was purest politician.

This had been too easy.

OceanofPDF.com

3

“I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do with that thing,” Chief Aguilar growled, shaking his head. “We’re on a Goddamned starship ninety percent of the time.”

“We gotta get some shore leave sometime,” Hill insisted, tossing the baseball up in his right hand and catching it with the glove on his left. The passersby in the close corridors of Farragut Station stared at him, edging away even in the narrow confines. Aguilar didn’t blame them. “And I haven’t played baseball since I was in high school. I’m gonna make time for it.”

“Shouldn’t you have bought another glove, then?” Aguilar wondered. “Or hell, a bat? I mean, who you gonna throw the thing to?”

“I figured I’d throw it to you, Chief,” Hill told him, grinning. “You’re tough enough you don’t need a glove, isn’t that right?”

Aguilar rolled his eyes.

“Stop tossing that thing around before you hit somebody. This ain’t Gateway. They actually have police here, and they ain’t afraid to use those cattle prods they call stun batons. Damned things hurt like a son of a bitch.”

“And how would you know? Don’t tell me you got in a bar fight on Farragut Station and I wasn’t there for it!”

“I’ve been around a long time,” Aguilar told him, not wanting to give Hill any more ammunition than he already had. “I’ve seen a lot of shit.”

“You’ve been around since Moses was a private,” Hill agreed, tucking the baseball into the glove and letting it hang at his side. “But this place hasn’t. It was only finished like fifteen years ago.”

“And where were you fifteen years ago, pup?”

Hill frowned, brow creasing as if in deep thought.

“I think I was graduating college? Or maybe it was high school. Honest to God, everything kind of runs together.”

Aguilar grunted.

“Yeah, excessive alcohol will do that to you.”

“Hey, what you call excessive, I call just right.”

Aguilar’s phone vibrated against his hip, and an insistent beep sounded in his right ear. He sighed and touched the button on the side of the earbud.

“Go for Aguilar.”

“Chief, it’s Pri. You guys done yet?”

Chief tugged at the strap of his backpack, even though she couldn’t see it. His was bigger than Adrian Hill’s, as usual.

“Got the stuff,” he confirmed. “On our way back now.”

“Shag ass. I just got the signal from Chase. It’s time.”

“Roger that, Cap. Give us five minutes. Aguilar out.” He tapped the button again, ending the call. “Come on Adrian, we got work to do.”

“Why’d she call you?” Hill whined. “I’m technically superior in rank and position.”

“Maybe,” Aguilar said, arching an eyebrow, “because she actually wanted it to get done. Stop jawing and start jogging.” His grin was half a sneer. “Sir.”

* * *

“Is this the best you could afford?” Portia Radcliffe asked, eyeing the drab, faded interior of the aging Tesla with a jaded eye.

“Hey, it’s a rental,” Chase protested, eyeing the map in the corner of the windshield’s heads-up display. “You ever take a look at what the car rental places in the colonies have to offer? Even here on Farragut? I was lucky they had anything at all.”

Chase watched the woman out of the corner of his eye, trying not to move his head. She’d been Intelligence, and she was probably with the CIA now, and she’d know if he was eyeing her. Radcliffe kept glancing at the mirrors, and it seemed to him that she wasn’t checking to make sure they weren’t being followed but to make sure they were.

“We’re heading out of town,” she noted, nodding at the thinning buildings, the streets turning from pavement to gravel. “I hope we’re not going all the way to the Aldrin settlement. I have to work tomorrow.”

Chase offered a thin smile.

“Not quite that far.” He didn’t want chit-chat, not now. He wanted to pay attention, and she seemed to cooperate for a minute, not speaking, just looking out the window. But it didn’t last.

“I was kind of lying when I said I hadn’t kept track of you,” Radcliffe admitted. He looked over at her, saw her staring at him, her face unreadable. “I know you got out after the Union absorbed all off-world military.”

“I signed up for the United States Army,” he said, shrugging, “not the Union Defense Forces.” He offered no further explanation, not because he didn’t have one but because he was aware she was trying to distract him.

“You set up your own PMC,” she went on. “Tamar. Named it after your ship.” Her brows furled. “I always wondered, why Tamar? I know it’s the name of the ship, but what significance does it have? And why a rampant lion as your unit patch?”

Damn. The woman did keep up with me.

“Tamar is the name of a woman in the Old Testament,” he explained. “Long story short, she broke all the rules and manipulated the system to make sure her family was taken care of. Priyanka likes the story and wanted to name the ship that. Naming the private military company after the ship just made sense. As for the lion…well, I just always liked lions.”

There was more to it than that, of course. As a kid, he’d watched a movie about Robin Hood that had Richard the Lionheart come in at the end to set everything right, and he’d thought the rampant lion symbol the actor wore on his tunic was damned cool. But she didn’t need to know that.

“You caused quite a stir in my neck of the woods, you know,” Radcliffe told him. “When you started selling us the Alliance intelligence data. Some people thought you were dangerous, that buying the data from you would make us look complicit in the eyes of the Alliance government. They thought we should stop doing business with you, maybe even turn you over to the other side.”

Now, he did stop checking around them and paid attention for a moment.

“And did you?”

She nodded and for a single, heart-stopping moment, and he thought she was admitting to it.

“I figured you’d ask that,” she clarified, and his pulse went back to a steady beat. “Honestly, it was my first thought when I heard about the ambush. I figured someone had actually gone and done it. No one ever admitted to it, though. The official story is that Chinese intelligence set the whole thing up, baiting you with a target they knew you’d hit.”

“That’s what I always figured.” And it was my fault for taking the bait.

The dust cloud wasn’t large. Whoever was driving the tail vehicle wasn’t an amateur. He knew to keep his speed down, to keep his tires inside the marks of others, where the dust was already tamped down. But you couldn’t drive on a gravel road without throwing up some particulates, and the afternoon glare shone right through them.

Which is how I planned it. Chase fixed Radcliffe with a hard glare.

“Do you want to see this thing or not?”

“I thought we already established I do,” she said, the tone in her voice innocent, beset upon.

“We’re being followed. Don’t bother denying it’s your people. They couldn’t be tailing us unless you were transmitting to them. Get rid of it now or I drop you here and you never see me again.”

Chase had to give Radcliffe credit—she didn’t bother trying to keep up the pretense, just sighed and pulled her phone off her belt.

“This is government property, you know,” she scolded Chase as she rolled down the window. “I’m going to have to cover this out of my pay.”

Despite the financial obligation, Radcliffe tossed the phone out of the car, then rolled the window back up, leaving a haze of dust inside.

She could be lying. Only one way to find out.

“Hold on.”

Chase pressed the accelerator to the floor, and the rental rattled and thumped as the speedometer shot past eighty miles an hour. Chase held the wheel tight, glancing up at the map every few seconds to make sure there were no tight curves ahead. The road was fairly straight in this stretch, though and the tail vehicle fell back. By the time it was invisible in the rear-view camera screen, Chase’s teeth were about to shake right out of his head from the juddering suspension, and he was grateful to let off the accelerator.

Radcliffe regarded him with something between amusement and pity.

“You know that’s only going to buy you a few minutes, right?” She waved a hand overhead. “Once they figure out you’ve lost the tail, they’ll send in the drones. And the only reason they won’t be looking for you on satellite is because they don’t think you’re important enough to retask them. Yet.”

He didn’t answer immediately, squinting through the dust off to the left of the road, where rock walls cut it off from whatever lay beyond. Except for one narrow, dirt track.

“I know,” he said, then touched a control on the wheel to activate the voice message on his phone. “Zack, be ready. Five minutes.”

Radcliffe had seemed unfazed by the whole thing up to that point, but at his words, she leaned forward in her seat and scanned their surroundings like a prairie dog searching for red tail hawks.

“What the hell do you have up your sleeve, Weston?”

He grinned at her just before jerking the wheel to the right and bouncing the old EV up the rough dirt road, the wheels slamming into the suspension.

“Wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

* * *

Zack Wilson squatted on the rock ledge, waiting. He wanted to think he was waiting stealthily, but a man six-foot four and 220 pounds couldn’t be that stealthy. Of course, if anyone was looking for him with thermal filters or heartbeat sensors, they’d find him whether he was a five-foot nothing ninja or an NFL linebacker.

But then again, they weren’t looking for him. The dust trail below told him who they were looking for. He grinned and keyed the voice message button on his phone.

“I see you. I expect I’ll see them, too, any second.”

Chase didn’t respond, but he probably had his hands full. The “road” was more like a game trail and he had to be busting the suspension on that old piece of junk driving it that fast. Zack chuckled, imagining the blender-ride Chase was taking and thanking God that he didn’t have to be in the car for it.

He pulled the binoculars out of the nylon backpack, along with everything else he’d managed to pick up in the market district of Armstrong. One of the more interesting things about the markets in what was perhaps the most strictly controlled of the western-settled colonies was how many of the kiosks sold stuff intended to help you avoid being strictly controlled.

There. The binoculars had a thermal filter, which had cost quite a bit more than he’d intended on spending, but they were worth it. The surveillance drones glowed like fireflies on a summer night, flying in formation toward the canyon… toward him. They’d reach his position before they reached Chase, which was exactly how we wanted it. He already had the rockets set up and was just itching to try them.

The whole thing was just so freaking cool, it made him grin just to think of whoever had invented it, and grin even more broadly at the balls on the son of a bitch who’d decided to sell it in a kiosk at the street market. Four model rockets, all hooked up to the same electric igniter, each trailing a wire connected to a net woven from conductive fiber, each carrying a small capacitor meant to discharge at exactly the same moment.

All hooked up remotely to the app on Zack’s phone. He touched the button and the rockets hissed away with a scaled-down version of what would have been a roar on a full-sized version, if anyone had still used rockets. They didn’t have far to go… the drones did most of the work, zipping downward and into the canyon, hunting for the rental. They never made it. The net draped itself across the formation of quad-copters, and four capacitors discharged with an electric snap and a wisp of white smoke.

The drones were too light for Zack to hear them fall, but when he raised the enhanced optics binoculars again, their thermal signature was gone. He stuffed the field glasses back into his backpack, slung it over his shoulder, and scrambled back down the rock wall to the waiting vehicle.

It wasn’t much to look at, the quarter-panels a dull, primer gray, the hood black, the trunk rust-brown, and the engine something that hadn’t been used on Earth for nearly a hundred years. Internal-combustion engines were common on the colonies, but this one was from a pattern dating back to the 1970s, not a single computer chip in it. It shook like a clothes dryer when he started it up and spewed out a cloud of dark smoke from the muffler, but it ran… and no military-grade maser or EMP could shut it down.

Zack tapped his fingers on the steering wheel to the time of the valve train ticking and wondered if the thing had finally burned the last of the extra oil he’d poured into it right after buying it from the gray market. The salesman had certainly taken him for a mark, taking his DigCoins with a smirk he hadn’t tried to hide, but assuring him the car would run for at least a few hundred more miles.

And that’s all I need from it.

Well, that and big tires. They might be nearly bald, but they gave the old rattletrap enough clearance to make it down the dirt track that had once been a tributary of the river that had cut the canyon until both had dried up. Zack was no geologist and couldn’t have said whether the river had died ten years ago or a thousand, but whenever it had gone, it had left a real mess for any vehicles trying to use its corpse for a road. Boulders the size of his head littered the sand and clay path, too many to drive around them all, and he considered fastening his seat belt the third time his head smacked against the side window.

One more like that, and it’s gonna crack. Though whether his head or the window would give way first, he wasn’t sure.

There. There was the old Tesla, pulled out onto the embankment as far as the thing would go given its relatively low clearance, and Chase was leaning against the driver’s side door while the government lady wandered around, scanning the sky like she expected drones or something.

“Hey Sarge,” Zack called, reaching across to roll the passenger’s side window down with a hand crank. “That piece of shit break down on you?”

“Not yet, but it’s one maser shot away from becoming a paperweight.” Chase pulled open the front passenger’s side door and motioned to Portia Radcliffe. “Climb aboard, ma’am.”

Radcliffe, Zack decided, reminded him of one of his mother’s friends, the kind who would come over to watch old movies and drink cheap wine and talk about the men who’d done them wrong.

“Howdy, ma’am,” Zack said to her as she slid hesitantly across the torn and faded upholstery. “Zack Wilson.” He stuck out a hand and she shook it with even more reluctance. “I’ll be your driver today while his highness rides in the back like the pampered princess he is.”

Chase shut Radcliffe’s door, and the woman’s head jerked around at the crash of metal, but the other man was already climbing in behind her.

“Home, James,” Chase said, motioning down the rocky dirt path.

“You may call that tin can home, Sarge, but it’s not mine.” He shifted the old car into gear and pushed the gas to the floor, sending them fishtailing off in a cloud of smoke and dust. “And my name’s not James.”

OceanofPDF.com

4

Victor Lee. My name is Victor Lee.

He had to keep reminding himself of that. It was too easy to lose himself in the memories of walking in another’s body, with legs bending different directions than the ones he was born with, strange fingers with more joints than he was used to, eyes seeing alien worlds in colors he had no words for. He would get up to move to another compartment and forget how to walk, or try to grab a latch and have his fingers slide off because he was relying on a second opposable thumb that he, the human, didn’t have.

But it was so worth it. The knowledge was a drug, each hit more powerful than the last, each lasting a shorter time. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that The People had evolved from an aquatic ancestor, then had gone avian before settling down to an omnivorous lifestyle on the plains, knew it as certainly as his own name. But the pattern of it, the Tree of Life showing him how it all made sense and how they’d used their origins to prove logical, predictable laws of evolutionary biology… that kept slipping away, a fish squirting from his grip every time he tried to land it.

He knew as well as he knew his own name exactly how The People had come to the arcane laws of physics which led them to the Soong-Tierney drive, from the first discovery to the last. Yet when he tried to put it into words that made sense to his human mind, they wouldn’t come, and it wasn’t just because he lacked the background in math or physics. The principles simply wouldn’t translate to a human way of thinking.

We would never have discovered it if it wasn’t for them. We would have muddled along with rockets and never left the Solar System.

Even though he knew he lacked the capacity to carry the understanding of the drive over to his human brain, he kept trying, kept connecting to the Emissary longer each time in the vain hopes that this would be the time it lasted.

“Victor.”

He didn’t register the words at first, thought it was his own internal voice still trying to remind him of his own identity, but he felt the hand on his shoulder, an electric shock of human contact, and his eyes snapped open.

He was back in the galley of the Tamar and Angel Cortez was staring at him with profound concern written across her face.

“Victor,” she repeated, “are you okay? I’ve been calling your name for thirty seconds now.”

“Why?” he asked her, though he found he didn’t care. Nothing happening between them seemed as important as what he was learning from the AI.

“We’re landing,” she said, as if that explained everything. “Just a couple minutes now.”

He felt it. He hadn’t before, not when he was immersed in the mind of The People. But now he felt the slight drop deep in his stomach, the pressure in his sinuses.

“You should try spending some time away from that thing,” Angel suggested, motioning at the glowing orb. “It can’t be good for you, being… connected to it like that all the time.”

She’s afraid. Scorn curled Victor’s lip, but it faded away at a realization, though he was unsure whether its origin was his own intuition or the Emissary’s. She was afraid, but not of him. She was afraid for him.

You should talk to her.

“It’s not going to work.” The words tumbled out of his mouth without intention, and he wasn’t sure what they meant at first, or who was saying them.

“What’s not going to work?” It was a very good question, though he didn’t know the answer at first.

“What they’re doing. It won’t work.”

The ship lurched, settling into the hydraulics of its landing gear, nearly sending both of them tumbling off their chairs. We should have strapped in.

“How would you know?” she wondered. Then she glanced at the orb again. “Or does it know?”

“I’m not sure there’s a difference,” he admitted.

“Then shouldn’t we try to stop them?” Angel was half out of her seat, hands flat on the table as if she was about to sprint to the cockpit and tell the others.

“That won’t work either.” Victor’s voice was tinged with sadness and he searched for a reason. There… there it was. Not sliding away this time, no alien logic behind it. “They’ll have to find out for themselves.”

Chief Aguilar loomed in the hatchway to the galley, eyeing him with suspicion.

“It’s time,” the older man said. “Let’s go.”

Victor rose, but Angel’s hand on his arm stopped him.

“Remember the plan.”

He tried to pull away, to take the duffle bag with him, but her grip tightened, becoming painful. She’d asked before, but this time, she pleaded.

“Please, Victor. Just do what they asked. It’s for your safety.”

Go ahead. I can speak with you through your ear bud.

“All right,” he answered them both at once, letting the strap of the duffle bag slide off his shoulder.

It was difficult leaving the Emissary behind, but he allowed Angel to steer him out of the galley. It wasn’t going to work. But he should see it for himself.

* * *

“Holy shit,” Portia Radcliffe breathed. “The damned thing is real.”

The woman ran her fingertips across the surface of the golden orb, and Chase stiffened, wondering if the thing would shock her or take over her mind or something equally apocalyptic. Nothing happened, though he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. He snuck a glance back out the open belly ramp, into the barren badlands. Zack Wilson had concealed his ancient car in a draw and was jogging back to them, the sky beginning to turn purple behind him.

“It is,” he said, “and everything it’s told us so far has been proven right. I don’t want to take the chance that it’s not telling the truth about the Sunkillers.”

Radcliffe’s eyes narrowed and she nodded toward the artifact.

“You haven’t told me how you communicate with it.”

“And we won’t,” he declared with a good deal more confidence than he felt. “That’s non-negotiable. If the government wants to know the secret, we have to get some assurances from them first. Chief among those that they won’t ignore the warning, but also that they won’t put any of us on a dissection table to figure out how we’re doing it.”

“Chase, my sweet summer’s child,” Radcliffe said, chuckling. “The government will tell you whatever you want to hear, but do you honestly think they keep all the promises they make? I mean, we did work for the same Army, didn’t we?” Her gaze flitted back and forth as if instinctively checking for anyone listening before she continued. “I’ll be straight with you, I was offered a fairly sizable bribe by someone I happen to know works for Hart-Klein to share with them any information I could get about you and this ship. I told them no… but that doesn’t mean everyone will. You’re taking a huge risk and I can’t guarantee what’ll happen when I kick this up the chain.”

“I know,” he admitted, raising his hands in surrender. “But you have to try. I’ll make sure you get all the details of the warning, but unless we get some guarantees, we’ll be gone and good luck finding us.” Chase shrugged. “I mean, you know I wouldn’t sell it to the Chinese if the US government screws me over, but they don’t need to know that.”

“Still thinking with your balls, Weston.” She laughed, but she also seemed to give in. “Okay, I’ll do my best… and that tack might work. But I’d feel better if I had some idea how you did it.”

Almost as if he was listening and trying to give Radcliffe exactly what she wanted, Victor Lee surged forward, his palm slapping against the side of the orb, eyes as focused as sighting lasers.

“Victor!” Angel yelled, emerging from the hatchway behind him, trying to pull him away, but it was too late.

“Goddammit, Vic!” Chase exploded. “Can’t you control yourself for a couple minutes?”

Vic speared him with a flat stare that was somehow more frightening than any glower.

“Something’s coming.”

Chase bit back the profanity-laden rebuke forming in his throat and tried to slug his brain into motion. If anybody would know…

“Hill!” he yelled back into the cockpit. “We got anything on sensors?”

The copilot twisted around, just visible down the long, straight passage from the ramp to the cockpit. Even from this distance, Chase could see the man’s face had gone pale.

“Our surveillance drones just went dark.”

“Oh, shit!” Pri blurted, leaving the rest of them in the utility bay while she sprinted back toward the controls. “We gotta get out of here!”

“You should come with us,” Chase urged Radcliffe, his thoughts nearly outpacing his mouth as he tried to come up with scenarios. “We can drop you back off closer to the city.”

“I can’t go flying off with you, Chase, as romantic as that might seem.” Radcliffe seemed unfazed by the prospect of unexpected visitors. “It’s probably my people seeing an unauthorized landing outside the city and putting two and two together with my disappearance.” She arched an eyebrow at him. “Which is likely the only reason you haven’t been swarmed by Space Force gunships already. Don’t worry,” she told him, jogging down the ramp, shielding her eyes from the setting sun as she searched the horizon. “I’ll tell them you’re contacts of mine and smooth everything over.”

“Portia, wait!” he shouted, following her. Her long-legged stride had already taken her a good twenty yards away, and he had to run to keep up. The sound of his own breath in his ears nearly drowned out the hum-whine of the S-T drives, and he didn’t spot the gunship until it was nearly on top of them.

It wasn’t, he noted, a military boat. No Space Force markings, no registration numbers, just matte-black paint and a recessed gunport that could have held anything. It had “spook” written all over it, the sort of vehicle he’d expect CIA shooters to be zipping around in.

If its looks intimidated Portia Radcliffe, she didn’t show it. The woman waited with her hands on her hips as the craft descended, squinting up at it until the bulk of the hull blocked out the sun. The side hatch of the ship was open and a familiar, pinched, too-perfect face watched them, those etched features sterner than ever.

“What are you doing out here, Ms. Radcliffe?” John Valente called to her.

He was no longer dressed in his designer suit, having traded it for black utility fatigues so impeccable they might have come straight from the tailor, their creases ironed and starched. But there was nothing overly fancy about the Glock 9mm he held in one hand, the other gripping a safety handle in the hatchway.

“Jack,” she said, waving at him not as if in greeting but more like she was shooing away a mosquito, “it’s all right. I know these people… they’re contacts of mine.”

The unmarked craft had been descending on the high-pitched whine of the S-T drives, but they cut off abruptly and the landing gear absorbed the suddenly evident weight of the gunship on its hydraulics, squeaking and groaning in protest. To his credit, Valente wasn’t thrown out of the hatchway, and Chase thought the man must have practiced the move in order to look cool.

“You always meet contacts out here in the middle of nowhere, ma’am?” Valente asked, still standing in the hatch, waiting for the boarding ladder to extend.

“It was confidential,” she said, an angry edge to her voice. And if she was faking, she was a very good actor. “I ordered surveillance because I didn’t want the meeting disturbed, not because I wanted a full-scale rescue mission. Who authorized this?”

“I took the initiative and authorized it myself.” Valente didn’t seem the least bit cowed or apologetic, which Chase thought was out of character, given the little he knew about the man. “I thought you might need help.”

“And what gave you the impression that there was something here I couldn’t handle?” Still anger in her voice, but this time her tone was more cautious, and Chase thought she was getting the same impression that he was. Something wasn’t right.

“You’ve always been a woman who was ready to seize the main chance.” Valente smiled thinly. “I admired that about you. You never let an opportunity pass by without grabbing it. And yet, when you had a chance at not just a fat chunk of change, but also an in for retirement from Hart-Klein, you passed it up.” He shook his head, tsking sadly. “I didn’t.”

He shot her.

It happened between one heartbeat and the next, so fast and unexpected that Chase was stunned, frozen in place for the barest fraction of a second, as if time itself had stopped. In that single frame of history, suspended in the thickest aether, the back of Portia Radcliffe’s skull hung in midair, propelled backward on the crest of a crimson wave, and Chase could have sworn he even saw the black blur of the bullet itself as it passed between her eyes and out the back of her head.

Time resumed its usual pace as her shoulders touched the ground, as if the contact had sparked a return to normal, and Chase took the first step toward a lunge at Valente, his right hand sweeping back toward the handgun holstered strongside inside his waistband. Valente was fast, and a gun in the hand was worth two in the holster.

It wasn’t the first time Chase had seen the muzzle flash of a gun from the wrong side, but he had the sense that it might well be the last. Something hard and fast slammed into Chase Weston’s chest and darkness claimed him.

OceanofPDF.com

5

It had to be at least eighty degrees outside, but the icy hand of winter settled across Angel Cortez’s heart when she saw Chase Weston fall forward, clutching at his chest. She wanted to cry out, wanted to scream, wanted to curse, but the unearthly cold choked the words out of her throat.

But not Zack Wilson’s. He bellowed something half profane and half incoherent and swung his rifle off his back and around to his shoulder in a move polished by what must have been years of practice. He’d been the only one in the cargo bay with a rifle, and God alone knew why he’d thought he’d need it, but whatever instinct had prompted him to arm himself had been prophetic.

The weapon, something Angel had heard Chase referring to as an M27, barked spitefully, sending brass cartridges pinging off the interior walls, and the man in black who’d shot Chase jerked backward, dropping his handgun. For a moment, Angel thought he’d been killed, but then he leapt onto the boarding ladder and scrambled up, one-handed, rounds smacking into the side of the ship all around him.

If he’d been alone, that might have been the end of it. Zack would have put a round into his back the second he stopped long enough to pull himself inside. But the hatchway was suddenly filled with other black-clad figures, their faces covered by balaclavas beneath ballistic helmets, their hands filled with wicked-looking assault rifles… and, in one case, a machine gun.

The weapon chattered and Zack dove for cover as a hail of slugs smacked into the side of the Tamar, a few whizzing through the open belly ramp to come to rest in the interior bulkheads. One came so close to Angel’s face that she felt its hot breath on her cheek, but she fought an urge to throw herself to the floor, noting two things—one, Victor hadn’t moved and was just standing at the center of the compartment, one hand on the artifact, and two, Zack was down.

The wound didn’t look fatal, but a stain of red was spreading across the outer part of his right thigh, and worse, he’d dropped his rifle. Angel moved and scooped up the weapon then fell into a crouch, using the edge of the belly hatch for cover as she centered the bright-red targeting reticle on the chest of the machine-gunner and pulled the trigger. Semiauto, she thought. One round for every pull of the trigger, so she pulled it three more times and still wasn’t sure she’d hit anything until the machine-gunner’s fire stopped, leaving the sporadic pops of the rifles as the only incoming rounds.

Not that they weren’t enough. A bullet slammed into the deck at her feet close enough for red-hot metal fragments to spray up at her face, and Angel flinched away, hands covering her eyes. Just a second of inattention, but enough to get her killed, if a hand hadn’t grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her away from the open hatch. She looked up, expecting Zack Wilson, and instead found Victor Lee.

“Hold on,” he advised, his expression as calm and detached as if he’d offered her a cup of coffee rather than pulling her out of a firestorm of lead.

She wondered what he’d meant by hold on. Hold on for what?

The Tamar lurched into the air, scraping the edge of the ramp against the sandstone, the metal on rock scraping setting Angel’s teeth on edge, the wild swing of the aft end nearly sending her tumbling out the open hatch.

Thump-thump-thump.

Angel had heard the sound before. It was the Bofors gun, the shells streaking across the distance between the Tamar and the gunship, going right through the open side hatch, and filling the interior of the craft with orange and red fire. Smoke poured from the opening, and where the black-clad troopers had been, there was nothing except a splash of red on the hull.

Angel didn’t hesitate, didn’t wait for the ship to steady itself or touch back down. She sprinted down the shifting ramp, jumped the last five feet to the ground, and stumbled at the impact but didn’t fall, despite the twinge in her ankle.

Why? The voice that whispered in her ear was an old and familiar one, one she’d heard every time she’d come close to a real, lasting relationship. Why are you doing this for him? What’s he to you? Why is he worth it?

She didn’t take the time to answer it. She was too busy running. There was a chance Chase was alive, and if she could get him back to the ship, to the medical bay and get him treated…

She nearly stopped in her tracks when she saw Chase roll onto his side and push himself to his feet. He was still holding his chest with his left hand, coughing fitfully, but there was no blood that she could see. She grabbed him as he started to stumble again and helped him upright.

“How the hell are you alive?” she demanded, smacking him on the shoulder, which wasn’t the sort of approach she’d intended.

“Jesus!” he yelped, wincing at the blow. He yanked his flannel shirt open, revealing the soft body armor strapped over his chest beneath it. A copper jacket was splayed out in a star shape, embedded in the fabric over his heart.

“You were wearing a vest?” she asked, then cursed for asking a stupid question and concentrated on helping him back to the Tamar, which was settling back down to her landing gear. But curiosity got the better of her. “How did you know?”

“In my line of work,” he explained, his voice pained and breathless, “it’s never a question of whether you’re paranoid. It’s always whether you’re paranoid enough.”

He was still hurt, she realized. Even with the vest, even though it had been a handgun round, the impact had left him with at best severe bruising, at worst cracked ribs. But he straightened after a few steps and forced himself to walk upright, taking the weight off of her.

“We need to get you to the medical bay,” she said as he pulled away on the ramp. Zack Wilson was still poised there, rifle back in his hands, reloaded, covering them in case anyone came out of the downed gunship. Chase slapped him on the shoulder, then the big man stood and hit the control to close the ramp.

“You gave me a scare, Sarge,” he said, shaking his head.

“Why? You knew I was wearing the vest.”

“Yeah, but your big ugly head is such an appealing target, I wasn’t sure if that admin dick could resist it.”

Chase shot him a bird, then winced as the motion clearly hurt his chest.

“I said,” Angel insisted, pushing ahead of him as the ramp rumbled closed, “you need to get to the medical bay.”

“And I will,” he promised, leaning over and kissing her. The contact shocked her enough that she stopped protesting for a moment. Chase drew back and offered a pained grin. “After we’re in the Rift. You should get strapped in,” he advised over his shoulder, heading for the cockpit.

Angel just stood in the utility bay, face frozen somewhere between a smile and a scowl, and the two emotions battling inside as well as out.

“Asshole,” she murmured, and Zack Wilson chuckled as he passed her.

“Yeah, he gets that a lot.”

* * *

“Did you get shot again, Weston?” Chief Aguilar asked Chase as he stumbled onto the bridge, left arm clamped to his side.

Chase glanced down at the powder burn on his shirt, the ragged hole left by the bullet and shrugged.

“Nothing gets past you, Chief.” He fell into a chair on the other side of Priyanka from Adrian Hill and strapped in. “What’s the sitrep, Pri? Oh, and by the by, thanks for saving my ass.”

“If I had a DigCoin for every time I saved your ass,” she said, hands massaging the controls, the ground dropping away beneath them, “I’d probably invest it in starting a new business where I didn’t get shot at.”

“We got at least four gunships incoming,” Hill announced, ignoring the byplay and not adding his own smartass comments for a change, which had to be a bad sign. “Space Force interceptors, I’d guess.” He nodded at Pri. “We gonna run, or what?”

“Yes, running is indeed the plan.” A long sweep of her fingertips across the throttle, and the high desert canyonland beneath them transformed into a red and tan blur.

“Oh, damn,” Hill said. “We’re being hailed.”

“Put it on speaker,” Pri told him.

“…in violation of air traffic control regulations for the United States colony of Farragut, and you need to set down immediately or you will be fired upon.” A pause for breath and the deep, sonorous male voice repeated itself. “This is the Space Force patrol ship Valiant-6, registration 890-4567-89B, warning privateer Tamar that you are in violation of air traffic control regulations, and you need to touch down right now before we open fire.”

Chase muttered a curse and picked up the hand mic from the console beside Pri, then keyed the transmit button.

“Patrol ship Valiant-6, this is Chase Weston on the Tamar. We are declaring an emergency. We’ve been fired upon by another vessel that is unmarked with no registration numbers, and one of our party was killed. We are running for safety to avoid destruction.”

Chase offered Pri a shrug. It was the truth, sort of.

“If that’s so, Tamar,” the Space Force officer said, “then set down immediately and you’ll be under our protection. We’ll have to take you into custody, but if you’re telling the truth, everything will be okay, if you just touch down now and surrender to us.”

“Don’t do it.”

Chase nearly jumped out of his skin at the voice from behind him, though he was completely unsurprised when he saw it was Victor Lee, still carrying that damned glowing alien thing.

“What the hell, Vic?” he asked, spreading his hands helplessly. “More revelations to share with us?”

“Yes.” If Victor was offended, he didn’t show it, didn’t show anything in his expression or his voice. “There’s a warrant out for your arrest for the murder of Portia Radcliffe, Undersecretary for Colonial Affairs.”

“The hell there is,” Chase blurted. “If there’s already one out, then…”

Zack Wilson finished the sentence for him, coming into the cockpit behind Victor.

“Then that bastard Valente intended this whole time to kill her and pin it on you.” He sat down in one of the spare jump seats and buckled the safety harness. “And there ain’t no way the Space Force is going to listen to our story.”

“There’s the ship’s security video,” Hill suggested, sounding hopeful.

“Which could be faked,” Aguilar pointed out. “Or just wiped and they’d pretend it never existed.”

“Get ready, Pri,” Chase said, nodding to her. “Throttle back, descend to treetop level.”

She nodded, and he could see in her eyes that she understood. Chase keyed the mic again.

“Valiant-6, roger that. We’re touching down immediately.”

Chase nodded to Pri.

“Hey, aren’t you two listening to what Wonder Boy and the big doofus are saying?” Hill demanded, staring between Chase and Pri. “They’re gonna arrest us!”

“Shut up, Adrian,” Pri muttered, her face screwed up in concentration. “And strap in, Vic, if you’re going to be up here.”

Victor didn’t argue, just pulled a chair out of the rear bulkhead and fell into it, as if surfing the rocking motion of the boat.

“One of those ships is coming up on us fast,” Hill reported. “She’ll be here in about ten seconds.”

The Tamar had slowed nearly to a stop and was coasting about twenty feet off the ground in a wadi where a dead river had once meandered through the valley. Chase’s gaze flickered back and forth between the radar/lidar screen and the view from the external cameras as he watched both the ground and the Space Force interceptor growing closer.

“Hold on to something,” Pri warned over the ship’s intercom. “We’re going vertical.”

“We’re doing what?” Zack asked, then squawked as the ship abruptly turned up on its tail, throwing Chase back into his seat and sending the breath out of him in a pained hiss as his bruised chest took another beating.

The Tamar just sat there for long seconds, hovering, waiting until the Space Force interceptor appeared on the external cameras, a grey wedge in the blue sky, speeding toward them, assuming, most likely, that they’d landed and were surrendering. He wouldn’t see them until the last second, until he’d slowed down to nearly nothing, floating into view with his gunports open and ready to fire.

“And alley oop,” Pri said, opening the throttle.

The Tamar boosted straight into the air much like the rockets of old, wasting power on the vertical takeoff only because she had it to waste. Shuttles and cargo haulers generally ran on battery banks and couldn’t afford the sort of profligate expenditure of power that the vertical lift required, instead using the same sort of gradual rise that took advantage of the rotation of the planet. Ships with their own nuclear plant didn’t have to be so thrifty, and they definitely weren’t what the local Space Force patrol was used to dealing with. And even with the nuke…

“We’re redlining it,” Hill cautioned. “We keep this up, we’re going to vaporize the coolant and the MHD generator will melt into slag.”

And if Hill wasn’t yelling the warning, it was probably because he couldn’t get a full breath of air to do it lying on his back.

“I think I’ll take the chance,” Pri ground out, “since the alternative is a big, fat Space Force missile right up the ass.”

“I hate it when that happens,” Aguilar agreed.

Chase said nothing, clenching his teeth closed to keep himself from groaning in pain… no use distracting Pri right now. It could have been worse. At least the drive was reactionless. Going out of the atmosphere this fast would have required a twenty-gravity burn from a rocket, and bruised ribs would have been the least of his problems.

“We have seven… no, eight missiles on our tail,” Hill said, as if he was trying to slap back at Pri. “Estimated time to intercept, six minutes, thirty seconds.”

“Don’t forget the orbital gunships closing in on our trajectory,” she reminded him, not seeming to take offense. “They’ll be in firing range quicker than that.”

“Any ideas, Cap?” Aguilar wondered.

“Keep going fast and hope the damn generators don’t melt down.”

“Sorry I asked.”

As if they didn’t have enough on their plate, a siren whooped, filling the cockpit with perhaps the most annoying sound Chase had ever heard.

“Laser,” Hill told them. “Orbital laser. Bastards.”

Chase wasn’t clear if Hill was calling the Space Force orbital defense crew bastards for firing on them or calling Zack and him bastards for getting them into the situation.

“Energy dispersal spin,” Pri said, and ten seconds later, Chase decided that it was a fair assessment either way.

Laser weapons were devastating close-up, the trick being getting someone to fly their ship within a few hundred yards of the nuclear reactor and gigantic focusing mirrors needed to make one work. From tens or hundreds of miles away, their main utility was in heating the target up until the people inside cooked to death, or, more humanely, until they surrendered rather than cooking to death.

There were various defenses against laser weapons. Particulate clouds were a favorite, dispensed by aerosols, but that only worked if the target was hanging around where the particulate cloud had been sprayed. Not as useful for the Tamar, shooting straight up through the atmosphere toward space.

Which leaves spinning the damned ship like a top and hoping we’re out of range of the laser before we all die from puking our brains out.

“Oh, sweet baby Jesus, I hate this,” Hill moaned, and this time Pri didn’t tell him to shut up. No one told him anything because the rest of them, including Chase, had their jaws clamped shut.

Chase had been at this game a long time, long enough for most things other people found intolerable not to bother him much. But the spin always got to him, and the only reason he was able to refrain from throwing up was the moral certainty that the spasms in his torso would make his chest hurt even worse.

Trying to focus his eyes was impossible, but keeping them closed was a recipe for disaster, so he stared at something directly in front of him, which happened to be the image of the planet’s moon hanging huge in the blackness. He tried to keep centered on it, but the blurry edges drew his attention away, and for just a few seconds, he caught sight of Victor Lee.

He would have expected the younger man to be just as afflicted as the rest of them, but Victor was sitting bolt upright, both hands inside the opening of the duffle bag, pressed flush against the artifact. His eyes were closed, an expression of utter peace on his face. The Emissary was doing it, Chase realized. The thing was taking his mind away from all this, away from the torture his inner ear was being subjected to.

Lucky son of a bitch.

“We’re getting some burn-through,” Aguilar warned, and the words sounded as if he was straining them out through his teeth. “Number two water tank is steam right now, venting to relieve pressure.”

Oh, that’s bad. The water tanks lined the outer hull to give extra protection against radiation and if one of them blew, it could do some serious damage, not to mention leaving them vulnerable to all those nasty little bits of ionizing radiation.

“We’re out of the soup,” Pri announced as if she hadn’t heard Aguilar.

“The soup” was a pilot’s term for a planetary atmosphere, and being out of it and free of atmospheric drag meant they could boost even faster, fast enough to outrun the missiles the Space Force had set on their tail. The bad news was, it also made that damned laser even more effective.

“Ships coming up on our three o’clock,” Hill reported, and Chase was impressed he could focus on his instruments long enough to relay the information. “They’ll be in weapons range in one minute.”

“Maybe less,” Pri said, jerking the control yoke to her right.

Chase was already watching the main screen, so when the image there turned along with the steering controls, he had a pretty good idea what the pilot was doing.

“Pri, tell me you’re not trying to ram the Space Force ship,” he moaned.

“Ram? No. Just gonna get that damned laser off us. They can’t shoot it at us if they’re going to hit their own people.”

The ship ceased spinning and the ever-present alarm cut off, the Space Force crew came to the same realization as Pri had. Chase sucked in a deep breath for the first time in minutes and waited for his inner ear to catch up with reality and stop making him feel as if the cockpit was still spinning around him.

“They may not be able to shoot that laser at us,” he finally had the presence of mind to argue, “but that interceptor you’re running straight at has guns. Big guns. And we can’t shoot back.”

They could shoot back, of course, but Chase had no intention of firing on US military personnel and he knew Pri wouldn’t either.

“You know the thing about bullets, Chase?” she murmured, eyes focused in deep concentration, fingers guiding the ship with the gentle touch of a surgeon. “Once they leave the barrel, they can’t accelerate, can’t change course. We can.”

“And if those bullets are traveling at three thousand feet per second,” he countered, “and we’re traveling at twenty thousand feet per second, when they hit us, that’s gonna be”—he squinted, giving up on doing the equation in his head—“a hell of a lot of feet per second.”

“With math skills like that,” she murmured, “it’s a shame you didn’t become a pilot.”

The Space Force interceptor was a gleaming, metal wedge on the main screen, growing closer with each second. Chase’s fingers sank into the armrests of his chair, aching for a gun, even though he wouldn’t have used it if he could.

“Hold on,” Pri said, which might have been one of the most useless warnings in the history of the language, but Chase supposed it was the thought that counted.

If the anti-radiation spin had been a ten on the discomfort scale, the maneuvers she put the ship—and them—through were a nine and a half. Chase couldn’t see or hear the cannon rounds streaking out of the guns in the nose of the military ship, but he knew they were coming just as well as Pri did, though both of them were only guessing at their trajectory. Hers was better, of course, since she knew what she was doing and he couldn’t have gotten the Tamar off the ground without the autopilot, but it was still a guess.

For nearly a minute, Chase believed she’d guessed right, rolled sixes in this game of chance a dozen times in a row as somehow they flew head-on at the interceptor without taking a round. Then something rang the ship like a gong and those damned warning klaxons sounded again, louder and more insistent this time, telling them the obvious, that they’d taken a hit.

“Almost dead-center on the nose,” Aguilar reported dolorously. He took damage to the ship personally and his voice lost any trace of an accent, all business. “We’ve lost two inches of armor off the bow, but the round didn’t penetrate the inner hull. We got significant structural weakening in the area, though. One more shot anywhere near the bow, we’re going to lose atmospheric integrity.”

“Ten more seconds,” Pri said, and maybe it was a promise but Chase thought it sounded more like a prayer. “Just ten more seconds.”

Those ten seconds lasted for an eternity, twisting and rolling and spinning until Chase’s inner ear waved a white flag and promised never to leave the ground again if only God would get it out of this mess.

“Capacitors charged,” Hill said, and hope surged in Chase’s gut. That meant they had to be far enough out for….

“Jumping.”

The Rift opened up around them and the Tamar reached safety, battered and bruised, but alive.

Safety. Yeah, right.

“We need to have a talk,” he said, hitting the quick-release for his harness. “All of us. The galley, in an hour.”

“Why an hour?” Hill asked. “The longer we wait, the longer it’s going to take us out of our way.”

“Two reasons,” Chase said, pushing himself to his feet, then swaying there, unsteady. “One, I promised Angel I’d get this big-assed bruise on my chest looked at once we hit the Rift, and I don’t like breaking promises.” He leaned against the bulkhead, catching his breath. “And two, because I need some time to think before I try to tell anyone else what to do.”

“How bad is it?” Hill asked with an expression like a dog expecting a kick.

“I think I can sum it up in two words, Adrian. We’re screwed.”

OceanofPDF.com

6

Everyone was angry.

Victor understood the fact that they were upset, but he was having a problem figuring out why. Chase Weston paced across the galley, rubbing at his chest and pulling his shirt away from the elastic bandage pulled tight over his ribs.

“This situation just went from difficult to impossible,” he said, bitterness dragging his words and his tone downward. “Before, all we had to worry about was the Chinese and Hart-Klein. Now, we can add arrest warrants for murder from our own government to that. And the US government hunting for us automatically means the Union will be, too, and every member nation.” He slapped a palm against the bulkhead, the sound gunshot-loud in the small galley, and Angel winced.

She was hurting, and she had been ever since they’d reached the Rift. Victor could see it, so why couldn’t Chase? Even Priyanka had noticed. She was eyeing the archaeologist, and looked as if she wanted to say something but didn’t.

“I didn’t believe this would work,” Victor told Chase. “No government agent would believe us without proof, and what proof could we give them? I know these things to be true, but no one else can. This Radcliffe person wouldn’t have helped us.”

Chase surged toward him, fists clenched and Victor thought that the soldier was actually going to hit him. So did Angel apparently, because she jumped up and interposed herself between them, putting a hand on Chase’s shoulder.

“It’s not him,” she reminded him, shaking her head. Chase could have pushed past her, even with the sore chest, but he allowed her to hold him back, his shoulders shaking. At first, Victor thought it was rage possessing him, but then he noticed the glint of a tear in the man’s eye.

“Portia Radcliffe was a damned good officer and a patriot,” Chase ground out, “and she deserved better than this.” He slumped away from Angel’s grip, sagging as if he was about to fall in on himself. “Just like Gavin back on Vishnu. That’s two good people who’ve died because Hart-Klein wanted this Goddamned artifact. I’m ready to shove the damned thing down their throats.”

“We can’t,” Victor reminded him, tapping a finger against the surface of the relic. “It’s the only hope we have of finding the other pieces. And without them…” He shook his head. “I can’t say how long we have. It could be years, it could be months. That depends on where they hit first. But we don’t have enough time to do anything like The People did, try to build enough ships to pack everyone up and run away. We have to find a way to stop the Sunkillers.”

“I still think,” Angel said, the slightest quaver in her voice revealing how the events of the last few weeks had affected her, “that we need to at least try going to the Colonial Authority.”

“We’re wanted for murder,” Hill scoffed.

“The CA only enforces interplanetary law,” Chase told him, though he sounded reluctant to accept it. “And Good God, it’s hard enough getting them to do even that. They probably won’t try to arrest us, but I don’t know if they have the resources to help us.” He rubbed at his eyes as if it was a strain just keeping them open. “And there’s always the chance that we’ll run into a CA bureaucrat with an eye for a quick payday and the number for the nearest Alliance intelligence agent or HKC operative on speed-dial.”

“We could just tell them,” Angel insisted. She nodded, smiling slowly as the idea took hold. “We work up a recording with all the facts, jump into the system where they have a station and transmit it to them. Tell them we want them to share it with the Alliance and the Union and everyone else.”

“They won’t believe it,” Aguilar said, slumped in a chair, dejection written across his face. “The kid’s right. Everyone is going to want proof. And what are we going to tell them?”

“You could tell them to start sending probes toward the route from here to the Sagittarian Arm,” Victor suggested. “If I’m right, they’ll find the Sunkillers not too far along that path. No more than a few weeks’ travel by Colonial Authority scout ship.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Zack Wilson said, finally speaking up. The big man hadn’t said much since their escape from Farragut, and Victor sensed Zack was upset with himself for not protecting Chase more effectively.

No. That’s wrong. I didn’t sense it. I didn’t know the Sunkillers could be found along that course. The Emissary did. This is him talking, not me. Why am I saying these things?

Victor didn’t expect an answer, didn’t welcome it when it came.

Victor, there really isn’t a difference anymore, is there? You and I are one.

“They might look,” Chase agreed. “They’ll have scout ships heading out that way without us telling them. Diverting them a few light years one way or the other won’t cost them anything but time.”

“Okay,” Priyanka said, seemingly as eager to seize onto any straw of hope as the rest of them. “Let’s say we do that. We need to know what to put in the message. Victor, sum it up for us. What does the Emissary think we should tell them?”

Victor opened his mouth to tell them that they shouldn’t do this, that they’d be better off not risking the knowledge on entities they couldn’t trust, but he shut it again. That wasn’t him talking.

“The Emissary doesn’t think you can trust them and doesn’t want you to send them a message at all,” he said, taking control of his thoughts with a tremendous act of will. “But if you’re going to do it, I’ll tell you what I know. What the Emissary has allowed me to know.”

“Where’s the Archive?” Zack asked him. “Let’s start with that.”

“I don’t know. He won’t tell me because he’s afraid I’ll tell you.”

That is not accurate. I won’t tell you because the knowledge was kept from me.

Shut up.

“Okay, maybe I’m not being fair,” Victor admitted. “He said that neither he nor either of the other two AI we need to find were given the whole story because they didn’t want to take the chance some idiot would stumble onto one of them and get their hands on technology that could destroy planets. To find the archive world, you have to have all three. The Emissary, the Navigator, and the Engineer. The Emissary knows where the Navigator is, and the Navigator will know where the Engineer is… and when you collect all three, as a bonus, you get the Archive and the means to get there.”

I would have phrased it with more respect and decorum.

I said shut up, for once.

“And where’s the Navigator?” Chase asked. He didn’t seem as angry at Victor as he had been before, and Victor—actually Victor, this time—thought it was because he believed what Angel had said, that it hadn’t been him, it had been the Emissary. “You said it was on a Chinese colony, but which one?”

“It’s called”—Victor hesitated, trying to recall the pronunciation without the Emissary’s help—“Lóng dàn. I think that means Dragon’s Egg.”

“Shit,” Pri murmured. “I’ve heard of that place. It’s not a fortress like Xi'an, but it’s pretty heavily settled. They dumped a bunch of farming families there just so they could brag they had more humans settled off-world than anyone else, but they didn’t want to deplete their own farms, so they basically kidnapped them from the neighboring countries they conquered back in the war… Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines. Lóng dàn might not have as many ships or bases as Xi’an but there’re so many civilians there, it’ll be hard sneaking in.”

“And we ain’t doing it with just you and me as trigger-pullers and door-kickers,” Zack told Chase. “We’re gonna need at least a squad.” He shrugged. “I’d wish for more, but this boat can only hold so many people.”

Pri made a face at the man but didn’t snap back.

“I can get them,” Chase said, leaning back against one of the tables, eyes fixed on the deck. “I know where to find some people from… before. It’s gonna be tricky though, with everything hanging over our heads.”

“I still have a couple forged registrations that haven’t been burned yet,” Pri assured him.

“So what?” Hill demanded, hands spread in a full-body shrug of disbelief. “So, we got a squad of soldiers and we can give people a fake name, but how the hell does that get us a safe harbor on a Goddamned Chinese colony world?”

“I might know someone who can help us,” Victor said.

“Is this the Emissary talking,” Angel asked him, “or you?”

“It’s me,” he promised, staring her in the eyes until she nodded, satisfied. “I may be a California boy, but my grandmother came to the US from Vietnam.” Victor smiled and the expression felt unfamiliar, like it was stretching muscles he hadn’t used in too long. “And Grandma always did try to keep in touch with the old country.”

* * *

Chase wiped carefully at his chest with the threadbare towel, wincing at his reflection in the half-fogged mirror. The bruise was ugly, black and blue and turning yellow at the edges.

“I should have worn a damned combat vest,” he murmured.

Trying to look away from it, he noticed his beard, which was getting shaggier by the day. It was an affectation he’d adapted shortly after getting out of the Army, a little badge of rebellion, to remind himself and others that he wasn’t Sgt. Chase Weston, 75th Ranger Battalion anymore, that he’d declared his independence. But it was getting out of hand.

Chase wrapped his towel around his waist, sighed, and dug through the medicine cabinet for the electric razor he kept there. He hadn’t charged it in a while, but batteries lasted longer nowadays than when he’d bought his first razor at fifteen, probably three years before he’d really needed one. He leaned over the sink, then reconsidered. The sink drain went to the recycling unit, and his hair would clog up the filters and get Pri and Aguilar shouting at him again.

A small trash can was tucked into an alcove in the bulkhead. He slid it out and set it in the sink, before leaning into the mirror. Then reconsidered again at the twinge in his chest. He sucked in a breath and was about to give up on the whole venture when the bathroom door squeaked open on old hinges that needed oil and Angel Cortez stepped inside.

She eyed him up and down, her gaze lingering at the bruise on his chest, and he wasn’t sure if he imagined the twitch at the corner of her eye, the deepening of the frown lines at her mouth. It faded quickly and her eyes settled on his chin… and the razor.

“You finally going to shave that thing?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” he admitted. He gestured at the bruise. “But I may have to wait until I can wrap this thing back up.”

“I’ll take care of it for you.”

Chase thought Angel was offering to re-wrap his chest and was about to thank her when she grabbed the razor from his hand instead and motioned at the trash can.

“Hold that under your chin and stand up straight.”

This is a mistake.

But he did as he was told and grabbed the waste bin. The bathroom wasn’t large—nothing was large on a spaceship—and she had to step very close to him, so close their hips met, which gave him thoughts having nothing to do with her skills as a barber. Until the first stroke of the shaver sent a huge chunk of his beard falling into the wastebasket, leaving a strip of his cheek bare to the universe.

“I was just planning on trimming it!” he squawked.

“Too late now,” she said with a malicious chuckle, sweeping the buzzing instrument of torture across his face and doing too much damage to reverse.

Chase watched a face emerge from beneath the beard, a face he hadn’t seen in the mirror since that fateful day when he’d taken the option given to all US military personnel of resigning rather than transfer their allegiance to the Union Armed Forces. He hadn’t thought he’d see that face again. The chin was firm with a resolve he’d lacked these last five years, but the eyes were the difference.

How could my eyes change from shaving my beard?

But they had. They were the eyes of another man, and if they hadn’t changed just now, it had happened gradually, without him noticing. He settled into the new face and allowed Angel to finish what she’d started, ridding him of his mustache as well, pressing harder to erase every stray whisker and leaving him clean-shaven. He was the soldier again, the Ranger. Not the bodyguard, not the contractor trying to make a living, but the soldier who killed from the belief he was in the right.

Angel shut off the shaver and placed it back in the cabinet, then took the waste can from his hands and slipped it into its cradle, still smiling, though there was sadness in the expression.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked her.

“Very sure.”

She kissed him, and he still wasn’t sure if she understood the question.

OceanofPDF.com

7

“I can’t believe we’re back here,” Adrian Hill said, staring at the main screen, at the image of the blues and greens of Earth. “What the hell? I mean, didn’t we all agree that the Alliance, the Union and Hart-Klein all want us dead? What are we doing here?”

“I hope that question is rhetorical, Adrian,” Priyanka said, eyeing him sidelong. “You were sitting right there when we decided on the plan.”

“Yeah, and I didn’t like it then, either.”

“Your fake registration should hold up, right?” Angel asked Pri, letting more of her concern show than she’d intended. She was used to being the person who charged in and made everyone else worry.

“Spoofed, not fake,” Pri corrected her. “And yes, there is a difference. This registration is real, not a forgery. It just so happens that the vessel it belongs to was destroyed in a drive overload, and it was never reported since they happened to be on a smuggling run at the time. The facilitator who arranged the run took advantage of that fact and recycled their registration for a hefty price.” She rolled her eyes. “Thank God we were flush at the time, since that didn’t happen too often. With a forged registration, this close to Earth, we’d get spotted in a heartbeat. With a spoof, the only way that happens is if we’re boarded and they compare the logbook to the registration.” Pri shrugged. “Or if there’s someone around who knew the privateer Kerouac and can tell the difference between a Class-C body and a Class C3 body.”

Angel was sure that the distinction was important to Priyanka, but it just made her more frustrated.

“It’s simple,” Chase said, not strapped in but holding onto the safety rail along the overhead for when the drive cut off and took the artificial gravity with it. “Zack and I are going to hitch a ride aboard Gateway station with an under-the-table deal for an unscheduled stop by a commercial shuttle. While we’re there on our recruiting mission, you guys stay out here and resupply, and Victor sends a message to his grandmother via satellite relay. The only tricky part is you docking to pick us up, but that should be short enough to minimize risk the ship will be identified.”

“We’re here,” Pri announced, though how she could tell, Angel wasn’t sure. This section of empty space seemed just like any other, with nothing around for tens of thousands of miles, and even Gateway just a glowing diamond in the distance. “This is the edge of the L5 orbit, technically international waters… well, you know what I mean. No nation has jurisdiction out here, so we won’t be boarded by the Space Force or the Alliance Navy.”

“And you can just order supplies out to here?” Angel’s stomach twisted halfway through the question as the artificial gravity faded and her shoulders pressed against the safety restraints. “I mean, someone will ship them out here even though there’s nothing else, no other customers?”

“Yes, Dr. Cortez,” Aguilar answered for his captain, which Angel supposed was appropriate since he handled procurement for the company. “They’re not burning anything but a little time. The barges don’t even bother with a generator, just put solar collectors connected to a battery bank and a low-output S-T drive.” He snorted. “Hell, the cheap bastards wouldn’t even bother with a pressurized hold if they didn’t have to ship perishables sometimes.”

“You know what you’re going to tell your grandma, Vic?” Chase asked, clapping the younger man on the arm. He’d been making an effort to treat Victor more warmly since their confrontation on the run from Farragut, and Angel appreciated it… especially since she’d been the one to ask him to do it.

Victor looked at his shoulder and at Chase’s hand, no feeling in his eyes, never taking his palm off the surface of the artifact. Angel had been encouraged when Victor had defied the Emissary to tell them the truth about the Archive, but like any addict, he’d gone back for another fix.

“I already recorded it,” he said, finally. With Angel’s help, before he’d totally sunk into his connected fugue. “I told her I needed help and said if she had any friends or relatives who’d been shipped to Lóng dàn, could she record a message to them and send it to me.”

“That’s… good.” Chase moved his hand away, shaking his head. “Come on, Zack,” he said, waving at the big man. “That shuttle will be docking anytime now.”

Angel unstrapped and followed the two men out of the cockpit. She caught up with Chase before he reached the main tunnel and touched him on the arm. “I want to go with you,” she said, glancing back to make sure no one had moved up behind her.

Zack had already headed down the passage toward the utility bay and the two of them were alone.

“I don’t want to stay here,” she said.

“Why?” he asked, shaking his head. “We’re going to be recruiting hired guns. Not exactly your area of expertise.”

“It’s Victor,” she whispered. “It’s him and that thing. It’s taking him over again and I don’t want to watch it.”

Chase slipped an arm around her shoulder, and she stiffened at the casual familiarity for a moment before she let herself relax.

“I understand,” he said, hugging her to him. “But you’re the only one here he gives a shit about. If you’re gone, I don’t know that Pri and the others can keep him in check.”

Angel wasn’t sure why she felt the urge to push away from him, why it felt presumptuous.

“I know. But he’s…” She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to erase images of addicts on the streets of Los Angeles, needles hanging out of their arms. She’d wandered those streets at thirteen, and the first time she’d encountered an overdose, she’d tried to wake the young woman up. The body had been cold under her hand. “He’s slipping away.”

Chase sighed, not contradicting her.

“The only thing I can hope for is, when we get this all done, when we find the other AIs, that the thing will let him go. I mean, it’ll have served its purpose then, right? It won’t need him anymore.”

“Do you really believe that?” Angel meant the question to sound hopeful, but instead, it carried the weight of her skepticism.

“I guess I have to.”

Chase left and she let him, not tempted to say goodbye.

Hill passed her on his way out of the cockpit, but the others were still there, Pri going over a wish list of supplies with Chief Aguilar.

“…and we’ll need a full restock on 20mm for the Vulcans,” she told the older man, “as well as 30mm for the cannons, though that’s going to be harder to get on short notice.”

“And expensive,” Aguilar added, making a face like he’d just bitten into something sour. “I’ll ask if they have any Bofors ammo, too, though I wouldn’t hold my breath for that. It’s easier to find out in the colonies. Less call for it here in the Solar System.”

Pri nodded. “And see if Bodhi will let us put everything on our credit account.” She raised a hand to forestall the protest forming like a storm cloud on Aguilar’s face. “I know, I know, he won’t, but it never hurts to ask.”

Aguilar grunted and turned back to his console, then started tapping items into his entry pad with a hunt-and-peck style worthy of her boss at Cal Berkeley, Dean Devlin.

“You can order ammunition here in the Solar System?” Angel asked Priyanka. “I’m surprised. I thought things would be more… controlled here.”

“It’s easy to fabricate,” Pri explained, floating above her command chair, one arm hooked in the restraint harness to keep from floating away, “and impossible to police outside a gravity well.” She shrugged, more a thing of her hands than shoulders in free-fall. “Hell, even on Earth, the various government agencies and local cops can’t stop people from 3D-printing guns and making ammo with home fabricators. It used to be that gunpowder was hard to produce, but there are synthetic replacements for it now. The Colonial Authority makes a show of trying to keep weapons and ammo smuggling away from the more established colonies, but everyone knows it’s a waste of time.” Pri’s gaze went to the bulkhead as if she were seeing through it into the future. “I guess someday, they’ll have the tech to shut down the black market, but it’s not going to be cheap and it’s not going to be soon.”

“And you’re happy about that?” Angel asked. Pri grinned.

“Well, my livelihood pretty much depends on it.”

The captain went back to some arcane technical task involving the reactor, and Angel left her to it, pushing away to the rear of the cockpit, entertaining ideas of grabbing some food. She hesitated beside Victor, who was sitting at the communications console, wearing a set of wireless headphones and nodding to himself.

“We have a response from my grandmother,” he announced, pulling off the headset. “There’s a woman named Lan who lives on Lóng dàn. Apparently, my grandmother had a cousin back in Vietnam, one who was as close as a sister, but they were separated when Grandma emigrated to the United States. They stayed in touch until twenty years ago.”

“When this woman Lan was taken to Lóng dàn with the other forced colonists?” Angel deduced.

“Grandma has given me a message for Lan, assuming the woman is still alive.” Victor shrugged. “Grandma is old and Lan has been living under rough conditions her whole life. There’s no guarantee she’s still alive.”

“It’s something,” Angel insisted. “Something we didn’t have a few minutes ago. You did well, Victor.”

He didn’t react to that, either with gratitude or cynical doubt. She hesitated, checking whether the others were paying attention.

“Do you think,” she asked, hesitantly, “that you’ll ever go back to the way you were before? Before the Emissary?”

Now his expression did change, to confusion.

“Why,” he asked her with more sincerity than she’d seen of Victor Lee before or after his bonding with the AI, “would I ever want to go back to the way I was before?”

Victor wasn’t strapped in, and when he waved a hand demonstratively, he should have come out of his seat, but he didn’t move.

“Do you know what I was, Dr. Cortez? I was a loser. I was a perpetual grad student, scared shitless to publish my doctoral thesis because you might not like it… and mostly, because if it was accepted, we wouldn’t be working together anymore and I wouldn’t have any excuse to be around you. You considered me a nuisance, an annoying little shit who you only kept around because you’re such a ball-buster, you couldn’t keep any other graduate assistants around.”

Angel rocked back as if he’d slapped her—not because of the rudeness, the directness of the words, but because of their truth. Her first impulse was to snap back at him, to tell him what an asshole he was being, but that wouldn’t affect him, not the him he’d become. She had to try to reach Victor Lee, down beneath the bond with the Emissary.

“You’re right,” she admitted. “That’s exactly how I thought about you. But things have changed now. I didn’t know you before, didn’t know how courageous and selfless you could be.”

There was something of the old Victor in the curl of his lip, something snarky and sarcastic and if it wasn’t the side of him she wanted to see, at least it was him.

“And now that you do know,” he said, “does that mean you’re going to drop Chase and pledge your undying love to me?”

Again, Angel forced herself not to react in anger. He was trying to provoke her, trying to get her to leave him alone because he didn’t want to go back to what he was.

“You’re my friend, Victor,” she insisted. “I know it’s not what you wanted before, but…”

“I’m not angry at Chase,” Victor interrupted her. “He’s a good man trying to do the right thing. And I don’t blame you, either. You’re not interested in a relationship with a kid a decade younger than you. Who would be?” He waved the subject away. “But mostly, I wouldn’t want to go back to the kid I once was because everything then meant nothing. What we’re doing now, what I’m doing now is more important than anything any human has ever done before. And if I have to give up all that I was in order to save everything else, then I’m good with that.” He smiled, and this time it seemed genuine. “Be happy for me.”

“I’m trying. But I want to know what happens to Victor Lee once this is over, once we’ve got the Archive and the Colonial Authority or someone is working to stop the Sunkillers. Do we get him back?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think the Emissary knows. There’s never been a bond before, and they were designed by a race who barely knew humans existed.” Victor took his palm off the artifact with obvious reluctance, like a man scared of heights letting go of the railing at an overlook of the Grand Canyon. “I know the Emissary needs me. He’s an artificial intelligence, but he’s not truly sentient without the bond.” His brow furled, the first sign of strain or worry. “I don’t know what he’d do if he thought I was going to separate from him.”

His hand went back to the surface of the artifact as if magnetically attracted to it and the worry disappeared.

“It’s probably best we don’t find out.”

OceanofPDF.com

8

The smell of sweat, blood, and massed humanity, the cheers and yells and catcalls, the smack of flesh on flesh, the blinding glare of the spotlights all assaulted Chase Weston’s senses as he walked down the steps toward the octagon.

“People actually pay to watch this shit?” he asked, having to lean close to Zack Wilson’s ear to be heard over the crowd.

“You and I did this shit all the time when we were in the Rangers,” Zack reminded him. “And no one was footing the bill… we did it for fun.”

Chase grunted noncommittally. The fighters inside the octagon didn’t seem that much more skilled than he and Zack had been when they’d practiced combatives on each other in the yard between the barracks as young enlisted men. They were bigger but also fatter, though that might have been a function of their weight class.

If these guys even have weight classes.

They didn’t seem to have much else in the way of rules. The MMA Chase remembered watching as a kid was sometimes brutal, but it also had to pass the muster of the various government agencies in the many countries where the fights were held. This… well, Gateway was famous for its lack of government oversight of just about everything. No gloves, no illegal strikes, no rounds. Two men—or women—went into the octagon and one came out. The only role of the referees was to make sure that a surrendering or unconscious fighter didn’t continue to get pummeled by their opponent.

There was, however, plenty for the ringside security to do. The crowds ringside were nearly as dangerous as the fighters, and much more likely to be drunk or high. Someone was yelling louder than the rest of the crowd, cursing at one of the fighters, calling him a cheater, which seemed impossible in a fight with no rules, but that didn’t deter the man. He was as big as either of the two fighters in the ring and sported a gut as big as both of theirs, and seemed convinced he’d do better against the supposed cheater.

Maybe if alcohol were a performance-enhancing drug.

The fat man exploded out of his seat, urged on by the woman sitting next to him, who was wearing virtually nothing.

She must be cold. They keep the air conditioning blasting pretty high in here.

Two security guards sprang forward and caught him as if they’d been there the whole time and not so far back that Chase hadn’t been able to spot them in the shadows of the octagon. They were bigger than the fat man, and while both of them were a bit thick around the middle themselves, it was just the side-effect of a training regimen devoted more to pure strength than looking cut. As the fat man found out the hard way when they slammed him to the floor, whipped his hands around behind him and zip-tied them together, then hauled him to his feet and hustled him over to another set of uniformed security, who were slightly less gigantic but no less insistent. The half-naked girl ran after them, screaming at their backs.

Zack laughed, apparently considering the whole thing better entertainment than the fight, and Chase pushed past him, jogging to get to the security guards before they moved back into position. They saw him coming and advanced on him, violence in their eyes.

“Get back in your seat, asshole,” one of them growled through a bushy, orange beard, “or you’ll eat the floor just like that last loser.”

“Sorry, not looking for trouble,” he told them quickly, holding up his hands. He was fairly certain Zack and he could take the two, but the guards weren’t alone and security didn’t pride itself on fighting fair. “I was wondering if you know Carlos Vazquez and Jackson Walker? I was told they work security here.”

“I’m not going to tell you again,” Orangebeard yelled, but the other man, taller and less colorful in his choice of hair dye, stopped him with a hand on his massive bicep.

“Carlos?” he repeated, frowning. “You mean Chilly?”

“Yeah, Chilly,” Chase agreed, encouraging any line of conversation that didn’t result in a fight.

“Yeah, he and Jax work here, but they’re working the tournament.”

“Could you get them a message from me? I’m an old friend of theirs from the Army.” He almost told them his name, but caution grabbed the words and hauled them back. “Tell them it’s the Ranger squad leader from Subic Bay who saved their asses.”

“No,” Orangebeard insisted, pushing past his more sensible friend and smacking a palm against Chase’s shoulder. “They’re working the tournament, and so are we. You want to talk to them, go sign up for the damned thing!”

“Sign up?” Chase repeated. “Neither of us is a professional fighter.”

“Neither are these assholes,” the less mouthy one confided, motioning at the two men in the ring still trying to pound each other into submission. “It’s amateur night… anyone can sign up. Drunk assholes fight each other for the entertainment of other drunk assholes. It’s a nightmare for us, but some slob wins five thousand in DigCoin. Go see the registration table in the back.”

“And get the hell away from the ring,” Orangebeard added, giving Chase one last push before both of the security guards faded back into their positions.

Zack’s eyes lit up and he shot Chase a grin.

“Five thousand? Shit, man, I’m in.”

* * *

“We don’t have time for this, Zack,” Chase insisted, trailing behind as the tournament “official”—some teenaged boy undoubtedly hired for peanuts, Zack was sure—hustled them all toward the left-hand octagon.

“What choice do we have?” Zack asked, throwing his shirt back at the other soldier. Cold tendrils of overpowered air conditioning sent chills up his spine, despite the ambient heat of the overstuffed auditorium and the glare of the lights. At least he didn’t have to worry about gloves, just the possibility of breaking his knuckles on someone’s head. “We don’t know where they live and finding out would take time and money we don’t have. This way, you act as my ring manager and when the fight starts, you can find Chilly and Jax and tell them why we’re here.” He grinned over his shoulder. “Plus, it’s five freaking thousand, man. And I have a feeling this is as close as I’m going to get to a payday for quite some time.”

The kid waved them to the far side of the octagon, glancing aside at the fight still going on in the center ring. The two overweight wannabes were quickly tiring out, their punches swung wild. The first one who connected was going to win, Zack judged, since whichever one of them got knocked down first wouldn’t have the energy to get back up.

“You’re going to have five minutes after this one ends,” the kid warned them, harried, overworked, and sweating despite the AC. “You”—he pointed at Chase—“stay on the other side of the ring gate and don’t open it or you forfeit.”

“What the hell use is a ring manager in a fight with no rounds?” Chase griped.

“If your boy here is getting his ass kicked,” the kid answered, “you need to open that damned door.”

And then he was gone, scurrying back up the rows of raving fans. One of the amateurs in the next ring over had finally connected and was staggering back to his corner, hands raised above his head, blood pouring from his nose. The ref had waved his opponent out and the bell rang, ending the fight.

“That lasted a lot longer than I thought,” Zack admitted, dancing in the center of the ring, trying to shake loose and warm up. They’d made him take his boots off as well, and the cushioned surface felt disgustingly moist under his bare feet. He didn’t want to think about his face against it and resolved not to adapt a ground-and-pound strategy for this fight. “Wonder where the other guy is?”

“Here he comes now,” Chase said, tapping his right shoulder and pointing at the other side of the octagon.

Zack felt a bit of the confidence buoying him up slide away as the tall man pushed open the gate and walked into the octagon, the lights gleaming off his shaven skull. He had three inches on Zack, and maybe the same in reach, and despite the fact that the bald bruiser weighed at least two-twenty, there was, as far as Zack could tell, not an ounce of fat on the man. A lot of iron had pumped its way into those muscles, and if there was any fear in the tall man’s soul, it hadn’t made its way to his eyes.

“Hey,” Zack said, nodding to the guy. “Nice day for it, huh?”

The other man grunted, saying nothing, while his ring manager, an older woman with gray hair tied into braids hanging down her back, shot Zack a dirty look and closed the gate behind her.

“Guess that’s my cue to exit,” Chase said, chuckling. He paused and looked sidelong at the bald muscleman for a second, and Zack could see the calculation behind those steel blue eyes. “This guy’s hard in the muscle, soft in the head. He’s strong, but he’s too intimidating. No one’s ever kicked his ass and if you tag him good, he won’t be able to handle it.” He slapped Zack on the shoulder and grinned. “Good luck. I’m gonna see if I can spot Chilly or Jax.”

“Thanks,” Zack said, but the fence closed and Chase was gone.

“Please direct your attention to Ring Three!” the announcer’s voice boomed through the auditorium, bombastic and deep into baritone. “In Ring Three, in the white corner, we have two-time Amateur Tournament champion, Ray the King Lambino!” Baldy raised a fist and leered at the crowd as most of them booed.

Real popular guy.

“And in the red corner, we have a newcomer to the tournament, a last-minute addition, Zack Boom-Boom Barnett!”

“Boom-Boom?” Zack repeated at the air, not knowing where the announcer was actually located. “I never said my name was freaking Boom-Boom!”

“Fighters!” the referee yelled, her voice amplified by her throat mic, echoing through the auditorium. “When the bell rings, the fight begins! There are no illegal hits, no illegal holds, so don’t waste time whining to me. I’m here to make sure no late punches are thrown once the fight’s over and that’s it. Either fighter can quit at any time, and if you’re worried about getting hurt, well damn, son, you’re in the wrong place. If either ring manager opens the gate or throws in the towel, their fighter has forfeited the match. Do you both understand these rules?”

“Think I got it,” Zack told her, then cracked his knuckles while staring down Baldy, who only nodded his reply.

“Then get ready,” the ref said, hand raised. The bell rang and she slashed her hand down between them before jumping out of the way. “Fight!”

Baldy—Zack refused to think of him as the King, and he just didn’t look like a Ray—tried to get tricky, jumped in quick, and snapped out a jab in an attempt to catch Zack by surprise, but the push off his right leg gave it away, and Zack took a step to the right. The jab hit nothing, and Zack’s instinctive response was to step in for a counterpunch, but he controlled the impulse and danced away from the taller man. He needed to feel Baldy out, make sure he wasn’t underestimating him. Rushing in headlong without thinking was the stereotypical Ranger thing to do, but Zack had spent the last five years working with people he couldn’t necessarily count on to have his back, and it had taught him to be a bit more circumspect.

Plus, you ain’t twenty-five anymore and getting hit hurts.

Baldy scowled, clearly unhappy what was probably his trademark trick hadn’t worked, and stalked toward Zack, giving up surprise for overwhelming force. The right cross was well-executed and spoke of long hours of training, the head duck and the follow-up body blow showing that training had been in a boxing gym.

Good choice. Zack had been told by someone he trusted that there was no better combination of disciplines to study for self-defense than boxing and wrestling.

That didn’t mean he was going to sit around and take the blows simply because he appreciated the other man’s preparation. Zack stepped outside the cross, pushing it out of line with the edge of his hand and throwing off the follow-up shot by an inch, just enough to rob it of its power. Zack absorbed the off-balance hit to his gut, the smack of Baldy’s hand against his flesh sounding louder and more violent than the actual impact. It stung, but Zack had been ready for it, had been willing to take the shot to open up his own.

Left hook. Unlike Baldy’s attempts, Zack’s connected, the sting of the tall man’s cheekbones against Zack’s knuckles hurting worse than the gut punch. Baldy’s head snapped around, and he had no defense for the combination to the floating ribs. No amount of core exercises could protect those, and air whooshed out of Baldy’s lungs in a gasp, leaving him doubled over, totally naked to whatever punishment Zack felt like meting out.

There’d been a time, back in the bad old days, when Zack Wilson would have relished pounding the shit out of the bald man to prove a point, to show he was worth being respected, but he hoped that wasn’t him anymore. Zack slipped behind Baldy and brought him to his knees with a kick to the hamstring, then wrapped his arms around the man’s neck. Rear naked choke. Zack had been on the receiving end of enough of them to understand how Baldy was feeling.

It wasn’t like being strangled, which was what a lot of the new guys thought before they’d experienced it. It had been like he was being shot through a dark tunnel, and the walls were closing in, the blackness expanding to consume the edges of his vision until nothing was left. And then he’d been out, just like Baldy was now. The tall, shaven-headed amateur fighter slumped in Zack’s grasp, but he kept the hold in place for a few more seconds before he saw the ref approaching and he let the bald man go. The esteemed Ray “the King” Lambino hadn’t had time to break a sweat before he hit the floor, bouncing once off its springy surface before he went utterly limp.

The ref waved him away as if he were about to stomp Baldy’s face in and the bell rang furiously. Zack wasn’t even out of breath, and he offered the cheering crowd a distracted wave, feeling more disappointment than elation.

“Couldn’t you have drawn that out a little more?” Chase asked, ducking through the gate into the octagon and offering him a towel he didn’t need. “I didn’t have time to find Chilly, and it’s already over.”

Zack dabbed at his chest, wiping away the cooties from Baldy, then tossed the towel back to Chase and shrugged.

“Sue me, dude. That guy was all show.”

Baldy was back on his feet, shaking his head and making excuses to his manager, the ref, the crowd, and everyone else who would listen. The ref grabbed Zack’s hand and raised it, and a cheer went up, though Zack was sure it was more because everyone hated Baldy than that they were so impressed with his victory.

“The winner of this first round match,” the disembodied announcer said, “is Boom-Boom! Let’s give him a hand, folks!”

“Boom-Boom,” Chase mocked, laughing. “Oh, I’m never letting that go, buddy.”

“Rest quick,” the ref told him as Baldy did the walk of shame out of the ring and through the jeering fans. “Your next match is in ten minutes in the center ring. Against him.”

She pointed at a fighter walking barefoot and bare-chested from Ring Two to the center. He wasn’t as big as Zack or Baldy, but there was something about him, a wiry spring to his step, a look of competence that left Zack disquieted. And then there were the scars. They weren’t from fighting in the ring, they were old knife and bullet wounds. This guy had fought for his life, which made him oh, so much more dangerous than the muscular Baldy.

“Leroy,” she added. “He doesn’t compete every time, but he’s never been defeated.”

“Oh, joy,” Zack murmured. He grabbed Chase by the arm and whispered to him urgently. “Go find Chilly. And hurry the hell up.”

OceanofPDF.com

9

“I’m surprised you don’t have robots for this kind of thing,” Angel Cortez told Priyanka Ambedkar as she wriggled into the well-worn pressure suit, trying not to breathe through her nose.

Angel wasn’t sure who’d worn the thing last, but it was obvious they hadn’t disinfected or deodorized the suit and she hoped against hope that, once the helmet was sealed and air began flowing out of the tanks, the smell would fade.

Keep dreaming, girl.

“Well, I’m sure there are robots who can unload cargo from a barge,” Pri replied, sealing the gasket on one of her gloves while leaving the other floating beside her in the utility bay, “but we sure as hell can’t afford them. Thanks for volunteering to help.”

“Beats sitting around waiting for word from the others.” Angel had managed to attach both gloves, but she frowned in confusion at the helmet gasket, trying to look down at the collar of her suit but seeing only her own nose. “Can you help me with this?”

Pri chuckled, setting the helmet down over her head. Angel almost gagged. The helmet smelled as bad as the rest of the suit. Someone had tried to disinfect it, but all it had done was add a layer of bleach odor on top of the lingering BO. She held her breath until Pri had the gaskets sealed and flashed her a thumbs-up. Angel at least knew how to turn on the air—she’d been sure to memorize that before trying to put the suit on. She could have just twisted a physical valve, which she thought was incredibly old-fashioned, but Pri had assured her it was an important redundant safety feature. But the easier way was to flip open the cover on her left forearm and touch the push-button control.

Cool air washed over her face from the hoses running into the helmet from her backpack, and she finally took a deep breath, the air fresh and sterile. It wasn’t exactly a mountain breeze, but it was better than gym socks.

“Oh, man,” Adrian Hill said over her helmet radio. The copilot was already suited up and waiting by the cargo lock. “Did you get my old suit? I was so damn happy to get out of that thing. I bathed it in bleach and that smell still wouldn’t come out.”

“Shut up, Adrian,” Pri snapped. “Chief, is that barge close enough for docking yet?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The older man’s voice was as loud as anyone else’s in Angel’s ear, though he was back in the cockpit with Victor. She’d invited Victor to come and help, but he hadn’t wanted to get into a suit, most likely because he wouldn’t have been able to maintain his connection with the Emissary. “I’m bringing us in. Gonna get a little bumpy, so you all might want to hold onto something.”

Angel took the chief’s advice, found a safety strap mounted on the bulkhead, and grabbed it just before the Tamar was nudged sideways into the docking collar of the barge. She’d seen it on the screens before they came down to the utility bay, a ring that reminded her of a camera iris that mated with the ring collar around the Tamar’s utility airlock with a metallic grinding that set her teeth on edge.

The docking sequence terminated with a solid thump that tried to throw Angel across the compartment, only the safety strap restraining her, her feet extending out toward the opposite bulkhead before she pulled herself back in.

“All right,” Chief Aguilar said, his sigh a hiss of static in Angel’s earphones. She got the sense he didn’t much like being at the controls. “I’m on my way down.”

“He’s not staying in the cockpit?” Angel asked Pri.

“Not if we want this shit moved in under an hour,” Hill interjected. “If we take any longer, the damn shippers charge us extra, the freaking vultures.”

Aguilar was already in his suit and it only took him a few seconds to reach the hold and hit the switch to shut the pressure hatch behind him. He shot Hill the high sign and the copilot undogged the hatch and yanked it open.

“Don’t we have to pump the air out of here or something?” Angel asked, confused.

“Naw, the interior of the barge is pressurized,” Hill informed her, reaching through the open hatch, six feet on a side, to grab the lever on the barge’s lock.

“Then why are we wearing space suits?”

And why am I breathing in Adrian Hill’s funk?

“Because we’re dealing with a private contractor who doesn’t answer to any government or corporate entity,” Pri informed her. “And I for one don’t plan on risking my life or my crew’s lives on their ability to maintain this old piece of slapped-together shit.”

Put that way, Angel really couldn’t argue. She let Pri and Hill lead the way inside, pulling herself through just ahead of Aguilar. The interior of the barge was a place of glare and shadow, the lights built into the center passage not penetrating back beyond the cargo crates anchored in their storage cradles.

Angel knew the cargo hauler was big. She’d seen the stats on the sensor readout and even made a comment to Victor that the ship was nearly four hundred feet long, and the cargo bay took up all of that, the drive bolted to the dorsal spine, its batteries built into the drive pod. But it was one thing to see the numbers and know it on an intellectual level, and another to float into the massive, warehouse-sized ship, a space the size of a medieval cathedral. The shadows were the size of single-family homes, the empty cradles somehow more haunted and foreboding than the full ones.

“Our stuff’s over here,” Hill said, propelling himself ahead of them, reading the location of their cargo from a tablet.

“What about all this other cargo?” Angel wondered. She hated constantly asking questions. It made her feel as if she were back in school, bugging her professors. She’d been notorious for nagging them with constant questions, but it had seemed like the only way to learn. It still was, she was convinced, but it had been quite a while since she’d been the one asking the questions and not answering them. “If it goes to someone else, what’s to stop you from taking some for yourself?”

It was amazing. They were all wearing helmets, and she couldn’t see any of their faces, but she still felt Adrian Hill’s eyes rolling.

“Well, they know what the hell they loaded the ship with. If it showed up at the next stop with something missing, they’d blame us. Plus, I guarantee this whole thing is being watched in as close to real time as the speed of light will allow. They don’t even try to hide the security cameras.”

He probably meant for her to be embarrassed, but she wasn’t. Angel Cortez had learned long ago not to filter her questions. The answers to the obvious ones were sometimes as informative as for the ones she had no clue about.

“Help me out here, Dr. Cortez,” Pri said, waving toward a crate ten feet long and four feet wide, marked 30mm ammunition on the side. It probably weighed over a ton, but once Priyanka hit the quick-release for the cradle restraints, it floated upward.

Probably spring-loaded.

“Just get a leverage point and then plant your magnetic soles and click your heels together, then say ‘there’s no place like home,’ and we’ll be back in Kansas.”

Angel barked a laugh, almost involuntarily.

“Have you actually seen that movie?”

“Every Thanksgiving night with my father until I graduated college,” Pri confirmed. She took a spot at the rear left corner of the crate and connected her boots’ magnetic soles to the metal grating of the deck. The click was audible, which meant there actually was air in the compartment, and Angel didn’t have to be breathing the inside of the suit. “Come on, get here beside me.”

Angel fastened her boots, the sensation less like gravity and more like being anchored to the bottom of the ocean, the rest of her wavering like one of those inflatable dummies businesses used to advertise. But she had leverage, and she used it to push the crate, timing her efforts with Priyanka’s. It was miraculous, the way the giant mass moved at her push, and she took another step, speeding up the pace.

“Careful!” Pri told her. “This thing doesn’t have any weight, but it’s got a shitload of mass, and we don’t want to give it momentum on top of that or we’ll wind up smashing it right into the airlock.”

Angel nodded, though she knew the other woman couldn’t see it. She wasn’t a physicist, but she knew enough about free-fall to realize the difference between weight and mass. Between the two of them, they guided the crate through the cargo doors and set it in place above an electromagnetic cradle built into the deck of the utility bay.

“Right here.” Pri touched a control set in the bulkhead and the magnet snapped to life, pulling the crate down with a thunderous crash. The captain turned to her, and Angel could see the other woman’s grin through her faceplate. Pri clapped her hands together. “All right. One down, six to go.”

They didn’t have to move all six themselves, of course. Aguilar and Hill were bringing a second crate through before they could even make it back to the hatch, this one marked 20mm armor-piercing ammunition. Hill didn’t quite manage the deft braking maneuver, and a ringing thump echoed through both ships when a corner of the crate smacked into the edge of the airlock.

“Goddammit, Adrian!” Pri snapped. “You break their lock, they’re going to charge our account for the repair, and I’m taking it right out of your salary!”

“I get a salary?” Hill repeated, voiced strained and distracted as he manhandled the crate back through the hatch. “When did that start?”

“If we don’t have enough to pay you,” she suggested, “I could take it out of your hide instead. Now get out of the way so we can get this job done.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The work, Angel decided, was therapeutic. It didn’t require deep thought, so she could allow her mind to rest, but it did call for a constant concentration, so she couldn’t allow her thoughts to drift to her fears and worries. It was only another ten minutes before she and Priyanka had another crate in the Tamar’s cargo bay, which made four altogether.

“That’s the last of the ammo,” Aguilar announced as he and Hill plodded behind them, magnetic soles click-clacking along the deck.

The chief sounded worn out, and Angel couldn’t blame him. Sweat was pouring down her face despite the cool air washing through her helmet, gathering at the center of her back and in her socks. She was beginning to understand how the suit had wound up smelling so bad in the first place.

“All that’s left is the food,” Aguilar added.

“It’s back here,” Hill said, his tablet out again, leading him deeper into the cargo barge. “I don’t know why the hell they couldn’t just put all our stuff in one spot, but I guess that would have been too damned convenient.”

“It’s prepackaged food,” Aguilar pointed out. “I’m sure they keep a bunch of it on the barge because someone’s going to need it eventually. It’s probably been here for weeks, waiting for a buyer.”

“Which makes me just as excited as all hell about eating it,” Hill shot back.

Angel was never sure what had drawn her eye to the shadows to the right of the area where Hill had indicated the food was stored. Perhaps it was a flicker of motion caught in her peripheral vision, one of those events that made people think there was such a thing as a sixth sense, though it was actually just the subconscious mind doing its primeval job, watching for threats. She hadn’t even had the time to piece together the sight of the dark figures clambering out from behind the crates, six of them, hands filled with the wicked, angular stocks of bullpup rifles before she cried a warning.

“Look out!” she yelled, the volume instinctive though, intellectually, she knew the suit radio would equalize it. “To the right! They have guns!”

If it had been Chase or Zack, she was sure they would have moved, taking the warning to heart from reflexes honed on a dozen battlefields on a dozen planets. But Pri, Aguilar, and Hill were a Space Force crew, their reflexes constructed during ship-to-ship combat, and they froze. Not for long, just a second or two, but long enough for gunfire to erupt from the shadowy figures. Hill was caught with one foot off the deck and the other half-detached, and the impact of the rifle rounds sent him spinning off to his left.

Angel yelled a curse, partially at Hill being shot but mostly because she didn’t have a gun.

Pri did. Angel hadn’t noticed it, since it seemed that everyone she’d been hanging around with lately carried a gun whenever they could get away with it, and yet it was there at the woman’s left hip, strapped against her thigh to keep it from slapping around in free-fall. Angel couldn’t have identified it without a minutes-long internet search, but it seemed different than the one Chase carried. His was polymer framed, light, built for the electronic sight and the flashlight mated to it, while this one was big and metal and looked as if it would have been heavy if they were under normal gravity. It was the gun of someone who rarely had to carry one, and Angel hoped that didn’t mean that the pilot lacked practice.

If she did, it didn’t slow down her first shot. Even through her helmet, Angel heard the deep thunder of the gun’s discharge, saw the basketball-sized muzzle blast, and knew it had to be a heavy-caliber weapon. Pri rocked back under the recoil, only her magnetic boots keeping her in place, and the closest of the black-clad shooters, the one who’d fired at Hill, clutched at his chest and floated off in a cloud of crimson globules. The blood was its own solar system, orbiting the man as he tumbled through space, and Angel nearly found herself hypnotized by the sight.

The staccato rhythm of automatic fire woke her from her fugue, and she realized that she had to move. Wearing the magnetic boots wasn’t a natural thing for her, and it took her far too long to realize she needed to click her heels together and deactivate the things. She kicked away from the deck and sprang for the ceiling just a half-second ahead of a spray of bullets, the rounds sparking off the metal deck plates and ricocheting God knew where.

They’ll keep going, bouncing off the bulkheads until they lose all their energy to friction or bury themselves inside one of these packing crates. And so will I.

It was a long damned way to the ceiling, and Angel was moving fast. The hit would be hard, and then she’d hit again when she came down, but she’d done enough martial arts that she’d never be able to forget how to take a fall, and a fall was a fall, even if she was falling up. She spun head for feet and absorbed the impact through her knees and into her hips, and finally smacked her palms against the smooth steel of the overhead plating. It had spread out the blow, but the hit was still enough to drive the air from her lungs and send a twinge all the way from the soles of her feet to the small of her back.

She was going to bounce. There was no way to avoid it, beyond activating the magnetic soles of her boots, and she hadn’t hit in a position to do that. All she could manage was trying to control the angle of the ricochet, and where she came down was mostly a guess, since the glare of the light panels mounted in the overhead had turned her polarized visor nearly black. The smart thing to do would have been to try to get back to the hatch of the Tamar and get her ass out of the firefight, but she’d jumped at the wrong angle for that. She had the choice of coming down behind Pri or behind the bad guys, whoever the hell they were.

Pri had one handgun, while the bad guys had automatic weapons. Angel aimed for the side that had fewer bullets flying at it.

She had more time than she would have liked flying through the air on her way down, and she felt as if she’d hung a giant sign around her neck that said “shoot me,” then hung herself from the ceiling to make it easier for them. Angel wanted to squeeze her eyes shut, to not see the end coming, but instead, she forced herself to take the opportunity to figure out what had been going on in the seconds she’d been soaring across the barge.

Pri had moved forward and to the right, going for cover behind a ten-foot-long crate, but she was still firing, her shots easy to track since her sidearm flared like a cannon with every discharge. Two of the black-clad gunmen had been hit, which was impressive given the fact that Pri wasn’t an infantry soldier, but the other four were laying down suppressive fire, forcing her to stay behind the crate.

Chief Aguilar was moving as well, clomping along on the deck with his magnetic boots, trying to pull Adrian Hill to safety. Hill was moving, which both relieved and amazed her, since she’d seen him take a burst of rifle fire to the chest, but neither of the two men was in any position to help Pri… or Angel.

But maybe she wouldn’t need their help. She’d figured the shooters would be taking potshots at her already, but they seemed to have lost her in the lights and kept their attention on Priyanka, the only one firing back at them. Angel was ready for the hit this time, the electromagnets in her boots already activated, and her gut clenched against the pain that was coming. She couldn’t roll, couldn’t bounce, not if she wanted to stick, which meant she had to take the whole impact in her feet and legs, and this time, it hurt.

Angel couldn’t localize the pain into discrete packets—it was just a general wash of pain. But she knew she’d pay for it later in detail, in knees strained from all those years of martial arts, all those marathons and triathlons. But all of those had also taught her how to ignore the pain until it was convenient to deal with it. She straightened and focused on the man just ten feet in front of her. All of the attackers were men, as far as she could tell, all wearing the same black combat utilities and balaclava, and, interestingly enough, none of them was wearing a space suit. Apparently, they had more faith in the structural integrity of the barge than Priyanka did.

The upshot of all that was that she had the mass of the heavy suit behind her when she slammed into the back of the unsuspecting gunman and all he had to cushion the blow was a few layers of fabric. The man pitched forward and tumbled head over heels, his rifle spinning in mid-air. Angel grabbed at it and caught the pistol grip, then pivoted toward the other three gunmen.

It was awkward—her feet were anchored to the deck in the wrong position to turn that direction, and she was forced to swivel at the hips and knees and aim the rifle from the hip. Angel had been squeezing every ounce from the element of surprise, but she’d squeezed it dry, and all three of the enemy were already turning her way when she pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. Angel Cortez stared down the barrels of three automatic weapons and waited to die.

OceanofPDF.com

10

“Holy shit,” the thick-chested, grizzled veteran said, staring at Chase like he’d seen a ghost. “Is that really you, Weston?”

Carlos “Chilly” Vazquez had been much younger the last time Chase had seen him, and much more convinced of his self-importance, just a few months out of BUDS training and sporting his SEAL trident in combat against the Chinese. And thinner, if Chase was being honest.

Of course, I was pretty young myself.

“I never thought I’d see you two in security uniforms on Gateway,” Chase admitted, pumping Chilly’s hand while Jackson Walker laughed in disbelief and pounded him on the back hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs.

“Well, you know,” Jax said, his laugh softening to a rueful chuckle, “I swore an oath to protect and defend the United States of America. I didn’t sign up to take orders from some Brit or German who never spent one day in the teams.” He nodded at Chase. “I guess you got the same idea. We were working as contractors, too.”

“I heard,” Chase said. “Executive Options.” He shrugged. “I guess you guys got caught up in the whole business with the human traffickers on Churchill.”

“Goddamned Colonial Authority saying that was an illegal action,” Chilly spat. “A fucking war crime or some such shit. Like those assholes didn’t deserve exactly what they got.”

“Tell me that’s not Zack Wilson in the ring with Leroy Jenkins,” Chilly said, staring up the steps to the octagon at the two men, who were still huddled in their corners, waiting for the bell.

Chase’s eyes narrowed.

“That is not his name.”

“No, not his real name,” Chilly admitted, shrugging. “Everybody just knows him as Leroy, but you know, we get bored.”

“You’d think guarding MMA fights wouldn’t be this tedious,” Jax lamented, “but there you go.”

“But he’s damned good, and Zack is about to get his ass kicked,” Chilly added. “Never seen anyone as fast, and his roundhouse kick can take your head right off.” He tilted his head and looked Chase sidelong. “You guys didn’t come here just to fight in the amateur tournament, did you?”

“I’m on a job,” Chase said quickly. “Me and Zack both. And we need a team. I was hoping you guys might be interested.”

The two men shared a look. They’d always seemed an odd pairing to Chase, Vazquez squat, stocky, and short-tempered, Walker taller even than Zack, lanky as a scarecrow, and eternally patient. But they’d served for five years on the same SEAL team and left the service together, and he’d never once heard them talk about going their separate ways.

“I don’t know,” Jax said. “We leave here, these jobs ain’t gonna be waiting for us when we come back.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t count on coming back,” Chase confided, grinning. “We’re planning on raiding a Chinese colony world, so the most likely outcome is we all get killed.”

Chilly’s eyes went wide.

“Well, why the hell didn’t you say so to begin with?” He elbowed Jax in the side, and the tall man winced, then frowned down at him. “You hear that, Jax? We’ll never have to worry about paying the bills again! It’s the perfect solution to all our money problems!”

“You ain’t serious, are you?” Jax asked him. “What the hell could be worth raiding a Chinese colony?”

“Saving the world.”

“What?” Chilly asked, motioning outward in the general direction of Earth. “That world?”

“All of them. Every one of them, Union, Alliance, independent. And if we don’t do it, no one else will.”

“Oh, shit,” Chilly moaned. “He is serious.”

“Serious enough that Zack’s about to get his ass kicked just so I could have a chance to talk to you two.” Chase put a hand on each of their shoulders. “I’m telling you guys, this is everything you signed up for when you were eighteen years old. If you’ll come with me after the tournament, I’ll take you back to our ship and prove it to you.”

“Ladies and gentlemen!” the announcer bellowed, interrupting their conversation through his sheer volume. “In the center ring, in the white corner, we have five-time undefeated amateur tournament champion, the man of mystery known only as Leroy!”

The crowd took up the chant of his name, building like a wave, as enthusiastic in their love for Leroy as they had been in their hatred for Ray Lambino. The announcer went on, unfazed by their thunderous cheering, simply turning up his own volume to match theirs.

“And in the red corner, we have the challenger, first-time competitor in the Gateway Amateur Tournament, Zack Boom-Boom Barnett! Let’s have a good fight and may the best man win!”

“I gotta get up there,” Chase told the two former SEALs, climbing the stairs to Zack’s corner.

He had to get up there, but he didn’t know why. Even if they’d let him actually be a cornerman, he’d never done it. Could he have closed a cut? He’d never know because they hadn’t given him so much as a water bottle.

“He’s fast, Zack!” he yelled over the referee’s instructions, earning a dirty look from the broad-shouldered woman. “Watch his roundhouse.”

“Thanks for the obvious, Chase,” Zack growled, his words punctuated by the bell starting the match. “If you wanted to warn me that the bad man is going to try to hit me, I think I got that part.”

Leroy dashed in without warning, probably trying to take advantage of Zack’s distraction, but the soldier danced sideways, a right hook scraping across his bicep as he dodged. Zack might have blown off Chase’s advice, but that didn’t mean he’d ignored it. The soldier tried to end the fight quickly, spinning from the dodge into a back kick and aiming his heel into the local fighter’s gut.

Chilly and Jax hadn’t been wrong about the man’s speed. The kick came nowhere near Leroy, and the miss threw Zack off balance, leaving him wide open for the leg sweep. The concussion of the soldier’s back on the canvas was as thunderous as the crowd’s roar of approval, and Chase gritted his teeth, sure that was it for his friend, that Leroy was going to mount and start pummeling Zack.

The local fighter certainly tried, not even bothering to get back to his feet from the sweep, just twisting over onto all fours and lunging toward Zack. The soldier rolled out of the way and tumbled his way across the octagon until he’d gained enough room to pull himself up on the fencing surrounding the octagon. Leroy’s eyes followed him, feral and bright, and he moved to close the distance between them.

Chase frowned, noticing the slightest hitch in Leroy’s gait as the fighter dragged his left leg, not quite picking up his heel as he walked.

“Zack!” he yelled again, willing to risk his friend’s mockery. “Over here!”

The big man scowled, but circled his opponent, making his way across the octagon in a sideways shuffle until his back was against the fencing of the gate, blocking Chase from his opponent’s view.

“He took a shot to the left leg in his last fight,” Chase whispered, hoping Leroy wouldn’t hear. “He’s dragging the leg.”

“Got it.”

Zack ducked away just as Leroy slashed in with a roundhouse kick, his bare instep smacking into the side of the soldier’s hip rather than the outside of his thigh. Chase’s fingers gripped the wire of the cage white-knuckled, and he wished he was inside the octagon instead of Zack. It made no sense, since they were about equal in terms of unarmed combat skills and Zack was bigger, but Chase just knew he would have done better against the local, the same sort of conviction that made him want to walk point in combat.

They also serve who only stand and wait, someone had said. He couldn’t remember who, but he knew they’d never been a Ranger.

* * *

Zack Wilson hurt.

He was ashamed to admit it. He’d been shot, stabbed, blown up, and run over in his life and often had to Charlie Mike, continue mission, after being injured. He prided himself on his ability to ignore the pain. All this little shit had done was punch and kick him a few times and not even anywhere vital, but the bastard hit so damned hard. His hip and bicep still stung from the shots he’d taken, and he knew as certain as he’d ever known anything that a solid, center-mass punch or kick from Leroy and Zack would be out of the fight.

What hurt almost as much as the hits he’d taken was that he had to admit Chase was right. This Leroy was favoring his left leg. His ankle wasn’t swollen, so maybe it was a bone bruise, but he was a bit slower on that side and Zack was doing his damnedest to keep that side facing him. But what then? Wear the guy out? Not likely. Leroy seemed as if he could keep this up for hours.

What job does this guy have that lets him train this much for a freaking hobby? I soldier for a living, and I can barely work in an hour of training a day.

Zack’s brain churned out ideas and rejected them just as quickly. Leg kick on the bad leg? He faked it just to see what would happen, and Leroy still almost nailed him with a right-leg roundhouse before he could jump back.

Same deal for a feint to the right then a hook to the left. Damned guy was too fast for it, could shift his weight and not need to plant his left leg, and he had enough power not to need to throw his hips into a punch to make it punishing.

Maybe… ground and pound? A takedown? The guy was fast and probably knew how to avoid a takedown, but if Zack could get him from the left, maybe that bum leg would make the difference. And if not, it was really going to hurt.

Fuck it. You only live once. May as well get it over with.

A jab to start it, Zack’s right, Leroy’s left, and when the local tried to slide into a cross to counter, Zack went down. Even slowed by the injury, Leroy almost managed a knee strike to the face that would have taken Zack out. Zack felt the leg rising even as his arms closed around it. The man was wearing shorts and his leg was slick with sweat, as hard to grab onto as a greased pig, but the lack of gloves finally came in handy and Zack dug his fingers into flesh and heaved backward.

Leroy went down. The crowd had been a constant background roar for the length of the fight, and the sound was much more conspicuous for its absence. A collective gasp went up as Leroy’s shoulders hit the canvas and Zack assumed the low mount, his legs pinning the other man’s thighs to the ground. Leroy could still punch, but to do that, he’d have to stop blocking Zack’s blows. And Zack wasn’t going to stop punching.

Leroy had speed, technique, and power, but none of that meant a damned thing flat on his back. With no rules, Zack could have done a lot of nasty things to the local, like gouging his eyes or going for a punch to the throat, but this wasn’t combat, where lives were on the line and you did what you had to do. This was a contest, and it didn’t feel right.

And hammer-fists at his face and chest are better somehow?

It was, he decided, the principle of the thing. Leroy didn’t complain, and neither did he block all the blows. Too many landed, leaving the local nose bloody, his eye closing from an incipient cut above Leroy’s right brow. The fighter tossed his hips in frantic desperation, but Zack had the weight advantage on him and no amount of training was going to change the physics of that. Leroy finally tried to make a grab for Zack’s hands, a last-ditch attempt to throw him off, but all it got the local was a hammer-fist between the eyes.

And that was it. The local was only stunned, not unconscious, but his arms were down, not even trying to block the shots anymore, and Zack was through. He rolled off Leroy and stared at the ref, waiting. She showed no inclination to jump in and end the fight, she simply shook her head.

Leroy tried to push himself up, and Zack kicked his arm from beneath him, sending the fighter slumping against the canvas, dripping blood. The crowd murmured, unsure what to make of the development, but Zack was sure.

“Call the match,” he barked at the ref, using the same voice he’d reserved for dumbass young privates ten years ago. “He’s out of it.”

“He’s conscious,” the ref said, arms folded. “It doesn’t end until he’s out or his corner throws in the towel.”

His corner was occupied by a teenaged girl, who was staring in horror at what was happening in the ring. His daughter? His younger sister? Zack snapped his fingers, bringing her shocked gaze toward him.

“End this now.”

Her reply was quavering but not panicked, as if the girl had dreaded this moment but it hadn’t come as a surprise.

“He made me promise not to.”

Leroy had managed to roll onto his elbows and knees. Zack sighed, wrapping the man in a rear naked choke. It was a formality, something to satisfy Leroy’s pride and the ref’s insistence on following the letter of the law in a lawless game. The local didn’t even try to fight it, perhaps his way of tapping out without the ignominy of actually tapping out. Leroy went limp, then Zack tossed him down and jumped to his feet, determined to stand while he still had the energy.

The crowd was going wild, their love for Leroy apparently fickle. They were screaming, chanting “Boom-Boom” at the top of their lungs. The ref came and raised his hand, and the announcer crowed his praises to the rafters.

Zack felt dirty.

He wiped sweat out of his face and noticed that Chase was holding the gate open for him. The girl had run in and was crouched down beside Leroy, her arm around his shoulder, supporting his head, sobbing quietly, shoulders shaking. Zack felt an irrational urge to say something to the two of them, to try to comfort them, like he’d somehow wronged them… as if Leroy only had this one claim to being special, and Zack had robbed him of it.

“Hey, Wilson,” a familiar voice said through the gate, from behind Chase. Zack pushed past his friend and saw Chilly Vazquez and Jax Walker waiting for him, Chilly grinning ear to ear, Jax with a more reserved expression. “Damn, man, if I’d known you could fight like that, I’d have laid some money down on you,” Chilly said.

“Nice seeing you two again,” Zack said, limping just a little as he took Chilly’s hand and gripped it tight. He paused. “Are you two on board?”

“According to Weston here, we’re looking at questionable to nonexistent pay for a suicide mission to save the galaxy.” A laugh rumbled through Chilly’s deep chest. “Hell, yeah, we’re on board! This might be the coolest thing to happen to us in the last five years!”

“I think,” Jax put in, less exuberant than his partner, “that we might know a few others who’d sign on if you’d like to go talk to them.”

“Hey!” Zack spun at the call. It was the ref, leaning out through the gate in the octagon fence. “Your next fight’s in ten minutes! This one’s for the championship, and you have to go up against him.”

Him, Zack found out following her gesture, was a mountain of a man, nearly seven feet tall and probably three hundred pounds if he was an ounce. And though there was some fat around his middle, most of that weight was thick muscle.

“Oh, hell no!” Zack blurted, laughing and taking his shirt and boots back from Chase. “Tell Mr. Undefeated in there, he can fight that dude with my blessings.” He nodded to Chilly and Jax. “Come on, take us to your friends. A suicide mission sounds a lot safer right now.”

OceanofPDF.com

11

“Give me that thing, you crazy bitch!”

Angel Cortez didn’t fight when the black-clad figure grabbed the weapon out of her hands, not with three assault rifles pointed at her face. If they wanted her dead, she was dead. But he didn’t kill her, just grabbed her around the throat and pressed the muzzle of his short-barreled carbine against her faceplate.

“All right, you assholes better cease fire now!” the man bellowed. “Next person takes a shot at us, Dr. Cortez gets a burst right through the face!”

Angel stiffened in surprise. They knew her name. She’d assumed until that very second that this was a hijacking, just another band of pirates who’d bribed their way aboard the cargo barge in order to seize the Tamar. But the fact they knew her name meant this was so much worse.

The sporadic shots coming from the direction of Pri’s hiding place stopped, though none of the three Tamar crewmembers showed themselves.

“What do you want?” Pri asked, her voice amplified by a speaker on the outside of her helmet. “I’ll tell you right now, though, you’re not getting my ship. You’ll have to kill all of us for that… and if you do, you’ll never get past the security codes.”

“We don’t want your piece of shit boat!” the man snapped. “We want the artifact. Bring it out here or she’s dead.”

A long pause, long enough that Angel thought Pri had decided to withdraw back to the ship and leave here with them. It would have been the logical thing to do. They likely wouldn’t kill Angel no matter what they were threatening.

“You’re Hart-Klein,” Angel said. “How did you know we were here?”

She wasn’t sure why it mattered, but her whole life had been driven by a need to know, and she wasn’t going to change just because the field of study had changed.

“Your friends shouldn’t have been so damn cocky about their spoofed registration,” the man holding her growled in her ear. “Maybe that shit can fool government security systems, but HKC computers can tell the difference between a Class-C body and a Class C3 body.”

“Shit,” Pri murmured in Angel’s ear, and she realized the captain had used the radio and not her external speakers. She’d probably been listening in to the man’s boast the same way. “Dr. Cortez, if you can get clear of these assholes, give me the signal and I’ll cover you while you get away.”

Angel said nothing. The man was close enough to her helmet that he could have picked up anything she said through the metal.

“Hey assholes!” the gunman yelled. “I said I want that artifact! Get it out here in two minutes or she’s dead!”

Gears turned in Angel’s thoughts. If they were Hart-Klein, why weren’t there more of them on the barge? Why didn’t they have their own ship?

“Okay,” Pri called, interrupting Angel’s train of thought. “You got it. But it’s gonna take us more than two minutes to get back to the ship, much less get the thing in here for you.”

“We know you have one more person on the ship. That kid, the grad student. Have him bring it.”

Shit. They knew about Victor. And they knew he was the only one left on the ship, which had to mean…

“I’m here.”

The voice was soft, not a yell nor the sort of projected bellow she’d heard from Chase in combat. Somehow, it made its way across the hundred yards from the cargo airlock as clear as a bell. Angel searched for the source, though she recognized the voice, and was shocked when she found it. It was Victor, but he was wearing a space suit, helmet and all, though how he’d managed to put the thing on himself, she didn’t know.

Or maybe I do.

The duffle bag was slung over his shoulder, opened at the top, the golden glow of the artifact shining out into the shadows like the rays of the rising sun.

“I have what you want. Come get it, leave them alone.”

What was he thinking? Did Victor honestly believe these mercenaries would simply take the artifact and let them live? That they wouldn’t grab him and her along with him?

Angel blinked. The airlock door was shut. Why had Victor shut it?

“Bring it here,” the leader of the group said, motioning at Victor. “Bring it to me.”

“Let her go first.” Victor motioned back to the airlock. “Door’s shut. I can’t run from you before you get me. But I want those guns off Dr. Cortez before I bring this to you.”

“Fine.”

The arm came off of Angel’s throat, and the barrel of the carbine lifted before setting back into a line with Victor.

“She can get to cover,” the man said, “but the same thing goes. If anyone fires on us, we shoot the kid instead.”

“No one’s going to fire on you,” Pri said. But her voice sounded distant somehow. Why was that? When she spoke again in Angel’s earphones, it was as if she was right there at her shoulder. “Come over to me, Angel.”

She didn’t want to leave Victor alone, but she also didn’t want to get shot in the back, so she clomped awkwardly over to the crate where Priyanka was hiding and tucked in beside the woman. Pri still had her heavy, metal handgun held at the low ready, and she said nothing, just pushed Angel behind her, attention fixed downrange, staring at Victor.

Victor was walking, slowly and deliberately, his magnetic soles thumping on the deck…

No, wait. They should be louder than that.

“Hey, boss,” one of the masked mercenary team choked out, his voice tinny and distant, “something…”

He got no further. He didn’t collapse because there wasn’t enough gravity to drag him down, but his arms went limp and boneless, his rifle tumbling away. And he wasn’t the only one. The others were doing the same, one of them caught in mid-step and floating off across the barge, arms akimbo.

The last to go was the boss, the man who’d held Angel. He tried to aim his rifle at Victor, but the weapon floated away from strengthless hands.

“What the hell?” Adrian Hill asked. “What happened to them?”

Angel sighed with relief. At least Hill was alive.

“Check your suit’s atmospheric readings,” Pri told him, voice grim.

Angel did and was shocked when she saw that the barge was well on its way to a hard vacuum. Her gaze went to Victor and her eyes grew wide.

“Did you do this?” she asked him.

Victor didn’t answer for a long moment, just finished his walk across the cargo bay, coming close enough that she could make out his features inside the helmet. His face was neutral, unaffected.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” he said. “It took me several minutes to find the last spacesuit and get into it without help.”

“And you had time to hack the barge’s safety systems when, exactly?” Pri wanted to know.

“Their systems barely have any security. The Emissary was able to penetrate them remotely using the net connection in my suit helmet.” Victor shrugged. “From there, it was simply a matter of disabling the vacuum alarms.” He regarded Adrian Hill and Chief Aguilar, who were finally coming out from behind cover. “Are you injured, Mr. Hill?”

“No,” the copilot told him, patting the side of his space suit. There were three bullet holes there, but Angel could tell that none had penetrated through the outer layer. “These suits are built tougher than that. Hurt like a son of a bitch, though.”

“Everyone shut up,” Angel said, holding her hands up, palms out. “You heard what they said, right?”

“Yeah, they wanted the artifact,” Pri acknowledged. “They were Hart-Klein and the bastards saw right through our registration…”

“Not that,” Angel interrupted. “They said they knew Victor was the only one left on the Tamar.”

“Yeah,” Hill said, shaking his head. “So?”

“Shit,” Pri muttered. “Chase and Zack. They know Chase and Zack are on Gateway. They’re going to be hunting for them.”

“Oh, that sucks,” Hill said, inanely. “What can we do?”

“You and the Chief get those food crates loaded,” Pri told him. “We paid for it and I think we’re gonna need it. I’m going to go see if there’s any way we can warn Chase… without winding up dead ourselves.”

“I can go get him,” Angel volunteered. “I know Gateway.”

“Hell, no. They know your name, they know your face. And they know this ship. If we go anywhere near the station, they’ll be crawling all over us before we can get out the airlock.” Pri stalked toward the airlock, not waiting to see if Angel would follow her. “Chase is going to have to get out of this one himself.”

* * *

“Where the hell are we going?” Chase asked, eyeing the decaying innards of Gateway with increasing wariness. The last time he’d been this deep in the bowels of the station, beyond the tourist and business districts, the Los Gatos cartel had come after him with knives.

None of the people passing by seemed to be in the mood for a knife fight, but neither did they look like they were enjoying life. He couldn’t blame them. They’d descended into the layer of the spinning cylinder closer to the outer hull and beside the obvious effect of the centripetal gravity being greater than Earth normal, which was physically and psychological grinding. The whole level was at least ten degrees hotter than the tourist sections of Gateway. Just walking at a comfortable pace, Chase was already dripping sweat. Yet somehow, despite the heat and the proximity to the sunlight, it was dimly lit. There were enough light panels in the ceiling, but half of them were flickering or just plain non-functional, and Chase wouldn’t have put money on how long it would be before station maintenance got around to fixing them.

“Not the penthouse suite, I’ll tell you that,” Chilly told him, laughing softly. “The people desperate enough to do something this insane aren’t going to be living anywhere nice enough to miss it.”

“We’re not talking like some serial killer living off dumpster-diving here, are we?” Zack asked, trailing behind the other three. Chase glanced back and saw him still limping slightly.

“That guy really nailed you, didn’t he?”

“It’s not that bad,” Zack said, waving it off. “I should be walking normally in two, maybe three weeks. Seriously though, it’s gotta be like half again Earth gravity here, and it’s killing my hip.”

“Well, rest easy, Boom-Boom,” Jax told him. “We’re here.”

Here was just another of the tiny apartments crammed together like cards in a deck, each about twelve feet across and two stories tall, though where they managed to fit a staircase inside the things, Chase wasn’t sure. A communal courtyard lined the front, each section closed off by a flimsy, plastic barrier, each equipped with a metal picnic table and benches that were bolted to the floor.

“How much is the rent in these places?” Chase asked, pushing aside the gate to walk through the courtyard to the front door. “Or do they pay you to live here because no one else will?”

“Close.” Jax waved a hand in an expansive gesture. “All this shit, this whole level, is company housing. You take one of the company’s lowest level jobs, like sanitation or janitorial work, they provide one of these places and fold it into your paycheck.”

“Yeah,” Chilly agreed, chuckling humorlessly. “Except it’s triple occupancy, and they charge you about half your pay to live here. And between that and food and shit, you never make enough to save anything. They got themselves the perfect wage slaves. The only way out is to volunteer to emigrate to a colony world that’s looking for workers, and then you got to take your chances with bandits, wild animals, and revolutionaries, not to mention shoveling shit for a living or basically doing the same job you do here except there’s not as many comforts.”

“When you put it like that,” Zack said, pulling the gate shut behind them, “why would anyone ever want to leave?”

“And of course,” Jax went on, staring down the strip of apartments to a cluster of residents sharing an injection gun, “there’s plenty of alcohol and drugs to take the edge off of living in this shitbox.”

Chilly grunted wordless agreement before he knocked on the front door of an apartment labeled “3478C.” There was no answer for a few seconds, and Chase shared a look with Zack.

“Maybe they’re not home?” he guessed.

“They should be,” Jax said. “Their shifts aren’t for another three hours.”

“Probably asleep,” Chilly opined, then knocked on the door louder. Chase winced, wondering if any of the nearby residents might not be asleep as well and might not be too happy about the noise. But if it bothered anyone, they must have been accustomed enough to it that they didn’t bother to come out and complain.

“Who the hell is it?” The voice was female, Chase thought, but deeper than any woman he’d come across outside the Rangers. “Our shift isn’t for three hours, and you’d better have a goddamned good reason for waking us up!”

The door flew open, propelled by a tattooed, muscular forearm, and the tallest woman Chase had ever seen stalked out, dressed in an olive-drab T-shirt and black PT shorts, her close-cut hair dyed blue and a row of diamond studs lining her left ear. Her expression was severe enough that it took Chase a moment to see past the hard-edged scowl to the not-unpleasant face beneath it.

“Chilly?” she said, coming up short in the doorway. “Jax? What the hell are you two doing here? And who are these losers?”

“Hey, Alex,” Chilly said, his grin cheerful and seemingly oblivious to her bad mood. “Sorry for the early wake-up, but we need to talk. Is Grey around?”

“Alex, m’love,” a British accent murmured, groggy and half-asleep, from the hallway behind her. “What th’hell is going on?”

He was shorter than her by an inch, not physically imposing, and had a mild, scholarly look to his eyes and the cut of his red-tinged beard, but Chase had a feeling about him, the sort of feeling he’d gotten when he’d worked with Delta operators during the war.

“Alexandra Quesada,” Jax introduced, “formerly Staff Sergeant Alexandra Quesada, USMC. Grey Haskell, formerly Warrant Officer in the Royal Marines, I’d like you to meet Sgt. Chase Weston and Zack Wilson, late of the US Army Rangers and most recently of Tamar PMC.”

Chase offered a hand, but Alex ignored it.

“Contractors?” The woman’s face twisted into a scowl, and she stared past Chase at Chilly and Jax. “How many times have we had this conversation? We don’t blame you two for what happened on Churchill with Executive Options. There’s no way we can work for any contractors. The first time the Colonial Authority saw our names, they’d pull our authorization.”

“Yeah, mate.” Haskell nodded. “I mean, I appreciate the thought, but we don’t need to give up our jobs here and sign on with some crew when we’ll all get busted anyway.”

“You should know that more than us,” Alex said, gesturing at Chilly and Jax and their security uniforms. “If we could sign up with a PMC, do you think we’d still be here?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Chase told her.

“Hey sis, who’s at the door?” The woman at the top of the staircase just inside the doorway was younger than Alex by at least seven or eight years, maybe more, and much softer around the edges, but she was definitely blood relation. She was dressed in a long nightshirt and nothing else, and if Chase hadn’t been involved with Angel Cortez, he might have been more interested in that fact.

“We got company, Gina,” Alex told her. “Chilly and Jax and… some friends of theirs. They’re not staying.”

“Sgt. Quesada,” Chase said. “This is really important. More important than any of us. And if we could just have a few minutes of your time, we’ll explain.”

Alex glared at him, but then shared a look with Haskell and sighed.

“Fine.” She nudged the British man with an elbow. “Get us some coffee, honey. I think we’re gonna need it.”

OceanofPDF.com

12

“That’s insane,” Alex Quesada declared, then took a sip of her coffee from an old mug with a faded globe, eagle, and anchor image on it. “I mean, just bug-nuts insane.” She shook her head. “You don’t really expect us to believe that shit, do you?” She pointed at Chilly across the cheap, plastic table. “You don’t believe this, do you?”

“I trust Chase,” he said simply, his jaw set. “He may be crazy as a loon, but I don’t believe he’d lie to us.”

“Some of it sounds perfectly plausible,” Gina said, staring at the steam pouring up from her coffee cup. She’d changed into blue jeans and a cut-off T-shirt and tied her dark hair into a ponytail, though her sister and Grey Haskell hadn’t bothered, settling for their sleepwear.

“Which part?” Alex demanded, glaring at her sister.

“The Soong-Tierney drive has never made any sense from a theoretical physics standpoint. I mean, we know shit now we didn’t before it was proven to work, and we think we know why it works, but really, we’re just guessing. There is no way Mara Soong-Tierney stumbled across this thing on her own.”

“Pardon me,” Chase interrupted, eyes narrowing at the authoritative tone in her voice, “but were you in the Marines like your sister?”

“What?” Alex snapped. “You think just because I was a Marine, that I don’t understand all this science stuff?”

“Well, yeah,” Zack answered for him, and Chase buried his head in his hands. “I mean, I’m a grunt too, and I don’t understand any of this shit.”

“I have a Master’s degree in physics,” Gina told them, smacking her sister on the arm with the back of her hand. “I wasn’t in the military, but…”

“She tended the reactor on our ship back when we were with Executive Options,” Jax explained.

“And she should be doing something better than working the hydraulic sensor on this station,” Alex growled, and Chase sensed the rekindling of an old, family argument.

“The point is,” Gina insisted, “what they’re saying may sound wild, but it makes sense. It’s not like we don’t know there are other alien races who existed who had FTL travel. That’s what the Arborists are, right? Why is it so hard to believe that there was a race out there who was ahead of us technologically? And that they were the ones who originally discovered the drive?”

“That part isn’t so hard to swallow,” Grey Haskell said, speaking up for the first time since they’d sat down for coffee and explanations. Chase couldn’t identify his accent exactly, though it sounded vaguely like soldiers and Royal Marines he’d known who were from London. “It’s the part about the magic computer that gave us the drive and the mysterious hive mind that sent out these… Sunkillers?” Chase nodded. “That sent out these Sunkillers tens of thousands of years ago.”

“You can look up the unexplained novae yourself, if you like,” Chase told him.

“I did,” Gina said, tapping the cheap tablet she’d brought with her to the kitchen when she’d changed clothes. “He’s telling the truth about that,” she told her sister and Haskell. “And while I’m not an astrophysicist by specialty, I can tell you that the ones I know of who are intellectually honest admit they can’t figure out why this would be happening.” She chuckled. “They’re talking shit like some kind of transfer of energy through the Rift causing the chain of novae, which is just as good as saying ‘we have no idea.’ So, that part, well…” She shrugged. “I can’t say there’s evidence for the story, but it fits the fact.”

“Okay, you know I trust you, Gina,” Haskell said. “Let’s say these fellows are telling the truth as they know it. That still leaves the fact that we won’t be getting paid. So, how is that better than where we are now?”

“I never said you wouldn’t get paid,” Chase clarified. “I said, no one’s paying us to do this. If we pull it off, if we find this Archive, you can bet your ass that the Union will pay through the nose to get the information from us.” He grinned, leaning back in his chair, the overworked plastic groaning in protest. “Not that I plan to hold out on them. This isn’t something I’m doing for money. But I know you all deserve to get paid for your work, and you have my word. If we can get these artifacts, I’ll make sure you get what you want.”

“I don’t know that these artifacts even exist!” Alex said, throwing up her hands. “If they don’t, what then? We gonna be sitting out on the ass end of nowhere holding our dicks with no jobs?”

“We can show you the artifact.” Chase had to work hard not to let the anger roiling in his gut leak into his tone. He wanted to tell them to go to hell, but he wasn’t in a position to be choosy. The longer they took getting to the next artifact was more time the many forces hunting for them had to find them. “Okay, here’s the offer. You come with us, we show you the artifact. You’re gonna lose your jobs here, but if you decide we’re full of shit, we’ll take you anywhere you want to go. You won’t have to count on anyone shipping you there on your dime and charging you for it later, taking it out of your pay and making you slaves to them like you are here. You’ll have a clean do-over, and I know a couple colonies where the local police are hiring veterans.” He spread his hands. “That’s the best I can do.”

Alex sat back in her chair, rubbing a hand through her close-cropped hair, eyes focused on something distant. She said nothing for a solid thirty seconds, and Chase was sure he’d lost her, that she was about to throw them all out on their asses. Instead, she looked to Haskell.

“What do you say, honey?”

Haskell drummed his fingers against the table, then rubbed at the rough plastic and scowled.

“I hate this fucking place, love. You know that. I have since we got here and it hasn’t gotten any better. Worst case scenario, this lot is full-on bollocks, then we at least get off this tin can and get to live somewhere we can feel the damned sun on our heads.” Haskell shrugged. “I say we go.”

Alex patted his hand, then turned to her sister.

“Gina?”

The younger woman was smiling, and even though he’d just met her, Chase thought he knew what her answer would be.

“I studied to be a physicist at Caltech, sis. I haven’t complained about being here because I know there’s not a damned thing any of us could do to change it. But honestly, if any of this is true, any of it at all, then it’ll at least be the most interesting thing I’ve done since we lost the ship.” She put her hand on top of the other two. “I’m with Grey. I say we go.”

Alex laughed softly.

“I knew you two were crazy… after all, you hang out with me.” She offered Chase a hand. “Okay, we’re in.”

Chase took the hand and tried not to wince when she squeezed it hard.

“Meet us at Polar Dock Six in an hour,” he told her. “We’re going back to their quarters”—he nodded to Chilly and Jax—“to grab their gear.”

“All right, we’ll see you there.” Her expression went from a fond smile to a glare as hard as a naked nuclear reactor. “And if you’re screwing with us, Army boy, I’ll slice your damned balls off and toss them out the airlock.”

Chase laughed and pushed away from the table.

“I can tell already that it’s going to be a pleasure working with you.”

* * *

“Well, Sgt. Quesada is quite the charmer,” Zack said, chuckling.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Chase told him, then glanced back at Chilly and Jax. “How far is your place, anyway?”

It seemed to him that they’d been walking for fifteen minutes just since getting off the elevator, wandering through the workers’ quarters at the main level. At least it was cooler here, and the spin gravity was closer to normal.

“Are we there yet, Daddy?” Zack asked in a mocking, childlike tone.

“Just a little further,” Chilly supplied the standard answer before replying seriously. “We’re up like another half a mile… we turn right at the next intersection. It won’t take us long to get to the dock from here. Alex and Grey live way out there.”

“And yeah, she can be a real handful,” Jax answered Zack. “But she’s a damned good troop, you know? And so’s her husband, Grey. We served with them for over a year.”

“How the hell did those two wind up together?” Zack asked. “Some kind of foreign exchange program?”

“They met working for Executive Options. Chilly and I ran a joint op with the Brits during the war and when we got out and decided to go the PMC route, we looked him up.”

“Mercenaries in love.” Zack guffawed. “It’s so romantic, I might puke.”

Chase rolled his eyes.

“I swear to God, between Quesada and Chilly and you, the ship’s going to be an asylum.” He trailed off, something catching his eye behind them and to their left.

Three men were walking together, which wasn’t unusual, but the way they were arrayed wasn’t casual, wasn’t three friends talking. Two were behind, one ahead, like a tactical wedge formation. None of them were saying a word and it seemed to him that they were trying way too hard not to look at Chase and the others. All three of them were somewhere between early thirties to early forties, and their clothes seemed both too expensive for workers yet too plain for tourists.

“Zack, is it just me or do those three guys back at our four o’clock look sketchy?”

Zack didn’t ogle the men—he wasn’t an idiot, for all he played the fool sometimes. He just took a brief glance from the corner of his eye, then nodded.

“Yeah, I get that vibe, too.”

“What’s going on?” Chilly asked a little too loudly, head craning around. “We got trouble?”

“Don’t be so damned obvious, Chilly,” Jax said, smacking him on the arm.

“I don’t know,” Chase admitted. “Just a feeling that…”

“Chase! Can you hear me, Chase?” The voice in Chase’s earbud was Angel’s, and while he’d expected to hear from the Tamar at some point, she sounded close to panic.

“I got you,” he replied, pulling his phone out of his jacket pocket. He’d left an open circuit to the ship so they could reach him without having to establish a connection. “You guys get resupplied?”

“It was an ambush,” she said, nearly stepping on his question. “Hart-Klein mercenaries.”

Ice crawled up Chase’s back and he nearly forgot about the suspicious trio.

“What? Are you all right?”

“We’re all okay. We got out. But Chase, they know you’re there. They’re going to be coming after you.”

He was already checking around them, scanning every face and he picked out the other two. They were cut from the same cloth as the three behind them, but they were coming from the opposite direction, and the crowds were thinning out, turning right toward the main drag heading to the apartment blocks where the workers lived.

“Yeah, I know. Meet us at Docking Port Six, just like we planned. Anything changes, I’ll call and let you know.”

“Be careful.”

He didn’t answer, not because he didn’t want to, but because the trap was closing.

“We have two at one o’clock, three at four o’clock,” he said quietly. “They’re Hart-Klein mercs, so they might have the jack to smuggle in guns.”

“Shit,” Chilly muttered. “How did they find you?”

“Not important. They’re closing in now. You know this place. Give me options.”

“We need to get to our apartment,” Jax told him. “We’ve got a gun there. One of the station security guys owed us a favor, and I don’t feel comfortable if I don’t have a gun around somewhere.”

“Right. We’re going to split up, then. Chilly, you and Jax walk ahead of us and make that turn toward your apartment. If you draw some of them off, try to lose them in the crowd. If they all come after us, let them. Get back to your place, grab your stuff, and we’ll lead them to the lift banks. You meet us at Port Six.”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving you two on your own with five assholes gunning for you,” Chilly declared. “If all of them follow you, we’re doubling back and taking them down from the rear.”

Chase bit back a curse. There wasn’t time for debate, and one thing he’d learned from his company commander back in the Rangers was to never give an order he knew wouldn’t be obeyed.

“All right, but give it some time. I don’t want them seeing you coming.” He nodded to the right, to the upcoming T-junction. “Go, now.”

He didn’t wait for them to comply, just cut left, away from the turn, toward a strip mall of company stores selling food, clothing, and liquor to the employees at inflated prices. There were a few dozen people milling around between the open-faced markets, some eating takeout from one of the delis, others drinking beers they’d picked up at the liquor store. They all had a look about them, either wearing their work coveralls after a shift or the flashy, brightly colored clothes that were popular with the employees enjoying their days off.

Neither he nor Zack fit that look, but he was looking for cover, not camouflage.

“They’re all coming this way,” Zack told him, speaking quietly but in a conversational tone. The big man knew as well as he did that whispers actually traveled farther than using a normal voice. “If they have guns, we’re pretty well screwed.”

“There’s five of them,” he reminded his friend. “They don’t need guns for us to be screwed.”

Zack was right, though. The three from the rear and the two in front had both changed course and were curving toward the market stalls, far too much purpose in their step for it to be a coincidence. Chase led Zack past picnic tables occupied by clusters of young men and women doing their best to get drunk enough to forget being stuck on Gateway, into the liquor store. It didn’t have much of a selection, and he was sure what was there was home-brewed and watered down. They’d save the good stuff for the tourists.

The checkout system was automated, but there was still an attendant sitting behind a desk near the scanners, watching a video on his tablet and only glancing up at the store every few seconds. When he looked their way, he frowned.

“You two know this is for station employees only, right?” he said, motioning between the two of them. “If you want to buy beer or liquor, you have to go to the main shopping district, which is back that way.” He pointed back the way they’d come.

“Oh, uh, we’re just here to meet some friends,” Chase assured him. He winked at the sallow, pale little man. “Couple of girls who work in one of the casinos said they’d hook up with us here after work. Any chance we can buy a twelve-pack and have it ready for them when they get here?”

“Look dude,” the attendant said, shaking his head, “it ain’t me, you have to have the ID chip to even pay for anything here…” The little man went on, but Chase had stopped paying attention to him. The three who’d been tailing them had come into the store behind them. They spread out across the front, not even trying to pretend they weren’t staring straight at Chase and Zack.

“Confident bastards, aren’t they?” he asked Zack, who grunted agreement.

The big man already had his knife out, held low along his thigh, and Chase nodded, sliding his own out of his small-of-the-back sheath, shifting it to his left hand and holding it blade-down in the Filipino style.

“Hey!” the store attendant yelped, jumping up from his seat and backing away. “Guys! There’s no need for that! I mean, just take what you want, I’m not trying to stop you!”

“You need to get out,” Chase told him, not looking at the man, attention fixed on the three coming into the store, the closest only twenty feet away now. The little man scrambled out from behind the kiosk and sprinted for the rear exit, then slammed the door behind him.

Zack had moved to the other side of the store, spreading the attackers out, which forced the third man to choose which target he’d back up. The three all seemed cut from the same cloth, medium build, thick through the shoulders and chest like every merc he’d ever run across, putting their time in the weight room or the CrossFit gym. What they didn’t look like was specialized hitters. Chase knew such people existed, though he’d never met one… or, rather, if he’d met one, he’d never known it. Those people were shadows, blending in with the crowd and doing their jobs quietly. These were just normal doorkickers, which meant HKC hadn’t known they were coming in advance and had just scrambled whatever assets they had in place once they’d heard about it.

The mercs split up, the one who assigned himself to Chase a younger man with a blond, handlebar mustache and sideburns who obviously thought he was channeling a 19th-Century cowboy. The hired muscle going after Zack was maybe an inch taller and thicker through the chest, clean-shaven and all business, while the third, his head shaven to get even with his early onset male pattern baldness, waited at the entrance, eyes flickering back and forth, as if waiting to see which would need his help more.

It wasn’t how Chase would have done it. He’d always been a fan of quick action and he would have told Mr. Fence Sitter to rush one or the other of them, finish them off and then put all three on the second.

Good help is hard to find.

He ignored the other two, ignored Zack for the moment, and concentrated on the cowboy. The merc didn’t have a gun. Chase was sure of that because if he had been armed with any kind of ranged weapon, he’d have drawn it already and probably used it before he even pursued them into the store. Instead, Cowboy reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out not the knife Chase expected but a stun wand. The name was generic for a bunch of different manufacturers, but the design was the same. It was a telescoping baton, extending with a flick of Cowboy’s wrist, with electrical contacts studding the surface, slaved to a switch on the handle. It was theoretically nonlethal, though Chase had heard of more than one person who’d succumbed to heart failure after enough jolts. He wondered if that meant they wanted him alive. ‘Fraid I can’t echo the sentiment.

Cowboy lunged forward like a fencer, the baton his epee, and Chase stepped backward, while feeling behind him with his right hand, letting it warn him when he was about to fetch up against the desk that the little attendant had vacated. The contacts lining the baton crackled, the smell of ozone wafting through the air in the confined space, and Chase slid sideways, trying not to let himself get trapped.

The Filipino style grip he had on his knife wasn’t going to work against the stun baton. It was based on the tactic of blocking with the knife in his left hand, slicing into the arm or leg his opponent tried to strike with, leaving his right hand free for a punch or grab. But the stun baton was just as likely to catch his left arm if he tried to block with it, which would not only leave him helpless for a few moments, but also cost him his grip on the knife. Chase shifted to a European grip and switched the knife to his right hand, blade extended past his fingers, his thumb pressed against the grip. That would keep the knife safe, drawn back in his power hand while his blocking hand was still forward.

Which meant he could still get shocked in that arm, however. He backed into the store, gaze darting to the shelves beside him, waiting for the cowboy to make his next lunge. He traced a line on the shelf to his left with his empty hand until it came up against a bottle. Not glass, not on Gateway, but full and heavy. Lamenting the waste of a good bottle of vodka, Chase snatched it up and whipped it overhand at Cowboy. The merc was fast enough to smack the bottle out of the air, triggering the electric charge from reflex, the arc crackling and sparking through the cloud of vodka.

Electrically charged alcohol turned out to be a great distraction. Chase lunged in behind the bottle, just inside Cowboy’s guard as he swung the baton forward… and swung his forearm into the tanto point of Chase’s blade. HKC might have a reputation for hiring the toughest mercenaries, but Cowboy screamed and the baton fell from his spasming fingers. Chase stomped downward into the merc’s knee, and Cowboy’s arm slid off the knife as he slumped to the ground, clutching at his shattered kneecap with his good hand, not screaming anymore simply because he couldn’t find the breath for it. Chase’s instinct was to finish the man off, but Fence-Sitter had come into the fight, apparently deciding Cowboy needed more help than the man Zack was fighting. He hadn’t come armed with anything as benevolent as a stun-wand, though. He’d produced a full-size kukri from somewhere under his leather jacket and swung it with enthusiasm that made up for his lack of skill. Chase stumbled backward, slipping on spilled vodka, and came down in the aisle, right next to Cowboy’s blood-spattered stun baton.

Chase grabbed the fallen weapon and stabbed upward with it as the bald merc rushed in at him, kukri raised for the killing stroke. It was just a happy coincidence that the business end of the baton rammed into the man’s groin. Chase left the trigger pulled for a full three seconds before he allowed the corporate merc to collapse. Zack… where’s Zack?

Chase spun on his heel and lurched to his feet, sucking in a breath, adrenaline a bass drumbeat in his head and his chest. Hundreds of fights through the last twenty years, guns, knives, fists, and not one of them had gone by without an adrenaline dump or the shakes that came after.

Zack, as it turned out, didn’t need his help. He stood above the limp, motionless form of his opponent, blood splattered across his face and the front of his shirt. Chase winced. He wasn’t squeamish about killing when the situation called for it, when there was no other choice, but neither was he as enthusiastic about it as Zack.

“There are two more outside,” Chase reminded the big man, but the words were barely out of his mouth before Chilly and Jax ambled up to the front of the store. Chilly wasn’t exactly dusting his hands off with the satisfaction of a job well done, but the smugness was emanating off of him like a scent.

“Nope,” he said, “no more outside.”

Past the two former SEALs, Chase saw the two Hart-Klein operatives who’d waited outside sprawled on the ground, one of them clearly dead, his neck twisted at an impossible angle. The other was still moving, writhing in fact, his lower leg flopping around, the foot dangling. A double fracture of the tibia and fibula was ugly, nasty, but survivable. Chase felt a brief stab of pity for the man, for all of them. They were probably former soldiers, like him, though not necessarily for the United States or even the Union—HKC wasn’t picky about that sort of thing. They were stationed on Gateway, pulling security for corporate executives or cargo shipments and then, all of a sudden, told to execute a snatch-and-grab on people they didn’t know. Of course, they didn’t have to work muscle for amoral assholes like HKC.

“Come on,” he urged, motioning back to the intersection. “We need to get to your quarters, then get out of here. These guys were just the first they sent after us, but they won’t be the last.”

“Um, Chase,” Zack said, clearing his throat. “About that…”

Chase followed his gesture back the way they’d come, where at least ten men and women were jogging up the walkway, shoulder to shoulder, pushing aside any civilian who got in the way. These weren’t carrying knives or stun batons. This was their emergency response squad, and they weren’t interested in the Gateway regulations. They had guns, mostly handguns, but the three in the center were carrying short-barreled shotguns.

At times like these, Chase knew, it was important for an NCO’s orders to be succinct and easy to follow.

“Run.”

OceanofPDF.com

13

“We’ve got to go get them,” Angel said, wishing they were moving under the drive field so she could pace. She wanted to pace. “Hart-Klein is going to be coming after them.”

“They are,” Pri agreed, not taking her eyes off the sensor screen. It would normally be Adrian Hill’s purview, but he was back in the medical bay with Aguilar, getting his ribs taped up. If the recovery took him as long as it had Chase after he’d been shot in his body armor, he was likely to be very sore for more than a week, which Angel didn’t envy him. “But they’ve already come after us, and just charging in without knowing what’s waiting for us isn’t going to do Chase and Zack any good.”

“And how the hell are we going to find out what’s waiting for us while we’re sitting here thousands of miles away?” Angel gesticulated with the exclamation and rose toward the overhead, again bemoaning the lack of gravity. She caught herself and pushed back down to the seat, grabbing the back of it to hold herself in place.

“Maybe your boy there could hack the Gateway Traffic Control system,” Pri suggested, nodding at Victor, “the same way he hacked that barge.”

Angel tried not to stare at Victor Lee. He was sitting, strapped in, his face impassive, as if he hadn’t just been responsible for the deaths of four people. She didn’t fault him for killing them…it wasn’t as if they’d had any choice, and she’d been ready to shoot them herself, but he was so cool about it, like it meant nothing to him.

“We were able to penetrate barge security,” he said, looking into the golden surface of the Emissary rather than at Priyanka, “because it was almost nonexistent. Gateway has very efficient firewalls, including no connection whatsoever between the public communication frequencies and their internal security systems.” The barest hint of a smirk passed across his face. “If you want, we can hack their casino’s financial records sheet and give them both a rewards card, but that’s as far into their systems as we can get.”

Pri’s brow furled, the muscles in her cheek twitching as if she were having to restrain herself from snapping back at the younger man.

“I’m not seeing any ships coming our way,” she finally said, turning in her seat and nodding to Angel. “We’ll start heading in, but I’m going to take a parabolic course, just in case anyone’s watching. Get Chase on the horn and let him know we’re on our way.”

Angel hunted for the right control, making sure the communications board was synchronized with Chase’s phone.

“Chase, this is Angel, can you hear me?” She waited, swallowing hard before trying again. “Chase? Do you read?”

“Can’t talk.” The words were clipped off, like he was short on breath. Angel leaned forward by reflex, as if it could help her hear better to be closer to the speaker. “Being pursued. Meet us at Port Six ASAP.” A distant explosion echoed in the background, the unmistakable sound of gunfire, and the transmission cut off.

“Oh, shit,” Pri spat, twisting the control yoke. “So much for a parabolic course. The hell with it.” She hit the intercom control. “Chief, Adrian, I need you both up here now. Things are getting sporty.”

* * *

Sean Haricot wasn’t a happy man. Not in general since he’d been forced out of the CIA after a promising career, and particularly not lately. He’d screwed up royally, and he was dead lucky that James Hart, CEO of Hart-Klein, had given him a second chance. Hart wasn’t the forgiving type, and the fact he’d let Haricot remain on the hunt for the Artifact was a testament both to how desperate he was to find it and how short he was on leaders.

Still, he hadn’t let Haricot forget that his second chance was his last chance. Haricot had spent weeks scouring every independent colony system with no sign of the Tamar since the report from his people on Farragut. They couldn’t be anywhere in the Union without risking arrest, but none of his intelligence sources had been able to pin them down.

Now, Haricot was back in the Solar System, stuck in an office in the Hart-Klein suite at Gateway, waiting to see which would come first, word of the Tamar’s location or James Hart’s personal bodyguard escorting him to an airlock and giving him a one-way ticket out of it. He’d been looking up tickets out of the system on his work computer and hoping that Hart wouldn’t notice.

“Mr. Haricot!” The voice on his intercom sounded stressed, excited and Haricot looked around frantically, wondering if he was being watched. He tapped his touch screen to hide the search window, then stabbed at the control to respond.

“Yeah, what is it?”

“We have a situation in Gateway. The Tamar has been located, and Chase Weston is on the station, near the workers’ quarters. We’ve sent crews to intercept, but there’s been no report back as of yet.”

Fire filled his guts, and a smile crept across his face. Maybe there wouldn’t be an airlock in his future, after all.

“Get my personal gunship ready. I’ll be down at the docking port in five minutes.”

* * *

Chase Weston grabbed Zack by the arm and yanked him back around the corner of the cell phone kiosk just ahead of the shotgun blast. He wasn’t sure how he’d spotted the gunman through the panicked, screaming thongs of people running down the passageway, or how Zack hadn’t seen him, but the buckshot shattered a display of cheap, plastic phones instead of their heads, which he considered a good trade.

At least they didn’t hit any civilians.

He held onto Zack’s shoulder for two seconds, waiting for a gap in the fleeing crowd of workers and tourists, then pushed the man ahead of him. No second shot, which meant the Hart-Klein shooter had lost sight of them, but he still had the man targeted. He rushed into the opening created by Zack Wilson’s bulk going against the grain of the rush, hoping Chilly and Jax would follow but not counting on it. They were good troops, but he hadn’t worked with them for ten years, and God alone knew how well they’d kept in practice of anything except busting heads.

The HKC merc had either circled around ahead of them from the pack following, or he’d been left behind to cut off possible retreat. Either way, he was alone with a short-barreled, inaccurate gun in the tunnel between the worker’s quarters and the docking level, and Chase thought he knew it. The man was skinny, almost gaunt, which made the 12 gauge look even bigger in his hands as he swung it back and forth, hunting for a target. He spotted Zack first, just like Chase figured, and the yawning shotgun muzzle swung around in the direction of the big former Ranger.

But the skinny merc didn’t see Chase, shorter, crouched lower, wriggling through the press. Chase hated the crowd, hated crowds in general, and claustrophobia surged in his chest as they crushed against him, only a grim determination overriding the fear. The little bastard was ready to fire right through the civilians to get to Zack, and Chase felt none of the regret or sympathy he’d experienced at the liquor store when he grabbed the shotgun and forced its barrel upward. The blast went into the insulation of the ceiling twenty feet overhead, and he plunged the blade of his knife into the merc’s throat.

The solar plexus would have been better. Straight into the heart, no blood spatter. But body armor made that impractical, and Chase had to twist the man away from him and rip the knife free, sending most of the blood spilling onto the metal grating of the floor. He still got a spray of it right in his face, the coppery taste of fresh blood in his mouth along with that unmistakable smell almost enough to bring the gorge rising into the back of his throat.

The gunman went down, but Chase pulled the shotgun out of his weakening grasp and passed it back to Zack as the man came up by his side. Chilly and Jax were right behind Zack, forming a blocking semicircle around the dying merc to keep the crowd from closing in on it while Chase leaned in and patted down the body. A pouch on the man’s vest yielded a handful of shotgun shells, and he handed those over to Zack as well, then retrieved a handgun from a holster at the merc’s right chest.

Blood dripped onto his hands and Chase gritted his teeth against the sensation, fighting to stay focused. The pistol was a Heckler and Koch HK VP9 9mm, a design from over thirty years ago but still suitable for combat. Chase wiped the blade of his knife clean on the dying man’s pant leg and sheathed it, then grabbed the two spare mags for the pistol and stuffed them in his pocket.

“Go!” he urged the others, letting Zack break trail.

Chilly and Jax followed, and Chase rode drag, coming up last because he knew most of the emergency response squad they’d seen would be coming from that way. Sirens wailed on the loudspeakers above and around them, announcing that there was an ongoing threat and everyone should get to shelter inside, that help was on the way. That worried the hell out of Chase. That meant station security, and they wouldn’t be shy at all about shooting anyone they saw carrying a gun. Even if Chase and the others didn’t get shot on sight, they’d wind up in a holding cell, a nice little package tied up for Hart-Klein in a bow.

Chase was so busy worrying about security and the mercs on their tail, he almost didn’t notice the T-intersection until they were right on top of it. He remembered it from the map of the station he’d studied and from his previous visits. It went from the casinos to the hotels and it was only a quarter mile from the ramp down to the docking ports… and the alarm klaxons and repeated warnings over the loudspeakers were sending a steady stream of people from the casinos to the hotels. Right across their path.

“Oh, this ain’t good,” Zack yelled over the wailing alarms, motioning at the unending swarm.

They could get into that throng if they jumped in at the right moment, but there was no way to get through it until it slowed to a trickle, and Chase had no desire to get swept along toward the hotels, since that was exactly where station security would be congregating.

At least the flow of people heading past them had dried up, leaving them all alone in the corridor, which seemed like the only good news, until a row of figures in black appeared around the upward curve of the hallway. It was the HKC troopers, arrayed in a wedge now, probably forced into the formation to get through the crowd.

“No,” Chase agreed, tapping the others on the shoulder and pointing back the way they’d come. “It’s not good at all.”

He glanced around, searching for cover, and found a rack of motorized luggage carts, secured by an automated rental kiosk. Tourists coming up from the docking ports could pick one up cheap and take their luggage to the hotels, then let the carts return on their own to the kiosks. As cover against gunfire went, they weren’t much, but they were better than thin air.

“Get down!” Chase said, waving the others behind him as he picked out a spot behind the solid metal release mechanism.

He’d barely had the chance to duck down behind it when the mercs spotted them and opened fire. It was mostly wasted from this range, a good forty yards away, firing at targets behind cover with handguns and sawed-off shotguns, but the cacophony of gunfire echoing through the corridor and the spark of bullets and buckshot off the metal was a good encouragement to keep his head down.

That wouldn’t help them, though. Keeping behind cover would just let the mercs advance on their position until they’d flanked Chase’s position. The alarms, the gunfire, the screaming of the crowd behind them as they realized the violence had caught up to them were all enough to drive Chase to distraction. He took a deep breath, steadied the 9mm in both hands, then leaned out from behind the kiosk and opened up.

The rear sights of the German gun were a blur, the lead shooter in the group of mercs fuzzy, only the front sight of the 9mm in focus, just as he was trained. He didn’t feel the kick, wasn’t conscious of the trigger reset or the brass casings flying over his head. When the slide locked back on the last round, it was a surprise, and even more so when he saw the lead merc and the one behind him both going down, one of them limp and lifeless, the other clutching at a wounded arm.

It was more than he had a right to expect with them wearing body armor, and it was surely more harm than Zack was going to do with that shotgun. That didn’t stop the big man from emptying the weapon in an ear-shattering barrage, and Chase used the distraction as an opportunity to duck back behind cover and drop his spent magazine. Fishing a fresh one from his pocket took a moment longer than it would have if he’d come equipped with his own handgun and its shoulder holster, but he got the full mag slapped home and the slide dropped closed on a 9mm cartridge before the last thunderous roar from Zack’s shotgun had ceased echoing.

Chase swung back out for another volley, but the HKC troops weren’t waiting around to play target. They retreated along either side of the corridor, falling back to the public restrooms, men on the right, women on the left. A chuckle burst free from Chase without his volition at the thought of the hardened mercenaries taking shelter in the shitter, though he couldn’t hear his own laugh over the racket and the ringing in his ears from the nearby shotgun discharge.

Which was why he didn’t realize the security doors were closing until Chilly dashed up to his position and pointed it out. Someone had finally figured out where they were and had the brilliant idea of separating the guys with guns from the people in the hotels and casinos. The doors were descending slowly, cutting them off from the intersection, and Chase and the others were too far away to make it through before they shut.

“Shit.”

They had no choice but to go back the other way, though getting to the Docking Port that way would involve taking an elevator down two levels, running nearly a mile to the next lift banks, and taking another elevator back up.

And the way isn’t going to get any shorter because I sit here thinking about it another five minutes.

“On my six,” he yelled to the others in a short gap in the gunfire. “We have to make our way back to the last intersection.”

“Right through all those assholes,” Chilly growled. “And me without even a damned gun.”

“Next one I come across is yours,” Chase promised him. “When I start shooting, we split up. Zack and Chilly, you go down the left side. Jax and me will go down the right. That’ll keep them from shooting across at us.” Which the mercs would figure out any second, so they didn’t have any time left to sit there and jaw about it. “On three. One… two… three!”

Chase swung around the side of the kiosk and fired a string of double-taps into the women’s restroom, driving back the cluster of HKC troops gathered in the entrance, the slugs smacking into plastic walls which caused spider-web cracks to spread. Zack’s shotgun boomed in full-throated chorus with the sharper cracks of the HK 9mm, suppressing the corporate troops on the other side of the hallway and then the four of them were moving. Chase’s breath shuddered, chuffing with each pounding step of his boots on the grating of the floor, the muzzle of the HK wavering at the impact.

The enemy troops sheltered in the men’s room popped off a couple shots in return, but none were daring enough to stick their head out to aim, and he and Jax were past the position in seconds. Chase let Jax pass him up and ran backward, covering their rear until they were up the curve and out of direct fire range. Chase turned back to the front and increased his pace, stifling a reflex born of training to switch to a fresh magazine. He only had one left and couldn’t afford to waste however many rounds remained in this one.

He touched his earbud, praying he could still get a signal out.

“Tamar, this is Weston. We are cut off from the docking ports and have to reroute. Will contact you when we get close.”

Nothing. Either that meant he couldn’t get a call through from here or…

“Oh, hell.”

OceanofPDF.com

14

“We have them pinned down in the station, sir,” the technician reported, his enthusiasm blaring in Sean Haricot’s earbud.

Haricot swallowed his reply, waiting until the gunship separated from its docking port and the drive activated, pulling him back into his seat.

“Pinned down how?” he wanted to know. The problem with HKC direct-action forces was that they were all such complete ass-kissers, always telling their boss what they thought he wanted to hear.

“The team says that station security has shut down access to the docking ports. Weston and his people are trapped between levels and our team is on their track.”

“On their track is not the same thing as pinned down,” Haricot ground out from between his teeth. “You tell them to make sure if they don’t get him then station security does. I’m going after the Tamar, and when I’m done, I’m coming down there, and Chase Weston better be in custody or dead.” He cut the transmission off with a solid thump of his palm on the switch.

The pilot was glancing at him out of the corner of his eye, though Haricot didn’t know the man well enough to say whether the look was one of respect or fear.

Either will do.

“Show me the Tamar,” he told the man.

“Gene,” the pilot said, nodding at the copilot.

“Yes, sir.” Gene was a gawky, younger man, too big for his chair, with arms and legs from a man a foot taller. “We’re right here.” He pointed at a blue icon on the screen, moving away from Gateway station, then traced a line from that to a red triangle approaching from past lunar orbit. “This is the bogie we believe is the Tamar, though she’s identifying herself as the privateer Draco. She’s on a direct course for Gateway and has requested permission to dock.”

“She’s trying to come in and save Weston’s ass,” Haricot told them. “Set intercept course and arm weapons.”

“Are we weapons-clear, Mr. Haricot?” the pilot asked. Haricot squinted at the man’s name tag.

“You are authorized to fire on their drive pods, Captain Campea. That’s it. We need the crew compartment intact and the occupants alive. Am I clear on this?”

Haricot had never considered himself a particularly frightening individual, despite the sheer number of people he’d killed in his life. He’d gotten much farther with honey than vinegar and made his living on charm and a disarming smile. But he’d seen enough intimidation to know how to pull it off and by the look on the pilot’s face, he’d scored a ten.

“Copy that, Mr. Haricot. Setting an intercept course.”

Haricot wanted to break out that charming smile but decided on a taut grin instead. Scenarios of running for the star colonies and buying a new identity vanished, replaced by visions of James Hart making him the head of Hart-Klein security and rewarding him with a nice big bonus.

Barbados. That’s where I’ll buy a house. I always wanted a vacation place in Barbados.

And all he had to do in order to make that happen was catch this one, troublesome ship.

* * *

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Adrian Hill said, staring at the screen as if he could see threats through it if he just got close enough. “Someone is going to notice we don’t fit the model in the registration.”

“Then they notice,” Angel snapped at him. “What the hell do you think we should do? Wait out here and see who gets killed first, us or them?”

Hill raised an eyebrow and Angel flushed with embarrassment. She was letting her emotions get control of her, which wasn’t going to do anything to help Chase.

“No, Doc,” Hill said, his tone subdued and gentle, as if he knew what she was feeling, which was even more embarrassing. “I’m just saying, we’re not going to do them any good if we wind up surrounded by the damned Space Force out here and arrested for accessory to murdering a US embassy official.”

“If we see the Space Force coming in,” Priyanka interjected, the voice of reason as usual, “we’ll hop into the Rift and come back out on the other side of the station. But we’re not leaving them there.”

“Well, I’m not seeing any Space Force ships,” Hill said, sighing in resignation. “Yet. But they’d better get to the docking port soon, ’cause I don’t think we’re going to be able to pull this off.”

“Duly noted,” Pri said, eyeing him sidelong. “You have my permission to say ‘I told you so’ when everything goes to shit. But until then, shut up, Adrian.”

“Copy that, ma’am,” he murmured. Then his eyes narrowed at something on the screen. “Umm, we got…”

Angel flinched at the ringing echo of metal on metal and the lights in the cockpit flickered.

“Incoming fire!” Chief Aguilar snapped, but Priyanka was already jerking the control yoke to the left, spinning them off into a barrel roll, dragging Angel’s inner ear along with them at a slightly slower pace.

“HKC gunship,” Hill reported, voice taut either from tension or an attempt to not throw up. “Fifteen klicks out and closing.”

“And she’s calling us,” Aguilar added. “Video and audio both.”

“Put it on the main screen,” Pri ordered, pulling the ship out of the roll and into a tight curve.

Angel pried her fingers off the armrests of her seat and snuck a look at Victor. He hadn’t said a word through the whole incident and didn’t seem inclined yet. She wanted to ask him if he was okay but knew it would be a waste of time.

The face on the main screen was horrifyingly familiar, the smarmy good looks and the used-car-salesman smile, the handlebar mustache, and the dark, slicked-back hair.

“I told you so,” Hill muttered.

“Greetings, Dr. Cortez, Captain Ambedkar. For those of you who I haven’t met, my name is Sean Haricot, and I work for Hart-Klein Consolidated. Mr. Hart has a vested interest in the artifact you’ve discovered, and he’s willing to pay quite handsomely for it.”

“I don’t recall any handsome offers back on Vishnu,” Angel told him. “All I remember is you trying to kill us.”

“I was working on incomplete information,” the man replied smoothly. “I apologize for the misunderstanding, but I can make it up to you now. You let me on board and give me the artifact and I’m sure we could negotiate a reward in the seven-figure range.”

Pri shot Angel a look, just a subtle dipping of her eyes. Angel knew what it meant: stall.

“And the artifact is all you want?” she asked. “We hand it over and that’s it?”

“Well,” Haricot said, stretching the word out into four syllables, “not exactly. We’ll also need you to come along as a resident expert to help us interpret the usefulness of the artifact. But you’d be paid ten times your salary at Cal Berkeley, believe me.”

But I don’t believe you, you slimy piece of shit.

“If we say no,” Angel assumed, “you’ll blow us to scrap?”

“I’ll blow your drive to scrap,” he corrected her. “Then I’ll have my people board the ship, take the artifact and you, and then blow the ship to scrap.”

“And what if I say I’ll do it,” she offered, “if you let Chase and the others go?”

Hill was gawking at her, but Pri was murmuring something to Aguilar, something she couldn’t quite make out except for “damage report.” Aguilar shrugged, seemingly unconcerned.

“Of course,” Haricot acceded far too easily. This was a lying contest, and Angel was afraid she was doomed to come in second to someone who’d obviously spent their entire adult life lying for a living. “We’ll dock with your ship and take you and the artifact aboard, and then the Tamar can go.”

“What do you think, Captain Ambedkar?” Angel asked, working to keep her expression neutral. “Would seven figures be enough for you to give up the artifact?”

“That depends on what the first figure is,” Pri said. “Let’s say… five?”

“Five million,” Haricot repeated, then shrugged. Again, far too easy. “I can make that work.”

He went on, bloviating, self-satisfied, convinced he’d managed to intimidate and charm them into cooperating, but Pri’s mouth was still moving in a silent count down from five.

Four. Her hands went to the steering yoke, and Aguilar turned ever-so-slightly toward the weapons board.

Three. Two. One.

The Tamar slewed to the starboard side, pitching Angel against the side of her padded chair, and a deep-chested vibration rattled the hull, as if they were in a car running over rumble strips at the side of the road. Haricot’s image vanished from the screen, replaced by the image of his ship, gleaming silver in the ever-night, and a string of ragged pockmarks erupting along its nose.

A flare of light along the dorsal wing of the HKC gunship and the hull of the Tamar rang for a half-second before the enemy vessel fell away to their rear.

“Oh, shit,” Hill breathed. “What the hell are we gonna do now? They’re at least as fast as we are.”

“I told you already,” Pri said, her voice calm, eyes locked on her control board. “We hit the Rift and come back on the other side of the station.”

And pray to God Chase is still alive when we get back.

* * *

“Goddamned bitch!” Sean Haricot raged, slamming a fist into the arm of his chair, his stomach still twisting from the unwelcome surge of fear. The autocannon rounds hadn’t quite penetrated the nose of his gunship, but it had been close enough to force the pilot to yank the wheel upward and take them out of the firing arc.

And to let the Tamar slip away.

“Get on their ass!” He gesticulated, glaring at the pilot. “Do not let them get away! Open fire! I don’t care if you blow them all straight to hell!”

“Yes, sir!” Campea squawked, seemingly more scared of Haricot than he was of the possibility of the Tamar shooting at them again.

The gunship lurched forward, kicked in the ass by a jolt of power from the nuclear reactor to the Soong-Tierney drive. There was no press of acceleration, which was a damned good thing. Haricot was old enough to remember when Newton’s laws of motion had been a thing, when pilots and astronauts had blacked out if the acceleration went past nine G’s, but that wasn’t an issue with the S-T drive. The only limit was power, and Haricot was pretty sure his ship had more than that junk privateer.

“Why aren’t we shooting yet?” he demanded, looking back and forth from the image of the Tamar on the screen and the pale, sweat-drenched face of his pilot.

“Sir, we’d be going faster than the cannon rounds… they’d just fall back at us.”

Haricot bit back a retort, angry that the man was right and still angrier that he hadn’t thought of it first. This wasn’t his area of expertise. He was comfortable making deals in dimly lit coffee houses on colony worlds or slipping a few hundred in Dig-Coin to some local toughs to ambush a rival in a dark alley. None of that involved space combat, and certainly none of it involved memorizing the acceleration coefficient of rotary cannon rounds.

“Well, what the hell’s your plan, Campea?”

“We just have to get in front of them, sir. Then we can open fire with the rear cannons and their own velocity plus the muzzle velocity of the cannon rounds should be enough to penetrate the buffering effect of their drive field.” The man wiped at his forehead with his uniform sleeve. “We’ve got a Class Six reactor, the best money can buy for this size ship. There’s no way they can stay ahead of us long, unless they make for the Rift.”

“They won’t do it,” Haricot declared. “They’ll never leave Weston behind. I got a look at them together, and they’re too damned loyal to each other. They’ll try to make it back to the station and pick him up.”

“Then we have them,” Campea said, laughing with something that might have been enthusiasm but sounded more like relief. “We’re gaining. Another…” He looked at the copilot. “Gene?”

“One hundred and thirty-two seconds,” the younger man said, giving no sign that he shared his senior officer’s tension or that he’d noticed Haricot’s wroth. “That’s to get even with them. To get ahead, another ten.”

“Wait,” Haricot said, putting up a hand, a troubling thought nagging at the back of his mind. “What’s to keep them from firing on us while we’re in pursuit? Wouldn’t that penetrate our… field buffers, you said?”

“We’re at pursuing a fifty-degree angle to their direction of travel,” Gene informed him, leaning over to trace a finger between the two vessels in the tactical display where the computer presented them in a holographic projection. “Their turret can’t traverse that far. That’s the point.”

Haricot nodded, satisfied.

“Two minutes, then we’ll…”

Something happened. The Tamar was there, then there was a flash, a rainbow that seemed to exist more inside his head than on the main screen, and the ship was gone.

“What the hell?” he blurted, leaning toward the screen, hand extended like there was a control he could touch to reverse what he’d seen. “Where are they?”

Campea was slumped in his seat, face more ashen now than it had been when the ship had fired on them. He hesitated, and Haricot was about to yell at him to say something when the pilot blurted the answer out.

“They went into the Rift. They went FTL.” He shook his head. “They’re gone.”

OceanofPDF.com

15

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Chase thought the serial profanity had come from Chilly, but it was hard to tell over the still-blaring alarms and the roar of Zack’s shotgun. But the roar was preferable to what came next… the ominous, empty click.

“I’m out!” the big man announced, swinging back around the cover of the recycling bin, which wasn’t much cover, but it was all they had.

Return fire spanged off the thing, some of the rounds of buckshot penetrating but deflected away from them. The Gateway Security officers were wearing heavier armor than the HKC mercs had been, and they were carrying more ammo. Thank God they were using shotguns and low-penetration pellets, the better to minimize civilian casualties, but they weren’t shy about spraying that stuff everywhere.

The bastards had beat them to the lift station. Chase shouldn’t have been surprised. Gateway had a reputation for being loose and open, but a place like this couldn’t stay in business if they didn’t have a fairly ruthless security system to keep the patrons safe, particularly since they couldn’t count on any national government or law enforcement agency for help.

They’d nearly walked right into it, too. Or ran into it. That was his fault. He’d been so preoccupied with staying ahead of the corporate mercenaries on their tail that he’d forgotten all about the inevitable clash with security. There were cameras in every corridor, and it had only been a matter of time before someone identified them and sent the rent-a-cops on their trail.

“What the hell are we gonna do now?” Chilly demanded, crowding in beside Jax and hugging the wall behind the only cover they had. The gray-bearded former SEAL had a trickle of blood running down his upper arm where a buckshot pellet had grazed him, and Chase would have felt bad for getting him into this if he hadn’t had his own flesh wound across his right quadriceps. “There’s no way we’re getting to the docking port now!”

Chilly was getting on his nerves, but he was dead right about that. The HKC mercs didn’t have to capture them, they could just hang back and let station security take care of it.

“We have to get off this place,” he said aloud to Zack. “There’s gotta be some way.”

“If we had suits, we could try a maintenance airlock,” the big man suggested. “Maybe we could steal suits?”

Chase was about to tell him what a harebrained idea that was when a blast of 12-gauge pellets came even closer this time, two or three of the lead balls burying themselves in his jacket, though no further since it was backed with Kevlar.

“Sons of bitches,” he swore. He’d been saving the last magazine for an emergency, and this qualified.

Chase rolled out onto the floor, the metal grating cold and uncomfortable even through his clothes, the stolen 9mm pushed out in front of him. Shooting the security guards in the torso or head would have been futile, even if he’d been willing to kill a bunch of poor schlubs just doing their job. They wore thick body armor and ballistic face shields on their helmets, which made the moral decision also the tactically sound one.

For once.

The thinnest spots on the armor were the elbow joints and the knee joints, and elbows were just too hard to hit. Knees, however….

The 9mm barked and snapped like he was trying to hold a vicious little dog, but he managed to keep it at the same level as he emptied the magazine, sweeping sideways. Three of the guards went down, clutching at their legs, and whether the armor had stopped the bullets or not, it was thin enough that they would still wind up with either a severely bruised or fractured patella.

He wanted to feel bad about that, but there were more pressing issues.

“This way!” he yelled, rolled to his feet, and cut across the compartment. A few shotgun blasts followed him, but so did the others, and none of them went down, which he considered a win.

He tossed the pistol away. It was useless now, except in the unlikely event he found a full magazine for that exact model laying around somewhere. They were heading back toward the workers’ quarters again, and that was a dead end, which was the only reason there weren’t guards in their way already. Station security wanted them away from the tourists, from the casinos and hotels, and if they stabbed or shot a couple of the workers before they got caught, well, that was just a job opportunity for someone else.

Chase’s phone vibrated against his hip, and he nearly lost his footing at the surprise. The only call he expected was from Angel, and she had an open line. He checked his watch and saw the ID light up, then frowned in confusion until he recognized the name. Gina Quesada.

Shit. I’d nearly forgotten about them.

He touched his earbud to answer the call, not slowing down.

“Yeah.” The word came out a gasp. He’d been running and gunning for a half hour, and the adrenaline had finally left him.

“Mr. Weston, it’s me, Gina.”

Yeah, I know, get to the point. At least he could still hear her. The earbuds he wore weren’t exactly hearing protection, but they’d kept out the worst of the damage from firing a gun so close to his ears.

“Gina, we’re not gonna be able to get to the docking ports to meet you…”

“We can’t make it, either,” Gina told him. “Security has all the approaches cut off. I tapped in with a code a friend of mine gave me and it says they’re looking for you.”

“I told you about Hart-Klein.” This was rough, trying to talk and run at the same time. He felt like he was back in Ranger training, having to sing cadences while he ran, and he tried to do the same thing now, get the words out in a rhythm matching his stride and breathing. “They have mercs on board who tried to ambush us. Now they’re hanging back and waiting for security to bring us in and we’re stuck between the workers’ quarters and the security detail and we have to find another way off this station.”

There was no response for a moment, no sound except his own breath.

Maybe they all wised up and they’re just going to forget the whole thing. Working shit jobs in this place is probably better than dying. Probably.

“Can you contact your ship?” Gina asked, just when he’d given up on her and was about to end the call.

“Yeah.” He hoped. He hadn’t heard from the Tamar in a while, but that could just be because there’d been nothing to report and they were still waiting for him to call and tell them he was at the port and ready.

“Good. Meet us at the far end of the upper level workers’ quarters, at the emergency shelters.”

“I don’t know where that is,” he admitted.

“Follow the big red arrows on the wall. Get here as soon as you can.”

Now, the call ended and he lacked even the breath to curse. That damned girl had sure as hell never been in the military. Keeping secrets and making yourself look clever were great for college kids playing around, but the military worked by disseminating information, making sure everyone from the brigade commander right down to the newest E2 fresh out of AIT, so if they were the last one alive, they could still accomplish the mission.

He hated working with civilians. But at least she had a plan, which was one better than him.

“This way!” he called back to the others, spotting a red arrow near the ceiling and heading for it.

Emergency Shelter it said, and something else in smaller writing that he couldn’t make out. He could barely see, the sweat dripping in his eyes, blinding him every few seconds even after he wiped it away.

“Angel,” he called into his phone pickup, coughing with the effort, “can you hear me?”

Nothing. Goddammit!

What if the Space Force had got them? Or HKC? He should have been worried about what that would mean for him, for the others, if he was being selfish, or worried about the artifact and Vic falling into the hands of Hart-Klein if he was being altruistic. But all he could think of was Angel.

For Christ’s sake, you’re not a kid anymore, Weston. Grow the hell up.

No guards down here at least, just workers, or at least the few that hadn’t already run for shelter like the warning sirens had directed. They meandered around, probably half-drunk or stoned, laughing at each other and the sirens or cursing them for how loud they were. A few of them noticed Chase, and the others running and stared curiously, but none made a move to intercept them or as much as to ask where they were going.

“Where the hell are we going?” Zack asked, not sounding as tired as Chase, which didn’t seem fair.

“The emergency shelter.” Or whatever. He didn’t have the energy to explain it.

The red arrows were larger now, which he thought was a good sign, but the walkway narrowed with each turn, bringing the rows of apartments closer, forcing them closer to the onlooking workers. They were mostly young, mostly poor, mostly indifferent. Except for one.

“Nine o’clock,” Zack said, spotting her as well. “On the porch.”

A woman, a little older, some gray in her braided hair, who had her cell phone to her ear and her eyes on Chase.

Damn.

“Want me to grab the phone?” Zack asked, jogging up beside him as they passed.

“No, just keep going.”

There was no use confronting her. She was either turning them in or she wasn’t, and getting into a shouting match wouldn’t change that. The arrows turned them again, and Chase sighed in a rush of breath. This was all so unnecessary. They were on a space station, and it would have been simpler to just keep all the walkways straight, the apartment houses parallel, but some ergonomics expert had decided that circles and curves and interrupted sightlines were better methods to help people forget they were in a spinning tin can in a hard vacuum.

If the walkways had been straight, Chase wouldn’t have run nearly straight into the squad of station security guards.

It was a surprise to both of them, he thought, his shoulder colliding with the chest of the leader of the group as he rounded the superfluous corner. Chase could tell by the squawk of surprise and the widening eyes and the fact that this particular batch of private police weren’t wearing body armor or carrying guns. They had stun wands on their belts, but they hadn’t pulled them out yet and obviously didn’t expect to be making the acquaintance of four wanted fugitives.

The data washed over Chase in an ocean wave, but experience picked out the important bits and let the rest drain away. Six security officers, four male, two female, walking in a sloppy sort of staggered column, three of them on the right side of the walkway, three on the left.

There was a chance that the rent-a-cops wouldn’t know who they were, and Chase was preparing a story about how they were workers heading for the shelter because of the alarm, but a light of recognition flared behind the eyes of the one he’d bumped into, and he knew it was too late for that. The man’s hand went to his stun wand and Chase kicked him in the thigh.

A punch to the face was the amateur’s move, an opportunity to break knuckles or slice them on someone’s teeth. A kick to the outside of the thigh, targeted correctly, would bruise the common peroneal nerve and make the poor bastard’s leg feel like jelly for hours or even days, but wouldn’t do him any permanent harm. Chase had found that out the hard way in combatives training, courtesy of a particularly sadistic master sergeant.

The guard screamed and collapsed and then Zack, Chilly and Jax were on the others. Two more went down, writhing from one painful injury or another but still alive, and the other three backed away, their stun wands out, two women, one man. This was going to take way too long now, long enough for the station to reroute an armed emergency response team to the workers’ quarters.

Chase was so focused on the guards he didn’t notice Alex Quesada and Grey Haskell coming up behind the rent-a-cops until the retired Marines slammed into them from behind, taking all three down in full-body blocks. Alex had one of the women in a rear naked choke while Haskell grabbed a loose stun wand and zapped the other two into senseless torpor. Neither of those would last long, but they didn’t need long.

“It’s just up this way,” Gina Quesada said, running up behind her sister and Haskell, a backpack hanging from her shoulders and a duffle bag in each hand. “Come on!”

The emergency shelter wasn’t the only refuge at the end of the walkway, and Chase skidded to a halt as they came to the cul-de-sac. The door to the shelter yawned open, a few workers standing near the entrance, staring outward as if they were waiting for their employers to come tell them what to do. They stared at the seven strangers uncomprehending, one of the younger ones waving them toward the entrance as if he thought they were lost.

Chase barely noticed them as they stared in shock at the section to the left of the shelter that held row upon row of oval hatches set in the wall, dozens of them, some reachable via ladders. The cylinders reached all the way out to the station’s outer hull, one of several banks of the things located in every section, the only way of escape for the workers and tourists in the event of a catastrophic failure.

“The life pods,” he murmured, kicking himself mentally. He turned to Gina. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

“Hurry, get in!” she urged them, waving toward the closest of the pods. “If those guards get a call in, station security might shut these things down.”

Chilly hauled the cylinder’s hatch open and leaned inside, then looked back at the young woman with narrowed eyes.

“All seven of us are gonna fit in this thing?”

“It’s built to hold ten,” she said, pushing past him brusquely. “Go or stay, but we’re out of here.”

Chase let Alex and Haskell climb in behind Gina, then scrambled aboard himself, not wasting his breath trying to convince Chilly to come. He didn’t know the man, but he knew SEALs, and there was no way a SEAL’s ego would allow him to let a young girl outdo him.

Although Chase was thankful he wasn’t extremely claustrophobic, because there wasn’t a hell of a lot of room inside the escape ship, even if it seated ten. The acceleration couches were set up facing forward, and he had to clamber over the rear seats to get to the one behind the row where Alex, Haskell, and Gina had strapped in.

A glance over his shoulder showed him Zack, Chilly, and Jax were already on their way into the thing, and he took a moment while Zack dogged the hatch shut to try his phone one more time.

“Angel, if you can hear me, please respond. I’m calling an audible here and I need your help.”

“Hold on!” Gina said, yanking down on the manual separation lever. “This thing is basically a big electromagnetic catapult, so…”

Acceleration slammed Chase back in his seat, and the darkness closed around the edges of his vision.

* * *

“Get us back,” Angel said, repeating it like a chant, or a prayer. “Get us back there.”

“I’m fucking trying,” Pri ground out, fingers tapping out a discordant rhythm on the control board. “This isn’t like a holding pattern around LAX, sweetheart. We’re going faster than light, and it’s going to take a few minutes to get turned around.” She glared at Angel out of the corner of her eye. “I know you care about him, but he was part of my crew long before you ever met him, so back the hell off.”

Angel was halfway into a snarled reply, but she bit the words off and chewed them up instead. Pri was right, and there was no use distracting her. She turned to Aguilar, who was tapping his boot on the deck, looking like an expectant father.

“Did we take any damage from when they hit us?” she asked him, trying to take her mind off of Chase.

“Nothing too bad. I can patch it with what we’ve got on board, if I get the chance.” He shrugged. “Nothing too bad if we don’t take another hit in the same area,” he amended.

“Okay.” Pri sighed, sinking back in her seat. “We’re turned around and heading back to the station. Going to be tricky getting the right exit point… lots of gravitational influences in the Earth-Moon system.”

“They were being chased,” Angel reminded her. “Shot at. What if they can’t make it to the docking port?”

“We’ll figure that out when we get there. But we aren’t going to have long. We might have given Haricot the shake, but the same systems that picked us up the first time are going to detect us this time. They’ll be on us in minutes.”

Angel’s fists clenched, and she badly wanted to hit something, or possibly somebody.

“I’ll go in,” she volunteered.

“Hell, no,” Aguilar cut her off. “That slimy dickhead from HKC just proved they know who you are. Your face will be up on their warning BOLOs all over the station. I’ll go. Or me and Adrian.”

“Yeah,” Hill agreed cheerfully. “We’re nobodies.”

“Except your face is so damned ugly, no one could forget it.”

Hill shot the chief a bird, and Angel was ready to smack both of them upside the head. How could they be so damned calm about this?

“Ten seconds to exit,” Pri announced, as unconcerned as if she were telling them that dinner would be late. “We’re coming out of the Rift sunward of the station, so hopefully, their visual sensors will be distorted. That should give us more time until someone recognizes our profile.”

Ten seconds was an eternity, and it felt like it. Too damned many things could happen in ten seconds.

Everyone she loved could die in ten seconds.

* * *

Chase shook off the fuzz of the near-blackout from the launch force and tried to focus on the tiny viewscreen at the front of the pod. It showed the station, huge and looming against the blue and green circle of the Earth, then the darkness of space, then the glow of the reflected sun on the silvery skin of Gateway, a slow tumble that no one was bothering to correct.

“Escape pod 1024-A3,” a harried voice came over the speakers. “Your launch was unauthorized. You will be towed back to the station and there will be a substantial fine and term of punitive confinement for improper use of emergency equipment.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Gina said, slapping a switch. The voice faded away, and the young woman got to work at the tiny joystick that was the only control the pod had.

Steering jets thumped against the hull of the escape pod and the tumble slowed, then stopped, and they were floating free.

No, not free. Chase was no physicist or pilot, but he knew there was no way they’d built up enough velocity to escape orbit. They were still in the same orbit as Gateway, still vulnerable to any ships the station launched, since the pod didn’t have its own S-T drive.

“We don’t have much time,” Alex warned, twisting around in her seat to fix Chase with a glare. “Where’s your ship?”

“I’m calling them,” Chase promised her, holding up a hand. “Angel, do you read? Anyone on the Tamar, this is Weston, do you read?”

“This thing doesn’t have much for sensors,” Gina said, pointing at the screen, “but I think there’s a ship heading our way.”

“From where?” Chase asked, guarding against the relief threatening to wash away his tension. Gina traced a line from the thermal reading glowing red against the darkness back to the docking port on the station.

“Has to be security,” Alex spat, thumping her fist against the bulkhead. “Goddammit, Chilly, I never should have listened to you. Yeah, our jobs sucked, but they were better than sitting in a holding cell for the next year.”

Chilly said nothing, and the look he gave Chase wasn’t exactly accusatory, but it also wasn’t pleasant. He racked his brain, trying to come up with a backup plan, but there was none to be had.

“I’ll tell them I forced you three to get in the escape pod,” he said, only a massive effort of will keeping him from screaming a curse. “Chilly, Jax, you can say you chased us in here trying to stop us and got caught when I hit the launch control.”

“Gee, buddy,” Zack murmured, “any way you can get me out of this, too?”

“Hell no,” Chase told him, snorting a humorless laugh. “You’re going to jail right alongside me. I’m not gonna be alone in there.”

“That station security ship is almost right on top of us,” Gina announced dolorously.

Chase watched the thing approaching, visible on the external cameras now, boxy and utilitarian, never intended to enter an atmosphere. An oversized docking collar took up most of the bow, an adapter to allow it to dock with anything, including an escape pod. It was coming toward them at a sedate pace, no hurry at all because where could they go?

The security ship slewed to the right, and Chase blinked. Was that debris coming out of the rear of the ship?

“What the hell?” Alex murmured.

The ship was drifting now, no momentum left because the S-T drive didn’t impart any, and Chase still couldn’t make out what had happened to it. Until a familiar matte-gray wedge shape soared into the viewscreen’s picture and imposed itself in front of the helpless Gateway security vessel.

“Chase, are you okay?”

“We’re a little banged up,” he told Angel, a laugh burbling up inside him that was hard to tamp down, “but I think if you get us on board and get us the hell out of here, we’ll all be much better.”

“Give us two minutes to pull alongside and match airlocks.”

Chase looked at the others. They were staring at him, anticipation and confusion in their faces, and he realized they hadn’t heard the other end of the conversation and couldn’t be sure what was happening.

Chase let the laugh escape. He couldn’t help it.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, motioning toward the ship on the front viewer, “welcome to the crew.”

OceanofPDF.com

16

“So, that’s what all the fuss is about,” Chilly Vazquez murmured, staring at the golden surface of the artifact, through it to the strange dark shapes twisting inside. The man seemed to be hypnotized by the thing, unable to take his eyes off of it.

Victor Lee knew just how he felt. It was everything he could do to not grab the artifact away from the table where Chase, and Angel had told him to leave it on display so their new allies could see it and be convinced.

“A lot of people have died for this thing,” Chase told the thick-chested former Navy SEAL. “Almost us, more than once.”

The younger girl, Gina they’d called her, leaned across the other side of the table, nose wrinkling. She was, Victor noted absentmindedly, cute in a waif pixie sort of way, her dark hair cut short.

“This is not any kind of material I’ve ever seen before,” she said. “I mean, I’m not a geologist or anything, but”—she grinned—“I dated one in college, and we compared notes. This isn’t even any alloy I saw in engineering physics. But what does it do?” She shook her head. “I mean, you said it’s a computer, an artificial intelligence. How do you know? Did you hook it up to your ship’s computer? Does it talk? How does it work?”

Chase and Angel looked at him, though neither said a word.

“It works through me,” Victor told her. He cleared his throat. The statement wasn’t easy to get out, as if he was ashamed to admit it to the strangers. “I… bonded with the Emissary, the artificial intelligence, shortly after we found it. I was the first, so it was me, and it’s permanent.”

“So, you… talk to it?” Jax asked. He was a tall man, though not as broad-shouldered as Zack, and there was intelligence behind his dark eyes.

“The link is neural.”

“Like psychic?” Alex was Gina’s sister, though there wasn’t much similarity to them beyond a certain likeness through the eyes. She was the brawn and her sister was clearly the brains. “It’s inside your brain?”

“It’s not psychic,” Victor sighed. “But yeah, we communicate in a nonverbal way. There needs to be a physical contact, though, for it to work.”

He didn’t mention the withdrawal he went through when the contact was broken. He didn’t want them to think of him as an addict. The word brought to mind too many images of the street people he’d driven around and walked past back in Berkeley. That wasn’t him. This wasn’t the same.

“What’s it like?” Gina asked him, curiosity lighting up her eyes. “When you communicate with him? Do you just hear it like it’s your own thoughts?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Other times, I can see him.”

“You see a computer?” Grey Haskell asked sharply, eyes narrowing. He was an intelligent-looking man, a bit older than Alex, less of an imposing brute and more the type to use his head.

“The Emissary was built by a race who called themselves The People,” Angel explained. “We found the fossil remains of one on Vishnu.” She shrugged. “We don’t have it anymore because the Chinese raided the dig, but I have pictures.” She pulled out her phone and scrolled through its menus until she came to the one she wanted, then she set it on the table beside the artifact.

The projector built into the side of the phone shone an image on the bare bulkhead nearby, the skeletal remains of a creature Victor had seen fleshed out, living and breathing… Well, almost. The skeleton told a fraction of the tale, showing the hooplike ribs and the elongated skull, but there was so much more to The People. They were tall, broad-chested, and straight-backed, though the arrangement of their hips and knees were more reminiscent of a kangaroo than a hominid. Their skin was gray and scaly, not so much like a reptile but more along the lines of a pangolin or an armadillo. Their faces were angular, narrowing to an oval mouth with omnivore’s teeth, though they didn’t look as if they grew there from roots but were extrusions of the jaw. And the eyes. The eyes reminded him of the artifact itself, golden, with subtle shapes formed deep inside, floating yet also part of the structure.

He shook the image away, reality returning in the form of the dead and desiccated remains.

“Sweet mother of God,” Jax said, crossing himself.

“And you talk to one of those things?” Chilly asked, face gone pale.

“Sometimes.”

“This is so damned cool,” Gina enthused, looking between the image of the skeleton, the artifact and Victor. “This is all the stuff we talked about in class that no one thought we’d ever see, stuff that our grandchildren might be able to play with.”

“I thought you were a physics major,” Angel said, cocking an eyebrow at her. “Or was this another boyfriend?”

“I minored in computer science.” Gina might have said it with a hint of smugness, unless Victor was imagining it. “I figured it would help me to work with modeling algorithms. Our profs used to talk about neural links. I mean, we’ve experimented with them for the last twenty, twenty-five years, but no one’s been able to come up with anything that works more efficiently than other input methods because we still can’t figure out how to get data directly into the brain.” She rolled her eyes. “I mean, sure, we can feed signals to the optic or aural nerves, but that’s complicated and involves invasive surgery, and if it doesn’t do anything better than just seeing or hearing the information, why bother?”

“You’ll have to excuse my little sister,” Alex said, leaning against the bulkhead, arms crossed, amusement written across her blunt features. “She kind of catches fire anytime someone rubs two dry electrons together.”

“I don’t mind,” Victor said perhaps a little too quickly. “It’s been a while since anyone on the ship understood what I was talking about.”

“Hey, I resemble that remark,” Adrian Hill called back from the cockpit. Victor didn’t know why Priyanka bothered to have anyone on watch. It wasn’t as if anything could happen to them in the Rift.

“Where did you go to school?” he asked Gina.

“Caltech.” She nodded toward him. “You?”

“UC Berkeley. I’m Dr. Cortez’s graduate assistant in xenoarchaeology.”

“That is just so freaking awesome. I’d give anything to be involved with studying alien technology.”

“Well, I guess you kind of”—he shrugged—“are. You know?” He motioned at the artifact. She laughed, glancing aside with a shyness he hadn’t seen until now.

“I guess you’re right.”

“Okay, I guess I buy this,” Alex admitted, falling into a chair at the table.

Her hand strayed near the artifact but she flinched away. Victor realized he’d tensed up, ready to yell at her not to touch it, and he shook his head at the inanity of that. Her touching the artifact wouldn’t do anything. He was the only one who could bond with it.

“So, now what?” Alex went on. “You said there’s another of these things on… Dragon’s Egg?” She shot a questioning look at Chase.

“Lóng dàn,” he confirmed. “It means Dragon’s Egg.”

“And this Lóng dàn place is a Chinese colony. Not even Alliance, pre-Alliance Chinese. Which means they’re going to be even more possessive about it. You said you have a plan?”

“We have some things in motion.” Chase motioned toward Victor. “His grandmother has a cousin who was a forced emigrant to Lóng dàn, a farmer, and we think we can get a message to her.” He shrugged. “If she’s still alive. Assuming she is, we have a place to insert where we can get our bearings and figure out where the other artifact is… the Navigator, it’s called.”

“That’s a place to set down,” Chilly interjected, settling down into the couch built into the bulkhead. “But how do we get past their orbital defenses, their atmospheric drones, their satellite coverage… all that shit?”

“I think,” Priyanka said, speaking up for the first time since the briefing had begun, “that I have some ideas about getting us close… maybe even getting the Tamar down to the village. But that still leaves us with a problem. We know where the village is, but we have no damned clue where this Navigator is.”

“I… we can detect it once we get into orbit,” Victor reminded her.

“Yeah, but we can’t be sure it isn’t somewhere the Chinese are already settled. If we try to land next to it, they’ll be on us before you can grab the thing. We need the village as a secure base while you grab the artifact. But we can’t touch down there and then take you to the artifact, or they’ll detect us. We need some way to get the extraction team down to the artifact undetected.”

“Yeah,” Jax agreed. “Too bad we don’t have a drop pod.”

“A what?” Chase asked, frowning at the man. Chilly laughed at the reaction.

“Oh, yeah, that’s not something you Army types would have heard of, is it?” Chilly shaped something oblong in the air with his hands. “It was an insertion tool for the SEALs during the war. Something the R&D types developed to get us from orbit to the surface of a planet without getting pinged by radar.”

“An insertion tool for SEALs, huh?” Alex cracked, throwing back her head and barking a laugh. “That sounds like a Navy thing, all right. You boys couldn’t get laid without a special tool.”

“Hey, Jax,” Chilly called to his friend, “you have any crayons. The Marines here might be hungry after their adventure.”

Victor watched Gina watching the exchange. She was grinning broadly and he guessed she was used to this sort of banter between her sister and… brother-in-law? He hadn’t asked whether the two were married.

“Anyway,” Jax interrupted, a long-suffering expression on his face, as if he was used to Chilly’s foolishness, “a drop pod is a tight fit. Like Thirty feet long, twelve feet wide on the outside, barely enough room for an eight-person team... or squad, if you’re a Marine or Ranger. You give it momentum from a ship, then just cut it loose on a ballistic trajectory. It’s covered in radar-absorbent foam that also helps shield it from the heat of reentry.”

“And then what?” Zack wondered. “Does it screw itself into the ground and then your press agent digs you out once you’ve got a book deal?”

“Oh, good God,” Chilly moaned. “We got Marines and Rangers ganging up on us, Jax.”

“Well, it’s not like they could take us on one on one, Chilly.”

“Hold on a second,” Chase interrupted, raising a hand to halt the exchange. “Now that you say that, I think I’ve seen one of those pods before.”

“Well, that’s great,” Chilly said, “but we need to figure out a way to get down to the planet.”

“I saw the thing,” Chase went on, ignoring him, “in an arms depot.”

“Oh, shit, yeah,” Pri blurted, eyes going wide. “Telemark!”

“What the hell is a Telemark?” Alex demanded, her patience obviously wearing thin.

“It’s a region in Norway,” Victor said before he could stop himself. The others eyed him doubtfully and he shrank under their regard. Except Gina, who seemed fascinated. He shrugged. “I saw it in a movie.”

“Yes, well, that’s true, but it’s also an outpost on the moon of a gas giant,” Grey Haskell elaborated. “I’ve heard of it. They built it back during the war to have an arms depot within striking distance of the Alliance colonies.”

“On the moon of a gas giant?” Gina repeated, frowning. “Wouldn’t that take a lot of work? Air processing, water production, radiation shielding…?”

“Telemark is habitable,” Pri corrected her. “Barely, but habitable. It’s one of the few habitable moons we’ve discovered. It’s a shit detail, though. Cold as hell and there is higher radiation than normal from the planet.” Her brow furled. “I can’t remember the name of the planet.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter, we can look it up. But the upshot is, it’s dangerous after prolonged exposure, so they rotate the crews out every few months. No one ever knows anyone else and morale is through the floor. It’s basically a punishment for officers and NCOs who’ve pissed somebody off, which also kills morale, but no one cares because it’s basically just a place to store old weapons in case there’s another war.”

“And they have a drop pod there?” Jax asked, eyebrow going up. He nodded to Chase. “You saw it?”

“I was there on one of those shit details at the end of the war,” he confessed, his thin smile self-deprecating. “I hadn’t quite been enough of a dumbass to get assigned there, just pissed off my CO to the point where he put me on a supply run. I got way too familiar with their inventory, and most of the stuff I knew pretty well, but the drop pod was in a section that they didn’t allow us grunts into.”

“That was years ago, though,” Angel pointed out. She hadn’t contributed much since the whole military conversation started, and Victor wondered if she was feeling left out. That wouldn’t be a common thing for her, since she was the most well-read person he knew. “Wouldn’t that kind of thing have been disposed of since then?”

For all their sniping at each other, there seemed to be one thing all the military personnel had in common, and that was disdain for the lack of knowledge a civilian had of the armed forces. Chase, at least, kept his reaction to a low chuckle, though the others didn’t try to restrain their guffaws.

“Come on, Dr. Cortez,” Zack said, gently compared to how the Marines or the SEALs would have put it, Victor was sure, “this is the military we’re talking about. They never throw anything away unless Congress writes a law saying they have to, and even then they put it off for as many years as possible. There’s probably still Beretta M92s in that armory from the Gulf War.”

“Not to mention,” Priyanka chimed in, “that it costs less for them to just leave the shit there than to ship it back for disposal.”

Victor felt bad for Angel. She was silently fuming, and he wondered if Chase saw it. He supposed the man did, since he tried to smooth things over.

“It’s not something anyone who hadn’t served would know,” he said, giving Zack the stink-eye. “But the point is, the thing was there and is still there, probably. And it’s kept in a base with high staff turnover and shitty morale.” He grinned broadly, the look in his eyes rich with an almost sadistic cunning. “Shitty morale means the security won’t be doing their job and no one really cares about things like authorization and proper paperwork, right?”

“You bet your ass it does,” Chilly agreed. The former SEAL chuckled long and low, rubbing his hands together. “They’ll never know what hit them.”

“We’re not going in guns blazing, Chill,” Jax told him, eyeing him archly. “These are still Union troops… hell, they’re probably all still American troops since this outpost is old enough to predate the Colonial Authority and the treaty. We have to finesse this.”

“And how do you suggest we do that, Petty Officer Walker?” Chilly asked, sketching a mocking salute. “Them being disorganized and slack doesn’t mean they’re going to let a privateer waltz in and take a drop pod.” He shrugged. “I mean, maybe if the base commander’s a total shitbag, they might take a bribe, but…”

“We need clearance,” Pri said, leaning back against the bulkhead, fingers stroking her chin thoughtfully. “I can disguise this ship as a military bird.” She laughed. “Hell, it is a military bird, or used to be. And we’ve restored a lot of what the Space Force stripped out of the hull before they sold it.”

“Yeah, that’s no shit,” Chief Aguilar put in. “We got the spoofed registration numbers that would check out for all the automated systems.”

“Really?” Alex cocked an eyebrow. “And how did you manage that?”

“I’d rather not say,” Pri shot back, her smile twisted at the side. “But what we can’t fake is the landing clearance.” She raised a hand as if forestalling any objections. “And an acquisition request for the drop pod, of course, but that’s a bit more doable. Shit like that gets misplaced sometimes, and I doubt they’ll care… I mean, if we have proper clearance for a requisition run, why would they care if we take an obsolete, unarmed drop pod?”

Victor had a thought but didn’t want to make any promises he couldn’t keep. He pushed up from the table and laid his palm against the surface of the artifact. It was like touching a live wire, a jolt that removed his blinders and opened up the universe. He was calm and collected and not at all awkward, as if he hadn’t spent the last twenty-five years learning to be a geek obsessed with the past.

“I can reprogram their automated system to give you clearance,” he said. Then he shrugged, feeling the nudge from the Emissary. “We can,” he corrected himself. “But we need access to it. A connected link… some kind of secure comms.”

“If she can fake the registry,” Gina said, “then they’ll have to connect to our comms to confirm it. I know a little about cracking government systems.” The corner of her mouth turned up. “It was a hobby of mine in college. If they hook up to the ship with that carrier, I think I can get you inserted into their system.”

“Well, there you go,” Chase said, spreading his hands. “We got ourselves a plan. Pri, you want to do the honors?”

“Adrian,” the pilot called up to the cockpit, “find the coordinates for Telemark. Get us there as fast as the Rift’ll carry us.”

OceanofPDF.com

17

“I don’t understand,” Angel admitted, and it bugged the hell out of her. There’d been too damned many things she hadn’t understood lately and she wasn’t used to it. “We’re supposed to be hacking the clearance, so why are you all getting ready to”—she waved at Chase and the others gearing up in their fake Union military uniforms in the utility bay—“jump out of the ship ten feet up?”

“We can fake the clearance,” Chase explained, strapping on a tactical vest loaded down with rifle magazines, “but not a requisition. That would require us to have authorization from the computer back on Earth, or maybe Farragut, and there’s no way we can get that.”

“So, what’s the plan, then?” she wanted to know.

“Pri is going to get their attention,” he said, checking the load on his rifle, “while we go through the forests east of the base and sneak into the storage shacks. We can get the pod out of there and stash it someplace where the Tamar can pick it up on the way out.”

“And they won’t notice that?” She shook her head. “You sneaking into their base?”

“There ain’t no alarm systems out here,” Chilly assured her. He looked, she thought, a little unconvincing as a Union Space Force trooper, given the gut he’d developed since he’d left the service, but then they’d mentioned that the place had lax standards, so maybe he could get away with it. “Ain’t nobody to steal anything way out here except the Alliance, and they wouldn’t be bothering. They’d just blow the shit out of the place, if they bothered with it at all.”

“Yeah, we’ll be fine,” Alex assured Angel, pulling a heavy, white jacket over her uniform, then flapping the open edges of it. “Damn, this thing works better than I remember.”

“You’ve got the heating circuits switched on, love,” Haskell told her, reaching over to hit a pressure switch on her lapel. “There, that should be better.”

“The thing that gets me,” Gina said, from where she sat beside Victor on a pile of cargo crates, “is how there’s a moon of a gas giant that’s habitable at all. I mean, it’s very possible that life of some kind could evolve there, but for it to be habitable for humans? On the surface, even? That’s just so incredibly unlikely.”

Victor’s eyes were clouded over the way they got when he was connected with the alien AI, and his hand was inside the duffle bag where the orb resided, hung around his neck.

“It was no accident,” he said, and Angel winced at the tone of his voice, so unlike the young man she knew. “The People terraformed this moon. In fact, they terraformed nearly all the habitable worlds you discovered.”

“The People?” Gina repeated, frowning. “Oh, right. That’s what the aliens called themselves.”

“Roughly. It isn’t an exact translation because there can be no exact cognate between species that evolved on different worlds and have no genetic relationship.”

The girl, Angel noted, didn’t seem bothered by Victor… or rather, by Victor’s change in personality whenever he was connected to the Emissary. Angel wondered if she considered him an oddity or if she just hadn’t known him long enough to notice the shift.

“And The People just decided to engineer life on all those planets?” Gina went on, switching to a lotus position, resting her chin on her fists and staring at Victor and the Emissary in what looked like honest fascination. “Just because they could?”

“It was a challenge. They’d been around a long time and new challenges were sparse.”

Angel wanted to concentrate on the upcoming operation, but there was nothing she could do to aid in it except stay out of the way, and since the Emissary was in such a talkative mood…

“Why Earth life?” she asked. Victor looked at her in question, and she elaborated. “All the life we’ve found on the colonies has been slightly different from Earth flora and fauna, but it’s obviously based on the genetics of animals and plants from Earth. Why did you use Earth life to shape the ecologies of these worlds? Why not use the life from your own planet?”

The eyes regarding her weren’t Victor’s. She could feel it, feel the alien intelligence behind them.

“Because we were old.” We. “Too old. The life on our worlds had become too specialized, tucking itself into niches that wouldn’t be found anywhere else. Their genetics had been twisted into unrecognizable knots, and the task of unwinding them and forcing that life into something adaptable enough to live in a whole new ecosystem was considered to not be worth the effort.” Victor slumped forward as if his chest was trying to bend in the middle in a way a human couldn’t, and then winced and straightened. “And The People were just as old, just as loathe to change their ways, to adapt to something new. It was why they ran instead of staying to fight, instead of trying to find a way to destroy the Sunkillers.”

Victor fell silent, jaw clenching as if he wanted to say more but something wasn’t allowing it. Angel wondered if he remembered the knowledge he’d gained during the connection, if she might be able to corner him sometime when he was away from the thing and find out more. No one else even seemed to be listening to the exchange, which she found maddening.

“You guys good back there?” Pri asked over the PA speakers. “We’re about ready to come out of the Rift.”

“We’re ready,” Chase told her, grabbing a helmet out of an equipment locker. “We’ll be down at the belly ramp. Just give us the signal when it’s time.”

“Copy that. I need the kid and the girl up here for their computer magic.”

Angel was still pissed at Chase for not coming to her defense when the others were making fun of her for her unfamiliarity with the military bureaucracy, but not so pissed she didn’t want to speak to him before he jumped out the back of the ship in mid-air.

“Be careful,” she told him, though she knew it sounded inane.

“I’ll be okay,” he assured her, putting a gloved hand on her arm. “You three”—he nodded toward her, Victor, and Gina—“ just stay in the compartment and keep the door locked. They shouldn’t come looking for you.”

“What if they search the ship?” she asked him.

“If they search the ship,” Chase said, letting his hand fall away, “then we’ve got much bigger problems than them finding you.”

* * *

Priyanka Ambedkar shouldn’t have been nervous. She’d done this sort of thing before. No one who flew for mercenaries could have avoided faking their registry at one time or another, not when there were so many governments and corporations who took a dim view of that sort of ronin. The only mercs the corporates liked were the ones who worked for them exclusively.

But I am nervous. Maybe because this was her own government, and the consequences of being caught weren’t as mundane as a quick death in a space battle. She couldn’t honestly say she didn’t fear death, but she didn’t fear it as much as she feared spending the rest of her life in prison, which was a distinct possibility.

“Coming out of FTL in five,” Adrian Hill chanted as if it were a magic spell that the ship needed to accomplish the feat. “Four…three…two…one. Now.”

The mass of white at the front of their field of view separated into streaks as stars separated from it and solidified into their fixed spots in the cosmos. And in the midst of those stars was the sullen, ocher and amber countenance of a god, the gas giant her records had reminded her was called Thelir. It took up most of the front screen, dwarfing not just her ship but the blue and green and mostly white sphere that was her largest moon, Telemark.

“Where are those…” She spun around, feeling irritation that the kids weren’t in the cockpit, then saw that both Victor and Gina had showed up while she was occupied with the passage out of the Rift. She sighed, waving between them and the control panel. “We’re picking up the Nav Comm signal from the base. You guys need to do your shit.”

“Give me a little space,” Gina urged, scooting Chief Aguilar out of his chair. The older man grumbled but vacated the seat, standing behind the woman with a skeptical frown set in his lined face.

Gina pulled a tablet out of her thigh pocket and plugged a hardwire cable into a socket on the control panel. The readout at Aguilar’s operations display changed to something Pri didn’t recognize, some sort of programming diagram. What the young woman did next, Pri understood even less, but when she was finished with the series of commands, she shot Victor a grin.

“You’re linked with their system. Think you can penetrate the security?”

Victor didn’t answer, but his eyes went out of focus, as if he was seeing something beyond the cockpit, and the display cloned from Gina’s tablet changed yet again, showing a stream of data from a file somewhere inside the base’s secure systems.

“What’s the name and registration number of this fake ship again?” Victor asked, though the focus of his eyes didn’t change.

“USS Terrence Souther,” Pri supplied. “AKE-47608.”

“Got it.”

Pri couldn’t follow the flow of data across the screen, but she did notice when the name of the fictional Terrence Souther appeared and was swept away by the wash of letters and numbers. The screen flickered and then went back to Gina’s hacking display and she yanked the cord, shifting it to Aguilar’s ops screen.

“Thanks, Chief.” Gina offered the man a smile as repayment for stealing his seat and gave it back to him, joining Victor at the rear of the cockpit.

“Let’s see if it worked,” Pri said, tapping a series of commands into what was supposed to be a read-only registration system. What the government doesn’t know won’t hurt them.

The status bar indicated the new registration was active and pinging. Pri took a deep breath and keyed the comm systems.

“Attention Telemark base, this is the Terrence Souther requesting clearance to land.”

Then she held what was left of that breath, hands hovering over the boost controls. They probably wouldn’t just fire off a surface-to-air missile at her if the registration didn’t hold up, but she wasn’t going to stick around to find out. She eventually had to let the air out because it took what felt like forever before the base responded. When they did, the voice was young and male and definitely confused.

“Um… copy that, Terrence Souther. I see you here on the clearance roster, but I guess the officer of the watch didn’t brief me on your arrival. What are you carrying, again?”

She almost froze at the question, not because she didn’t know the answer but because they’d spent so long trying to figure that part out. The ship wasn’t carrying enough of anything to even pretend they’d been assigned to drop it off for shipment, except one item, though it was the one she hated to part with, since she’d wound up spending the better part of her last paycheck on it. But it was also the one thing an outpost out here on the ass-end of nowhere would welcome the most.

“Fresh fruit,” she told them, affecting cheerfulness. “Aren’t you guys the lucky ones, huh?”

The duty officer laughed, sounding as genuinely happy as she was pretending to be.

“Damn, that’s gonna be a nice change from the frozen and canned stuff. All right, Terrence Souther, you’re cleared for landing. Follow our nav beacon and come in over the east, but watch your belly. Some of those trees are pretty damned tall.”

“Thanks for the warning, Telemark. Coming in on the beam.” Pri pushed the throttle open and guided the Tamar into orbit around the planet, slaving her autopilot to the nav beacon for the moment before she turned back and offered a salute to Victor and Gina. “Thanks, you two. Now get yourself locked in the cabin and once you feel us land, don’t make any noise and don’t answer the door unless it’s one of us.”

“What if someone breaks down the door?” Gina asked, and Pri could have sworn there was a mischievous glint in her eye, as if she looked forward to the challenge.

“If they find you,” Pri replied, having at least thought this bit out beforehand, “tell them you bribed me to drop you off at Bifrost.”

“What’s a Bifrost?”

“Quasi-legal private space station technically within Alliance territory, though they’ve never pushed the issue. Most people think they’re being paid off somehow by the owners.”

Pri stared at Victor, mouth open. He’d rattled off the answer without hesitation, and she was fairly certain he couldn’t have heard of the place before she’d mentioned it. Which meant he’d learned of it through the Emissary, who had to have accessed reports about Bifrost on the ship’s computer net in the second after she’d said the name. Pri shook the uncanny feeling off and continued the explanation.

“It’s the sort of place criminals too hot for Gateway would go to try to change their identity, get hired on to a crew. Tell them that and nothing else. You might wind up in a cell, but it’ll keep them busy long enough for us to figure something out.”

“Nothing will keep them from finding this,” Victor told her, nodding toward the artifact in the duffle bag.

“We have a hidden compartment under the deckplates in the cabin,” Pri explained. “Get the Chief to show it to you. You can put the artifact in there if we’re boarded. It’s shielded from any detectors they’re likely to have out here.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Victor said, sounding hesitant, which was unusual when he was connected to the artifact. “It might do us more good if I have access to it…”

“Just do as you’re told, Victor,” she snapped. “This is our area of expertise, not yours. If we get into trouble, we can get out of it. You trying to magic your way out with ancient alien tech is just going to get us noticed quicker.” Pri scowled. “I know when you’re hooked up to that thing, you think of the rest of us as stupid humans who think too slow, but I’m asking you to trust us.”

Victor looked as if he were about to argue the point, but Gina put a hand on his arm. He stared at it as if it were some unfamiliar alien appendage. And maybe to him—them—it is.

“Come on, Vic,” Gina urged, not noticing—or pretending not to notice—his expression. “Let’s do what she says. Everything’ll be fine.”

Something in the kid’s expression changed, as if he’d been wearing a mask and it had slipped off, revealing the Victor Lee she’d first met weeks ago.

“Okay,” he assented, allowing her to lead him off the bridge.

“Good luck, Captain,” Gina called back over her shoulder as she left.

The girl, Pri decided, actually liked Victor. She knew about the AI, about his bond with it, and she still liked him. Pri shook her head and turned her attention back to the controls.

“Good luck to you, too,” she whispered, knowing the girl couldn’t hear her. “Good luck to you, too.”

OceanofPDF.com

18

“Ten seconds.” Pri’s warning was still buzzing in Chase’s helmet when he echoed it to the others.

Hanging off the safety strap in the utility bay, straddling the frame of the belly ramp, Chase was transported to seven years ago, to another ship just like this one, though the world where they’d landed had been light-years away. Unlike the boreal forests skirting Telemark’s equator below them, that landing had been in the northern hemisphere of Shenyuan, in a tropical rainforest. The Chinese already had a colony there, so it had proven the perfect place to station troops. Plenty of food grown by what was essentially slave labor by forced emigrants, an agreeable climate if there was air-conditioning and weather-sealed buildings to sleep in—which the military troops and government officials had, if not the aforementioned peasants—and overhead cover that could be combined with camo netting to make sure American ships couldn’t target them from orbit.

They’d done it the hard way, boots on the ground, and it had been a slaughter. Not just of the invading American Army and Marines, not just of the Alliance troops, but of those forced emigrants. The Chinese had used them as human shields, and God knows the Americans had tried to avoid killing them. Or at least, Chase’s CO had. He couldn’t speak to anyone else. But it hadn’t been avoidable. The Alliance had known it wouldn’t be avoidable, and they’d milked the propaganda value out of it even after the military defeat.

They’d been damned good at that, which is why the US and her allies had been so ready to sit down at the table and sign the Accords that had formed the Colonial Authority, despite the hundreds of thousands of deaths on and off Earth.

And that was another reason I got out.

The chill wind whipping up at his face from the descending belly ramp broke Chase free of the memory and dragged him into the present with a lash of cold air.

“Go! Go! Go!”

The last word arced upward in tone as he flew out the back of the Tamar at upwards of twenty miles an hour, as slow as the ship could go without attracting unwanted attention from the Telemark traffic control radar tracking her. It would have been a painful landing, particularly for a Ranger within spitting distance of forty, except for all the snow. Chase tried to land upright, but his momentum carried him forward and what he meant as a barrel roll turned into an undignified plop into a snowbank four feet deep.

His jacket and pants were made for this kind of weather, theoretically sealed against it, but of course the snow found a way down his neck because Murphy didn’t give a shit about how well sealed his gear was. Chase swore under his breath as he clambered to his feet and did a restrained dance to shake the chill fingers off his neck and down his back until they reached his belt. His M27 looked like a cookie version of the weapon covered in confectionary sugar and he banged his gloved palm against it until the snow fell free.

“Oh, Jesus!” The profanity was drawn out and too loud and it was Chilly.

Chase turned just in time to see the man plop face-first into the pack snow, leaving a man-shaped silhouette through three feet of it. Jax hit just behind him, landing in a controlled crouch, then immediately went to go help his buddy, yanking him out of the snow by the casualty handle on the back of the SEAL’s vest. Alex and Haskell had come down in at least something close to good order, and both were on their feet, but where was Zack?

“Wilson?” Chase hissed, trying not to yell. They all had radios, of course, but using them this close to the base was chancy. Yeah, the troops here were probably screw-ups who hated every second of being assigned here, but counting on someone else’s incompetence was just an indicator of lazy planning. “Where the hell are you?”

“Over here.” The reply was a groan on the other side of a stand of sort-of fir trees. The forest grew thicker as it neared the base, until it reached the artificial clearing manufactured by a judicious amount of C4, but Pri had dropped them in a clearing, or the closest thing to a clearing they’d been able to find within walking distance.

Chase post-holed through the snow until he reached the other side of the trees and found Zack leaning against one, holding his side. His face was mostly covered by his helmet, goggles, and balaclava, but the wince was obvious even through all that.

“Tell me you didn’t break your ribs,” Chase said, nearly pleading. Zack would drive on either way, he was sure, but it would severely complicate things.

“No, Sarge,” he assured Chase. “Just fell back-first into one of these damned trees and got the wind knocked out of me. I’ll be fine, just give me a second.”

And I can believe that as much as I want. Zack’s leg could be cut off at the knee, and he’d try to say he could walk it off.

“You got five minutes,” Chase told him, checking his watch to be sure. “That’ll give Pri enough time to land and attract those sad-sacks’ attention. Then we are out of here and on the march. Copy?”

“Five by five,” Zack confirmed, giving him a thumbs-up.

Chase grunted skeptically, but went to check on Chilly and Jax. It didn’t feel cold, he reflected. It was early morning, the sun barely over the eastern horizon, the angry orange and white of Thelir still passing across the sky to the west, three times as big as the full moon from Earth, a sword of Damocles raining radiation down on them. But not enough to make it warm. This was the hottest part of the moon, the only area where humans could live without space suits, and it was still the equivalent of northern Montana in the dead of winter. But the heated jacket and socks kept him comfortable, as long as he didn’t drizzle any more snow down his neck.

Chilly looked like he had snow in every nook and cranny of his suit from the way he was shivering, but Jax, apparently, wasn’t worried from the deep, rumbling laugh.

“Goddammit,” Chilly stuttered, teeth chattering as he brushed snow off himself, “I look like an idiot.”

“What else is new?” Jax replied, banging the other man’s M27 free of white powder and handing it back to him. “You’re making the Navy look bad, you know that, right? This isn’t the first time we’ve jumped out the back of a moving aircraft.”

“Hey, you two,” Chase hissed, “let’s try to keep it to a dull roar. Just because there shouldn’t be any personnel out here doesn’t mean there won’t be.”

“Sorry, Chase,” Chilly said softly, sounding even more embarrassed than he had before.

“The snow isn’t as deep over there,” he told them, pointing with a knife-hand motion toward the trees. “Find somewhere you can take the prone without burying yourself and set up a perimeter. We move out in five mikes.”

“Copy that,” Jax acknowledged, guiding Chilly through the thigh-deep drifts toward the stand of firs.

Alex and Haskell were moving in the same direction, showing an admirable initiative and smarts, which he’d hoped for from the two SEALs but hadn’t known if he could expect from a jarhead. Haskell motioned for Alex to move on ahead and shouldered up to Chase close enough to be heard without raising his voice.

“Gotta ask you something, mate,” the Royal Marine said, motioning with his carbine, an M27 identical to the ones the rest of them carried, although his and Zack’s were fitted with under-barrel grenade launchers. “These are Union troops. We’re packing loaded rifles. Are you prepared to shoot at them if they shoot at us first?”

“At them?” Chase repeated, shaking his head. “No. Near them? Yeah.” He smacked the side of Haskell’s barrel. “That’s why we didn’t bring the suppressors. Most of these guys won’t even know where the ammo is stored, much less be carrying a loaded weapon. But if some eager beaver does have a sidearm, I think putting a few rounds over their head will be enough to send them running for reinforcements.” He patted the row of grenades in loops across his tactical vest. “Or a little CS. I don’t expect any of them to be wearing gas masks.”

Haskell chuckled and pounded a fist against Chase’s shoulder.

“Brilliant. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t a bloodthirsty bastard.”

“And what if I had been?” Chase wondered.

Haskell’s balaclava was pulled down below his mouth and his beard parted in a thin smile.

“Well, you have a bloody large reward for your capture, mate.” He waggled an eyebrow. “I just might have had to try to collect it.”

The Brit moved off to join his wife, leaving Chase to watch him go. The man had some stones, and, apparently, a conscience, which could be a dangerous combination.

“I think,” he murmured to himself, “these guys are gonna work out just fine.”

* * *

The Tamar shuddered, her landing gear sinking into their hydraulic mounts before raising up again to their full extension, and then she was down. Priyanka sighed and sagged back into her seat for a moment before she hit the quick-release on her safety harness.

“This place is a fucking dump,” Adrian Hill opined, propping a boot against his console while staring out at the view from the external cameras.

“Shut up, Adrian,” she said automatically, but the copilot wasn’t wrong.

At the center of the depot were the storage buildings, which weren’t much more than sheet-metal hangars, their roofs curved to keep the snow off, though there were huge piles of it on either side that no one had bothered to shovel away. Base housing and apparently all the admin offices were in Quonset huts, probably for the same reason, metal that had once been shimmering silver aluminum now pitted and corroded. A few dozen troops with wire brushes could have corrected the problem, but the job would have sucked, even if it hadn’t been somewhere below zero Fahrenheit outside.

One thing they did keep clean and well-maintained here was the landing pad, probably because everyone from the base commander down to the lowliest specialist-1 knew how badly they depended on the regular supply ships. It was a platform resting on dozens of pilings, each six feet across and fashioned from the massive conifers in the forest to the north, tall enough to keep it above the drifting snow. A catwalk connected it to the administrative and storage buildings, and by the time Pri was out of her seat, a crew was guiding a motorized pallet jack into position to handle the cargo.

“Remember what I said,” she cautioned Hill and Aguilar. “Don’t get trapped in specific questions. None of us know the latest bullshit from the Union Space Force, so don’t pretend you do. Talk about sports or movies or some such nonsense.”

“My hair hasn’t been this short in six years,” Hill complained, running a hand over his new buzz cut. “The girls back on Gateway are going to be crying bitter tears.”

“Naw,” Aguilar said, leering at him. “Your money spends just as good whether you got hair or not. I assumed you meant the girls for hire, because I ain’t seen you with any other kind since I’ve known you.”

Pri spun on the chief and stabbed a finger into his chest.

“No talking about Gateway. We’re Space Force. We don’t get to visit the joy girls on Gateway, and we don’t run cargoes to independent colonies. Earth, Mars, the Jovians, Farragut, Borealis, that kind of place.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Aguilar said, throwing her the first salute she’d seen in six years. “Will do.”

She wasn’t sure if he was being respectful or sarcastic. If it had been Hill, she would have been sure, but with Aguilar, it was more likely respect. She returned the salute.

“You gonna open up in there?” The voice coming over the PA speakers was different from the duty officer she’d spoken to before, this one older and not nearly as good-humored. A distant banging on the belly ramp accompanied the transmission and Pri sighed.

“Get the fruit ready to offload,” she told Aguilar. “Let them do the heavy lifting, but make sure they don’t nose around.”

“Not a problem,” Hill said over his shoulder as he left the cockpit. “I’ll get the ramp.”

Pri checked herself in a deactivated monitor. Her hair was put up, regulation if not overly neat, her uniform the same one she’d been wearing for years except the patches had been exchanged from the rampant lion of Tamar LLC to Union insignia, only slightly different from the US military ones she’d worn in the service. The face staring back at her was about five years too old for captain’s bars, but that fit with the shit detail of running cargo out to a hole like this.

Should I have stayed in? I’d have been a light colonel by now. Sitting behind a desk, shuffling reports around, never flying anywhere except with someone else as my pilot.

No, this was a better life. She’d never been in the military for the career… she wanted to fly to the stars.

“Hey boss!” Hill called and Pri winced. Yeah, it was plausible a military copilot would call her that, but she wished he would at least try to take this all more seriously. “The base CO is out front. Wants to talk to you.”

“Shit,” she murmured, then raised her voice for the benefit of whatever cargo crew might be within earshot. “On my way!”

The motorized cargo jack was taking up half the walkway through the utility bay and she had to squeeze against the bulkhead on the other side of it, which gave the workers an excuse to pretend not to notice her and avoid saluting. She didn’t care, though the officer she was pretending to be might have. A chill wind whipped up the ramp from the landing platform outside and reminded her to stop by one of the lockers set in the bulkhead on the way down the ramp and retrieve a jacket. She’d prepared one while they were under way, replacing the patches and making sure the fake name she’d adopted was on the tape across the chest.

The last bit was the cap. She hated wearing them, had hated it just as much when she was in the US Space Force, but it was unavoidable. It hadn’t changed much except that the US flag had been replaced by the Union eagle, though that change had been enough to convince a lot of people to leave the military. She pulled her ponytail out the back of the thing, despising how it made her look like some feckless teenager, steeled herself against the wind and tromped down the ramp.

The place smelled of pine and ozone, not an unpleasant fragrance although the ozone was an uncomfortable reminder of the extra rads she was pulling from their proximity to the gas giant. Mostly, it had the unmistakable smell of cold. At least the gravity was less than Earth normal, just not as much less as she would have guessed by the size of the moon. The thing must have a pretty dense core for it to be upwards of half a gee, but the difference was enough to put a spring in her step and unwarranted optimism in her heart.

That optimism faded quickly when she saw the officer waiting for her at the end of the ramp. The woman was tall, broad-shouldered and straight-backed, with an air of authority and professionalism that clearly didn’t belong in this place. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes a piercing blue and a blond braid fell from the back of her black Union Space Force cap. It was a stern face, etched from polished stone, and it looked as if a smile would send cracks spider-webbing through it, causing it to flake away.

That was her imagination working overtime, because when the smile came, there were no cracks, no flaws. Felicity McGraw’s features were just as perfect as Pri remembered them from flight school.

“Why, Priyanka,” the woman drawled with an exaggerated Texas accent, “fancy meeting you here.”

OceanofPDF.com

19

“I can feel myself getting cancer by the second,” Chilly Vazquez muttered.

Chase shot the man a quelling look and went back to the task of trying to break the security encryption on the lock of the warehouse door. It wasn’t complicated as these types of things went, nothing that would have stood up against the determined criminal types on Gateway, but Chase had to pay attention to the readout on the cracking module or he’d wind up cycling through a dozen more codes than he needed to.

“You smoked for ten years, Chill,” Jax reminded him, his voice low, rumbling with long-suffering humor. “And you’re robbing a military arms depot so we can land on a Chinese colony world. Are you really worried about dying of cancer?”

“I swear to God,” Zack growled from the other side of the door, “if you two don’t shut up, neither one of you is going to have to worry about dying from anything besides my Goddamn foot in your ass.”

“You Rangers are so uptight,” Chilly said, punctuating the remark with a cluck of his tongue. “There ain’t nobody around, and if these losers have active sensor security, I’ll eat my damn helmet.”

“Aren’t SEALs supposed to be the silent service, love?” Grey Haskell asked Alex down where they covered the eastern approach to the warehouse, where the walkway wound back around to the admin buildings.

“That’s submariners,” she corrected him. “SEALs are a lot of things, but silent isn’t one of them.”

The hacking module beeped quietly, a green light flashing on its small display and the electromagnetic lock disengaged with a gentle thump. Chase pulled the door open and ducked inside, rifle coming to his shoulder. The rays of the morning sun crept through the doorway hesitantly, unable to keep up with Chase as he barged through the shadows, counting on the enhanced optics in his goggles to reveal the secrets of the place.

It was empty. He’d figured as much when he’d found it dark and secured, but a Ranger never assumed.

It makes an ASS out of U and ME, Ranger! The voice of his old platoon sergeant rang in the halls of his memory. The man had died during the war, but his advice lived on, and Chase followed it, moving quickly around the perimeter of the warehouse, Zack at his heels, clearing it quickly and efficiently before he circled back to the front and waved the others inside. It galled him not to leave a watch outside, but armed strangers wandering around outside the warehouse would attract too much attention if someone did wander by. He pulled the door almost closed but not quite, keeping the lock disengaged.

“Stay at the windows,” he directed Alex and Haskell. “You see anyone coming, pull that door all the way shut and get to concealment.”

Which would be a pain in the ass, because he’d have to use the door-cracker again from this side to get the lock open, but it would be better than being found out.

“Chilly, Jax, find the thing.”

He could have helped. He knew what it looked like and remembered seeing it, but sending those two off to do it would keep them quiet. They were, he knew, deadly in a fight, but the nonstop banter was starting to wear on his nerves.

“I hope Pri can pull this off,” Zack said quietly, shoulder to shoulder with him at the center of the place, surrounded by the metal, wood, and plastic of cargo crates dating back to well before the establishment of the Union, right to the invention of the S-T drive. “We’re gonna feel pretty damn stupid sitting out in the woods with that drop pod if she doesn’t come to pick us up.”

“Let’s keep a positive attitude,” he said and received a skeptical grunt in return.

“Hey!” Chilly called, and Chase winced at the man’s volume. “We found it!”

“Can anything shut that guy up?” Zack wondered.

“Duct tape,” Chase declared with conviction, resolving to try the method later.

The drop pod was tucked into a far corner of the warehouse, and from the khaki tarp laying on the floor beside it, it had been covered up before the two SEALs had discovered it. It looked much as they’d described it, as he remembered it, though the years had blurred out the lumpy gray foam coating the thing’s exterior.

“It’s big as shit,” Zack commented, and he wasn’t wrong. The thing was thirty feet long, ten feet in breadth and the same in width, as large as some of the smallest S-T drive sleds used for sport racing by the rich and insane. “How the hell are we going to move it?”

“Look man,” Chilly told him, pointing at the base of the thing, at a metal platform hard to see even with the enhanced vision goggles. “It’s on a cargo cradle. We just need to find the remote control.”

“Got it!” Jax announced from the other side of the thing as he emerged with a small, gray device in his hand. He held it close to his goggles, as if trying to focus on the controls. “If I can just remember how to work the damned thing…”

He jabbed at a button with his thumb and an electric motor gave a reluctant grinding moan and squeaked to life after years of disuse. The entire dull-gray mass of the drop pod rose a few inches as fat-tired wheels extended from beneath the platform with a metallic bang, like the whole mechanism was some patchwork monster from an old horror movie, gradually coming awake to seek revenge on the world.

“Jesus God,” Zack said, shaking his head. “They’re going to hear this shit back on Earth!”

“Unless you want to carry the thing,” Jax told him, scowling resentment, as if he expected everyone to thank him, “then you’re just going to have to deal with it.”

“Enough,” Chase interrupted, waving impatiently at the pod. “Pull it out of there and get it to the door. Zack, get the main cargo door open. We’re gonna have to roll this thing out into the woods, and yes, I know it’s going to be obvious as all hell, but we have to hope the troops who aren’t asleep are preoccupied with the Tamar.” He snorted. “Sorry, the Terrance Souther.”

Zack grumbled, but he jogged over to the controls for the roll-up door at the west side of the warehouse, while Jax backed out of the aisle as the cargo cradle rolled sideways from its nook in the corner. Every move the old cargo platform made was accompanied by a clank or a moan or worse, a bang that echoed through the place, and it took every ounce of self-control Chase had not to run outside and check for himself whether anyone was around to hear it.

“Haskell,” he said, his voice taut with the tension, “get over to the rolling door and be ready to check outside once it’s open.”

“Got it!” Zack announced, twisting a lever set in the wall.

If the cargo cradle was a kettle drum solo, the curtain door was the accompanying bass, rumbling up into its roller base. Haskell didn’t wait for the door to open all the way and instead rolled out beneath it when it was less than three feet up, then he took up a crouched position outside.

“Quesada,” Chase ordered, “get out there with Haskell and watch our egress.”

“Egress,” the woman said, chuckling as she passed him. “Damned Army can’t just say exit.”

“Zack, with me,” Chase ordered, ignoring the jibe as he and the big man fell in behind the cargo platform, walking backward as they followed it out the roller door.

This might actually work. He shouldn’t have been so surprised—it had been his plan, after all, and he wouldn’t have approved it if he hadn’t thought it could succeed. But Murphy always had his say, and any op that was going too well worried him.

“Oh, shit,” Jax said, and Chase had to stop before he ran into the former SEAL.

The cargo platform was half-in and half-out of the doorway, the motor grinding in futility, the wheels stuck on the lip of the entrance.

“What the hell?” Chilly said, throwing up his hands even though one of them was occupied with his rifle. “They had to get the Goddamned thing in here this way, didn’t they?”

“Seven years ago,” Chase reminded him. “The motor’s in bad shape.” Jax kept pushing the same control with the same result, except the whine from the motor was getting louder with each second. “Kill it, Jax.” He had to make an instantaneous decision, even if it was the wrong one. “Everyone get back here and push this damned thing.”

The great thing about the enhanced optics goggles was that Chase couldn’t tell if everyone was staring at him in disbelief. Either way, they followed orders and fell in behind the pod, letting their rifles hang at their sides as all hands went to the rear of the cargo platform. Except Jax, who stared at the remote control and then at the pod, as if debating whether he’d be better off pushing a button or the back of the cart.

“Get your shoulder into this,” Chase said patiently, “and push the button with your off hand.”

“Right.”

“One,” Chase counted off. “Two… three!”

He wasn’t sure which was louder, the complaints of the old balky motor or their collective grunts and groans, but whichever did the lion’s share of the work, the thing moved. Not quickly and not easily, and Chase felt a worrisome tug in his lower abdomen that gave him visions of a hernia, but the cargo platform’s front wheels banged as they surmounted the lip of the doorway and they all fell forward but managed to keep their shoulders against the pod..

“Keep it going!” he said to Jax, waving at the door.

The man took his weight off the pod and concentrated on the button, but Chase didn’t bother to correct him. The platform had built up steam now and when the rear wheels hit the lip, they bounced over with a thunder of crashing metal.

“Yes!” Chilly exulted, pumping a fist.

“Hey, what the hell are you guys doing here?”

It was a damned good thing, Chase decided in retrospect, that none of them had a gun in their hand, or the Space Force NCO would have been a dead man.

Chase had no idea where the technical sergeant had come from, but there he stood, big as life and twice as ugly, bowed up like a redneck on Friday night.

“I said,” the NCO repeated, voice going up an octave, “what the hell are you doing here? This is a restricted area!”

“We’re with the supply ship that came in,” Chase said, falling back on the contingency plan he’d made while lying next to Angel in his cabin last night, unable to sleep. “The one that just brought in that load of fresh fruit? The Terrance Souther—the Terry, we call her. Your CO granted us access.”

The Space Force sergeant was bundled in winter clothing, but he wasn’t wearing a balaclava, so his thoughtful frown was visible through the haze of his breath.

“Okay, but what the hell are you doing with this old thing?” He waved at the massive drop pod.

“It’s being taken back to Earth,” Grey Haskell supplied, surprising Chase with his ability to think on his feet. “They want to put it in a military museum in an exhibit about the war.” The Brit shrugged expressively. “Apparently, not too many of these survived, and yours is the one that’s in the best condition.”

Chase thought for a fleeting moment that the man would buy it. Hell, he almost bought it, that British accent being so damned convincing. But the internal debate going on behind the sergeant’s eyes switched into another gear when those eyes focused on their equipment.

“Hey, hold on a second, why are you guys armed, then? And why are you wearing helmets and EV goggles?”

Great. We managed to find the only on-the-ball NCO in the whole base.

“It’s SOP,” Chase insisted. “Our CO is a real hard-ass and she makes us wear full combat load-out whenever we’re on the ground anywhere outside an established colony world. It’s a huge pain in the ass, honestly, but what can you do?”

“I’m going to have to check this,” the tech-sergeant insisted, reaching for the phone on his belt.

He didn’t get the chance. While Chase had been keeping him occupied, Zack had edged around the side of the drop pod and snuck behind the NCO. The second the sergeant’s hand went for his phone, then Zack’s arm snaked around his throat and the other came up to brace it for the rear naked choke. The Space Force NCO struggled for a three count, then slumped, the blood flow from his carotid to his brain cut off. Zack held the choke for a few more seconds, enough time for Chase to rush forward, grabbing flex cuffs out of one of the pouches in his tactical vest.

“Let it go,” Chase urged Zack, grabbing one of the Space Force NCO’s arms to guide him to the ground once the choke hold had been released. “Don’t want to give the poor bastard brain damage.”

That was the problem with choke holds. Done right, they’d put someone out for a few seconds, long enough to get them secured without hurting them. Held too long, they could cause irreversible brain damage. Fortunately, Zack had timed it just right, and the NCO began to stir just as Chase got the flex cuffs around his wrists. The tech sergeant’s eyes widened and his mouth opened to yell, but Grey Haskell stuffed a field bandage into it before he could, then knotted it tight behind his neck.

Chilly had thrown his weight over the captive’s legs and Jax wove two flex cuffs together and secured the Space Force NCO’s ankles. Chase stepped away and so did the others, as if they were looking to him for a cue, leaving the captive wriggling helplessly on the ground, glaring at them and grunting loudly beneath his gag.

“Get him in the corner where this thing was,” Chase said, nodding toward Chilly and Jax. “And get his phone, bring it with us and dump it in the snow.”

“Well, this puts a time limit on things,” Zack said as they watched the former SEALs muscle the captive back into the depths of the warehouse. “Sooner or later, someone’s going to miss that guy.”

“Yeah. We need to get this damned antique out of here.” Chase shook his head. “And hope to hell that Pri does her job.”

* * *

“You’re in deep shit, sister,” Felicity McGraw declared, pushing the door shut to her office, leaving a puzzled Chief Aguilar standing out in the hallway.

Aguilar had insisted on coming with her, though what he thought he was going to accomplish, Pri wasn’t sure. He’d just seemed to sense something was wrong and bless his overprotective chief warrant officer’s heart, he wouldn’t let his captain walk into it alone. The gears of Pri’s mind were whirring so fast, she couldn’t separate one thought from the other, much less come up with a coherent, plausible story for McGraw. The only clear thought to penetrate the misery was a line from an old movie she and Chase had watched back during the war.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” she quoted, shaking her head, “she walks into mine.”

McGraw’s laugh was as loud and raucous as it had been when Priyanka had first met her, during in-processing at Space Force flight school. It was what had attracted her attention to the outgoing Texan, and they’d wound up spending their off-hours cruising the local bars.

“You always liked those old black and white flicks, Pri,” McGraw recalled. She waved at the seat on the other side of her desk. “Sit down. Take a load off.”

Pri sat stiffly, her feet flat on the floor, as if she might have to make a run for the door at any second. Impatience gnawed at her insides, and she ground her teeth together to keep her mouth closed, thinking of Chase and the others out there in the forest who were waiting to get picked up.

“What’s it been?” McGraw asked, elbows leaning on the cheap, aluminum desk. “Eight years? Where was that?”

“Franklin City,” Pri supplied, her eyes locked on the other woman’s. “The O-club.”

“Right.” McGraw pointed a finger at her. “You got thrown out because you tried to sneak that sergeant in. That Ranger with the rugged good looks.” She frowned. “What was his name again?”

“Chase,” Pri said, almost whispering the word. “Chase Weston.”

“So, whatever happened? Did you two stay together after the war?”

“For a while.” She shrugged. “We worked better as friends.”

“Worked or work?” McGraw tilted her head to the side. “This may be the ass-end of nowhere, but we still get status reports from Earth once every couple weeks, you know?” She pulled out her phone and touched it to the display mounted on the wall. “Like the one that came in last week.”

Pri winced, rubbing at her forehead.

“That’s not a very good picture of me,” she said. But it was a good photo of Chase. He was looking out at the horizon, very stoic, very Ranger-like, some alien sun rising behind him.

“The whole wanted for murder and treason thing isn’t very flattering, either.” McGraw tapped her phone and the display went dark. “I’m not a smart woman, Priyanka.” Pri opened her mouth to object, but McGraw stopped her with a raised hand. “I know, I graduated first in our class at Flight School, but I’m talking politically. If I were a smart woman, I wouldn’t have wound up here.” A smile flickered across her face. “You want to know how I ended up here? No one comes here on purpose, I can tell you that. This is my last stop, you understand?” She fingered the major’s oak leaves on her uniform collar. “I’ll never see light colonel. My old brigade commander, Colonel Gennaro sent me here for a tour as one last little ‘screw you’ because I wouldn’t cover up for his Academy-grad son when he tried to pressure one of my enlisted into sleeping with him.”

“Felicity…” Pri shook her head. “I’m sorry.” She meant it. McGraw was a hell of a pilot and a good officer.

“The point I was trying to make,” McGraw went on, “is that I’m not a smart woman, but I do know people. I know you. At least, I knew you. And the officer I knew back then would never commit treason.” She chuckled. “Maybe murder, if the asshole deserved it, but never treason.”

“I didn’t murder anyone. Neither did Chase. This is corporate politics.” Pri sighed, knowing the risk she was taking but not seeing any other choice. “We’ve been working as contractors. We raided Alliance outposts, sold the data to the CIA, to the Union, military intelligence. It made us a lot of enemies, and not just in the Alliance. There’s a black-ops type who works for Hart-Klein Consolidated, a man named Sean Haricot. We stepped into the middle of one of his ops and took something he and the Alliance want. We tried to give it to a CIA field officer who Chase used to work with, but HKC was already there. They paid off her assistant to kill her and take the… thing from us. When they couldn’t do that, they framed us for her murder.”

“Hart-Klein,” McGraw repeated, eyes clouding over. “Bastards.” Her gaze sharpened, focusing back on Pri. “I said before, no one comes here by accident. Even if I assume you’re telling the truth, why in the living hell are you here?”

This part was even trickier. How far could she trust the woman?

“We’re going to try to follow through with this,” she said, as obliquely as she could get away with. “We’re going to get proof that we didn’t do this, that HKC is behind it. But to do that, we have to run an op on an Alliance-controlled world. We needed a stealth drop pod to get down there and this was the only place we knew that we could get one.”

“The stealth drop pod?” McGraw’s eyebrows went up. “That old piece of shit? That’s why you’re here?”

“It is.” The corner of Pri’s mouth twisted upward. “I wish I could say I’d come to say hello to an old friend, but I had no clue you were the poor soul in charge of this place.”

McGraw went to a coffee pot behind her desk and poured the dark brown liquid into two plastic cups, then handed one to Pri. The coffee was uncomfortably hot even through the thin plastic, threatening to burn her fingers, and she turned it from side to side, trying to find a comfortable way to hold it. She was afraid to sip it but did it anyway. It was still frigid-cold, even inside the office. It burned her tongue, and, being military coffee, it sucked. But she needed the warmth and the caffeine.

“If I turned you in,” McGraw mused, sipping her drink carefully, “it might be enough to restart my career, you know?” Pri tried not to let the alarm she felt show in her face, but she knew it was a losing battle when her old friend turned her head to the side and laughed. “No, I’m just screwing with you, Pri. The most likely outcome would be that shitheel Gennaro taking credit for it and still managing to screw me over.”

“So, you’ll let me have it?” Pri asked, eyeing McGraw slyly over the top of her coffee cup. The steam distorted the woman’s image like a heat mirage in the desert.

“Oh, Pri, you were always such a ballsy little bitch.” The taller woman shook her head and leaned back in her chair. “Tell me something. What would you have done if you’d come here and I hadn’t happened to be the CO? Even without the update on you and your friends, did you think you could just talk your way into some poor schmuck unlucky enough to be in charge of this place handing over the pod to you?’

“No, of course not.” Pri took a long sip of the miserable coffee. “You’re not stupid, Felicity, and neither am I. I’m just here to distract you.” Her grin was mischievous, bringing back memories of nights spent trolling the bars in San Antonio. “My people already stole the pod. They’re just waiting for me to come pick them up.”

McGraw looked as if she might get angry at that, but instead she just laughed again.

“You better hurry and finish your coffee then. You don’t want to be late.”

OceanofPDF.com

20

“That was way too close.” Chief Aguilar shook his head, pouring two fingers of amber liquid into the shot glass.

“Isn’t it a little early for tequila, Chief?” Chase asked, standing beside the drop pod in the ship’s utility bay, running a hand over the rough foam coating its hull.

“Hell, I don’t know what time it is,” Aguilar admitted. “You want a drink or not?”

“I’ll take one,” Pri said, surprising Chase as she walked back from the cockpit.

“Hill on watch again?” he asked, teasing. “I thought it was your turn.”

“My turn,” she scoffed, grabbing the bottle out of Aguilar’s hand and downing a gulp without the benefit of a glass. “My turn, my ass. Adrian just sat around and bullshitted about sports while I got a few years of my life scared right out of me.”

“What are the odds?” Zack asked, then chuckled and grabbed the bottle from her. “At least she was an old friend and not some asshole who had a grudge against you.” He sucked down a long swallow and offered the bottle to Chase.

“No, thanks.” Chase glanced around, frowning. “Where are the others?”

“Quesada and Haskell are getting some rack time.” Zack shrugged. “Jax said he was going to read some old manuals about how to operate this thing in case he’d forgotten anything in the last six years. Chilly was making fun of him, but he went along, and honestly, I wouldn’t go looking for them because if that old dog Vazquez finds out there’s booze around, he’ll polish off this bottle before you get a second drink, Chief.”

“Are they like… in a relationship or something?” Pri wondered.

Chase looked away from the pod and squinted at her.

“Seriously? You think?”

“What?” She laughed. “You’ve never noticed it? They’re like an old married couple.”

“I don’t see it,” Zack declared, shaking his head in obvious skepticism. “I’ve heard them talk about women.”

“I mean, I don’t know them that well,” Chase admitted, “but I’d think… I mean, I never saw them even be nice to each other, much less romantic.”

“Yeah, but what the hell do you know about being romantic, Weston?” Pri challenged, grabbing the bottle back from Zack. “If you ever had a romantic bone in your body, the damned Army had it surgically removed.”

“Ooh, she nailed you, boy,” Aguilar said, hooting a laugh. He downed his cup and pulled a seat down from the bulkhead, then fell into it with a sigh. “Oh damn, dude, I’m wiped. That shit was exhausting.”

“You’re exhausted?” Zack protested, waving his hands in disbelief. “I’m the one who had to push that stupid pod through the door and choke out some poor son of a bitch before he could raise an alarm!”

Chase eyed the ramp out of the bay, only half-listening to the exchange.

“What about… Vic and the girl?” He scowled, not wanting to give Zack the satisfaction, but unable to keep himself from asking. “And Dr. Cortez?”

Zack chortled in response and Chase fought back an urge to go smack him across the head, remembering what the big man had done in the bare-knuckle fight on Gateway.

“Vic and Gina are up in the cockpit,” Pri told him, not laughing, though Chase knew the woman well enough to interpret the twitch of the muscle in her cheek as a contained chuckle. “Dr. Cortez is in the galley. She skipped lunch because they were jammed into that cabin for two hours.”

Chase nodded thanks. He should go talk to her. She’d been pissed before, even though she hadn’t admitted to it.

Oh, hell. Maybe Pri’s right. I don’t know shit about relationships.

“Planning session in the galley after breakfast tomorrow,” he told them, heading up the ramp. “Tell the others.”

At least there was no one else in the galley. He was trying to be more open with his feelings, but there were limits. Angel was picking at a microwave meal of what was supposedly scrambled eggs and sausage, not showing much enthusiasm at the prospect of actually eating it.

“You picked the wrong one,” he told her, sliding into the seat across from her.

“I was thinking the same thing,” she admitted, shooting him a look that had him fearing she was talking about something besides the prepackaged breakfast. “I don’t know how the hell you people keep track of what meal you’re supposed to be eating, anyway.” She shook her head. “I tried, at first, you know. Tried to figure out when everyone else got up and ate so I could set my own, internal clock. But with people running shifts in the cockpit, stopping on so many planets with different time zones and now with two different groups from Gateway who were running on three different sleep shifts, I have no idea what meal I should be eating.”

“Welcome to life on board a ship.” Chase laughed softly. “In the military, you’re assigned a shift and you stick by it, but since I’ve been living on board the Tamar, I don’t think I’ve gone more than a month without shifting my sleep patterns.” He pointed over at the medical bay. “We’ve got some sleeping pills in the cabinet if you really need to get settled in. Or Chief Aguilar is passing around a bottle of tequila down in the cargo area.”

That at least got a chuckle from the woman. She eyed him for a moment, then pointed her fork at his face.

“Your cheeks are still bright red.”

“Sub-zero temps will do that to you. Particularly when you land face first in the damned snow.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Angel replied, and the chill in her voice put Telemark’s weather to shame. “I was stuck in the cabin, hiding behind a locked door, and hoping no one knocked.” She rapped the end of her fork against the plastic table. “I felt like a child.”

“I’m sorry you had to do that. But we all have our strengths, right? None of us would even be here without you and Vic. I don’t know shit about archaeology. This was an op on a military base, so I took the ex-military people with me because that’s what they know.”

The words were logical, well-reasoned. Chase was proud of them… until he noticed the fire kindling in Angel Cortez’s eyes and realized he’d made a tactical error.

“I’m not an idiot, Weston,” Angel growled. “I understand why we weren’t taken along on your operation, I just don’t like it.”

“Sorry,” Chase said, “but…” He caught himself and raised his hands in surrender. “No, just sorry. You’re right. I know you’re a brilliant woman, and you don’t need me to explain this shit to you. I’m just working against fifteen years of military instincts telling me I have to explain everything to everyone down to the slightest detail.” He sighed. “Which is maybe one of the reasons I haven’t been with anyone since Priyanka. She knew where I was coming from because we shared a history, the military, the war…” Chase trailed off, sensing again that he was heading down the wrong road, bringing up his past relationship with Priyanka. “Everyone else has been hard to relate to. But not you.”

Angel’s stare was skeptical, but not openly hostile. Yet.

“Why not me?”

“You’ve seen the things I’ve seen.” He hunted for the words, flailing like a drowning man. “You’ve gone through the same kind of loss and learned to deal with it.”

He shut up and let her think about it. That seemed the safest course of action. As his father had been known to say, when you’re in a hole, stop digging.

Angel didn’t look completely mollified, but the corner of her mouth did turn up, just slightly.

“Maybe that’s why I haven’t had much luck with men,” she mused, then followed the thought with a bite of the eggs and made a face. “Academia is full of pie-in-the-sky idealists who’ve never once stepped foot in the real world. Even in my field, most of them have never set foot off-planet.” She snorted. “Hell, more than half probably haven’t left their university since they were graduate students. And they think they understand ancient cultures when they don’t even understand their own. How can you take a man seriously when he unironically talks about the architecture of the Arborists being a sign of the dominance of the patriarchy?”

Chase shook his head, feeling utterly lost.

“I wouldn’t even know how to take that if it was ironic,” he admitted. “I just know I don’t want you to think that I don’t trust you, because I do.”

“That’s good to hear.” She took another few bites in silence before she speared him with a glare. “Because I’m going with you.”

Chase frowned.

“Going with me where?”

“When that drop pod launches on Dragon’s Egg,” she told him, enunciating each word as if she were speaking to a child, “I’m going to be on it.” Chase opened his mouth to voice an instinctive objection, but she went on before he could interrupt. “I know there’s room for eight, and you’re going to need me.”

“Angel,” he said, a note of pleading creeping into his voice, “this is a Chinese state colony.” He looked around, making sure none of the others were nearby. “The odds are none of us are coming back from this. But at least on the Tamar, you’ll have a fighting chance if things go to shit.”

He braced himself for her reply, expecting an angry rebuttal, but she remained calm, meeting his gaze with a cold rationality that scared him more than outright fury.

“You’re going to be searching for an artifact,” she reminded him, “probably beneath an archaeological site, an Arborist structure, if the one on Vishnu is any indication. Do you know how to dig it out without collapsing everything around it? I’ll bet none of you do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet none of you has dug anything more complicated than a foxhole.”

“Fighting position,” he corrected automatically. He didn’t tell her the unofficial nickname for a foxhole—a Ranger grave.

“Fighting position,” she acceded, waving her hand demonstratively as if that somehow supported her case. “Can you afford to take the time to dig out an Arborist settlement after you accidentally let a building fall on the artifact? You could spend hours just trying to find the thing. Do you think you’ll have that much time?”

Chase’s jaw muscles ached at the effort of keeping his mouth shut. He wanted to yell at her, wanted to tell her she wasn’t expendable, that they’d figure something out and there was no way in hell she was coming down on that antique piece of junk drop pod, that the thing was like as not to malfunction and plow them all into the ground. He didn’t say any of that, because she was right, and she knew it, and it was infuriating.

“Do you believe in God, Angel?” he asked her instead. She blinked and it was satisfying to see her taken aback for once.

“I guess. Sort of.” She shrugged. “Maybe not the same sort of God my parents believed in, but something… some creator. Sure.” Angel frowned. “Why?”

“Because I want you to swear to whatever God you believe in that you will do exactly as I say down there on the ground. No questions until afterward. If I say shoot me, you put a bullet between my eyes.”

Her lips quirked and she seemed to be restraining a smile.

“Are you going to tell me to shoot you?”

“Goddamnit, Angel!” he sighed.

“Yes,” she said, reaching across the table and putting a hand on his arm. “I’m not stupid. I’ll follow your orders.”

Chase hissed out a breath and rubbed a hand across his face.

“This just feels like a huge mistake,” he said, half a groan.

“I know, it’s got to be tough for you.” Angel kept her hand on his arm, stroking gently with her fingertips. “You’re military and I’m a civilian. You feel like you’re supposed to protect me.” She shrugged. “Pri told me why you guys didn’t work out, and I understand. It has to be tough watching someone you love put themselves at risk over and over.”

Chase’s eyes narrowed.

“Are you saying you love me?”

“I’m saying you’re in love with me, Weston,” she said, leaning across the table and kissing him.

The kiss erased a ton of stress and angst, and he lost himself in it, in her for what felt like an eternity. When she pulled away, he wanted to follow her across the table, and it took an effort of will to stay on his side.

“I’ll tell you what I think, Cortez.” He stood and held out a hand, then helped her to her feet and pulled her to him. He still felt cold from Telemark, but she was so warm. “I think you’re the one who’s in love.”

“You think that, do you?” Her tone was teasing, a challenge, and she pushed against his chest, though not hard enough to actually push him away. “What the hell gives you that idea? I never said it.”

“Neither did I,” he shot back, playing, but then again, not playing. He wanted her to say it first for some perverse reason. “But you seem pretty sure of yourself.”

“Of course, I am.” This time, she pulled out of his arms but caught the tip of his little finger and tugged at it. “You’re a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, Weston. You pretend to be a rough, tough Ranger who doesn’t give a shit about anything, but you don’t fool me. You want true love and you wouldn’t follow me to our cabin and sleep with me if you weren’t actually in love with me.”

“You’re awfully sure of yourself, Dr. Cortez.” He didn’t allow himself to be pulled along, but didn’t let go, either.

“Prove me wrong,” she dared him, letting go of his finger and heading back to the cabins.

Chase grinned and followed her, knowing he wasn’t about to do that. Even as he slipped through the door into their cabin though, something nagged at the edge of his thoughts.

Neither one of them had said it.

OceanofPDF.com

21

“I want to know,” Zack Wilson demanded, “why that computer thingy can’t just forge landing clearance for us like it did on Telemark.”

This was all too damned confusing, Zack decided. He’d been doing his best to not let the various impossible, mind-bending events they’d gone through in the last few weeks make him lose focus, lose sight of the end goal, but it seemed to get harder with each mission. Ancient aliens, automated weapons systems that could kill stars, telepathic thinking computers…

Shit. I’m a soldier. This is too damned much.

“We could penetrate the systems on Telemark,” Victor answered, “because we had an in. We had their nav beacon and this ship runs basically the same operating system. It was simply a matter of forging credentials when we already knew what they looked like.” The kid was touching the artifact inside its duffle bag, and it creeped Zack the hell out. It was like watching a stranger when he talked.

Pri took up the explanation and he was much more comfortable listening to her speak.

“The Alliance systems are based on Chinese military operating systems, and since none of us have access to Union military intelligence data, we can’t penetrate their network. I mean, we don’t even know if they have nav beacons, much less what frequency they’re on.”

A crunching sound off to the side drew Zack’s attention and he glared at Chilly. The man didn’t seem at all apologetic, just worked his way through the bag of corn chips he’d found in the galley cabinet as if he owned the ship.

“We know what we can’t do,” Chilly said around a mouthful of chips. “But what can we do? How the hell are we going to get close enough to the planet to launch that pod?”

“Jesus,” Jax muttered, shaking his head as he stared at his friend. “Chill, for God’s sake, didn’t your mother teach you not to talk with your mouth full?”

“My mom taught me how to use a knife,” Chilly replied. “Didn’t say nothing about how to talk except I’d better talk nice to her if I wanted to keep my tongue inside my head.”

“The family that knifes together, I guess.”

“What we do know,” Chase interrupted, eyeing the former SEALs balefully, “is what’s in the public record, and that is that the Chinese government keeps the colony resupplied with regular barges… automated ones like the one that HKC tried to use to ambush you guys near Gateway.”

Chase was sitting next to Angel, and as much as Zack liked to give his former platoon sergeant shit about how clueless the man was with regard to women, he had to give credit where credit was due. Angel Cortez was way out of Chase’s league, and yet there they were, and he hadn’t screwed it up.

Yet.

“Okay, I see where you’re going with this,” Haskell said. He sat on one of the tabletops, flipping a short, wicked-looking dagger between his fingers while Alex watched intently, as if waiting for him to slip and stab himself. “We’re going to use one of the barges for cover.”

“Give the Brit a prize,” Priyanka said, touching a finger to her nose. “The news story we accessed on the public net said that this place, Dragon’s Egg or whatever the Chinese word for it is, gets more barges a week than any of the Union colonies. Like two or three, even. The idea is, we come out of the Rift at the edge of the system, far enough away to avoid detection, and we wait until the next one comes out, then we jump into its wake, hopefully close enough that if anyone detects us, they think we’re a sensor reflection.”

“Shit,” Zack blurted, eyes going wide. “You’re gonna jump that close to another ship? One the size of a barge? Is that safe?”

Hill and Pri looked at each other for a half a second, then burst out laughing.

“Safe?” Hill repeated, wiping a tear of laughter from his eye. “Oh, good God, Wilson, what part of all this do you think is safe?”

“Okay, point taken,” Zack acknowledged, raising a hand in surrender. “We jump in close behind it, and… what?”

“We ride its S-T drive wake,” Pri went on, “and follow it into orbit. Then…”

“And this is the tricky part,” Aguilar warned. The chief hadn’t bothered with a seat. There weren’t enough to go around and the older man seemed content to stand off to the side, nursing a coffee.

“Jumping that close to a moving ship wasn’t the tricky part?” Zack asked, disbelieving.

“Oh, no, dude,” Hill assured him, still chuckling. “We’re just getting to the good shit.”

“They’ll hit orbit,” Chase cut in, giving the copilot a quelling glare, “and we’ll fall into their sensor shadow.” He closed his eyes as if trying to convince himself the next part would work. “Then, we’ll wait until the cargo shuttle comes up from the planet and we’ll keep the Tamar on the opposite side of the barge from it until it docks.”

“Then we’ll hijack the cargo shuttle?” Zack guessed, grinning, excited by the prospect.

“We thought about that,” Chase admitted, “but the problem is, none of us has ever tried to fly a Chinese spacecraft. A couple of us speak it, but none of us read it. The control systems are different, the readouts are different, and there’s just too big of a chance of all of us smacking into the ground. Or worse, ground control figuring out what we’ve done and taking control of the shuttle.”

Zack was prepared to argue that plowing into the ground was arguably worse than being captured alive, but it wasn’t worth the effort, and Chase was still going.

“What we’re going to do is wait until the shuttle detaches and then launch the drop pod in its wake. The pod is small enough and stealthy enough that the shuttle won’t even notice it, much less the satellites or ground control.”

“Okay,” Zack said, nodding. “I guess that makes sense. But what about the Tamar? She’s gotta get down there somehow.”

Chase shared a guilty look with Pri, Hill and Aguilar and Zack felt a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“What?”

“Here’s the thing,” Priyanka told him, shaping the answer in the air with her hands like a sculptor. “There’s no way in hell the Tamar could land without being noticed. Just not possible. Unless there’s a distraction.”

“We’re going to push the barge out of orbit,” Hill blurted. Pri gave him a dirty look and he shrugged. “Well, it’s what we’re going to do.”

“Adrian’s right,” Pri admitted, shoulders sagging. “We’re going to do it as gently as possible because I really don’t want a damned hole right through the nose of my ship, but we’re going to push it out of orbit. And when it hits the atmosphere, it’s going to burn up, break into pieces”—she spread her hands—“and we’re going to come down just like one of those chunks of debris. Except we’re not going to go boom on the ground below.”

“Hopefully,” Hill added.

“Oh, mother,” Alex murmured. Haskell said nothing, just kept flipping the knife through his fingers like this was all just business as usual.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Chilly said, still talking around corn chips, “I’m glad I’m in the damned pod.”

And Zack would have agreed except that the crew of the Tamar were his friends… and the ship was their only way home.

“Any questions?” Chase invited.

“What’s the load-out?” Jax asked.

“Full armor, helmets, visors. We don’t have anything that looks like Chinese military gear, but if it’s dark, maybe the locals won’t notice. M27s with grenade launchers for everyone except Haskell. He’s the sniper, so he gets the PSR.”

“What model do you have?” Haskell asked, pausing in his play with the knife and holding it blade-up.

“MK22 in .338 Norma Magnum with a Leupold Mark 5HD 5-25X56,” Chase told him. He shrugged. “It’s old, but it’s the best we could scrounge, and honestly, none of us is a sniper.”

Haskell shrugged and resumed the traverse of the razor sharp dagger through his fingers.

“It’ll do.”

“I assume all six of us are going,” Jax said, twirling a finger between Chase, Zack, the two SEALs and the two Marines.

“All seven,” Angel corrected him. Zack blinked, heads came up and stared at her in disbelief. She grinned as if she relished their shocked looks.

“We’re going to have to dig for this thing,” Chase said, a heavy sigh buried under his words, as if he didn’t like this any more than they did. “None of us has any idea how to extract artifacts from an archaeological dig. And I’ll vouch for Dr. Cortez,” he added, eyes on the newcomers. “She can take care of herself.”

“No.”

Everyone turned to Victor, who was standing now, even Gina staring at him in confusion.

“No what?” Angel wondered.

“No, it’s not going to be seven,” Victor elaborated, perhaps the barest hint of a smile on his face. He’d looked incredibly young to Zack before the artifact, but now the connection to it had added years to his face. “It’s going to be eight.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Angel asked, pushing to her feet, forcing Chase to rise as well since he was seated beside her.

“Just how did you think you could find the Navigator without me?” Victor said, apparently unfazed by her wrath.

“You told us you could pinpoint it from orbit,” Chase reminded him.

“I can tell you the general area,” Victor corrected him, “but we’re talking something this size.” He hefted the duffle bag demonstratively. “It could be buried anywhere. If I give you a ten yard by ten yard area, are you seven going to dig the whole thing up, down twenty feet or so? Because that’s what you’d have to do.”

“Shit,” Angel muttered, defeat in her eyes.

“Ten yards by ten yards?” Zack repeated, taking a step closer to the kid, resisting an urge to smack him, knowing it was really that alien computer he wanted to hit. “You can’t do any better than that? I thought that Emissary thing was hot shit on a stick.”

Victor rolled his eyes.

“There’s a concept called the inverse-square law. A signal spreads out as it travels. You’re lucky I can get that close from orbit.”

Zack expected Chase to blow his stack, to tell the kid there was no way he was coming and that was that. But Chase looked thoughtful rather than furious, staring at something far away.

“Vic is coming,” he said, and Zack wasn’t surprised by the decision this time. Chase had the look of a man who’d surrendered to the idea that there was a greater force in charge and everything was out of his hands. “I could sit here and complain about how it’s inconvenient, and he’ll probably get killed, and he has to stay on the ship, but what’s the point? We won’t find the thing without him and the Emissary, and if we don’t find it, what the hell are we doing here?”

He paced across the galley, hands stuffed in his pockets. Alex was watching him through narrowed eyes, and she was the first to speak up.

“We’re not rear-echelon pukes, but we didn’t sign up to be reactive targets.”

“I’m not trying to scare anyone,” Chase told her, “and I’m going to do everything I can to bring us all through this alive, but we’re here for one reason—if we don’t find the artifacts, we don’t find the Archive. And if we don’t find the Archive, the Sunkillers are going to wipe out everything, every trace of us.” He met each of their eyes in turn, ending with Zack. “You all understand that, right? That the primary goal is to save not just the Union, not even just Earth, but all humanity. And if you think I’m exaggerating, think about what happened to the Arborists.” He shook his head. “Ask Angel about them. We don’t know what they looked like, don’t know anything about them except what she found on Vishnu. They’re erased from history. I’m not going to let that happen to us.”

“Well,” Chilly said, chuckling, “haven’t you gotten all noble and shit since I knew you? Hanging out with the eggheads do that to you? Or just the pretty ones?”

Angel’s eyes flared and she took a step forward, hands balling into fists. Zack thought about interposing himself between her and Chilly, not because he was worried about Chilly hurting Angel but because they needed Angel on this mission and the archaeologist was likely to rip his throat out.

“Carlos,” Jax said, shooting a glare at his friend. Zack hadn’t heard the man use Chilly’s given name before. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll punch you in the face before Dr. Cortez gets the chance.”

“Jeez,” Chilly muttered, looking down at the deck. “I was just giving him some shit.”

“We’re in,” Jax told Chase. “You know that. If the kid has to come, then he has to.”

Angel didn’t look placated, but she took a seat anyway, arms crossed over her chest. Victor’s expression was impassive, as if he’d known the outcome all along and was just waiting for everything to play out. Chase turned to Alex and Haskell, waiting for their verdict, Zack supposed. Why, he wasn’t sure. What were they going to do? Refuse to go on the mission? Ask to get off at the next stop? That ship had sailed.

Apparently, the two Marines had the same thought. Alex nodded to her husband and Haskell did the talking.

“You’re the boss, Weston. I can’t say that I totally understand this whole affair, but if you say Victor comes with us, then he does. Like my wife, I didn’t come here to throw my life away, but risk is the nature of the business.”

Zack wasn’t sure he believed that Haskell didn’t understand what was happening. The man came off as perhaps the most intelligent person in the room. Maybe that was just the accent, though.

“Get your gear cleaned and ready to go,” Chase told them. “It’s tropical climate, dry season from what the news stories said, so dress accordingly. We’ll be in the Rift another thirty hours. Get what sleep you can.” He paused, casting a sidelong glance at Victor. “Zack, do me a favor and get Victor fitted out with combat utilities and body armor.” A longer hesitation. “And a weapon. Vic, you’ve shot a handgun. Would you rather have a pistol or should I have Zack show you how to use a rifle?”

Zack thought it was an odd way to phrase the question. How would Chase expect the kid to have an intelligent opinion on whether he’d be better off with a rifle or a pistol? A chill went up his back when he realized the truth—Chase wasn’t asking Victor, he was asking the Emissary.

“A handgun will be adequate,” Victor said. If it was Victor. “I’ll have to carry the bag.”

“Come on, kid,” Zack told him, waving for Victor to follow. “Let’s see what we’ve got that’ll fit you.”

“Can I come?” Gina asked. She was smart—book-smart, anyway, but she had the eager fearlessness of youth. If she was really smart, she’d steer far clear of the kid. Still…

“Sure,” Zack told her.

At least that way, he wouldn’t be alone with Victor and that thing.

OceanofPDF.com

22

“How long do you think we’ll be waiting out here?” Gina asked, oriented upside down, her hair waving back and forth in the microgravity, feet dancing on the overhead of the galley.

Equations leapt into Victor’s mind unwanted, vectors and velocities and momentum, lines drawing themselves around the woman, showing him which direction she would drift with the air currents and which way her movements would take her. He tried to shake them away, clear them from his thoughts and his eyes, and concentrate on her. Gina Quesada was pretty. It had taken him a while to decide, since she wasn’t his usual type, but now that he had come to that conclusion, he would have liked to just appreciate her, not evaluate her probable movements.

“Until a barge comes through,” he answered her question, once he realized no one else was around to do it and the Emissary had advised him she’d ask it again in approximately five seconds. “They get more than two per week, but for all we know, we’re just after the first one and it’ll be six more days to the next.” He glanced at Hill, who was anchored by a sleep net in the cockpit, snoring softly, counting on the automated sensors to tell him if anything jumped into the system. Past the sleeping copilot, darkness filled the main screen, the system primary so far away, it was barely bigger than any other. “You should be getting some sleep,” he added.

“Why aren’t you?” she asked, a challenge in her tone, a mischievous grin upside down on her upside-down face.

Victor was about to tell her something blithe and probable, but the possibility that the answer hadn’t come from him but from The Emissary stopped his mouth, and he blurted out the truth instead.

“This,” he said, indicating the golden orb inside the duffle bag. “It’s…” He looked aside to make sure that Hill was really asleep. “It’s overwhelming sometimes. There’s a constant stream of data, like a firehose trying to squeeze itself into a soda straw. Sometimes, I think I’m going to get lost in it. I guess I’m afraid to go to sleep because I don’t know if it’ll be me anymore when I wake up.”

“That does sound scary,” she agreed, pulling herself down to where he was belted into one of the galley chairs, righting herself so they could sit eye-to-eye. Her hand covered his, the one he’d rested on the artifact, and he almost jerked away, only controlling himself through an effort of will. “Maybe what you need is some kind of… anchor. Something to remind you who you really are.”

“I don’t know what that would be,” he admitted. The air seemed to go out of him and he would have slumped in his seat if there’d been any gravity. “The people I used to know, my friends, my roommate, it feels like forever since I’ve seen any of them, and I don’t think they’d recognize me if they could see me now.” He shook his head. “And I don’t just mean because of the Emissary, but yeah, that too. The only one here who knew me before, who understands, is Dr. Cortez, and she’s…” He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed at them. It felt like they were full of sand. “She’s afraid of me. Maybe she’s right to be.”

“You’ve been able to set the thing aside before, haven’t you?” She wrapped her fingers around his hand and gently pulled it away from the surface of the artifact. Losing contact with the Emissary was like amputating part of himself, and it was all he could do not to scream at her and snatch his hand away. “When we came on board, you didn’t have it. When we were hiding in the cabin for hours, you didn’t have it.”

“It’s gotten harder.” His other hand twitched, and he wanted to put it on the artifact. “It feels like he doesn’t want to let me be away from him.”

Gina wasn’t afraid. Victor wasn’t sure why. She had every right to be. He was scared shitless. She didn’t let go of his hand even when her expression turned thoughtful.

“Is it that you can’t let go of the Emissary,” she asked, “or that you don’t want to? And if you don’t want to, is it because you think you’ll just be normal without him?”

Anger flared somewhere deep in Victor’s chest, and he pulled away from her, though he still didn’t touch the artifact. It was a matter of pride now.

“I can set The Emissary aside anytime I want,” he snapped, his arm slipping out of the harness, letting him float up from the seat. “I’m not some kind of freaking addict!”

“Then prove it.” If Gina was fazed by his outburst, she didn’t show it. “There’s a locker right over there.” She nodded down the ramp toward the utility bay. “We probably have hours until we spot the barge. Put the artifact in the locker for just an hour. Or I’ll do it,” she offered, reaching for the duffle bag. He snatched the bag away, letting it hang, very carefully not touching the artifact inside. She arched an eyebrow and his ears warmed with embarrassment. “An hour. If you can set the Emissary aside any time you want, then do it. Just one hour.”

Victor was breathing hard and he realized with a start that he was damned close to hyperventilating.

Am I that scared? That desperate?

He looked deep into the woman’s eyes, seeing something that calmed him down, that made it possible for him to hand the bag over to her.

“Just an hour,” he repeated as if it were a mantra. “Just an hour.”

“That’s right.” She pushed away, taking the bag with her, and she skimmed the deck as she sailed down the ramp to the utility bay.

The drop pod took up most of the room in the bay, leaving only a yard or so on either side, and he couldn’t see her when she reached the locker. Panic rose in his gut and he wanted to bolt after her, take the bag back from her and run back to his cabin. Something stopped him, whether pride or maybe just a need to prove to himself that he was still his own person.

Gina returned without the bag, but with a broad smile, beaming like a proud parent.

“There,” she said, taking his hand again. Her fingers were soft, warm, and it felt as if just the contact sent waves of heat up through his body. “I knew you could do it.”

“What are we going to do for an hour?” he wondered and Gina laughed.

“We could talk about me,” she suggested. “It’s one of my favorite subjects next to physics, and I know you’re an archaeology student, not a physics major.”

Victor chuckled. She reminded him of hanging out with other students, something he thought he’d never get to do again.

“Okay,” he said, pulling himself back into his seat. “Tell me about you, then. How the heck did you wind up out at Gateway?”

“No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head. She didn’t sit in the opposite seat from him, just held onto the edge of the table and floated legs outward, her face so close to his he could feel the warmth of her breath. “That’s the tail end of the story. All good stories have to start from the beginning.”

Victor was breathing hard again, though this time, he wasn’t sure why.

“Okay. Tell me everything.”

She chuckled and rolled onto her back in relation to him, looking at him upside-down again.

“Sis and I were born in Houston. You know Houston?”

“Of course,” he said. “Everyone knows what happened to Houston during the war.”

“Well, yeah, but it wasn’t always famous for being one of the targets of the terrorist nukes. It sucked as a place to live way before that. I barely remember the attack. We were out in the suburbs, Houston Heights. Nice neighborhood, miles away from the port where the bomb went off. Most of what I remember is the sirens and then our dad sticking us in the car and hours and hours stuck on the freeway, trying to get to his brother’s place in Killeen.” Her smile flattened out to something dolorous. “And I kept asking him where Mom was. She worked at the port.”

“I’m sorry,” Victor said, stomach sinking, feeling out of his depth.

“I was like six.” She shook her head and twisted around again to match his orientation. “I barely remember her. Things weren’t the same for Dad after that, though. He threw himself into his work and most of the time, it was just me and Alex. I was the smart one and she was the athlete, all-state at swimming, soccer, track. I was in middle school when she was a senior in high school, and I went to every one of her games. But then she and Dad got into it. He wanted her to go to college, and she wanted to join the Marines and get revenge for Mom. And since she never once let anyone else talk her into something she didn’t want to do, she joined the Marines. And Dad disowned her and poured everything into my education.”

She sighed and finally slid into the seat.

“I graduated high school two years early, got accepted to MIT, and by the time I had my Masters, the war was over. Dad lived long enough to watch me walk before the cancer got him. The first time in years I’d seen Alex was at the funeral. She was getting out and getting married to Grey.” She smiled fondly. “Grey’s a really nice guy, a lot smarter than most people give him credit for. And he’s a damned saint for putting up with Alex. And the two of them were joining up with a few other vets in that Executive Options PMC.”

“You had a masters in astrophysics,” he said, shaking his head. “Why would you join up with a bunch of mercenaries?”

“Because I was dead broke,” she confessed. “Dad had poured all of our money into getting me as far as I did through college, and I guess he’d counted on making more. But cancer treatments drained most of what he had saved, and we had to sell the house to pay off the debt. So, I needed a job and a place to live, and Alex offered me both. And it was so much fun,” she assured him, shaking her head. “I got to run the nuclear reactor on a starship, travel to strange planets, meet cool new people…”

“And kill them,” he finished, remembering the end of that joke from when Chase had told it.

“Well, not me personally. I never even held a gun.” Gina shrugged. “I knew it was happening. Alex was Marine infantry. Sometimes, we got wounded back from a job, and I’d see them hauled on board. But all the Executive Options guys were good people… even Chilly, though he can be an asshole sometimes. They didn’t work for bad guys. And that thing on Churchill, when the Colonial Authority seized our ship and outlawed EO, that was bullshit.” Her expression clouded like the sky before a summer storm. “I saw the girls those bandits had taken from their village. If I’d had a gun, I would have executed every one of those sons of bitches myself.” The anger drained away quickly and she sighed. “Which brings us to Gateway, of course.”

“You’re brilliant,” Victor told her. “You need to be getting your doctorate somewhere. Isn’t there any kind of scholarship program you could go into? I mean, I think I read something about the Colonial Authority paying for scientists to work with their scouting program?”

“They sure do,” she agreed. “And I applied for it. And was told in no uncertain terms that no one who worked for Executive Options in any capacity would ever get a position in the Colonial Authority, and that we were all lucky they hadn’t just turned us over to our home nations for prosecution. Which is another reason I was on Gateway instead of back on Earth, because like Grey says, you never know when some politician is going to get a wild hair up their ass and decide we all need to be arrested.”

“That’s just not fair,” Victor insisted, outrage roiling in his gut. “You deserve better than that.”

“Modesty prevents me from agreeing with you,” she said, smiling thinly, “but thanks for being such an insightful judge of character.” Victor couldn’t help laughing at that, which he was sure what she’d intended when she joined in. As the chuckles died down, she waved the whole thing away. “It’s just as well, anyway. I never want to go back to Earth.”

“Why not?” he asked, surprised.

“Everything there is old and restrictive and stupid. The future’s out here.” She swept a gesture around them. “This is where humans are going to find their destiny, not back on that parochial dirtball.” Gina seemed to realize she was getting wound up and shrunk in on herself, chuckling. “Sorry. I can get a little flakey when I get going.”

“I can’t imagine,” Victor said, “anyone thinking you’re flakey. You’re passionate, and I think that’s awesome.”

“Passionate, maybe.” She shrugged, eyes going to the tabletop. “But I have a tendency to think with my heart and not my head too often, which isn’t the best quality for a scientist.”

“What do you mean?”

Victor had never been quite so surprised in his whole life as when she kissed him. It had been a while since he’d kissed anyone and he nearly forgot what he should be doing, but she was patient and the sensation was very much like the electric tingle he felt when he connected with The Emissary.

He was breathless and speechless when they parted, shocked beyond coherence.

“I, uh…” It was the most intelligent thing he could say. All he could do was smile, but apparently, that said enough. Gina laughed softly, running her hand over the stubble he’d allowed to grow through inattention. At least I remembered to brush my teeth.

“Don’t lose you, Victor,” she told him. “I like you.”

Victor was sure she was about to say something else, to invite him back to her cabin, or maybe to his, but an insistent beep interrupted both their conversation and Adrian Hill’s nap.

“What th’ hell?” the copilot murmured, rubbing at his eyes. He wriggled out of the sleep netting like an escape artist getting free of a straitjacket and smacked his palm on a control Victor assumed was the public address speaker. “We got the barge! It just came out of the Rift!”

“Damn,” Victor hissed. What happened to the wait taking hours?

“I’m coming,” Pri replied, her voice weighed down with sleep. “Get everyone ready.”

Victor shared a look with Gina, and a sigh of regret.

“I guess that means me, too,” he said. It meant he’d have to go retrieve the Emissary and, for the first time since they’d connected on Vishnu, he didn’t want to do that.

“It’s okay,” Gina assured him, pulling him into another kiss, this one brief but full of promise. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

He tried to smile, but for a scientist, she was making an unwarranted assumption.

There’s no guarantee I’m coming back.

* * *

“Everyone set back there?” Priyanka called, spinning her seat around to look back down the ramp into the utility bay.

She could just barely see the front of the drop pod, but it was enough to tell that the hatch in the nose was shut. Aguilar was standing at the base of the ramp, dressed in a well-worn pressure suit, the visor of his helmet propped open, and he shot her a thumbs-up.

“They’re sealed in,” he reported. “Ready to close the pressure seal when we have to launch them.”

“Get ready,” she warned him as well as Hill and the girl Gina in the cockpit. “This is going to be a little rough.”

The barge was a twinkle of light even at the extreme magnification of the optical camera, although the tactical computer gave it a quite realistic simulated avatar. It had come out of the Rift outside the orbit of the planet’s greater moon and it was almost inside it now, which made the jump even trickier… as if it wasn’t tricky enough.

She whispered a prayer and the Tamar surged forward, the stars streaking by the cockpit like racing stripes painted on the fabric of the universe.

“This is so cool,” Gina said. Pri spared her a glance, smiling. It was hard not to like the younger woman. “I studied this effect for years, saw video of it, but until I actually experienced it, it wasn’t real to me.”

The stripes contracted as they accelerated faster than the ship itself could have survived, much less the humans inside it, if the drive had worked on Newtonian principles. They shrank from a rainbow sunburst into a mass of white at the center of the screen, every now and then a star breaking off from the mass in front to join the one in back.

“I remember the first time I went into the Rift,” Gina went on. “I’d just signed on to the Icarus with Executive Options, and I begged the pilot to let me sit up in the cockpit for the jump.”

“No begging required,” Pri muttered, then punched the control to let loose the charge in the capacitor banks and push them over the speed of light.

The mass shrank into an ink-black pit and then everything disappeared into the Rift, the absolute absence that was FTL travel. It didn’t last long. Pri would normally have cut power manually, always believing a pilot should be the one in control of her ship, but the margin for error in a maneuver like this was beyond human reflexes, loathe as she was to admit it. The navigational system brought them out of the Rift automatically, somewhere between the three and four-count in her head.

“Oh, shit!” Gina blurted, and the reaction wasn’t unreasonable, given that they were only a few hundred meters from the ass end of a massive hunk of metal the size of a warehouse.

Pri’s hands ached for the controls, but the braking sequence for the maneuver was also something she knew was beyond her control, not so much because she couldn’t have activated the reverse thrust in time, but because to make this work, they had to not only kill their still-considerable speed after the jump back from lightspeed, but also match velocities with the barge. To do anything else would be to shine a spotlight on themselves for the Chinese military sensor net.

Pri ground her teeth nearly hard enough to shed enamel as the rear of the barge grew closer, but she allowed herself to breathe when their relative positions stabilized. She flashed Gina a tight smile.

“And there we are. All good.”

Gina started to return the smile, but her face froze in a rictus as the ship rumbled and rocked around them, throwing her against her seat restraints.

“What the hell is that?” she asked, looking around at the bulkhead as if she expected it to come apart.

“Oh, that,” Hill said, his grin full of malicious mischief. “Don’t worry about that. It’s going to get so much worse…”

OceanofPDF.com

23

The biggest dog in the universe had them in its teeth and was shaking them like a bone.

It didn’t seem to bother anyone else. Not that Angel could have seen their faces to be sure, not with their visors down over their eyes. She’d been issued a helmet herself, but she hadn’t lowered the visor. It made her claustrophobic, and the HUD and targeting features wouldn’t do her any good, not when she didn’t know how to operate them. She’d tried to insist Chase teach her how to use them, but he had it right. Without extensive training, it would only distract her.

Victor didn’t have his visor down either, but he seemed unbothered by the teeth-rattling vibration in the drop pod, though she was just guessing from a few short glances over her shoulder. The pod was narrow, the seats laid out two-by-two, and the only one she could see without twisting around in her chair was Chase, who sat beside her.

She made sure her helmet mic was shut off before she leaned over and murmured a question only he could hear.

“Is everything okay? Why is it shaking so much? Because we’re inside the pod?”

“No,” he said, his voice as quiet as hers, barely audible above the creak and groan of metal. “We’re riding the wake of the barge’s Soong-Tierney drive. It helps to conceal our sensor signature from the planet. There’s a slight spatial distortion in the wake of a ship using the drive and we’re inside it, which is why the Tamar is vibrating so badly.” He offered her a smile. “But it’s okay. The ship can take it, and we’re going to be entering orbit in just a few minutes.”

She eyed him curiously, wondering how he could be such a stereotypical grunt sometimes and yet come up with little gems of scientific knowledge… until the answer hit her between the eyes. Priyanka. They’d been involved for years, and she’d probably talked shop with him. It shouldn’t bother her. She was no kid, jealous of her man’s former girlfriends. And yet it did.

“You okay?” Chase asked, and she realized she must be letting her feelings show through to her face, which was something else she wasn’t used to.

“I don’t like not being able to see what’s happening out there,” she replied, figuring that was a more dignified answer than the truth.

“Put your visor down,” he told her.

Her eyes narrowed in confusion, but she did it. It accomplished nothing that she could tell other than dimming the already-dim glow of the interior lights in the pod, and she was about to ask him what he had in mind when she felt his hand on her left forearm, tapping on the control pad built into her armored sleeve. A heads-up display flickered to life in the corner of her visor, at first showing nothing but a stream of numbers she couldn’t interpret except they might have been ranges to possible targets. After another series of taps, she was looking at the back end of a barge much like the one she’d seen at Gateway, though perhaps larger.

“This is the ship’s external cameras.” It was half a statement, half a question.

“Yeah. They’re looped in through the command circuit in my helmet, and I just synched your system with mine.”

“That easy, is it?” she wondered.

“It’s simple,” he corrected her. “That doesn’t mean it’s easy.”

The video stream helped. It gave her a glimpse outside, even if it was a tiny one. As she stared at it, though, it grew larger, probably through some trick of the software in the helmet. If it weren’t for the artificial gravity from the ship, she could have believed she was floating outside in open space, close enough to grab at the struts and radiators on the rear of the barge.

Around the edges of the gigantic cargo ship, filling in the gaps in the image, was the blue, green and brown curve of a planet. Lóng dàn… Dragon’s Egg. It was beautiful, quite Earthlike, though a version of Earth without ice caps, or very greatly reduced ones, with larger deserts and oceans, smaller continents and more islands. As they grew nearer to the world, it began to squeeze out even the slivers of blackness at the corners of her field of view, and she wondered how much closer they could get without falling into the clutches of the gravity field.

Silence answered her silent question, the sudden absence of the clattering vibration, even louder in her memory now that it was gone. It hadn’t left on its own. With it went the artificial gravity as the S-T drives cut out, and her shoulder straps tugged at her. The minute body movements threatened to send her floating upward.

“Okay,” Chase sighed, sounding like he was as relieved as she was to be rid of the turbulence. “Pri, we getting a reading on the cargo shuttle? They probably launched it as soon as they detected the barge.”

“Yeah, we got it.” The pilot’s voice came over Angel’s earphones as well, though she didn’t know if it was the same for all of them or if she’d eavesdropped through the signal Chase had fed her from his helmet. “Ten minutes, maybe. Plus however long it takes them to unload. We’re going to be tucked into the butt of this barge, sheltered by the radiator fins, so I’m launching microdrones to give us a good look at the shuttle and let us know when it’s safe to launch you. I’ll send you the feed.”

“Copy that. Good luck.”

“You too, you flat-footed goofball.”

The fondness in the woman’s voice was obvious, which should have reignited the jealousy she felt earlier but somehow didn’t.

“I see it,” Adrian Hill reported, his voice far away, coming through Priyanka’s audio pickup, and when she looked, she saw it as well.

The shuttle was a gleaming sphere, circling Dragon’s Egg like a lesser moon, growing as it approached until she thought it was nearly as big as the barge itself.

“I’ve never seen a shuttle that large,” she said softly, then cursed under her breath, remembering she was hooked into the bridge.

“The Union makes them smaller on purpose,” Pri answered, not showing annoyance at the intrusion. “For the same reason they don’t use spherical landers, even though the shape makes the most sense for maximizing space. They use lifting body shapes because the doctrine is, if the drive fails, they want the ship to have at least some chance to glide down.”

“Yeah,” Hill agreed. “But the Alliance is a bit less humanitarian in their philosophy. If your drive fails, well, then it just wasn’t your day, dude.”

“Shut up, Adrian,” Pri told him. “Send that message to Victor’s great aunt or whatever she is.”

“Yes, oh mistress of the dark.”

The shuttle disappeared on the other side of the barge, and Angel had resigned herself to being in the dark again when another feed popped up beside the first, this one flitting about until it stabilized. It was a drone, she deduced, and the shuttle was visible again in the feed from its camera, the globular mass edging closer to the barge, lining up its main airlock with the docking ring on the freighter.

Angel scrolled through the controls on her arm and made sure her mic was turned off before she leaned in close to Chase.

“It seems empty up here,” she said. “I expected there to be more traffic. Don’t they have a space station?”

“Nothing like Gateway,” Chase told her. “The Alliance in general and China in particular don’t think much of large space stations. They think they’re too vulnerable.” He chuckled. “Ironic, since we never would have been able to pull half the operations we did against Alliance intelligence outposts if they’d kept their bases in orbit. That also means they’re not running as many shuttles and orbital transfer vehicles as Union worlds. I’m pretty sure they have a moon base, but those flights wouldn’t even bother stopping at low orbit.”

She nodded, though he couldn’t have seen it. The cargo shuttle was docked, the view from the drone whizzing around the far side of the vehicle, revealing the Chinese and Alliance flags painted on its silvery hull.

“How will we know if they see us?”

“I think our first clue,” Chase said, “is when they start shooting at us.”

She scowled and wanted to tell him he was being an asshole, but that would have meant admitting she was scared, and she’d made a huge point of insisting she go on this mission.

Why am I assuming he isn’t scared?

“Are you worried about it?” It was an inane question, one she already knew the answer to, but that wasn’t the point. He took a moment to reply, first tapping at a control on his wrist, and she thought he might be turning off his mic.

“Hell, yes. Waiting like this is worse than getting shot at.” He pulled up his visor and she did the same for hers, their eyes locking. “I’ve seen more combat than any ten other guys I know, Angel, enough that the prospect of being killed is something I just learned to live with. I don’t even pretend like it can’t happen anymore the way I used to when I was a kid. I know it can happen. And I can face it without freezing up, without letting it overwhelm me. But I’m scared, every single time. You don’t ever get over being scared.” He shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you what it’s like to be scared.”

“No,” she agreed. “But I spent a lot of my life trying to make sure I wouldn’t ever be scared again.”

“I’m sorry you got dragged into this.”

“Oh, bullshit.” She snorted. “I practically dragged you into this.”

“I don’t recall that I needed that much convincing.”

“Chase, you seeing this?” Priyanka again.

Chase cursed softly and pulled his visor down, and Angel did the same. The shuttle had separated from the airlock and was drifting away from the barge by inches at a time.

“Shit, that was fast,” Angel murmured. She’d been hoping it would take longer.

“We’re ready,” Chase declared with much more confidence than Angel felt. “Send us down.”

* * *

“Pressure seal good!” Priyanka called back through the intercom to Chief Aguilar, hands flying over the controls as she shunted the Tamar away from the rear of the barge. “Open the ramp and get ready!”

Gina’s hands were shaking. She grabbed at her restraints and clenched them tightly to hide the tremors, not wanting the others to see them. Her sister and brother-in-law were in that war-relic pod, about to get fired at the planet like a bullet. And Victor. She’d seen her sister walk into danger before, and she knew she shouldn’t have let it bother her this much, but there was a qualitative difference between going up against poorly trained bandits on some independent colony and bearding the lion in its den.

“Venting atmosphere,” Aguilar announced, the warning coinciding with a flashing red light on the console where the chief usually sat, a persistent, buzzing alarm. Gina thought she could hear the hiss of air escaping into space, even through the thick pressure seal hatch that cut off the cockpit from the utility bay, but it might have been her imagination. “Angle us another two degrees toward the port.”

“Two degrees,” Pri echoed, fingers just barely nudging the steering yoke.

“Ramp is open. Preparing to launch.”

“Hey,” Adrian Hill interrupted, looking up from his console, “we got a reply from Great Aunt Nelly!”

“Save it,” Pri snapped. “We’re in position, Chief. Launch the pod.”

* * *

“You know,” Alex Quesada said, loud enough for Chase to hear all the way from the back of the pod, “this might be the craziest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Get real, love,” Grey Haskell scoffed. “This doesn’t even make the top three.”

“Are you getting a signal, Vic?” Chase asked, ignoring the couple’s byplay.

“It’s on the nightside,” the kid told him, his voice with that too-calm monotone he adopted when he was linked to The Emissary. “Somewhere on the Big Island. That’s the local name for the largest subcontinent in the eastern hemisphere, just north of the equator. Can’t be any more exact than that until we’re over it.”

“You got that, Chilly?” Chase called up to the former SEAL, who was seated in the pilot’s seat of the pod, though that seemed a glorified term for the simple attitude thruster joystick that was all the controls the little atmospheric entry craft had.

“Copy,” Chilly grunted in response. He wasn’t his usual garrulous self, possibly because he was still trying to familiarize himself with the drop procedures.

“Launching,” Priyanka announced in his helmet earphones.

Chase was about to warn the others to hold on, but he was a second too late. The launch cradle for the pod was a single-use electromagnetic catapult, powered by a high-explosive trigger, and when it discharged, Chase had a fair idea of what it was like to be one of the many tens of thousands of bullets he’d fired in his career. Beside him, Angel grunted like she’d been kicked in the stomach, and if he didn’t, it was only because he’d had that split second to brace himself.

The feed from the Tamar’s external cameras faded into flickering static and then the flat blue of a dead channel, and he tapped his left arm to get rid of the feed, concentrating instead on the small viewscreen at the front. It wasn’t a window. The ship was entirely covered with the radar-absorbent foam, and leaving a big enough gap for a window would have defeated the purpose. It was a curved video display streaming the wireless feed from half a dozen external cameras, splicing them together via some software that had been old before the war.

The cargo shuttle was still close but pulling farther away with each second, leaving Chase feeling naked and exposed, despite the stealth coating of the pod. The planet wasn’t a sphere anymore, just a curve in the upper horizon, not below them but dead ahead and growing closer with each passing instant.

“Situation, Chilly,” he snapped after two seconds, which he figured should be enough for the man to recover from the launch.

“Yeah, I got it.” As if prodded by the man’s announcement, the steering jets banged on the hull, nudging them into a lower orbit. “Taking us to the Big Island.”

Space travel without the S-T drive was excruciatingly slow, Chase decided. He’d seen videos of it as a kid, but those were always edited to make them less boring, like the journeys took no time at all. Those videos were lies. The continents were passing by beneath them, but the half hour it took to reach the terminator crawled on forever, every second feeling like his last, like the one moment it would take for a Chinese satellite to spot them and launch a missile. What he’d told Angel about the lack of orbital traffic on this world cut both ways—there were fewer other ships likely to spot them, but there were also fewer ships for whom they could be mistaken. The pod was radar-absorbent, but if a human being happened to be looking at an optical telescope, they were done.

Finally, the terminator swallowed them up in a blanket of darkness and a chorus of relieved sighs went through the pod. Chase let out the breath he’d been holding, though he knew the protection of darkness was illusory, both in orbit and on the ground. It was psychological, but that was still worth something. A psychological edge was still an edge.

“There’s the Big Island,” Jax said, pointing at the screen. He was sitting beside Chilly, so he had a better view than Chase, but from his seat, he could just make out the jagged lines of the subcontinent, about the size of Madagascar, at least if Chase remembered his geography correctly.

“It’s a big place,” Chilly added. “A little help, kid?”

“Your current course will take you to the northwest corner of the island,” Victor told him, “approximately one hundred and twenty miles southeast of the largest city, Lóng yá. We need to adjust thirty-two miles northwest.”

“I just hope you’re doing this right,” Jax said, shifting in his seat like he wanted to switch with the man.

“Hey, you had every opportunity to fly this piece of shit,” Chilly reminded him. “I seem to recall specifically inviting you to fly this thing, as a matter of fact, but you were like oh, no, Chill, I trust you completely. Anyone else remember that?”

“Would you two old ladies save it for a marriage counselor?” Alex drawled. “I swear to God, I’d rather watch Aunt Carla’s old telenovelas than listen to you two cluck at each other!”

“I don’t know, man,” Zack’s voice said quietly in Chase’s headphones. “Maybe I’m wrong. Do you really think Chilly and Jax…?”

Chase checked to make sure that Zack was at least smart enough to use their private frequency for the inanity and hissed out a breath of relief when he saw that it was, indeed, not on the public net.

“Focus, Wilson,” he growled.

Maneuvering thrusters interrupted the back-and-forth, both public and private, with a persistent bangbangbang against the hull of the little pod. The image on the front screen shifted, though without a better view, Chase couldn’t tell if Chilly was going the right way. He had to trust Victor would tell the SEAL if he’d screwed up. The pounding of the rockets against the hull ceased abruptly, and Chilly twisted in his seat to face the others, his visor pulled up, a helpless expression on his face.

“That’s it,” he said, hands raised in an exaggerated shrug. “The rockets are out of fuel. If I screwed up, like Mr. Walker here thinks”—he glared sidelong at Jax—“then we’re toast.”

“We’re on course,” Victor said. “We should be on the ground in an hour.”

“Yeah,” Jax grumbled, “and what if the damned fifteen-year-old parachutes don’t work?”

Chase didn’t know whether it was Victor or the Emissary who smiled in response to the question.

“Then we’ll be on the ground even sooner.”

OceanofPDF.com

24

“Ramp is closed,” Aguilar reported, something distant and tinny about his voice from inside the pressure suit’s helmet. “Gimme back my air, Cap.”

“Repressurizing,” Pri told him, twisting the control to send atmosphere back into the rest of the ship.

“Does that hurt anything?” Gina asked, motioning toward the pressure seal at the rear of the cockpit. “Putting the rest of the ship in a vacuum?”

“It might,” Pri acknowledged, “if I hadn’t already killed Adrian’s bonsai tree twice before he gave up the hobby.”

“It was a passion, not a hobby,” Hill insisted, hurt in his voice. “Something beautiful in contrast to the metal and plastic all around us.”

“I’ll buy you another one,” Pri offered, “but you have to give me back the ViR goggles and give up online porn.”

“Oh, hell no!” The copilot shook his head, a look of horror on his face. “It’s just a damned houseplant!”

“Where’s the pod?” Gina wanted to know. She was out of her seat and floating behind Pri, looking over her shoulder at the main screen. “Can you still see it?”

“Not from back here,” Pri told her. “The drones might be able to, but they’re optical only and it’s too damn small to pick up.” She shrugged. “Which is sort of the point.”

The pressure seal parted with a relieved hiss, as if the entire ship was happy to have air back, and Aguilar floated through, helmet tucked under his arm.

“Did I hear someone say we got a reply from Lan?” he asked, pulling himself into his seat.

“Yeah, the Chinese lady,” Hill agreed. He nodded toward Pri. “You want me to play it now?”

“Go ahead.”

Priyanka’s gut twisted. This was where everything could fall apart. If Lan had sold her soul to the Chinese, become an informant or a willing collaborator, then they were done before they started. Victor’s grandmother had assured them that the message she’d crafted wouldn’t be understood by anyone else, that it was based on the code they’d used as children to avoid being understood by the adults who would have turned them in to the Chinese overseers. And she could believe that as much as she wanted.

“Here goes nothing,” Hill said, touching the file on his screen.

Pri glanced at the screen, for some reason expecting a video, but only a voice came through the speakers. It was ancient, hoarse, and crackling, the voice of age and hardship. And it was speaking Vietnamese, which she did not.

“Do we have a translation program?” she asked Hill, cocking an eyebrow.

“I think so,” he said, scrolling through the screen on his control station. “Though you never can tell how accurate these things are.” He slid his finger across the screen and the old woman’s voice was replaced by a computer-generated one of the same gender but much younger, speaking with a British accent.

“I am Lan Thao, cousin of your grandmother. We were best friends from the time we could walk and I am so happy that she was able to find a good life in the United States, to have children and grandchildren. It was everything I wished for her and yet, I have not had a poor life, for the life I’ve been given. I have had loves and children and grandchildren. And yet now, I am old and those children and grandchildren are back on Earth, and I have nothing to look forward to except work and death. And if I could strike a blow against those who robbed me of my home and my cousin so many years ago, I would do it. Follow this signal. Come to our village. We will conceal your ship and help you as we can.”

Pri let out a breath, giving in to relief she wasn’t sure she was right to feel.

“It could be fake,” Aguilar gave voice to her fears. “The Chinese could have intercepted the message and decoded it.”

“Why would they bother to try to get us to land in the village?” Hill pointed out. “Why not just blow us to bits if they know we’re here?”

“They might want to question us,” Aguilar suggested. “Find out if we’re working for the Union government. Send us to some blacksite where they can squeeze us for a few years then throw us in a work camp until we die.”

“Well, isn’t that a cheery thought?” Hill scowled at him. “What the hell do you think we should do, then? We already sent the landing force down? You wanna just abandon them and take off?”

“Shut up, Adrian,” Pri said, rubbing at her temples. “We’re not abandoning them, and since we aren’t, we’re going to have to just assume that the message is real. Adrian, trace that signal to the planet and get me coordinates.”

“Doing it.” Hill gave Aguilar a dirty look before diving into the task.

“Chief, line up the nose of the ship against the radiator fins. They’re the softest part of the barge, least likely to crack the hull.” She shook her head. “And everyone strap in. I’ve never tried this before.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Gina asked, pulling herself into one of the spare seats and buckling her safety harness. Pri considered it for a second. The girl had been the reactor tech on a ship.

“Monitor damage control for us,” she said. “If we get a hull breach, you need to seal off the cockpit.”

“Shouldn’t we wear spacesuits?” Gina asked. “Just in case?”

“Maybe,” Pri admitted, shrugging. “But the bottom line is, if we screw the ship up badly enough to crack the cockpit seal, we’re not making it back into the Rift. In which case, I’d rather die in a hard vacuum than get captured by the Alliance.”

Gina’s face drained of color and Pri felt bad, but it was better that the girl know the situation now.

“Got the coordinates,” Hill announced. “It’s on what they call The Big Island, south end maybe 250 miles away from the largest city there near a village or something. I don’t know what it’s called… the maps we have are all pretty general and drawn from public sources, but they show some kind of farming community there. We’re going to be over it in about eight minutes.”

“You know the drill,” Pri said, watching the view in the main screen shift as Aguilar maneuvered the Tamar around and set her nose against the aluminum radiator shell on the rear of the barge. She’d left it to him because no one was as intimate with every strength and weakness of the ship as the chief, since he’d worked as her engineer, reactor, and weapons specialist for the last five years. “Once the barge starts nosing in, we’re going to have to follow her down. Which means we go fast and we go low, and we don’t pull up until we’re under their radar and lidar. If anyone plans to puke, grab an airsick bag now.” She looked around, but none of them moved, even though Gina already looked green around the gills. “We ready, Chief?”

“Ready as we’re going to be,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m going on the record that I am not happy about this. Even if it doesn’t breach the hull, it’s going to cost some serious money to replace the nose armor. That shit ain’t cheap.”

“May financial problems be the least of our worries,” Pri replied, smiling thinly.

“I have a question,” Gina said. “Won’t the barge try to use its own drive to counteract our push?”

“It would,” Pri agreed, “but once the radiators are smashed, the automated safety protocols are going to shut down their Soong-Tierney pods and scram the reactor. Remember, no crew, so the ship’s priority isn’t going to be saving itself, just making sure it isn’t a hazard to anyone else. Smart question, though.”

The girl still seemed nervous, but Pri thought she looked a little pleased with herself as well.

“Hold on.”

Priyanka wiped her palms off on her fatigue pants and gripped the control yoke tightly, afraid the collision would buck it out of her hands. Her thumb stroked the throttle control, feeding power in a slowly climbing surge from the nuclear reactor to the drive. It was just as well they weren’t in an atmosphere. If there’d been air to conduct the sound, the metallic shrieking and crunching would have been much louder, more disturbing, and it was already bad enough just propagating through the hull of the Tamar. It wasn’t like the turbulence from riding the barge’s drive wake. There’d been something unreal about that, preternatural. This was visceral, physical, a ringing vibration that tore at her heart, a conviction that she was committing a mortal sin, abusing a loved one. She pushed down the guilt, reminding herself that they were risking a lot more than the ship on this operation, and spurred the Tamar on, a desperate warrior urging on her mount despite the knowledge the horse’s heart might give out.

The Tamar’s heart didn’t fail her, but Pri was terrified her nose armor would. The radiator had been crushed beneath it, accordioned into a soft, metal cushion, but below that radiator was the reactor shielding, the power feeds to the barge’s drive, made from sterner stuff, harder and unyielding. If the barge had been fixed at a point in space, anchored to an asteroid or a moon, the Tamar would have crushed herself against it, for there was no way even the sturdy nose armor could break through the reactor shielding.

But neither of them was motionless, despite the apparent lack of momentum. The barge was moving, slowly at first, barely noticeable on the screens as the two ships passed into the night side of the world.

“The turbines are overheating,” Aguilar warned, speaking up to be heard over the grinding of ship on ship, the agonized scream of torn metal. “I don’t think this is going to work.”

“It is working,” Hill told him, pointing at the sensor display. “We’re kissing the atmosphere already. And the barge’s reactor has shut down. You can see it on thermal.”

Priyanka took his word for it, unable to take her eyes off the controls, the image on the main screen. They were almost there, she could feel it.

The barge nosed up. Pri hadn’t expected it because how could she? She’d never even heard of anyone using a starship to push another out of orbit, much less studied the effect of hitting atmosphere. It seemed to happen in slow motion, the great bulk of the thing swinging upward under the pressure of the Tamar, scraping across the bow of the converted military starship, taking paint and armor with it.

“Damage control?” Pri barked at Gina, harsh and loud enough to get the girl’s attention.

Gina blinked then focused on her station for a moment before responding.

“Increased stress on all support membranes,” she reported, her voice quavering at first but firming up as she spoke, “but no hull breaches.”

“We’re past the point of no return, boss,” Hill announced. “That barge is going down and so are we, unless you pull us out of it.”

Pri didn’t need him to tell her. The roiling clouds on the main screen grew thicker and more violent with each second, the atmosphere buffeting the Tamar, threatening to rip the control yoke from her hands.

“This is where we earn our money,” Pri said, gritting her teeth. The narration wasn’t necessary for Hill and Aguilar, but she figured it would help keep Gina calm. The girl had guts and a little experience, but she also probably hadn’t been in a situation like this before. Then again, neither have I. “We have to stay right behind the barge,” she went on, “and keep our speed as close to it as possible, so the ground sensors and satellites don’t peg us as anything but debris from the ship. Thing is, we also have to survive the re-entry, so we can’t just free-fall in like the barge.”

“What do we do, then?” Gina asked. There was no break in her voice this time, though the tension was obvious in the clench of her jaw.

“We turn and brake a little.” Pri pulled the steering yoke toward her and flipped the ship end for end, ignoring with practiced ease the roller-coaster queasiness in her stomach. Just a few seconds of power to the drives, enough to slow their descent, then the fun began. “And after that, we tumble like the debris we want them to think we are.”

This part was harder to ignore, even for her. Cut power to the drive, let the turbulence take them, spin them, roll them. If the Tamar had groaned and complained before, when they were pushing the barge, she screamed and cursed them now. Or maybe that was the crew cursing Pri. She couldn’t be sure, couldn’t even be sure she was going to be able to hang onto consciousness.

“External heat building!” Gina warned her, and Pri was impressed the girl could still focus well enough to make sense of the readouts.

Pri didn’t reply, just grabbed the wheel and fed power to the drive again. It wouldn’t have worked with a conventional rocket or jet engine. The stress would have been too great, the power requirements too high. But the S-T drive wasn’t a rocket, wasn’t a jet, and didn’t put acceleration strain on the frame, though nothing could change the angular momentum they received from the spin. A burst of power, ten seconds this time, leveling them out, turning the ship back parallel to the ground, still in a flat spin. Another burst to put their nose toward the ground.

“Shit!” Gina yelped, a natural reaction to the ringing-gong vibration echoing through the superstructure of the ship.

“What the hell was that?” Aguilar wanted to know.

“Debris,” Hill told him, sounding much calmer than he had any right to be. “We’re decelerating, but the barge isn’t… pieces of it, anyway. One just smacked right off our dorsal stern.”

Pri couldn’t afford to search the data down herself and she was about to demand a report from Gina, but the girl beat her to it.

“No armor loss. Hull integrity remains sound.”

Damn. That was even professional. Maybe I should hire this one on full time.

“Uh, Cap,” Hill said, pointing at the sensor screen. “We got like… a mountain?”

“Yeah, I’m aware, Adrian.” She had looked at the damned map before taking the ship into a nose-dive toward the planet. “Been waiting for it.”

It would have been more intimidating if it had been full daylight, but the infrared and computer enhancement did the best they could to give them all a realistic view of the mountain range. Pri had seen the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the smaller hills and mountains of her childhood home in the UK before her family had moved to America, but none of those seemed to compare with this. These peaks weren’t snow-capped, weren’t jagged and barren, weren’t even worn by time and weather and veiled by forest. They were more like ranges she’d never seen in real life, only in tourism videos, the cloud forests of Costa Rica, buried under a blanket of green, shrouded by mists and mystery. And coming straight at them.

The pieces of the barge hit first. Nothing exploded, of course. There was nothing reactive in the cargo ship now that she’d automatically ejected her nuclear fuel. But the remains of the ship had built up momentum and heat on their journey through the atmosphere and they released both in plumes of glowing smoke, mushroom clouds rising above the trees, parting the mist. Static electricity crackled in the air, lightning bolts connecting bits of the clouds to each other as if a volcano had erupted out of the ancient mountains.

“I guess that’s as much of a distraction as we’re going to get,” Pri murmured.

She pulled the Tamar up in a gentle arc and took them through the largest of the mushroom clouds. Turbulence had become the new normal these last few minutes, and when the wheel tried to wrench itself out of her hands, she wrestled it into submission and kept the ship on course. Static lightning flared, chasing them out of the cloud as if making one final attempt to snatch at the ship and pull her back down to the same ignoble death she’d brought to the barge. Out of the cloud, Pri banked the Tamar to port, squeezing her through a pass of bare granite running through the jungle-clad mountains. She bared her teeth in defiance of gravity, geography and death itself, restraining herself from a war whoop only because it felt premature.

Aw, the hell with it. “Yippee ki-ya!”

OceanofPDF.com

25

“When are those damned chutes going to open?” Zack asked for what Chase estimated was the third time.

I thought if anyone was going to get a case of the nerves, it would be Angel.

But she was quiet and composed despite the rattling and shaking throwing them from one side of their seats to another, though he couldn’t have said if she was panicking inside, since the safety harness and the helmet hid both body language and her face. Victor had said nothing after giving them the final course adjustments, but then he didn’t talk much when he was interfaced with the artifact.

“Four thousand feet,” Jax answered, also for the third time, though he’d been very patient about it. “Which is another fifteen hundred… no, twelve hundred feet.”

“Shit,” Zack commented.

“You okay, man?” Chase asked him. He would have turned to face the other Ranger, but the pod was bucking so hard against the wind, he was afraid he’d pull a back muscle.

“I never had a problem with jumping, but this is different, dude. This is like riding a damn plane down.”

“You’ve ridden a plane down, mate?” Grey Haskell asked, sounding honestly curious. “How? The S-T drive fail?”

“No, it got blown right off the ass of the plane,” Zack growled. Chase winced, knowing the man wasn’t fond of this story. “With me and a whole squad still stuck inside the damn thing.”

“Were you around for this, Chase?” Angel asked him, the story at least having the effect of keeping her mind off their current fall.

“Nope,” he admitted. “Already jumped. But I did help pull him out.”

“Which is why,” Zack said, an edge ascending along with his volume, “I’d really like to know when the fucking chutes are popping!”

“And that would be now,” Jax said, straining against his restraints to grab twin handles above his position and yank downward.

For a long moment, there was nothing, no effect at all, and Chase was almost more afraid of Zack’s reaction to it than he was of dying in the inevitable impact. Then God grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and jerked him backward. Angel gasped, and if Chase didn’t, it was only because the shock had caught him between breaths and he didn’t have the air for it. Stars filled his eyes from banging his helmet against the headrest of his seat on the recoil.

“Oh, hell, yeah!” Zack exulted. “Thank the good Lord!”

Chase sucked in air and tried to dig through the haze from the whiplash to reach a coherent thought.

“Jax, how’s our LZ looking?”

“Umm… not so good, Chase.” The SEAL turned in his seat, jerking a thumb toward the screen and the green-tinted infrared image drifting slowly back and forth with the rocking of the pod on the landing chutes. “There seems to be a whole bunch of fucking buildings sitting right in the middle of it.”

“We have a problem,” Victor said. “See that largest one?” It took a second. All the blood was running to Chase’s head, and his arms were going numb from hanging against his straps. Finally, he found the square structure at the center of the clearing, surrounded by miles of trackless jungle.

“Yeah.”

“The Navigator is right underneath it.”

Shit.

Chase’s head hurt from the chutes opening and he wondered how SEALs managed to use the drop pods without getting traumatic brain injuries. Of course, that might explain Chilly.

“Jax,” Chase said, “can you steer these chutes?”

“A little.” Jax motioned at the toggles he’d pulled to release them. “These control the risers, but at this altitude, we’re talking a couple hundred yards at most.”

He sighed.

“Then take us into the trees. As far away as you can.”

“Copy that.” The tall man grabbed at the handles and tugged down on the left one. “But landing in those trees is going to hurt.”

“We have bigger problems than that,” Angel opined. “If the Chinese have a building right on top of the Navigator…”

Chase finished the sentence for her and just the thought made his head hurt even worse.

“They might already know it’s there.”

* * *

“I am,” the woman declared in halting English, “Lan Thao. Where is Victor?”

She looked, Priyanka thought, older than God. And yet somehow, the second the Tamar had touched down beside the village, before the ramp was even all the way down, Lan and her friends had appeared out of the night like a crack commando unit, surrounding the ship on all sides. Aguilar stood beside her at the foot of the ramp, and the chief looked twitchy, his hand brushing the butt of his holstered pistol as he watched the civilians unroll the netting.

They were all ages, men and women and even a few children, and what struck Pri most about them wasn’t that they’d come out to help so much as that they wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t look at the ship unless they were actually throwing the netting across it to camouflage it from the air. It was like they wanted to be able to tell the truth if they were asked if they’d seen it.

Or more like they’re all scared out of their minds.

“I’m Priyanka Ambedkar, captain of the Tamar,” she said, offering a hand. The old woman stared at it without moving as the younger man standing beside her whispered in her ear in Vietnamese.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, Lan took the hand, her grip remarkably strong for someone who was pushing eighty and looked even older thanks to the life she’d lived.

“Madame Lan,” the man said, nodding to them, “does not speak much English. My name is Chien and I will translate for her.” He was only young compared to Lan, Pri judged, finally getting a good look at him in the dim light filtering out from inside the ship.

“Where is Victor?” Lan repeated. It seemed to be the only English phrase she was sure of.

“Victor went with another group from the ship,” Pri said, speaking slowly and clearly, unsure how well the translator understood her language. “They’re trying to retrieve something very important, something the Union doesn’t want the Alliance to have.”

Chien leaned in again, and this time the old woman took hold of his arm and leaned against him for support as he relayed the answer. Once she heard, Lan’s eyes narrowed and ice filled Pri’s gut at the thought she wouldn’t believe them, that she’d turn them in.

“I am not a soldier,” Chien said, only seconds ahead of the old woman’s string of Vietnamese. “But if I were, I would ask you for a gun and fight beside you. As would anyone here.”

Pri couldn’t say whether the claim was true, but there were dozens of people helping to camouflage her ship. Some carried what looked to be strung-together fishnets, the kind she’d seen used on boats despite the fact they were miles inland, others canvas tarpaulins. They pulled them over the top of the Tamar through the simple expedient of tying one end of a rope to the sheet of netting or canvas, the other to something heavy, like a boat anchor or a metal hook, and flinging it over the top of the ship to be hauled down by villagers on the other side.

“Would you like to come inside?” Pri asked Lan, waving back up the ramp. “We could sit down and talk.”

Because frankly, you look like a good, stiff breeze could knock you over. That probably wasn’t fair. The woman had to be pretty damned tough to survive this long, and also to get the village to go along with this whole thing. But being inside would make the chief feel better. Me, too, if I’m being honest.

Lan nodded to them once the message had been passed onto her, and Pri offered her an arm to help her up. Lan glared at it and snapped something at her, which was, apparently, rude enough to make Chien hesitant before translating it.

“Madame Lan says she is not an invalid and can walk very well on her own.”

Pri suspected there had originally been a lot more profanity in what she said than what he’d relayed to them, but she nodded respectfully.

“Tell her I meant no offense. When I used to visit my grandmother in London, she would always hold on to my arm as we went up the stairs to her flat.” Nanna had also been a barely functional alcoholic, but Lan didn’t need to know that.

Lan said nothing, but nodded at Pri and tromped up the ramp with short, shuffling steps. Pri took a long look behind them before she followed the old woman. The village was tiny, primitive, like something she’d have found in their home country sixty or seventy years ago, the houses built from thatch and local wood, fences shaped from rough-hewn logs, constraining raw-boned cattle and restless goats. She’d seen the rice paddies from the air, but what she hadn’t seen was any sort of machinery, which probably meant the Chinese expected them to do things the old-fashioned way here.

She turned to head up the ramp, but her eyes met those of a teenaged girl. She was pulling up an armful of brush to pile around the nose of the ship, and she either lacked the fear and wariness of the adults or simply wasn’t cognizant of how much danger she was actually in. She offered Pri a smile and a half wave, and the pilot returned them, hoping she wasn’t about to get the girl and everyone she knew killed.

Aguilar had preceded Lan and Chien up the ramp and by the time Priyanka caught up to them in the galley, the chief was waving them to one of the tables. Hill and Gina hung back by the cockpit, the copilot glancing back and forth between the visitors and the main screens.

“Adrian,” she said, trying not to sound too sharp since they had guests, “you’re supposed to be on watch.”

Hill sighed and ducked back into the cockpit, leaving Gina alone. The young woman seemed acutely aware of this, and she folded her arms across herself and tried to shrink back into the bulkhead. Pri took a seat across from Lan and Chien, putting her back to the cockpit so she could watch the ramp, even though she knew Aguilar would keep an eye on it as well.

“What’s the name of your village?” she asked, trying to be polite. “We couldn’t find it on any of our maps.”

Lan laughed hoarsely at the question.

“The Chinese call it Duoyishu, after one of their small rice-farming towns back on Earth. No one here uses the name unless the overseers stop by to check our progress or collect their taxes. For us, it will always be Cu Lao Gieng. We have been here over twenty years and we will outlast the bastards.”

“You must have been in your sixties when you came here?” Which might have been a rude question to ask an older lady, but Pri couldn’t contain her curiosity. It didn’t seem like something the Chinese would have done when they were trying to drop self-sustaining colonies on other worlds as fast as they could, bringing along older people.

Lan didn’t just laugh at the question, she positively cackled, and even Chien chuckled before he passed along her reply.

“You’re wondering why they would want me. I will tell you the truth—they didn’t! They would have shipped me to Ho Chi Minh City with other refugees to be reeducated until I was either dead or singing the praises of the Chinese government and the new Alliance Vietnam had supposedly become a part of willingly. But I had friends in our village, relatives, and I decided that if my choices were a government work camp or exile to another world with the people I loved, I would choose exile.” The old woman scowled, a truly ferocious expression on her deeply lined face. “And all just so some Alliance politician could boast that they had a higher population on their worlds than the Americans and Europeans combined.”

“Did you ever meet Victor?” Gina asked, taking a few hesitant steps closer to the table.

“No. I did video chat with him once, before the Chinese forced Vietnam into their Alliance and suddenly, things like broadband internet became ‘tools of the counter-revolutionaries.’ He was four.” The smile flitted across the old woman’s face as if scared of the unfamiliar territory. “He was such a beautiful child. So intelligent. I wanted to see him again.”

A pang of guilt twisted Pri’s stomach, ameliorated only by the knowledge that it might be better if Lan didn’t meet Victor while he was under the influence of The Emissary. He freaked Pri out and she knew the whole story. She couldn’t imagine how Lan would react to him.

“He’s still very intelligent,” Gina told her, putting a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “He’s a graduate student of alien archaeology at the University of California at Berkeley. He’ll be a professor himself soon.”

“If he is a student,” Lan asked through Chien, “why is he working with the military?”

Gina froze at the question and Pri jumped in before the girl let too many cats out of the bag… particularly the one about them not actually working for the Union and in fact, being wanted by the government for murder and treason.

“He was recruited for his expertise on the subject of alien artifacts.” Which was also revealing too much, but they needed these people’s help and she had to tell them something. “There’s an important artifact on this planet and we have to get it before the Alliance does.”

“He was very brave to volunteer,” Gina added, catching on.

Lan eyed the younger woman with a raised eyebrow and said something that made Chien blush. When he translated it, Pri was certain the man had Bowdlerized it.

“Are you Victor’s… girlfriend?”

Now it was Gina’s turn to blush. To her credit, she didn’t stutter or hesitate.

“Maybe. I like him. But you’d have to ask him.” She smiled. “I hope you get the chance.”

“What do you need us to do?” Lan asked. “You asked for refuge, for a hiding place here, but is that all you would have from us?”

“If you have it,” Pri told her, “we could badly use some information. How often do the government overseers come here?”

Lan spoke to Chien in Vietnamese for nearly thirty seconds and when the man finally turned to them, Pri got the sense the reply was a combination of both their experiences.

“No more than once a month, in person. It is a”—he frowned as if searching for the correct phrase—“a big deal. We are expected to be pleased at their visit, to cease our work and have a holiday to celebrate. A feast.” He smiled wryly. “Which we, of course, pay for, on top of giving them a portion of our harvest and our animals twice a year. In return, we get… next to nothing. Oh, the overseer does bring a medical team with him, and an approved vendor to sell us what we need to continue working our farms and ranches at exorbitant prices. Also paid in trade, so that we may only raise enough to feed ourselves, and barely that, with little or nothing in the way of surplus, which is their plan.”

“You said in person,” Aguilar said, still facing down the ramp. Mosquitoes and light bugs swarmed at the bottom of the ramp, not able to make it past the overpressure vents at the top but trying their damnedest anyway. “What about flyovers? Drones?”

Another exchange that Pri couldn’t have hoped to follow even if she’d studied Vietnamese in college instead of taking two semesters of Spanish to satisfy her foreign-language requirement.

“Yes, we see their drones sometimes. No manned aircraft—we are not important enough for that. But I think they monitor us to make sure none of us are hiding produce from them in order to avoid paying taxes.” Chien shrugged. “They don’t come at any regular intervals, so I can’t be sure one hasn’t passed over since you landed, but usually someone spots them.”

“Usually,” Pri muttered. She twisted around in her seat and called back to Hill. “Yo, Adrian, have we spotted any drones?”

“Oh, yeah, Cap,” he told her, foot propped up casually on the center console. “Dozens. I just decided not to tell you because I didn’t want to interrupt tea and crumpets.”

“Shut up, Adrian.” She sighed. No drones yet, anyway. “Madame Lan, your people have helped us when you didn’t have to, and we appreciate it. Duty forces me to ask you, though… do you believe anyone here might be tempted to turn us in? Out of fear of reprisal if we’re discovered, perhaps?”

“Who can say?” The woman threw up her hands. “They are my people and I know them as well as anyone can who lives beside them every day. If they betray you, they betray me. And then, we are all dead.”

“At least she’s cheerful about it,” Aguilar said.

“Is there any way you can tell if someone has called out?” Pri insisted. “You were able to send us a message. Does the government allow you phones with access to their satellite communications or is there a central console of some kind?”

Chien answered this time, and Pri supposed he was entitled to, since he was obviously someone important enough in the village to be trusted as her translator. He pulled a phone out of his pocket and held it up to her. It was about ten years out of date and from a stolen design, but perfectly capable of connecting to a satellite antenna farm.

“Not everyone has a phone,” he explained. “They’re expensive, and we have to pay to access the system. But we share, and…” Chien shrugged. “There’s no way of guaranteeing all of the phones are secure short of searching everyone. And we’re not willing to do that. We trust our people.”

“Of course,” she agreed. “And so do we.” Pri smiled as sweetly as she was capable of. “Excuse me one moment, I have to go check on the ship’s systems.”

Hill didn’t look up at her entrance to the cockpit, chin resting on his fist, still staring at the screens.

“Can we jam their phones?” she asked him softly.

“Not a chance.” He still didn’t look up. “It’s a freaking satellite, Cap. The only way to stop it would be to put a Faraday cage over the whole village. Maybe the Space Force has some trick for doing that, but I forgot to requisition one before we resigned our commissions.”

She sighed, casting a look back over her shoulder at Lan and Chien. Gina was sitting with them, speaking softly, laughing.

“We’re going to have to trust them,” Pri said.

Hill finally turned and looked up at her. “Want me to have the ship powered up and ready to lift?”

“Of course. I don’t trust anyone that much.”

OceanofPDF.com

26

“Oh, my God, that hurt.”

“You have a gift for understatement, Chill,” Jax assured him.

Chase was surprised he was alive to hear them, even more surprised he was conscious. But Alex was right, it did hurt, everywhere.

“Are we upside down?” Angel asked, “or am I just concussed?”

“I think both,” Chase said. “But mostly upside down.”

Chase’s helmet visor was equipped with enhanced optics—infrared, thermal, even sonar pinging the sides and rear to form a 360-degree image put together by the best software the military had been able to afford fifteen years ago before it had been sold for surplus. But it couldn’t tell him a damned thing about where they were or what was outside. He was squeezed into a tin can with seven other people, the blood was running to his head, and the only solution he could see was to get out.

“I’m cutting loose,” he declared. “Everyone else hold on, we’ll get you down one at a time.”

It was times like these that Chase missed having enlisted soldiers around. They were generally young, suggestible, and recovered quicker from injuries, and he would have had no problem ordering a private or spec-4 to do this instead.

That’ll teach me to recruit a bunch of old farts for my team.

Cursing under his breath, Chase pulled down on the quick-release and dropped out of his harness. There wasn’t time to flip his feet around before he hit the pod’s ceiling, and extending his hands to catch himself was a wonderful way to break his wrists or dislocate a shoulder, which would have made him near useless in whatever fight was to come. Instead, he tucked his arms in and tried to land on his utility pack.

It wasn’t as comfortable as hitting on a ruck back in his days as a Ranger, because the ruck would have been stuffed with spare clothing, food, and a variety of other things that would have acted as cushion between himself and the corrugated aluminum overhead. The spare magazines, medical equipment, and other tactical gear he’d jammed into the utility pack did nothing but meld together to form the most efficient torture device since the iron maiden. When the combination of two hundred pounds of him, the unyielding ceiling, and the jutting edges of the gear slammed together, the result made the impact with the trees seem pleasant by comparison.

“Ow.”

“Are you all right?” Zack asked. “Do you need me to come down there and wipe the sand out of your…”

“Shut up, Zack,” he snapped, pushing himself up to one knee, “before I decide to let you hang there while we go carry out the mission.”

He needed to open the outer hatch, but he also needed to get Angel down. It didn’t make any tactical sense, and if he hadn’t been nursing what he was certain was a mild concussion, he would have left her there until he had the door open and Zack or Jax down to help the others. But he wasn’t thinking clearly, and all he knew was that she had to be hurting as bad as he was.

“Hang onto your shoulder straps,” he warned her, positioning himself beneath her seat before he activated her quick-release.

She fell from her seat, but did as he’d instructed and her lower body swung out, allowing him to catch her around the waist. She was solidly built, muscular and athletic, which made her heavy for her height, but he’d already known that and had prepared his stance to keep his balance when she landed on him. He set her feet down on the ground, leaving them in an awkward embrace, helmets touching. All he could hear was her ragged breath and for a moment, he didn’t want to move.

“Go help Vic down,” Chase said, letting go.

Zack was next since he was the closest, though he was looking forward to the task about as much as he had landing in the trees.

“You kick me in the head, you giant goofball,” Chase threatened, trying to work the restraint latch free of Zack’s rifle sling, “and I’ll let you drop to the Goddamned floor.”

“Yes, Sergeant Weston,” Zack said, his mockery cloaked in meekness. “Rangers lead the way, Sergeant Weston.”

“You’re damned right they do.”

Chase threw the restraint lever, ducked his head, and caught the weight of the big man on his shoulder, then shifted downward before it could wrench his back. Zack’s boot soles pounded on the aluminum ceiling like a bass drum, and the big man staggered backward, before catching himself on one of the seats.

“Get the others down,” he told Zack. “I’m going to check out the LZ.”

The escape hatch was in the back, which was why Chase had taken the rear seat instead of getting Chilly and Jax to teach him how to control the pod himself. The lever was old-school, no electronics, no motors, nothing that could fail unless the physical structure of the pod was compromised. It was also a stone-cold bitch to get open, particularly when it was upside-down. Chase planted a foot against the wall, grabbed the lever as if he was about to dead-lift it and pulled upward.

He tried to lift with his legs and not his back, to activate his core, anything to avoid throwing out a disc or pulling a muscle, and still felt like he was about to give himself a hernia before the damned thing cut loose. The pod was on the slightest incline toward the back and the hatch swung outward with a push. Chase winced as it clanged against the hull, sure the noise would carry in the night, but he shook the feeling away. If anyone was that close, they couldn’t have missed the pod crashing through the trees. Still, he swung his suppressed M27 up across his chest before he leaned out, ready to open fire if it turned out they were surrounded by Chinese soldiers.

They were surrounded by trees. Big trees, broad and solid, much like the oaks he remembered from Ranger school in Georgia, except the one they’d knocked over. It wasn’t that big, was not, thankfully, that solid. It had rotted from the inside and it had shattered at the impact. Approximately half of it was underneath them, leaving the pod about twelve feet off the ground, its parachutes tangled in the limbs of not only this oak but three or four around it. The impromptu suspension system kept them fixed in place, but Chase wasn’t convinced of its permanence.

“Hurry up,” he called back to the others inside the pod. “We need to get out of this thing fast.”

Despite the haste of his warning, Chase took a few seconds to scan around him before he tried to get out. Twelve feet wasn’t impossible to just drop. He’d done it before in jump school. The only trick was to do a proper parachute landing fall: balls of the feet, side of the calf, side of the thigh, side of the hip, side of the back. It might hurt from this distance, but it wouldn’t injure him.

Him. Zack could probably do it, too. The SEALs… maybe. Alex and Haskell, probably. The civilians, no way.

He craned his neck around, checking every side. The moon was out and through his enhanced optics, the reflection of its rays off the thick parachute cord was a shimmer of white light, drawing his eyes to it. The tightly wrapped cord dangled down the side of the pod, wrapped partway around a thick branch. The other end had ripped free of the parachute and was hanging off the bracket built into the rear of the pod. It looked solid enough but it was also just out of reach, a good two or three feet beyond his outstretched fingertips. Which meant he was going to have to do something stupid.

“Shit.”

Chase let his carbine retract back on its tactical sling and used both hands to pull himself into the hatch, where he braced his feet against the rim, steadying himself against the hinges just long enough to get a long breath. He jumped.

If he missed, there’d be no Parachute Landing Fall, no safe drop to the ground. He’d hit shoulder first and probably break something, certainly put himself out of the action. He didn’t miss. His palms burned even through the thick leather of his gloves as the entire weight of his body yanked at a few inches of surface area, and he swung out away from the pod before drifting back like a pendulum.

The pod shifted slightly and someone cursed inside of it loud enough for the sound to carry down to him. Hand over hand, he lowered himself until he was only three feet off the ground, then he dropped. Bits of shattered tree bark gave under his planted foot, and he fell to a knee, his M27 coming into his hands as if it had a life of its own.

Nothing moved. The only sound was the panting of his breath and the gentle moans and creaks of the tree under the weight of the pod. Chase held his breath and listened harder, counting on the sensitive external mics of his helmet and the algorithms of the software that interpreted those sounds to warn him if anything was approaching through the woods.

The breath whooshed out of him in a sigh. Still nothing.

“You okay down there, Sarge?” Zack called, looking down from the open hatch.

Chase stood, grabbed the dangling cords and swung them over to Zack, who caught them on his first try.

“Get the hell down out of that thing,” he told the man. “And don’t call me Sarge.”

* * *

Angel hated the rifle. The lines of it drew her eyes in, beautiful like the blade of a well-made knife, and the ergonomics bore the finish of decades of design, every handhold, every point that pressed against her body smooth, beveled off, perfect. Her thumb seemed to rest naturally against the safety switch, and when she’d brought it experimentally to her shoulder, the red dot of the electronic sight was an invitation, a sign where the bullets would go if she switched off that safety and pulled the trigger.

Which were all the reasons she hated it. She felt as if it wanted her to use it, wanted her to find someone to kill. She knew that was insane, irrational, that the rifle was a tool bent to her will, that it would shoot no one unless she made the conscious decision to try to kill them… and yet, with every step, every breath, all she could hear was the gunshot that had taken her mother’s life, all she could feel was that final tug on her arm, as if Mama had been unwilling to let go even in death.

She couldn’t picture her mother in her final moments because she hadn’t looked. Angel had known what was happening, and she hadn’t wanted to look, hadn’t wanted the blood and the shock and the pain to be the last image she had of her mother. For much of her life, Angel had been confident she’d made the right choice, but lately, she wasn’t so sure. Maybe her mother had tried to deliver some last-second message in her dying moments, something Angel had missed because she’d wanted to spare herself the horror of watching the woman die.

And what would Mama think of me now? Walking in—what had Chase called it? Oh yeah, Ranger file—walking in Ranger file through the woods on a Chinese colony world with a squad of mercenaries, trying to steal an alien artifact. Carrying a gun. Ready to use it. Would she be proud of her little girl or horrified?

But was she ready to use it? She’d told Chase she was. Could she watch him die or would she look away?

As if Chase was reading her thoughts, he raised his left fist, a signal she knew meant for the file to halt. A moment longer and he took a knee, and she followed suit. There was barely enough light from the full moon to see his movements, to watch the forest floor for loose twigs, but the darkness did have one advantage—it allowed her to more easily notice the light.

The glow was gentle but obvious, a dome of pale yellow rising above the trees, the sort of lighting Angel would expect at this time of night. It was enough to allow guards to walk around, enough to give security cameras something to work with, but not bright enough to shine in through curtains and keep people awake.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Chase murmured, not loud enough to carry past her ears. Was he talking to himself or to her? “We’re too close. There should be guards out here, at least drones or security cameras.”

He had to be talking to her. He wasn’t a man given to wasting his breath.

“It might not be military,” she suggested, keeping her voice as soft as his and trusting it to carry. “It’s a big planet, and this is a remote area. Maybe it’s a mine or a supply depot.”

“There’s no transport in and out. We saw it from the air. The cleared area wasn’t large enough for cargo haulers, and there’s no railroads, no surface roads big enough for trucks.”

He fell silent, and she knew he’d made up his mind.

Chase didn’t transmit his orders via their helmet radios. He’d warned her he wouldn’t, that they shouldn’t use them once they got close to the settlement. Theoretically, the helmet comms were secure, but Chase Weston wasn’t a trusting soul. He motioned them to go down from one knee to a high-crawl, which was what he’d called the elbows-and-knees motion he’d showed her. Bits of gravel, rock and bark littered the ground, and Angel winced in anticipation of them digging into her elbows and knees, but she’d underestimated the padding built into the fatigues she’d borrowed from the Tamar, and she barely felt discomfort much less pain.

She cradled her rifle in her arms like a baby and scooted along just behind him, second in line. Angel wanted to believe it was an honor, a sign of his trust in her ability and willingness to watch his back, but the reality was probably that he wanted her close enough to keep an eye on. She glanced back at Victor, who had the third spot in line, and decided that was probably closer to the truth. He lacked a rifle and his pistol was still holstered on his vest, but he carried the duffle bag in his arms instead, as disturbing an image as her cradling the rifle.

The others didn’t stay in line, spreading out on either side, Chilly, Jax and Zack on her right, Alex and Haskell on her left. A wedge formation, that was what it was called. She’d looked infantry tactics up on manuals Pri and the others had stored in the central servers of the Tamar, trying to be less useless in situations such as these, and ideally, she and Victor would be on one side or the other, but Chase hadn’t told them to pull up. Trying to protect us. It infuriated her. And yet, if he was protecting her, maybe she wouldn’t have to pull the trigger.

The tree line ended abruptly after only another thirty yards, the remnants of blasted stumps a divider showing where the Chinese had created the clearing with explosives and construction equipment. Chase halted them again just inside the shelter of the last cluster of the massive oaks. Not really oaks but close enough, according to the Emissary. She was going to call them oaks anyway, despite whatever genetic modifications The People had performed, but tree nomenclature wasn’t her primary concern.

The ten-feet-tall, bipedal robots were.

“What the fuck?” That was, of course, Chilly. He probably hadn’t meant to say it that loud, but she didn’t blame him.

There were six of them, lined up like sentries across the clearing, and to anyone else, it might have seemed they were guardians, waiting to blast intruders with machine guns or something even more esoteric. Not to Angel. She saw the attachments on their arms—shovel blades, scoops, augers—and knew what they were, and with one look at the open end of the building, she knew what this place was, and why there were no troops, no guards, no drones.

It wasn’t a warehouse. There were no cargo crates inside, no pallet jacks, no forklifts. It wasn’t a military base either. It was three walls and a roof, corrugated aluminum supported by four-by-six beams, mostly there as a shelter against the weather, she imagined. Piles of dirt six or eight feet high were pushed up against the tree line on the other side of the clearing, and where they’d been was now an earthen ramp leading downward… downward into ruins she recognized very well.

“Those are construction ’bots,” she told them. “They dug that ramp. They’re plugged in for the night, charging.”

“But what the hell are they constructing way out here?” Chase asked, shaking his head. “What the hell is this place?”

“This is an archaeological dig,” Angel replied. “An Arborist ruin.”

“Oh, son of a bitch,” Chilly moaned. “We’re too damned late.”

OceanofPDF.com

27

“No,” Victor declared, “we’re not.”

Chase was loathe to take his eyes off possible threats, and instinctively wanted to keep a watch on those damned giant robots, no matter what Angel had said about them being inactive and charging, but he looked back over his shoulder at Victor. The kid was staring at the building as if he could see right through it.

“How do you know?” Chase asked.

“Because the Navigator is still inside.” He pointed into the open end of the structure, down the ramp. “I can feel it.”

“They don’t know it’s here,” Grey Haskell said, coming up on one knee to get a better look. “If they did, this place would be crawling with troops.”

“If they knew it was here,” Chase corrected him, “they’d have taken it somewhere safer already. Probably back to Earth.”

“This is just another Arborist dig,” Angel insisted. “Well-equipped, so it’s probably government sponsored, but this far away from any cities or even farming settlements, I doubt they’ll have any real security. We can just walk right in.”

She was up on a knee as well, her rifle hanging at her side as if she’d forgotten it. And she probably wanted to. Chase trusted her, but he also had to factor in how badly she wanted there to be no enemy here to kill.

“Jax,” he said, “are you picking up any wireless security cam signals?”

Any of them could have used the detector, but someone had to do it, and Jax had volunteered. It was strapped to his tactical vest, the antenna running up the sides of his utility pack, the display linked into his helmet visor.

“Nothing,” he reported. “And I don’t know about anyone else, but I haven’t seen any thermal signatures moving around, either.”

“It’s your call Sarge,” Zack told him.

Yeah, no shit.

“Don’t call me Sarge. Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. Zack, Dr. Cortez, Vic and I are all going inside. The four of us are going to run across that field as fast as we can and spend just as little time in the open as we have to. The rest of you need to fan out around the tree line and keep security for us. Anything or anyone comes near the building, break radio silence and let me know.”

“Jesus, Weston!” Chilly said, throwing up a hand. “You’re taking the civilians in there but not us?”

“Chilly, the only way you could excavate an artifact is if it was buried up your ass.” Chase shrugged. “No offense. Spread out and try to get as good a vantage point as you can, all the way from the road to the other side of the building.” Which was as far as the tree line ran before it hit the landing field on one side and the other structures north of the dig, which Chase thought had to be barracks for the workers. Chase turned to his group, pointing at his own chest. “I’m going first, then you, Angel, then Vic. Zack, ride drag, make sure no one falls behind.”

“Copy that,” Zack told him. If Chase had to guess, he would have said the big man was as unhappy about the arrangement of the entry as Chilly, but had the good sense not to bother complaining.

Chase waited another few seconds, watching Chilly and Jax head one way along the edge of the forest while Alex Quesada and Grey Haskell went the other. He liked the two Marines, mostly for the fact that they didn’t talk nearly as much as Chilly.

“All right, move out.”

He’d considered trying to match his pace to the others, but rejected the idea. If there was anyone inside the dig shelter, he wanted to reach them first. He sprinted across the field, his steps high to avoid catching a foot on the charging cables running out to the construction ’bots or the other garbage and debris strewn in the tall grass. Shadows tugged at the corners of his vision, phantoms enticing him like the sirens had called to Odysseus, trying to get him to look aside and bust his ass tripping over a discarded folding chair or a beer bottle. Chase didn’t have anyone tie him to a mast, just focused on the top of the ramp. If any of the phantoms were real, Zack would warn him. Or he’d get shot.

Neither happened and the greatest danger he faced running full-out across the field was losing his head of steam and letting Angel catch up to him. He didn’t look back, but the woman was endlessly competitive, and he had the sense she was hard on his heels. He didn’t like to think he cared about her embarrassing him, but he did. Chase kicked in an extra gear and hit the top of the ramp almost too fast to slow down. Pounding steps turned into leaps and bounds, digging the side of his foot into the packed dirt with each landing until he came off the ramp and into the flat at a light jog, his rifle at his shoulder, scanning for threats.

There were none. The ramp had deposited him a good thirty feet beneath ground level, surrounded by aisles and walkways straight and even enough to have been dug by the bipedal robots outside. Between the walkways were the remains of Arborist walls and doorways, or at least they looked similar enough to the ones he’d seen on Vishnu that he felt safe making the assumption. There were a dozen nooks and crannies that could have served as a hiding place for enemy troops, but none presented themselves, though he nearly fired a burst into the wall when Angel came up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t think much of their archaeological technique,” she opined, motioning at the squared-off aisles. Chase was panting hard, but Angel didn’t even seem out of breath. “There’s a reason most universities won’t use digging machinery. The government probably did a survey with ground-penetrating radar and figured that, since they didn’t find anything, they could dig here without worrying about it.” She shook her head. “Not every artifact shows up on radar. They might have crushed skeletons to powder.”

“I’ll mention that to them at the next annual convention of Alliance Xenoarchaeologists,” Zack told her as he came off the foot of the ramp, Victor just in front of him. “Can we get this show on the road?”

“Vic,” Chase said, nodding to the kid. “Where is it?”

“This tunnel,” Victor said, pointing to the far right-hand corner of the shelter.

Chase hadn’t noticed the tunnel, buried in shadows, lacking any heat sources for his thermal optics to glom onto, but now that the kid had pointed it out, he spotted the entrance. It was just under six feet high and four feet across, and unlike the rest of the dig, had clearly been excavated by human sweat, braced up with the same sort of four-by-fours that were used in the construction of the shelter.

He ducked down by reflex, though he might have just scraped under the ceiling of the tunnel, and switched on his infrared flashlight. Chase and most other doorkickers avoided active infrared in combat, since the enemy had NVGs too, and shining an infrared light was just as much painting a target on themselves as using a visible-spectrum one. Down here, inside the tunnel, though, it was unlikely to give away their position, and it would be necessary to see a damned thing, unless he wanted to switch on one of the floodlights the Chinese had attached to support beams.

The tunnel went back about twenty feet, and at the end was a pile of rocks.

No, not rocks. Blocks. Building blocks, except the corners have worn down, and most are broken.

“It’s behind that wall,” Victor said, somehow right beside him even though he hadn’t been anywhere near the tunnel when Chase entered. He’d taken The Emissary out of the duffle bag, and the golden glow from the alien AI threw the kid’s face into sharp relief, his features angular and shadowy.

Chase had already let himself get startled once when Angel had snuck up on him. This time, he retained his composure, looking between Victor and the pile of rocks bigger than his head.

“How far behind?”

“A few feet. If you and Sgt. Wilson work together, you should be able to dig it out in less than an hour.”

“Me and Sgt. Wilson, huh?” Chase said, snorting a humorless laugh. “Isn’t that as convenient as hell.”

“I’m not an athlete, Sgt. Weston.” Victor waved a hand toward himself demonstratively. “I’d just slow you down.”

Angel sighed, pushing past him.

“I’ll help. Come on, I need to be up here anyway. You don’t want this whole tunnel collapsing because you moved the wrong rock.”

“Be our guest, Doc,” Zack invited, slinging his rifle and grabbing a rock near the bottom of the pile, slinging it to the side.

Chase wanted to object, wanted to put Zack up on watch at the mouth of the tunnel, but the truth was, by the time he saw a threat up there, it would be too late for them to run. Their best defense was finding the damned artifact and getting out quick, which meant the two of them had to move rocks.

He was already sweating, even in the slight chill of the forest night, and he was tempted to take off his helmet, but that would mean losing his night vision.

Embrace the suck.

Thirty minutes, forty stones and a gallon of sweat later, Chase was questioning both the ancient Ranger ethic and Victor Lee’s estimate of how long it would take to reach the artifact.

“Take a break,” he said, staggering to the side, catching himself against the packed dirt of the tunnel wall. “Get some water.”

Which meant that he needed a break and a drink, but NCOICs didn’t say that sort of thing. He pulled the nipple of his water bladder up to his mouth and took a long, satisfying sip. Hard labor had a way of making even lukewarm water taste good.

“You’re close,” Victor assured him, eyes closed, arms folded around the Emissary. “Just another foot or two and you’ll have it.”

Chase wanted to tell him where he could stick that foot or two, but that was another thing NCOICs didn’t do. Angel squatted beside what was left of the pile, her visor down, presumably making use of the night vision to examine the dig.

“I think we’ll be okay, as far as the support goes,” she judged. “Just try not to pull too much from the very bottom. There’s a base there that’s holding up the edges.”

Chase was about to assure her that he didn’t want to pull any more rocks out of the bottom of the pile than he had to, but the thought was interrupted by his helmet radio.

“Weston, this is Haskell.”

Shit. If the Royal Marine was breaking radio silence, that could only mean one thing.

“I copy,” was all he said, hoping he was wrong.

“We have six, repeat, six Tangoes coming your way on foot from the direction of the landing field. One civilian, one senior officer from the dress uniform and the fruit salad on his chest, and four armed infantry. They are three hundred meters from your position and about a kilometer from Alex and me. Do you want us to engage?”

Stuck in the tunnel, Chase tried to picture the approach and their relative positions. A kilometer wasn’t too far for the PSR sniper rifle, and it was suppressed, which might confuse anyone listening as to what they were hearing, but there were six of them, and all it would take was one getting off a shot to warn any other troops or security guards stationed at the dig.

Or hell, just the workers coming out would be enough problems. We’re not going to shoot them all down.

“Negative. Let them come. We’ll take care of them.”

“Chase,” Chilly cut in, “you want us to come in behind them? We could take them out after they’re inside the building.”

Not a bad idea, and he was a little surprised Chilly had been the one to come up with it.

“No. There could be more that we haven’t seen. I need you to keep watch while we handle the situation in here. If we need help, I’ll call. Weston out.”

Angel was staring at him, her rifle back in her hands and fear in her eyes. Not fear of what might happen to her, Chase was sure, but of what she might be forced to do.

“What do you want us to do?”

The answer was as simple as it was desperate.

“Hide.”

* * *

“You were a professional surfer?” Gina asked, laughing in delight and clapping her hands together. “That is so awesome.”

“I was young, then,” Lan said through Chien. “And the Chinese had not yet absorbed us into their Alliance. I can’t say Vietnam was as open as America or some of the European countries, at least from what we saw on the internet and television, but it was not a bad place to live.” The old woman laughed. “And I was much younger then, of course. I think if I were to try to surf today, I would wind up breaking my neck!”

Chien leaned over conspiratorially, as if sharing a secret with Gina.

“That is not true, if you ask me. Madame Lan is quite the athlete still, and I would give much to see her surf again.”

“I used to surf,” Gina confided. “I sucked at it, but I refused to give it up because being good at it just looked like so much fun.”

“That is the secret to life, my dear. Never give up on what makes you happy.”

Gina paused, taken aback not by the suggestion but by the sudden realization that she had no idea what that might be. Lan’s smile was canny, knowing, as if the old woman were inside her head.

“What’s wrong, girl? Do you have nothing that makes you feel complete?”

Gina didn’t answer immediately, trying to remember the last time she’d actually been happy. All she could think of was when she’d joined up with Executive Options, signed on to be their reactor tech. She’d met new people, gotten to hang out with her big sister for the first time in years… it had almost been like a new family.

“I guess,” she finally said, “I’ve always wanted to be part of something bigger.”

“We are all part of something bigger,” Chien said, and this time, Lan hadn’t spoken first. Gina hadn’t given much thought to the man except in his role as a mouthpiece for Lan. He had a certain dignified quality to him, something about his straight posture even seated at the table, the way he held himself. Lan might be the earth-mother of this place, but Chien was an important man. “Whether we acknowledge it or not, everything we do affects everyone else.”

“No man is an island entire of itself,” Priyanka spoke up. The woman had said nothing while Gina and Lan had talked, content, it seemed, to stand and wait for their call. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” she went on with the quote.

Gina had heard the phrase before, had known tangentially that it was part of a poem, but had never heard the whole thing. She rested her chin on her palm and listened to the pilot finish the verse.

“If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

“I didn’t picture you as the poetic type, Captain Ambedkar,” Gina said, clapping softly.

“I don’t know that I am,” Pri admitted. “But I went out with an English literature major in college, and if I took nothing else from that relationship, I did receive an appreciation for John Donne.”

“Cap!” Hill yelled, his usual detached apathy gone, his eyes wide as he spun in his chair. “We’ve got bogies! Coming in hot and low at maybe ten klicks out! They gotta be Chinese military!”

“Chief,” Pri said immediately, running for the cockpit, “get the civilians off the boat and away from the ramp. We are lifting immediately!”

Gina’s blood froze in her veins, knowing what that meant. The Alliance knew they were here. She looked at Lan, stricken, but the woman was calm.

“Come with us,” Gina urged. “We can take you back to Earth, to see your cousin.”

Pri glared back at her, but then her expression softened.

“You should,” she agreed. “If you’re gone, your village can blame all this on you. They’ll be safe.”

“That’s not how the Chinese government operates,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “Someone will be punished. If it’s not me, then it would be Chien, and if not him, then whoever was left who was looked to as a leader.” She stood and put a hand on Gina’s shoulder. Her grip was firm, her smile gentle. “This is what it means to be part of something larger.”

She and Chien went down the ramp, had barely stepped off before Aguilar hit the control to raise it. Gina couldn’t stop staring at them, even as the ramp closed, watching them disappear, swallowed up by a closing door.

“She won’t get to see Victor,” Gina whispered.

“Get strapped in,” Pri yelled back from the cockpit over the ascending whine of the drive powering up. “We’re going to pick up Chase and the others!”

“What if they don’t have the artifact yet?” Gina fumbled with the latch of the harness on her chair.

“Then they’d better get it fast. Because we’re out of here.”

OceanofPDF.com

28

Angel Cortez was alone.

Zack Wilson was ten feet distant, tucked behind a boulder the digging crew had worked loose from the rock wall. Chase was crouched in the shadows only a step away, and Victor had retreated into the gap they’d made in the rock wall, squatting in the midst of the wreckage like a Buddha. They were all close enough to see, to whisper to, and yet they might as well have been continents away, because the Chinese were inside the shelter, and the only one who could tell her whether it was time to pull the trigger of the rifle was her.

“Get the lights!” The voice was commanding, authoritarian, probably the officer Haskell had told them about. It spoke Mandarin, of course, but so did she, an investment in time and credit hours in college that she never dreamed would prove so damned practical.

“Visors up,” Chase hissed, and she wondered why for a second before the floodlights built into the support beams flashed on and the enhanced optics of her helmet visor flashed white, bright enough to send sparkling floaters cascading through her eyes.

Angel bit down on a curse and pushed her visor up, blinking quickly to try to clear her vision. Zack had listened of course, or perhaps known to do it already. Victor hadn’t lifted his, and didn’t seem bothered. Of course, that could be The Emissary’s doing. She wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find out the thing had improved the software in the enhanced optics to compensate for the sudden burst of light.

“Much better,” the deep, authoritarian voice declared. Footsteps, soft clomps in the packed dirt, then louder as they trod on the wooden planks laid over test holes dug in the floor. “You’ve made much progress Dr. Tsung. I trust the digging machines helped.”

“Of course, Colonel Xiang.” A softer tone, older. “They were much appreciated, as were the soldiers you sent as extra workers. They did take some time to train, however. Archaeology is a bit more gentle an art than soldiering.”

“Is that the excuse you’re giving for not producing results?” Any bonhomie Colonel Xiang had affected before was gone now, and the footsteps were heavy, his voice a few feet closer than before. Angel couldn’t see him yet, though elongated shadows shifted in the glare from the overhead lights and she thought the colonel had stepped closer to the archaeologist. “The Americans have already discovered the alien device in one of their Arborist digs. This is the largest Arborist ruin in the Alliance colonies and if there is anything valuable here, I expect you to find it.”

“Colonel,” Tsung objected, “there are a dozen Arborist ruins just that we know of. We only know of one which has produced something more than stones and broken, worthless computer terminals. The odds that this dig will have another of these artifacts you spoke of are vanishingly small.”

“Sir.” That was a new voice, younger, respectful. One of the soldiers. “What’s that glow?”

Angel glanced behind her. She hadn’t noticed the glow because of the floodlights, but now that the soldier had mentioned it, it was plain to her. It was the same golden radiance from the Emissary that she’d seen before, but now it seemed even more intense, and maybe that was because of the proximity of the Navigator. Or maybe the Emissary was trying to get them killed.

“What’s in that tunnel, Doctor?” the colonel asked.

“Just another section of the ruins, Colonel. We haven’t completely excavated it, yet.”

“Sergeant,” Xiang snapped, “take your men in and check it out.”

Angel wanted to yell at Victor to extinguish the light, but it was too late for that. She gripped the rifle with white knuckles and clung to it as desperately as she’d rejected it before. Chase was flashing signals to Zack, but when he glanced back at her, he whispered into his helmet mic. It was too soft to even carry the few feet between them, but the mic picked it up and the software enhancement transmitted it to her as clearly as if he’d been right next to her.

“Zack and I will take the soldiers. You and Vic take the officer and the archaeologist.”

Me and Vic. Victor was still nestled inside the wall, unmoving. Am I supposed to kill them? Chase had said “keep them busy.” Panic coiled in her stomach like a spring, tensed and about to let loose and leave her helpless. She clamped down on it and on the grip of the rifle, then her thumb flicked off the safety and turned it to semiautomatic, one shot for every squeeze of the trigger. Chase had told her it would be easier to control than trying to shoot full-automatic.

The sight was simple, a red circle floating where the bullets would hit, but when she brought the weapon to her shoulder, that circle was dangerously close to Zack. She cursed and lowered the barrel, only able to watch as the Chinese soldiers entered the tunnel.

* * *

The plan was simple because there wasn’t time for anything complicated. Just wait until all four soldiers were in the tunnel, bottled up in a chokepoint, then open fire. It would be a surprise attack so there was no reason to think he and Zack couldn’t take out four enemy troopers. The tricky part, in his estimation, was going to be getting to the colonel before he alerted the others. The archaeologist, Tsung, had mentioned soldiers being used as workers, and he doubted they’d come out here with no weapons. He had to make sure the officer was dead before he could get to his phone or radio.

Shadows stretched down through the mouth of the tunnel, men carrying rifles. Union or Alliance, American or Chinese, the shapes were the same. So was the job. These guys weren’t politicians, weren’t top brass. They hadn’t made the decision to finance terrorists to plant nukes in American cities, hadn’t been the ones to use them in Philippines. Some would be patriots who’d volunteered to serve their country, others poor schlubs who’d been conscripted. The colonel was probably as much politician as military officer, because that was how things went in anyone’s army. The higher the rank, the more politics involved. But not these guys. Not the ones who’d pay the price.

His visor was still up, so Chase was forced to use the backup electronic sight mounted on the rifle’s receiver. The crimson aiming reticle floated over the chest of the leader of the four, a senior sergeant or shang shi, if he remembered his Chinese ranks correctly. Way too high a rank to be a regular team leader, so this must be the colonel’s personal bodyguard. The fact he was going first meant he either didn’t trust the rest of his team or he had the courage of his convictions to want to be the first in the line of fire. The second possibility was a worst-case scenario, because good leaders made good decisions and right now, Chase was really hoping for bad decisions.

He tried to sink further into the shadows, but the dirt and stone were unyielding.

Breathe shallow. Don’t hold your breath. It was always a temptation, but the spasm of that first inhale could throw off a shot.

The Chinese sergeant took another step, so careful and thorough, he might have been walking in slow motion. Chase could see him clearly, the glow from the Emissary enough light now that the enemy soldier’s body blocked out the glare from the floodlights. He was tall and skinny, his body armor and fatigues the latest variable-camouflage stuff that the Union military had developed three or four years ago, and promptly had the design stolen by industrial spies. It shifted with the pattern of light and shadows, blending perfectly with any background.

Chase thought it was gimmicky, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have given his full cut from a mission to get a set for himself. It made it harder to find center mass, even this close, but even spray-and-pray would work in these tight confines. If the next guy would just move a little faster…

The shang shi stopped. His eyes were invisible behind his helmet’s visor but Chase read his body language, read the hesitation in the set of his feet and just knew. The sergeant was the only one he had a shot at, but Chase squeezed the trigger anyway.

A suppressed rifle wasn’t silenced, despite what a lot of action movies liked to portray. 170 decibels for an unsuppressed assault rifle vs 120 for the latest, high-tech suppressors, the ones that had only been around for the last ten years or so. 120 decibels was the noise level of an indoor rock concert or a leaf blower. Not damaging to the hearing of the shooter even without the noise-dampening headphones of the helmet, but certainly not silent. The dirt of the tunnel absorbed some of the sound, the interior of the shelter taking some more, probably enough that someone outside wouldn’t know they’d heard a gunshot. But they’d know they’d heard something.

The Chinese NCO jerked backward, whether from pain or surprise, Chase didn’t know, though he was certain he’d hit the man. Another way real life wasn’t like the movies he’d seen as a kid was, people didn’t automatically fall when they got shot. A human body could run for minutes on adrenaline before blood loss killed them, unless they were the recipient of a CNS—Central Nervous System—shot. The sergeant didn’t fall for a full second, the time it took Chase to deliver the follow-up shot through the man’s visor and into his brain.

A second didn’t seem like much, but it was forever in a firefight. Long enough for the soldiers behind the shang shi to react, if not to think. They reacted by spraying gunfire into the tunnel and running back the way they’d come.

There are those bad choices I was waiting for.

Chase ducked back, hoping the others were smart enough to do the same, trying to make himself smaller as 5.8mm bullets buried themselves in the dirt or blew splinters away from the wooden support beams. A baseball bat whacked him squarely in the thigh, and he nearly fell to a knee at the impact but stayed upright. He’d been hit, and he’d just have to hope the thick armor plate over his thigh had stopped the round, since there wasn’t time to check.

“Go!” he yelled, not caring whether his radio picked up the order or not. Zack would either hear it or would see him ducking out from cover and rushing the tunnel entrance, rifle stuttering a familiar chorus on full-auto.

Chase knew he had another two seconds maximum before the colonel or one of the subordinate junior NCOs took charge of this goat rope, maybe another three or four before someone thought to call for help. Charging straight into the enemy was risky, maybe even reckless, but it beat all to hell sitting in the tunnel and waiting for someone to throw a grenade at them.

He fired as he went, not having to worry about any friendlies ahead of him, even though there was no way he could maintain a consistent aim. Somehow, almost miraculously, he hit something. The closest of the three remaining soldiers staggered, clutching at his right arm, and just that half-breath delay was enough for Zack Wilson to get into the fight. Only one of the two unwounded Chinese soldiers was still firing, the other already trying to swap out a magazine, having emptied his weapon in a long, uncontrolled burst over the course of three seconds.

The 5.8mm chattered spitefully for another half-second before Zack cut him down with a three-round burst of 6.8mm, shattering the Chinese soldier’s visor in a spray of plastic and blood. That left two, the one changing mags and the one Chase had wounded in the arm. Chase had three choices, each equally bad. His rifle mag was empty, and switching out to a fresh one would take a two-count, not allowing for unforeseeable delays such as the edge of a magazine getting stuck against the interior of the pouch. Choice number two was dropping the rifle on its sling and going for his handgun. That would take only slightly less time and leave him with only the option of a head or neck shot, since the 9mm would definitely not penetrate the Chinese body armor.

The last option was, perhaps, the most desperate, but it was also the fastest and left his rifle in his hands. Chase swept the butt around in an arcing strike downward, smacking the rifle out of the wounded soldier’s hands, leaving the other for Zack. The Chinese bullpup clattered against the wooden plank walkway before it recoiled back up into place at the enemy soldier’s side on the tactical sling attached to the man’s vest. He was a junior sergeant, a xia shi, and though he might not have had the almost preternatural senses of his senior who’d died back in the tunnel, he was still a well-disciplined fighter. The xia shi’s right arm was useless, blood soaking through at the elbow joint, but he went for his sidearm with his left hand, stepping back to give himself time.

Chase had gone through bayonet drills as a private at infantry school, gone through them again in Ranger training, and always thought that it was an archaic holdover, a vestigial organ, the appendix in the body of the US Army. And yet here, twenty years later, he was using the same motions with his rifle, even if there was no bayonet attached. Butt-stroke to the soldier’s left wrist, breaking the bone there with an audible snap, then swing the barrel around and jam it into the man’s exposed throat.

No blade graced the front of his rifle, but he didn’t need one to crush the Chinese soldier’s windpipe. The xia shi collapsed, unable to clutch at his throat because both of his arms were broken. It might not have been fatal, if the man had been rushed straight from there to a fully furnished hospital, but Chase was working on instinct and reflex and the killing blow came automatically, a kick beneath the Chinese soldier’s chin that snapped his head back.

The man slumped, his neck snapped, and Chase took the opportunity to swap out his spent mag and scan for remaining threats. The last of the personal guard team was down, writhing, trying to breathe with his lungs full of blood, while Zack ignored the man, reloading his M27 with practiced ease, as if he hadn’t just killed two men.

Chase spun around in place, panic swelling in his chest.

“Where’s the colonel? Where’s the scientist?” There was no one in sight. “And where the hell is Angel?”

* * *

Angel crouched as low as she could, gritting her teeth and forcing her eyes to stay open despite the irresistible urge to squeeze them shut against the rain of bullets impacting all around. The Chinese soldiers couldn’t have actually been aiming at her, couldn’t have known where she was, but they were doing their best to kill her just the same.

It was the sheer sound that was the worst, the jackhammer pounding echoing off the walls of the tunnel, not exactly hurting her ears since the helmet headphones protected them, but still thudding inside her sinuses. It lasted forever, and then forever ended and Zack and Chase were running up and out of the tunnel, and she knew she had to follow. She didn’t want to. She wanted to stay right there where it seemed safe, but Chase was up there risking his life, and she couldn’t let him do it alone.

“Come on, Victor!” she called to the younger man, but she didn’t wait around to see if he would follow.

Coming out of the tunnel, the glare of the overhead lights nearly blinded her and she ran headlong into another hail of bullets, as if fate was conspiring to kill her off. Something caught her in the left shoulder, right on the pauldron built into the torso armor there, harder than any kick she’d ever received sparring, enough to knock the wind out of her and make her whole arm go numb. It nearly turned her to the side and she went with the turn, ducking to the left and running as hard as she could despite the spear of pain through her shoulder.

I’m shot. The realization was far from apocalyptic, more along the lines of discovering that she’d missed a doctor’s appointment or bought a carton of expired eggs. She’d been hit, but her arm moved and she felt no wetness. The armor had done its job… probably. Unless she was too numb to feel the blood. She chose to believe the former because she had more important things to think about.

Colonel Xiang was running. He’d taken off like a bat out of hell and was making straight for the open end of the shelter, fumbling at his belt for his phone. Angel couldn’t feel her left hand, definitely couldn’t use it to support the rifle, but she flipped the selector to full-auto and fired anyway. The gun bucked against her shoulder and the muzzle rose over a foot despite a desperate attempt to hold on to it. One-handed, running, unable to aim, she didn’t hit a damned thing except dirt and corrugated aluminum, but it was enough,

The fleeing officer tried to throw himself to the ground and wound up skidding out of control, knocking a wooden plank off the top of a trench and falling halfway into it. Angel held down the trigger and tried to spray rounds across the trench. She had the same problem as before, letting the gun get away from her, but this time, she got lucky. Xiang screamed and grabbed at his side, at the blood coating his dress jacket.

Not dead lucky, though. The man was hurt, but not mortally, and he climbed out of the trench, sprinting for cover behind an upright stone wall, one of the excavated Arborist ruins. Angel tried to take another shot, but the trigger wouldn’t pull, and a glance at the weapon showed her why. The bolt was locked back. She’d emptied a whole magazine at him. Angel let the rifle drop to her side and kept running.

Reloading would take attention and focus, neither of which she could afford to take off of Xiang. She had to get that phone away from him before he called for help… and she also couldn’t let him get out of sight long enough to pull a pistol. Maybe he didn’t carry one, but she couldn’t assume that, couldn’t give him space. She rounded the edge of the Arborist ruin a few steps behind him and found out she’d almost given him too much space.

Xiang had slowed to a jog and was yanking at the covering flap of his belt holster, trying to pull out the pistol she’d assumed existed but hadn’t seen till now. It was polymer and compact and she didn’t know any more than that about it except that it could kill her. She jumped, throwing herself at the back of his legs. The impact didn’t hurt, not through the body armor, not with the senior officer to cushion the fall. Colonel Xiang lacked any such cushion and slammed to the ground, chest first.

Angel was on him in a second, slamming her left elbow down at the back of his head because she couldn’t make a fist yet. The blow didn’t land clean, but she couldn’t follow it up. The gun was in his right hand, and she grabbed at his wrist, putting all of her weight into his right shoulder, trying to bend his elbow backward. The man was older than her, in his mid-forties at least, but he was strong, yanking his arm free of her grip, bending his arm to avoid getting the joint locked. She knew three different disarm methods for this situation and had never used any of them, but this seemed like a great opportunity to try.

She grabbed his thumb and pried it back, and Xiang couldn’t strike at her with his off hand because most of his weight and all of hers was pressing down on it. She slammed her left forearm into his face and jerked backward on the thumb with everything she had, yanking the pistol loose. It flew out of his hand, and she lunged for it, but that was a mistake. It gave him the opportunity to get his legs free of her body weight, and that was the chance he needed.

The punch would have been devastating if it hadn’t been for the helmet. She ducked her head at the last second and Xiang’s knuckles slammed into the side of it, knocking it off her head. Angel’s ears were ringing, her eyes full of stars, and she would have died right there if not for the fact that hitting someone in the head with a closed fist was a good way to break a hand. Xiang was cursing, shaking his fingers when she jammed a thumb into his eye and dug in.

He screamed again. For a colonel in the Chinese military, he screamed a lot. Xiang jerked away from Angel just for a moment, rage written on his puffy, florid face, then lunged at her… and directly into the blade of her knife. She’d nearly forgotten it, but it had jumped into her hand as if it had a will of its own… and she shoved it into his solar plexus, then plunged upward, forcing him onto his back, and put her weight behind it.

Xiang’s mouth shaped a shocked circle, and he gasped for breath he couldn’t get, blood trickling out of his mouth. Angel watched him die, watched the light go out behind his dark eyes. She didn’t try to pull the knife out. It was embedded too deep, and bile was already rising in the back of her throat. She stood, leaving the dead man, leaving the knife, leaving her helmet, and ran back the way she’d come. It was easier to run than to think about what she’d done.

“Angel!”

Chase was shouting her name, not even transmitting it, just shouting frantically.

“Over here,” she told him, limping as she stopped just a few yards shy of the two Rangers.

Chase looked at her and she, for the first time, looked at herself. Blood was splattered across her right arm and chest, deep red, almost black against her camouflage.

“It’s not mine,” she assured him, shaking her head. “The colonel is… he’s not a problem.”

Chase nodded, and though she couldn’t see his eyes, she knew there’d be understanding in them, because he understood killing more than most.

“Where’s the damned archaeologist dude?” Zack demanded, still looking around the place. “And where the hell is Victor?”

“In here.”

Victor hadn’t shouted, and there was no way Angel should have been able to hear him from all the way in the tunnel, but she did. She didn’t wait for the others, just jogged into the tunnel. Victor was there, and so was the xenoarchaeologist, Dr. Tsung. They stood, facing each other, Victor’s hands pressed against The Emissary, Tsung’s arms outstretched as if he were about to make a grab at the younger man.

Angel took a step forward to interpose herself between them but stopped in mid-motion. Tsung was frozen, immobile, eyes open and staring at nothing.

“He’s not breathing,” Angel said, watching the Chinese scientist’s chest.

“Jesus,” Zack muttered, circling around the other side of the man. “He’s dead.”

“Victor,” she said quietly, turning to face the man who’d once been her graduate student, “what did you do to him?”

“Whether I used the gun you gave me,” Victor replied, a thin smile passing across a face she no longer recognized, “or the weapons the Emissary provided me with, the man is just as dead. Does it matter?”

“Shit,” Chase hissed, and Angel sensed that he thought that yes, it did matter. But when he turned to look at her, it was clear his exclamation had been about something else. “It’s Haskell. People are coming out of the barracks buildings. They’ve heard the gunfire.”

Chase touched a button on his wrist control, and when Haskell spoke again, his voice came out of an external speaker.

“I think they’re soldiers, Weston. Some of them are armed, and they’re heading your way.”

“We have to get the Navigator,” Victor reminded them. “We’re very close. We only need another minute.”

“Haskell,” Chase ordered, not replying to Victor, “we need two minutes. Buy us some time.”

“How would you suggest I do that, mate?”

“You’ve got the fucking sniper rifle,” Chase growled, clearly not happy about the order. “Use it.”

He cut the feed to the speaker and motioned to Zack and Angel.

“Get this damned thing out of here.” He shook his head. “And pray to God that it’s been worth it.”

OceanofPDF.com

29

Grey Haskell hadn’t killed a man in four years.

Even with Executive Options, he’d often managed to avoid killing. It wasn’t so hard. Most of their assignments involved going up against bandits and raiders, desperate men and women who had taken to victimizing others because it had seemed better than being victimized themselves. A lot of the time, a simple show of force was all they needed to send most of the bandits scurrying back to their homes without the need to waste their ammo.

It wasn’t that he had a moral objection to it, of course. No one joined the Royal Marines unless they were prepared to take the life of enemy soldiers. But leaving the military to work for a PMC had removed a layer of ethical justification. He was no longer a loyal patriot putting himself between his home and the enemy’s depredations. Now, he had to make sure that each man and woman he killed deserved it, that they were trying to kill him or his fellow squad-mates or hurt innocent people.

It should have been easier with Chinese soldiers. Haskell had fought them before, and like many who’d left their nations’ militaries after the formation of the Union and the signing of the Treaty, he hadn’t been convinced the Chinese and their Alliance partners had paid for their misdeeds.

But the soldiers heading down the dirt road to the dig hadn’t come to Earth or one of the Union colonies to threaten his home. They’d been peacefully sleeping on one of their own worlds when Haskell’s group had come to steal a priceless artifact from under their noses. Was that ethical justification for killing?

“Officer,” Alex said, spotting for him through the scope they’d brought from the Tamar. She’d spotted for him in Executive Options as well. It was how they’d fallen in love. “Nine hundred meters. Sector Three Bravo, to the right approximately ten mills. He’s the short, chunky one shouting instructions and waving his hands.”

Haskell sighed and traversed the weapon right on its swiveling bipod mount. He and Alex had divided the visible sections of the outpost into sectors when they’d set up to make it easier to identify possible targets. And there he was. Still yelling, motioning for enlisted men to follow him toward the dig, telling others to go back and get weapons.

“Contact.”

“Go to glass,” Alex told him.

Haskell snuggled his cheek into the stock and looked through the scope. His helmet hung from his utility pack, replaced by a boonie cap. No ghillie suit this time, no taking days to sneak into position. Sometimes, he thought he missed those days, though it was probably in the same manner that the mother of a four-year-old reflects fondly on childbirth, the discomfort and pain having faded into the background.

“Contact,” he repeated when he spotted the officer again. “Target is dressed in camouflage fatigues, armed with a pistol.”

“Check parallax and mill.”

“One point six,” he reported.

“Check level,” she instructed. He didn’t look back at her, concentrating on making sure the leveling bubble in his scope was straight. “Hold over five point four.”

The adjustments were automatic, done without conscious thought, without considering that this was a human life he was about to end. It was the only way to get through it. Haskell took up slack in the trigger and started his breathing sequence.

“Ready,” he hissed.

“Left point four.” That was the wind call, the last confirmation he needed.

The reticle settled on the chest of the officer and the last pad of Haskell’s right forefinger stroked the trigger. The report was truncated, softer than he was used to because of the suppressor, but the kick against his shoulder was an old friend, a comfort.

The Chinese officer was young, no more than mid-twenties. A lieutenant perhaps, a captain at the most. Maybe he had a wife back home, a kid. Maybe he was good to his troops and treated civilians with kindness. Or maybe he was a huge piece of shit who needed killing. The bullet didn’t care. .338 Norma Magnum was a hell of a round and it went in the man’s chest and out his back. The young officer was dead before he hit the ground.

Troops scattered, some throwing themselves to the ground, others running back inside their barracks. Not that the wooden walls of the barracks would have been much of an obstacle to the heavy-caliber slugs Haskell was shooting, but he wanted them huddled inside with the illusion of safety, out of the way.

“Senior NCO,” Alex droned, “in the open. Eight hundred and fifty meters. Sector Three Delta, to the left five mills.’

Haskell searched for the target, found the woman rallying troops to her, pointing in his general direction. Muzzle flashes winked like stars in the night, the rifles chattering fitfully, shooting at phantoms. Haskell wasn’t worried about them. They’d have to be dead lucky to come near him at this range. He was worried about the soldiers coming out of the barracks wearing helmets, some of them armed with grenade launchers.

One thing at a time.

The Chinese NCO had gone down to a knee, peering through the night-vision scope of her rifle, trying to spot the sniper. It was the last thing she ever did. Haskell’s shot was high—he’d been aiming center-mass, but the round took her in the throat. She collapsed to the side, bleeding out, then two other soldiers ran to her and tried to drag her back to cover. Haskell let them, concentrating on those grenade launchers… because they were concentrating on him.

The first explosion was fifty yards away to his right, twenty yards short of the tree line. Still too close.

“Grenadier behind partial cover,” Alex said, picking out a target. “Eight hundred twenty meters. Sector Four Alpha…”

They didn’t get to the adjustments, because the next explosion was less than twenty yards away, a blinding flash of white and red, spattering them with burning debris.

“Time to move,” Alex said, calmly brushing a smoldering clump of leaves off her shoulder.

Haskell nodded silently and grabbed the rifle, cradling it against his chest as he and Alex high-crawled backward out of the firing position. They’d waited too long, he decided, taken one shot too many, and the grenade blast just ten yards from their abandoned position was the exclamation point on that thought. Shrapnel pattered off his shoulder and back plates, and a red-hot sting at the back of his neck reminded him that maybe he should think about putting his helmet back on.

“Weston,” he transmitted, “we have to pull out. We’ll set up again and try to cover your move, but if I were you, I’d get the hell out of there.”

“Copy that. We have the item and will be moving in one mike. We’ll meet you at the rally point.”

Back in the trees, Haskell rose to a crouch, Alex beside him as they shifted toward Chilly and Jax, to a better position to cover the move to the rally point.

“At least they got it,” Alex said.

“That was the easy part, love,” he told her. “Now we have to get out alive.”

* * *

Chase didn’t know what he’d expected from the second artifact. Something close to the first, he’d assumed, the same size, the same color. And yet, it wasn’t. It was smaller, this thing Victor called the Navigator, maybe the size of a volleyball, and polygonal—he couldn’t count how many sides because it seemed to shift, like it was a prism in the sunlight, though it shone from inside rather than reflecting. No images floating beneath a solid surface this time, though as Chase stared at it, he thought he spotted figures beneath the light.

“Don’t touch it,” he warned Angel as she approached with the spare duffle bag.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” she assured him, scowling but not looking away from the artifact. She looked like a surgeon trying to remove a tumor… or maybe more like his mother when she’d picked up the dog poop in a plastic bag.

The alien disco ball disappeared into the duffle bag, and Chase blew out a relieved breath.

“Come on, we have to get out of here.”

And not only because of the enemy troops outside. The faster Chase got away from the frozen statue that had once been the Chinese xenoarchaeologist, the better. He would rather face a hundred enemy soldiers than stare at the dead man a second longer.

“You guys ready?” Zack asked as the two of them emerged from the tunnel. The big man was keyed-up, dancing from one foot to another like he had to go to the bathroom. “You hear those fucking explosions?”

Chase hadn’t—the tunnel blocked out a lot of the sound from outside the building—but he did not. They were distant, nearly a klick away. Grenades, he judged, and probably aimed at Haskell. The Royal Marine wouldn’t be there anymore, but the attention he’d attracted would still help them out. Victor seemed interested in neither the distant explosions nor the prospect of escape. Instead, he was staring at the Arborist wall… no. He was staring at the dead body of Colonel Xiang behind it.

Chase hadn’t seen the corpse, but it didn’t surprise him. Angel’s knife was still jammed into the older man’s chest past the handguard, irretrievable.

“Do you think it would make a difference if they knew?” Victor asked. “If the Alliance knew what was at stake? Would all this”—he motioned at the body—“still be necessary?”

“Part of you is still human,” Chase said, the words sounding harsher in his own ears than he’d intended. “You tell me.” He didn’t wait for Victor’s conclusion. “Take point, Zack.”

The big man ducked around the edge of the left-hand wall, pausing there for a beat and then running into the night, heading for the next cover. Chase was ready to urge the civilians to follow, but he didn’t need to. Victor went first, surprising him, moving faster than Chase thought the young man capable of. Angel limped her first few steps, but fell into a comfortable stride, leaving Chase to watch their six.

He wasn’t crazy about riding drag, hadn’t been when he was an NCO in the Rangers, but he was the NCOIC of this outfit, as ragtag as it might be, and behind them was where the most danger lay. Gunfire echoed off the barracks buildings, bouncing back to wash over the grass fields before it died with a metallic finality against the row of construction ’bots. Zack waited for them in the shelter of the legs of one of the robots, down on a knee, head scanning back and forth like he was one of the automatons himself.

Chase slid down beside him, keeping his attention back on the shelter. He couldn’t see past it to the barracks or the dirt road, but the firing had died down. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing—if they weren’t shooting at Haskell, they’d have too much time to think and get organized.

“There ain’t nothing between us and the tree line but nothing,” Zack said, pointing out at the open ground with the muzzle of his M27. “We could take a security halt in the prone halfway, but I say fuck it, let’s just make a break for it.”

“They’re coming,” Victor said matter-of-factly.

Chase was about to ask him what he was talking about but Chilly interrupted the thought.

“Chase, you’ve got a platoon-sized element coming around the far side of that big building. Too far away for us to have a shot at them from here, but I think they’re either coming after you or they think they’re trying to flank us. Either way, they’re going to be on you before they reach us.”

“Copy that.” He cut off the transmission. “The kid’s right… the Chinese are heading this way.”

“I see them,” Angel said, pointing.

And Chase did, too. Tiny figures against the cyclopean walls of the shelter, double-timing in five squad wedge formations arrayed in a larger platoon wedge, far too organized. Someone had taken charge, some enterprising junior officer or senior NCO, whether they be a fervent patriot or just an ambitious opportunist looking for a promotion.

“Go!” he yelled, jumping up, rifle coming to his shoulder. The under-barrel grenade launcher was loaded with AP frag that he hadn’t had the opportunity to use, but in the second it took for Zack and the others to jump up and head across the field, he switched it out for smoke.

If the platoon didn’t know Chase and the others were there, he’d be advertising the fact, but he was willing to take that chance. He angled the rifle upward, toggled to the targeting reticle for the grenade launcher, and tugged on the trigger just forward of the rifle’s magazine. The buttstock kicked against his shoulder, and he was loading a second round before the first landed, hands moving with a speed earned through years and years of practice. Off to the other side of the clearing with this round.

Thonk!

The sound of the grenade launching was homelike for him, and this time, he didn’t bother reloading, just took off after the others. Angel was twenty yards ahead of him and pulling away, and he sprinted to keep up, only looking behind once he’d made up the ground. White smoke drifted across the field like a bridal veil, improving the looks of the pursuing infantry by obscuring it.

It wasn’t just smoke, of course. Metal shavings diced down almost to a nanoscale drifted through the smoke, a static charge running through them from a capacitor built into the warhead of the grenade. Theoretically, the smoke didn’t just block line-of-sight optics but also thermal and even lidar and radar. Some of the Chinese infantry decided targeting was for losers and opened fire anyway, and Chase stopped checking their six and quickened his pace, aware the unguided bullets could kill just as easily as ones carefully aimed, Murphy being such a fickle son of a bitch.

It’s okay. We’ll reach the forest before them and then we can lose them. They have no idea where our LZ is. It’s good. We’ll make it.

“Chase, it’s Pri.”

He didn’t quite stumble, but it was close. Priyanka shouldn’t have been breaking radio silence and the fact she was…

“I copy,” he said, the words bit off and breathless, almost drowned out by the pounding in his ears. Once upon a time, close enough that he’d seen it in movies as a kid, he would have been expected to say “over” and use alphanumeric identifiers for security, and he was very happy that communications cryptography had improved enough that it wasn’t necessary, because he didn’t have the air for it.

“We’re burned. We have six Chinese gunships coming after us and the only reason they haven’t sent orbital missiles after us is that we’re riding nap-of-the-earth. We’re heading your way and I’m going to run a parabolic arc to give you more time to get to the LZ, but when we come in, we’re gonna have one pass. Maybe thirty seconds on the ground and if we stay any longer, we’re all dead. Twenty mikes.”

“Copy that, Pri. We’ll be there.”

Because what else was there to say?

The LZ was two miles away, there was a platoon of enemy—at least—on their tail and even if they made the pickup, there was a whole planet’s worth of enemy spacecraft coming after them.

What was it his company commander used to say? The man was a bit of a blowhard, and everyone used to roll their eyes when he started on his motivational speeches, but a few of the things he’d said had stuck with Chase even after all these years.

I don’t know how I’m going to win, I just know I’m not going to lose.

OceanofPDF.com

30

Gina Quesada had spent two years working with Executive Options, most of it on their ship, and she had never gone this fast in an atmosphere.

The Soong-Tierney drive was reactionless, which meant there was no g-load from acceleration forces, but atmospheric friction was a thing and no twisting of Newtonian physics could erase that reality. That limited how fast a ship could go in a breathable atmosphere without burning itself up, but the Tamar was pushing right to the edge of that envelope. The temperature gauge kept spiking, setting off the insistent beeping warning, and just before Gina could speak up and warn Priyanka, the pilot would back off the throttle, and the red would creep back to yellow.

It was maddening in a way. Damage control was the only job she’d been given, and every time she tried to do it, Pri would interrupt. That left Gina way too much time to think… or to watch the trees and mountains fly by at inconceivable speed, or to listen to the others reporting how close the enemy was getting.

“Picking up another bogie coming in from the northeast at thirty klicks out,” Hill told them, so much more professional in combat than he ever was any other time. It was funny, she thought, how everyone on the ship—except Grey Haskell—used Imperial measurements when they were just bullshitting with each other, but the metric system whenever they were talking business.

Americans will never go metric. We’re traveling to other star systems, and we’re still talking about miles and pounds.

“I can’t tell for sure,” Hill went on, “but by its speed, I don’t think it’s a gunship. Maybe a ground-support fighter?”

“Shit,” Aguilar muttered. “That could be heading for the dig site. We should warn Chase.”

“And what’s he gonna do about it?” Hill demanded. “They don’t have any anti-aircraft missiles”

“Monitor its course, Adrian,” Pri ordered, remarkably calm in the best tradition of Space Force combat pilots. “Let me know if it gets close to the LZ.”

“Why aren’t they shooting at us?” Gina blurted, then cursed silently at herself for sounding like a clueless civilian.

“Physics, Ms. Physics Degree,” Hill cracked, laughing scornfully.

“Shut up, Adrian,” Pri said. “They’re behind us. No conventional gun or missile is going to be able to catch up to an S-T drive starship, even in an atmosphere. There are S-T drive missiles that could take us down, but they’re too big for any of the gunships chasing us to deploy. They have them on ground launchers, but if I know the Chinese government, most of those are on the bigger continent around their capital city here, Hangzhou. They might launch one at us, but it’s gonna take time to get here, and it won’t be any faster than those ships chasing us. Again, physics.” Pri shrugged. “That’s not to say we won’t have them coming after us on the way out.”

“Optimist,” Aguilar murmured.

Gina’s ears burned and she felt like a freshman in Dr. Hermosa’s Physics class again.

“Sorry,” she said softly.

“Don’t be,” Pri assured her, eyes never leaving the screen. “You wouldn’t believe the stupid-ass questions I asked my pilot on my first combat flight.”

“How do you do it?” Gina couldn’t suppress this question. It wasn’t something she should have learned in school. “How do you do this without being scared shitless?”

“Whatever gave you the impression,” Pri wondered, “that I wasn’t scared shitless? There is not a damned thing natural about all this, and every fiber of my being rejects it. But you do it enough times, your body just kind of does the work on its own, and you don’t have to think about any of it. It’s the thinking that keeps you scared. It builds up in your gut and spreads out through the rest of you and eventually, you can’t move a muscle.”

“But now… now you don’t feel that way anymore?”

Pri laughed sharply.

“No, now I feel that way days after, when I’m standing in the shower or trying to tie my shoes, or something just as banal and disconnected as that. And I expect I will for damn near the rest of my life.”

Gina was about to ask why Pri still did it, but she realized she could have asked the same question of her sister and brother-in-law. And she thought she knew the answer. They did it because it was who they were.

“Right now, though, I don’t feel scared for me,” Pri went on. She nodded ahead of them, toward the viewscreen. “I feel scared for them. For Chase, and Zack, and Vic and the others. And that’s enough to keep the other kind of scared away. For a while.”

Gina wished she hadn’t asked. It had been bad enough when all she was worrying about was whether the ship would crash, but Pri had reminded her that everyone she loved was below them, running from the Alliance army.

I wonder if any of them are as scared as I am?

* * *

Victor wondered why he wasn’t scared.

He should have been. He remembered what it was like the first time he’d been shot at, how terrified he’d been. Even when he’d been able to shoot back, the fear hadn’t gone away. It was something like being in subzero weather without the right gear, like that one time he’d gone with Angel to St. Valentine, to the island near its north pole where there’d been an Arborist dig, but she hadn’t warned him he’d need an electrically heated jacket. A shaking that came straight from the core and wouldn’t go away no matter how much he turned up the heat when they got back in the snow coach.

This time, there was no insistent shaking, no panic seizing control. The Emissary was warmth and assurance and safety despite the bullets slicing through the air around them, drilling into ancient oaks and slicing free clumps of Spanish moss. Chilly Vazquez ducked as a handful of the stuff fell out of the tree over their heads, then cursed as if he were embarrassed at showing weakness.

“Where the hell are these guys coming from?” he demanded, leaning around the tree and launching a grenade back the way they’d come. “There wasn’t more than a couple platoons in those barracks!”

Smoke… more smoke. The whole forest was filled with smoke and still the incoming rounds didn’t stop.

“They called for help,” Jax said, if not calm then at least better at concealing his anxiety than Chilly. The taller SEAL had his back to the tree both men were taking cover behind, the next one over from where Victor and Angel were crouched down. “Probably a troop ship out of that small city to the north… Suzhou, or whatever they call it. Surprised it got here this fast, though.”

Jax was correct in his guess. There’d been two troop ships as a matter of fact, landing in just the last five minutes, called in by one of the junior officers from the dig site, trying to cut off their escape.

How the hell do I know this? Victor asked the question, but he already had the answer. He knew it because the Emissary knew it. And the Emissary knew it… somehow. Just like the Emissary had killed that Chinese archaeologist somehow.

Part of you is still human. That’s what Chase had said. But was he right?

“Go!” Chase was only twenty feet away, shoulder against the trunk of a maple, but Victor could barely hear his bellowing order over the unending crackle of gunfire. “Go now!”

Chase went first, charging into the gap in the trees ahead and just assuming the rest would follow. The clearing was blackened, a recent burn, maybe ignited by lightning last dry season, thirty or forty yards across and running from one side of the trees to the other with no way to bypass it. Victor considered the problem, trying to determine whether there was a better way past the obstacle, but forced himself to stop when he realized the Emissary was calculating the odds of him getting out with Angel and the Navigator and leaving the others behind.

They’re not important. The survival of the entire human race is at stake.

Those weren’t his thoughts. the Emissary was thinking for him, and Victor wondered how often it had been doing that. He ignored the urgings of the alien AI, pushed it back into the duffle and broke off contact, just holding the bag tight against his chest as he took off after Chase and Angel.

And the fear returned, as if some mad, cackling god had turned on the spigot and sent it gushing at him in a wave. He couldn’t see the enemy, hadn’t seen them since they’d reached the forest, and somewhere along the line, his imagination had transformed them from young Chinese conscripts as young and frightened as he was into robotic killing machines, implacable and merciless and hard on their heels.

Adrenaline gave him wings and he nearly passed Chase up, would have if it weren’t for the fact that he didn’t know where they were going. The Emissary would know. The Emissary offered the knowledge of good and evil like Lucifer in the Garden of Eden, except this version came with a freedom from fear and uncertainty as well, and all he had to give up for this incredible prize was his humanity.

The trees swallowed them up again, though the shelter they offered was transitory at best. It still made Victor feel less vulnerable, made the wave of fear recede like the tide rolling out, and he even risked a look behind him. The helmet visor’s night vision was nice and bright by the light of the full moon, though he hadn’t been able to see anything but smoke and trees since they’d hit the woods. Chilly and Jax were right behind him, and Victor was amazed at how fast Chilly could run given his weight, while Alex and Haskell were behind them, the Brit turning every few steps to fire short bursts into the smoke.

“How far?” Victor yelled at Chase, not caring if he revealed their position because the Chinese obviously knew where they were.

“Less than a mile.” Chase bit off the words, panting with exertion. Victor didn’t ask how he knew, but he guessed there was some kind of mapping program in the man’s visor. There was nothing quite so fancy in his, not so much as a targeting screen, just straight night vision since Chase hadn’t wanted to confuse him. “We got ten minutes.”

A ten minute mile wasn’t that fast. Victor had run it in less than that plenty of times. Not in full body armor, of course, but he had plenty of motivation whizzing by them intermittently just ahead of the high-pitched cracks of Alliance small arms. None of them had come close yet, maybe from the smoke grenades the mercs had been launching every couple minutes, maybe because the Chinese soldiers weren’t any better at shooting on the run, in the dark than anyone else. As long as they kept the enemy behind them, Victor was sure they’d be okay.

Reality smacked him in the chest. Pain speared through his sternum, the air exploding from his lungs in a whoosh of white light and agony and he stumbled, unable to see, unable to breath. Somehow, he was lying flat on his face, loamy, moist dirt pressing against his cheek as if taunting him with the knowledge he’d soon be under it.

His fingers clenched, hunting for the Emissary as if it was his only salvation, a dying Christian clutching for the crucifix around his neck… and not finding it.

* * *

“Down!” Chase bellowed, half from fear and half from the pain of the slug that had spent itself on his torso armor. He threw himself to the dirt, grabbing Angel and pulling her with him. “Contact, front!”

The Chinese were in front of them, though God alone knew how, their crossfire ripping apart the night, brutal and focused and much more accurate than the guns of the soldiers who’d been pursuing them.

Ambush. The word rang in his ears like the whine of the bullets, like the certainty of his own death. And not just his. Victor was down, and he couldn’t tell how badly the kid was wounded, and he couldn’t even turn to check on the others, not with his helmet buried in mud and slugs whining all around them. All he could manage was to prop his rifle up on its magazine and fire burst after burst, hoping to hell he’d hit something.

Angel did the same, traversing her barrel back and forth, emptying her magazine in the space of two seconds, then pulling the gun back into her body for a reload. He did the same, but instead of slapping home a fresh mag, he dragged a High Explosive-Dual Purpose round out of his grenade bandolier and slid it into his launcher. He looked up and immediately regretted it as something moving hard and fast grazed the side of his helmet, nearly tearing it off his head despite the chin strap, but he blinked away the colored flashes from his vision and focused on the cluster of human shapes two hundred yards ahead and aimed the grenade launcher at the center of them.

Chase didn’t realized he’d pulled the trigger until the round detonated, a chest-deep thump and a flash of white and screams he could just barely hear above the shooting. The incoming fire slacked off for a heartbeat, the way it always did when a soldier saw the guys next to him get killed… not for long, but just long enough. The thonk of launching grenades was an off-key handbell choir behind him, but the crump of their detonation was in perfect chorus, and the pause in the firing became a lull, long enough to get the hell out of there.

“Get up, Vic!” he yelled, grabbing at the casualty handle on the back of the kid’s pack and hauling him to his feet.

The duffle bag had slid around to Victor’s back and as the kid came to his feet, it shifted to the front. Victor’s helmet visor had rotated up off his eyes in his impact with the dirt, and even through the night vision filters, Chase could see that the younger man’s eyes were glazed, his face frozen in shock. Victor’s hands went into the duffle bag, and as if a switch had been flipped, calm descended over him, his face transforming into someone else. Disgust gnawed at Chase’s guts, but right now, he needed The Emissary more than he needed the kid.

“Move!”

Zack, Alex and Haskell moved past them, taking the lead, suppressing whoever was left ahead of them with rifle fire while Chilly and Jax popped off what had to be their last HEDP grenades into the force still coming behind them. He didn’t know if anyone had been wounded and wasn’t about to do a casualty report at the moment. Hell, he wasn’t even sure he hadn’t been wounded and he hurt everywhere. Everything could wait until they were on the Tamar.

Nine minutes.

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31

Grey Haskell was a man who appreciated a well-made firearm, and the MK22 PSR was a fine weapon, but right now, he wanted to toss the damned thing into a swamp and be done with it. It was the wrong tool for this job and he would have traded it for an M27 if he could have found anyone stupid enough to make the deal.

He’d considered trying to strip one of the Chinese soldiers of their rifles, but that would have meant grabbing spare magazines as well and probably getting shot while he was doing it. Theoretically, he and Alex were the rear guard, which meant he turned back to the pursuing force and took shots when he could, which wasn’t often since he’d been running for nearly fifteen minutes and heavy breathing didn’t go well with precision shooting through a Leupold scope.

I should have put my bloody helmet back on. I’m going to trip over a sodding root and break my neck like a right prat.

More than the night vision, though, he missed the mapping overlay. He had no clue where they were or even if they were going the right direction. At least Chase Weston had been a sergeant, not a lieutenant.

“Where the hell are we?” he asked his wife as they did their regular check behind them, pausing in their stride to turn back to the phantom enemy who might or might not still be there.

“Just another klick,” she assured him. “Shit, I don’t know if they’re still following us.”

Haskell stopped in his tracks and just listened for a full second. No shots. No footsteps. Not even any smoke left, since the lot of them were out of grenades.

“Well, thank the good Lord for that,” he murmured, breaking into a jog to keep up with the rest.

“Makes you wonder why,” Alex pointed out. “And who called them back.”

The woman was in deplorably good shape for someone who’d spent the last two years stuck in a space station. He’d eaten too much crap food and rode the exercise bike while she had paid extra to run the periphery track in the high-g section. Not that he’d complained when their only free entertainment had been each other, but now he was straining out every word, and she was talking like they were out for a Sunday stroll.

“Their numbers are down,” he rasped, at least trying to sound as if he’d kept up the cardio. “Maybe they’re regrouping.”

“The Alliance don’t regroup, they attack until we’re all dead or they’re all dead.”

“Good point.”

The woods were thinning out, which was a good sign since it meant they were getting close to the landing zone. Haskell felt like they’d been running through this forest forever, like they’d stumbled into one of the woods of the fae his grandmother had told him stories about, where mortal folk got lost and never found their way out.

At least I didn’t eat any of their food or tell them my given name.

And maybe that had saved him, because the open sky was ahead, twinkling with a million stars… and a shadow passing across them.

“What the hell is that, love?” he asked, raising the rifle to his shoulder. Trying to spot the furtive shape through the night vision scope was like looking through a soda straw, but there was something hot up there, something that shone white and red on thermal.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Alex hissed, then broke into a sprint, heading after the others. “Weston!” she yelled, so much louder than he would have been able to manage in a dead run. “It’s a fucking fast mover!”

The Royal Marines used a different term, but Haskell understood the reference. It had originally meant a military jet, but nowadays, it was a reference to S-T drive ships like the Tamar. But this was no gunship, no starship. It was smaller, he could see that already, too small for a nuclear reactor but plenty big enough for a bank of batteries or capacitors, and that was all it needed for everything up to and including orbital flight. It was also plenty big enough to carry a bunch of weapons.

“Get to cover!” Alex yelled, pulling away from Haskell, halfway between him and the rest of the group.

There was a sound like a giant clearing his throat and bullets ripped into the ground, their progress marked with explosions of dirt and splintering trees. Alex spun and screamed, her legs going out from beneath her, and Haskell’s heart fell into his stomach.

“Alex!” He slung his rifle, raced after her, and slid across the torn dirt to crouch beside her.

“Oh, shit!” she moaned, still alive at least, but clutching at her right leg. Her calf was a mass of blood, though the fact that it was still in one piece meant that the minigun had been chambered in a rifle caliber rather than something like 20mm. “I’m so stupid! My fucking leg is broken!”

“Hold on, love,” he said, grabbing her casualty handle in one hand, lifting her below the arm with the other and dragging her toward the cover of the trees. “You’ll be right as rain and dancing with me to that horrid New Wave shit you love.”

“You know you like it, too, you Limey bastard,” she groaned, and Haskell winced, hearing the pain in her voice as he pulled her along. There was nothing for it, but icy tendrils of it clawed at his gut in sympathy.

The others were running ahead of him, trying to get to cover, except Chase. He was running back, coming to help.

“I got her!” he yelled to the man. “Help me carry her!”

“Get down!” Chase bellowed, hands waving.

Haskell looked up, realizing what the man meant, staring into the guns of the fighter, coming in for another run. He tried to pick up his pace, tried to pull her up higher, but it was a losing battle, far too late. There was nothing to be done.

“Bloody hell.”

He let her fall and threw himself over her prone form, praying to a God he hadn’t bothered in quite some time. God answered with a burst of minigun fire, hitting all around them. Something kicked Haskell hard in the back, and he had the thought that some tricky son of a bitch had taken advantage of his vulnerable position to put a boot to him before he realized the truth.

“Grey!” Alex gasped from beneath him.

I must be hurting her. I should move.

But he couldn’t. He just lay there, half on his side, staring up at the ground-support fighter, waiting for the end. It had cruised past and was turning again, getting the best angle for its miniguns to finish them all. The fighter stood in mid-air, only a couple hundred feet off the ground, turning slowly as if taunting them.

“I love you, darlin’,” he told Alex, the words coming out slurred and indistinct. He hoped she heard him. He wanted her to hear it one last time before they died.

The Alliance fighter rocked in mid-air like a plumb-bob and exploded. Haskell blinked, sure he was imagining things, that the blood loss had gotten to him, but the image remained, a series of flashes as the rounds impacted the side of the fighter, blasting holes through it until they hit something important and the aircraft tumbled out of the sky. The ground shook at the impact, dust and smoke rising in a mushroom cloud above the crash.

Haskell’s mouth dropped open and he wondered if maybe God had heard his prayer but had been just a few seconds too late answering it. Then he saw the Tamar descending in the wake of the fighter’s death, her belly ramp already open.

“Oh, good Lord,” he hissed. Maybe it was a prayer, and maybe it wasn’t.

Either way, he could take up with Him personally. The last shred of Grey Haskell’s strength left him, and he fell into eternity.

* * *

“No!” Alexandra Quesada screamed, thrashing and fighting as Chase tried to pick her up. “No! Grey! Goddammit, Grey!”

“I got him,” Zack assured her, grabbing the British Marine by casualty strap and throwing him over a shoulder with casual strength.

Chase winced. Grey Haskell was limp as a dishrag and the Brit’s skin was already turning gray. Haskell was dead and Alex knew it, but at least she stopped fighting him. The woman was heavy, solidly built, and muscular before adding on the body armor and gear and Chase grunted as the muscles in his back protested, but kept plodding forward.

The Tamar was barely touching the ground, the end of her ramp slewing to the side, scraping up a cloud of dust that glowed in the soft yellow light filtering out of the utility bay. Aguilar was standing on the end, a rifle tucked against his hip with one hand, the other waving for them to hurry.

What had Priyanka said? Thirty seconds? They’d used up twenty at least and everyone was straggling toward the ramp, beat up, wounded, exhausted. Except Victor. Victor was striding up to it as if he’d just woken from a power nap and was intent on getting to the club in time for a tennis match. Not in a rush, not desperate, just fast enough that Chase knew it was deliberate, that Victor—or the thing Victor had become—was aware of exactly how much time they had before the ship would have to bolt.

“Come on!”

Chase was close enough now to hear Aguilar yelling, the type of annoyed bellow only a Chief Warrant Officer could give because someone was doing something stupid enough to make him expend the energy to yell at them.

“Get in the fucking ship! The fucking Chinese are right behind us!”

“Yeah,” Chase panted, jumped up onto the ramp, and winced at the wrenching impact on his lower back. “They’re right behind us, too.”

Chase had already seen Victor and Angel go in ahead of him, and he didn’t stop and wait for the others, just carried Alex straight to the medical bay. The silence struck him like a physical object once he was up the ramp, rocking him with the sudden absence of the background noise. It had been a constant companion for the entire hellish journey to the ship, the thud of boots on the dirt, the clatter of small arms in the distance, the warm wind whistling through the trees. Now there was nothing.

Chase dropped Alex on an exam table as gently as he could, then staggered backward without the weight of her and caught himself against an equipment cart.

“Ramp closed!” Pri announced over the PA speakers. “We’re Oscar Mike!” On the march. An infantry term. She’d learned that from him, back when.

The ship swayed and Chase caught himself against the table this time, his stomach still on the ground while the rest of him climbed with the Tamar. Zack stumbled into the medical bay between bounces, Grey Haskell’s body still draped over his shoulder, and behind him, sobbing inconsolably, was Gina Quesada.

“Oh, my God,” the younger woman moaned, rushing to her sister’s side. “Oh, Alex…”

“Come here!” Chase told her, pulling his helmet off and tossing it carelessly into a corner, happy to be rid of its weight. “You know where the gunshot kit is?”

Gina visibly composed herself and turned to the storage cabinets, pulling them open and searching for the right supplies. Chase could have treated Alex by himself, of course. He’d taken care of more gunshot wounds than he could count. But Zack was laying Grey Haskell’s body out on the deck on the other side of the compartment, and until he had the corpse in a body bag, it would be better if Gina and her sister had something else to keep their attention.

“Got it,” Gina said, grabbing at the handle of the treatment bed.

Chase took a moment to buckle a safety strap over Alex’s chest so she wouldn’t tumble off the table under violent maneuvering, then began working loose the armor from her wounded leg. Alex should have been writhing in agony, but she was slipping into shock, and not just the physical shock he expected from someone who’d had their calf shredded by a bullet. There was disbelief written across her face, replacing the gung-ho certainty he’d grown used to seeing there, as if the entire underpinning of her world had been kicked out from beneath her.

“He died saving me,” she murmured. “That stupid Limey bastard threw himself on top of me like this was some old war movie. He should have let me be and saved himself.”

“Would you have?” Chase asked her. “If it had been him?”

Alex said nothing, just waited as Gina fished an injector gun out of the gunshot kit and pressed it against her thigh. Anesthetic hissed through the woman’s uniform trousers and her shoulders slumped against the table. Chase glanced over and noticed Zack zipping shut the body bag, Haskell’s ghost-white face disappearing beneath the black plastic.

“Zack,” he said. “Help Gina patch up Alex. I’m going to the cockpit.”

Chase didn’t wait for an answer, just left them in the medical bay and headed up the ramp. Chilly and Jax were sitting in the galley, strapped down to their chairs, their faces stunned as a steer ready for slaughter. Chilly’s armor was stripped off and a field bandage was wrapped around his left arm, but he seemed oblivious to it, his expression stricken.

“Grey’s really dead, Zack?” Jax asked quietly.

“He is,” Chase told the man. “He caught a round from the fighter just before the Tamar downed it.”

“He was a good guy,” Chilly said, voice breaking halfway through the sentence. Tears washed runnels through the dirt on the man’s face, disappearing into his beard. “Everyone loved him.”

Chase thought of Alex and nodded.

“Yeah.”

Angel and Victor were already in the cockpit, strapped in, each holding a duffle bag in their laps like recruits heading to basic training. The night sky had given way to the cloudless stars on the main screen, the curve of the planet visible now as the Tamar rose higher into the atmosphere, but Pri didn’t seem at all happy about it.

“We are so fucked,” she said, eyeing him sidelong as he buckled in. “We got eight Alliance gunships two minutes out, we’re a good ten minutes from orbit, and I got the throttle redlined.” Pri shook her head. “I’m sorry about Haskell, but I’ll be honest, Chase… I think he just took an earlier bus than the rest of us.”

“I’m sorry, Pri,” he told her, sinking into his seat. “I’m sorry for everything.”

She looked back from the pilot’s station, and the corner of her mouth turned up.

“I’m not. What the hell else was I gonna do?”

“I could think of a few alternative career choices,” Hill put in dryly.

“Shut up, Adrian,” Pri said, but she was laughing quietly.

Neither Victor nor Angel was paying attention to their exchange, though Chase was sure it was for different reasons. Victor was absorbed in his communion with the Emissary, while Angel looked as battered and exhausted as Chase, eyes haunted by the violence she’d seen.

“Angel,” Chase said, and her eyes flickered toward him as if she’d just woken from a sound sleep. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t think so. I feel like someone beat me up with a crowbar.” She patted at her chest, her arm, her leg. “But I think the armor stopped everything.” Her lip quivered. “I guess I’m lucky. Not like Grey.”

“It’s not luck. The infantry was shooting at us with 5.8mm rifle rounds. The minigun on that fighter was firing 7.62x54 armor-piercing rounds.” Chase tapped a finger against his battered chest plate. “This stuff is the best you can buy, but anything that would stop a round like that, we couldn’t walk around in.”

Her eyes flared in anger and she stiffened.

“Thank you,” she said, the words a cold growl, “for the technical explanation of Alliance ballistics and Union body armor.”

Chase winced. That wasn’t what he meant, but he was a soldier, not a poet, and the right words didn’t want to come.

“What I’m trying to say,” he told her, leaning over in his chair, taking her hand in his, “is that luck had nothing to do with it. Grey put himself between certain death and his wife, knowing what would happen. And I know what he was thinking when he did it.”

Her expression softened.

“And what was that?”

Chase swallowed hard.

“I love you.”

Angel smiled, and despite the enemy contacts closing in on them, red darts on the tactical display, nothing else in the world meant as much to him.

“I love you, too.”

“Shit,” Aguilar blurted from his station. “They’re in front of us now.”

A glance at the tactical display proved him right, another four red deltas appearing on the radar screen, blocking their course out of the atmosphere.

“Oh, damn,” Pri said mildly. She snapped the arming switches for the forward guns and adjusted the steering yoke, bringing the targeting reticles onto one of the blocking ships. A squeeze of the trigger and the Tamar shuddered, the 30mm cannons pushing her backward with all their might.

That was the advantage of ships being in front of them, the ability to use the main guns. Unfortunately, it also meant the enemy could fire on them as well, and the first they’d know of it was when…

The Tamar was a bass drum and Chase was inside it, pounded by a mallet. He grabbed at the armrests of his seat, trying to hold himself in place, the restraints biting into his shoulders as the ship was thrown back and forth. Alarms sounded, warning lights flashing red, and a haze of smoke filled the bridge from a short in the wiring.

“We’ve lost one of our drive nodes,” Hill reported.

“Speed’s decreasing,” Priyanka agreed. She jammed down the firing control again and, off to the side, Aguilar did the same for the rear 20mm Vulcans, and Chase couldn’t tell the difference between the shuddering from the gunfire and the bucking from the damage to the drives. “I think I can keep us heading out of the gravity well, but there’s no way we can jump to the Rift down one node.”

“There’s a way out of this,” Victor said, and Chase blinked, staring at him. The younger man was still calm, but now his face was alive with determination. “The Navigator. It’s more than a computer, and The Emissary believes it can save us.”

“How?” Angel demanded. “What do we have to do?”

“Not we,” Victor corrected. “You. You have to bond with the Navigator. And you have to do it now, or we’re all dead.”

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32

“No!”

The word burst out of Chase like he was a grenade and Victor had pulled the pin, and Angel thought he would have jumped out of his seat if he hadn’t been strapped down.

“You can’t do it,” he told Angel, shaking his head. “You’ve seen what it’s done to Victor…”

As if in counterpoint to Chase’s argument, the Tamar was rocked by another hit.

“There goes our port-side Bofors gun.” Hill strained the words out, grimacing as if he felt each hit the ship was taking in his own body.

Priyanka turned and looked back at Angel, saying nothing. Angel could almost read the pilot’s thoughts… because they were likely close to her own. We’re going to die if you don’t do it… but I don’t want you to do it.

“I love you, Chase,” she told the man. “Remember that.”

Angel ripped open the duffle bag and clasped the artifact in her palm, then turned it toward her face, the rainbow flashes of its inner glow throwing the entire cockpit into a light show.

“Angel…”

She heard his voice, but Chase was gone. The cockpit was gone. She was standing in a forest, and, without being told, she knew these woods were back on Lóng dàn, but not the Lóng dàn she’d seen only minutes ago. This version of the planet was younger, warmer, the edges of the nearby mountains sharper and less weathered, and the city laid out before her was no outpost, no collection of prefab buildings.

Twisted spires and curving shapes that couldn’t have even been imagined by a human mind much less built by human hand rose high into the morning sky, the light from their sun sparkling off their harsh white lines in sprays of rainbow colors. Angel gasped, amazed not just at the material science the impossibly skinny and towering structures represented, but also mystified at the purpose of the things. They seemed too narrow to be of use for habitation or a workspace, yet what else could they be?

You think like a human.

The words were inside her head, but they weren’t her own. The creature was there beside her, and she wasn’t shocked by its presence, as if she’d known all along that it had stood not six feet away. She looked up at it, no more surprised by its height than she was by her surroundings. It was exactly as Victor had described, tall, broad-chested, and straight-backed, the arrangement of the hips and knees more reminiscent of a kangaroo than a hominid, the skin gray and scaley, not so much like a reptile but more along the lines of a pangolin or an armadillo. It wore no clothes, or at least nothing she would have recognized as a garment, though its shins and forearms were encased in something that might have been metallic. The face was angular, narrowing to an oval mouth with omnivore’s teeth, though they didn’t look as if they grew there from roots but instead, were extrusions of the jaw.

The eyes, those were almost enough to surprise her despite the unnaturally casual feel of the vision. They were golden, without a visible iris, strange shapes floating freely inside them in much the same way that she’d seen the shapes inside the surface of the Emissary. But this was not the Emissary.

I am the Navigator.

“This is a projection inside my head,” she said, her own voice sounding loud and intrusive. “Surely, you can just talk so I don’t feel like I’ve suddenly come down with schizophrenia.”

“If you wish.” The creature’s mouth even moved to shape the words, though there was no way it could have. “I am of the race whose remains you found on Vishnu. We called ourselves…”

“The People. Yes, I heard this part.” The alien intelligence was acting too damned mysterious, like it was some eastern guru and she was a gullible western acolyte looking for something to replace her parents’ religion. “Why are you called the Navigator?”

“Are all humans this impatient and impudent?” the AI wondered. “Or was I simply fortunate enough to draw you in the great universal lottery?”

Angel grinned. Now that was more like it. Snarky alien computers, she could deal with.

“Why are you called the Navigator?”

“We are not simply computers, you know. You’ve made the mistake of thinking of us that way, but it isn’t a complete description.”

“You just joined the party,” she reminded the thing. How the hell do you know what mistakes I’ve made?”

“Because I have access to all your memories, just as you have to mine. Though you haven’t learned how to process the data you’re receiving.” The alien creature made a gesture that was purely human and Angel knew it was something it had to have drawn from her memories and used to make itself more relatable. “We each serve a purpose… more than one purpose. There’s the one you know of, that each of us are parts of a key that unlocks the Archive, but we are also necessary to allow you to reach its location. The Emissary is a repository of the cultural knowledge of our species, and I am, to put it in the simplest terms… a stardrive.”

“Like the ship’s Soong-Tierney drive?”

“If I were a human, I would be insulted that you named the drive after her. She is a middling physicist and an accomplished engineer, but she could have lived a thousand years and never come up with even the basic principles behind the stardrive.”

Angel’s eyes narrowed, struck by a sudden thought.

“You speak as if you know the woman personally.”

The alien creature shrugged. If she hadn’t already known it was emulating human body language, that would have clinched it.

“Not personally, but we—not just the Emissary and myself but all the messengers our race sent out prior to abandoning our worlds—are, as you might say, networked.”

Angel desperately wanted to pursue that line of inquiry, but the reality of where she’d been before the conversation had started crashed in on her and brought with it a sudden desperation.

“If you’re a stardrive, can you get us out of here? Can you take the Tamar into the Rift?”

“My dear,” the Navigator told her, its attempt at a smile horrifying, “I already am.”

* * *

“I don’t know what the hell is happening,” Priyanka said, and Chase thought she sounded more worried now than when they’d all been about to die. “This is fucking impossible.”

Chase Weston was no sort of pilot, but he’d already gathered that much. It wasn’t just that the Tamar was accelerating at a pace that she shouldn’t have been capable of with one of her drive nodes down. That, he was sure, had everything to do with the trance Angel had gone into, with the intricate pattern of colors cycling across the artifact in her hands. That had been Victor’s whole point in having her bond with it… or perhaps the point had been The Emissary’s, since he was sure that Victor wouldn’t have wanted this for Angel.

No, what was impossible was how fast the ship was going in the atmosphere. The numbers didn’t lie, and neither did the view from the external cameras. The Tamar was streaking upward out of Lóng dàn’s atmosphere like a reverse meteorite, far past the speed that should have burned them to a cinder from friction, yet the external temperature gauge wasn’t even close to the red.

Hell, it’s not even sniffing yellow, yet.

“Whatever that thing is doing,” Pri said, shaking her head, “it’s protecting us from the friction. Vic, you know what’s going on?”

“I do,” Victor said, “but I lack the language to express it. The mathematical principles behind what she’s doing don’t exist in human society.”

“They’re still coming after us,” Hill told them, motioning at the tactical display.

The flickering lights and luminescent lines on the screen should have held some significance to Chase, but they were meaningless. He couldn’t take his eyes off of Angel, off the blank expression on her face.

“They’re behind us now,” Pri declared. “We got missiles coming off the moon base, but they can’t keep up either. I don’t know if anything man-made has ever gone this fast. We’re already out of the atmosphere, for God’s sake.” She turned in her seat and stared at Angel, and at the artifact in her hands. “I understand that’s a drive or something, but what the hell is it using for a power source? Because it’s sure not our reactor.”

“Let me guess,” Hill said, jabbing a finger toward Victor, “you know, but you can’t explain it?”

“Unless you’d like to take ten years of advanced courses in hyperdimensional math.” The smile was wry, but it wasn’t Victor’s. “The simplest way of saying it is that it comes from another dimension, although that is woefully inadequate and perhaps deceptive in the inadequacy of the language.”

“Thanks for clearing that up.”

“Shut up, Hill,” Chase growled, and the copilot blanched. There’d been none of the playfulness present in Chase’s tone that was usually there when Priyanka got tired of Hill’s banter and cut him off.

“Oh, shit,” Hill said, and Chase glared at the man, on the brink of doing violence before he realized the copilot was motioning at the tactical screen. “We got a fucking battle cruiser coming out of lunar orbit, blocking our course.”

That was enough to break Chase out of the mental haze he’d fallen into when Angel had bonded with the Navigator. The massive ship was a red wedge in the tactical display, but it was big enough to be already visible on the optical telescopes even though it was still dozens of miles away.

“They must really want us bad,” Aguilar said, shaking his head.

The chief wasn’t wrong. There weren’t very many of the battle cruisers, mostly because the things were fiendishly expensive. The nature of the S-T drive made smaller starships not only possible but desirable. It was true that the stardrive didn’t require reaction mass, but the bigger the ship it was pushing, the more power it needed. A small nuclear reactor was enough to take something the size of the Tamar hyperlight, but to propel a ship the size of a skyscraper into the Rift, the power requirements went up exponentially. The reactor on a Union or Alliance battle cruiser was big enough to power multiple cities, and all that room and all that power meant the capital ships could carry serious armament—railguns, lasers, S-T drive missiles.

“Jesus,” Hill said, then whistled appreciatively. “There’s only a half a dozen ships that size in the whole Union arsenal.”

“And how many in the Alliance?” Aguilar asked.

“They don’t exactly advertise, but the latest article in Jane’s Defense Weekly says ten.”

“Lucky us,” Pri murmured. “Better start an evasion course so we don’t run headlong into a railgun round.”

Chase couldn’t feel the swaying, pendulum bob of the ship, but the shifting view on the main screen showed its effect, the battle cruiser and the ever-growing curve of the moon moving from one side of the display to the other.

“Of course,” Pri went on, “that won’t do anything against the damned laser.”

“Oh yeah, there it is,” Aguilar confirmed. “Heat spike on the hull. We’re a little far, but they’re patient. Burn-through in about two minutes at this rate.”

“Jump,” Angel said.

Chase whipped around, staring at her, not believing she’d actually spoken. Her eyes were still unfocused, her body unmoving, but he knew he hadn’t imagined it.

“Jump to the Rift,” she elaborated.

“We’re too close to the moon’s gravitational pull,” Hill protested. “We couldn’t even get close to FTL here, the tidal forces would rip us apart.”

Angel wasn’t swayed, though she didn’t tell him to shut up.

“Jump now.”

Pri turned in her seat and looked between Angel and Chase, her expression showing more doubt and uncertainty than Chase was used to seeing in her face.

“Do it,” he confirmed.

Priyanka shook her head but did it anyway, shoving the throttle open, feeding a burst of power to the remaining drive node. There was no way the ship could have jumped on the single node, no way they could have avoided being shredded by gravitational effects, and yet the stars turned into streaks on all sides of them, the black circle in the middle transforming into a white mass as the streaks solidified, and then they were through the Rift.

Lóng dàn and the Alliance battle cruiser were gone.

A sigh went through the cockpit, as if everyone had been holding their breath. Chase hit the release for his safety restraints and put a hand on Angel’s shoulder. She didn’t move, didn’t react.

“Are we okay?”

Chase knew the voice, but didn’t turn at Gina Quesada’s voice.

“Okay’s a relative term,” Pri answered, slumping in her chair, fingers massaging her temples. “We’re alive.”

“How’s your sister?” Chase asked, forcing his attention away from Angel.

“Zack says she’s going to be okay,” Gina said, seeming as relieved as everyone else in the cockpit. She leaned against the bulkhead beside Victor, her fingers brushing his arm. “He said it was a clean wound, no broken bones, so she won’t need surgery.”

“But how is she?”

Chase didn’t have to explain the question. The look on Gina’s face said she understood.

“She’s out right now. The anesthetic and the painkillers. But before those hit, she was pretty much”—Gina shrugged—“inconsolable. I don’t know what she’s going to do when she wakes up.” Gina touched Victor’s hand, met his eyes. “She and Grey were good together. They weren’t mushy romantic like some people, but they loved each other.”

If she’d expected a reaction from Victor, she was disappointed.

“We need to get the last of the artifacts,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “It’s called the Gatekeeper, and I have a good idea where it is, now that we have the Navigator. It’s on a world that the ship’s database says is an independent colony, and there’s a reported Arborist dig there. We have to get to it before the Alliance or Hart-Klein finds it.”

“Getting this one damn near killed us all,” Aguilar pointed out. The chief was sprawled in his chair, harness hanging off to the side, chin on his chest like he was about to fall asleep.

“And probably did get your grandmother’s cousin killed,” Pri added. “We asked her to come with us, but she wouldn’t do it.”

Chase hadn’t often known Priyanka Ambedkar to cry, but he thought she was near tears now.

“She didn’t want the Chinese to take it out on the others when it had been her decision.” Pri rubbed a sleeve across her face. “She was a good woman.”

“I didn’t know her that well,” Victor admitted, and this time, Chase thought it was actually Victor speaking. His hand had come off the artifact, as if the news had shocked him into releasing it. “Grandmother talked about her, and I got to see her a couple times on video calls.” He shrugged. “Even then, I barely understood a word she said.” His eyes squeezed shut. “And I got her killed. I didn’t even think about it. I just knew we needed the Navigator, and I knew she could help, and I didn’t even think about it.”

“None of us thought about it,” Gina said, crouching down beside him, hands on his, maybe comforting, maybe ensuring he didn’t retreat back into communion with the Emissary.

“This is important, Victor.”

Chase spun on his heel and managed to catch the light coming back into Angel’s eyes, the Navigator back inside the duffle bag. She looked drained, pale, exhausted, but that could just as likely have been the running battle to get to the ship as it could her experience bonding with the artifact.

“We’ve all had to sacrifice for this because it’s worth it. You know that better than anyone.” She smiled thinly. “Except maybe me.”

“It wasn’t important to her,” Victor countered. “I was. And I didn’t even see her.”

Victor grimaced and clutched at his sternum where a crack in his chest armor was evidence of the rifle round that had struck there.

“Come on,” Gina said, pulling him up by a hand. “Let’s go get your armor off and make sure you’re okay.”

“Hey,” Hill asked Angel, nodding toward the duffle bag, “are we going to be okay without you hooked into the psychedelic Rubik’s cube there?”

“Yeah.” Angel zipped the duffle shut and took it off her shoulder, then set it on the deck beside the pilot’s chair. “He just needed”—she shrugged—“programming. Now that he knows where we’re going, he can get us there.”

Hill grunted as if unconvinced but left the cockpit anyway. Chase thought he was getting out before Pri could assign him to another watch. Aguilar followed, muttering something about coffee.

“He?” Chase repeated, raising an eyebrow.

Angel grinned, pushing herself out of her seat with clear effort.

“When I first touched the artifact, I saw the Navigator as one of The People, just like Victor did. I tried thinking of him as an it then, and it was easier because he looked so damned inhuman. But when someone’s talking inside your head, it gets more difficult to be… impersonal.”

She stood at the ramp out of the compartment.

“Can we go clean up? I hurt all over.”

“Oh, God, you and me both,” he admitted, a knot of tension loosening inside his chest. She seemed so normal.

“What do I do with your friend?” Pri asked her, motioning at the duffle. “Get him a uniform?”

“Just don’t toss him overboard,” Angel advised her, “unless you feel like walking back to Union space.”

Her hand slipped into Chase’s, and they walked off the cockpit in silence, the clomp of their combat boots on the deck obscenely loud.

“It’s all right,” Angel said softly, pausing. Her grip tightened on his fingers, and she pulled him to a halt beside her.

They were outside the medical bay, and Alex Quesada’s bed was visible through the open hatchway, lit up by the faint glow of the passageway through the darkness of the compartment. She was covered by a sheet, asleep, motionless. Chase thought about what she’d lost and looked into Angel’s eyes, trying to see a hint of someone else behind them. He couldn’t, but it didn’t assuage his fears.

“I’m going to be okay,” Angel insisted. “Victor is a good kid, but he’s still a kid. I don’t need the Navigator to be whole, to know who I am. I can handle this.”

She leaned in and kissed him. They both smelled, her hair was tangled and knotted, and she had an incipient bruise on the side of her face, but it was the best kiss Chase ever had.

“Besides,” Angel added, “I have you.”

“Yeah, you do,” Chase agreed. He looked in at Alex and sighed, remembering how quickly that could end. “Come on,” he urged Angel, nudging her toward their compartment. “Let’s not waste it.”

“No, that would be a shame.” She bumped her shoulder into his playfully. “But I really need a shower first.” She sniffed. “And so do you.”

Chase couldn’t argue with that. Nor could he help one last glance back at the cockpit, at the duffle bag sitting there, all his fears zipped inside of it.

OceanofPDF.com

EPILOGUE

Sean Haricot didn’t like sweating. It was a sign of weakness, and besides, it ruined the lines of his suit. He couldn’t help it currently, because James Hart was the one man who could make him sweat, particularly when the Hart-Klein CEO had the means, motive, and opportunity to have him unceremoniously killed.

He also didn’t like waiting for people, but again, the whole having him killed thing, so he stood, hands clasped behind his back, and bided his time in an office designed to intimidate him. In that, it did a very good job. Artwork that would have cost tens of thousands if it had been fake, but it wasn’t. Marble tile floors, a fountain in the center of the room surrounded by a half-circle of leather sofa. And all of it had to be flown up from Earth, which might not cost as much as it used to when everything had to be sent into orbit on the nose of a disintegrating totem pole but still wasn’t cheap.

It was the picture of conspicuous consumption, and Haricot knew it wasn’t for Hart’s enjoyment. The man spent as little time in offices and boardrooms as possible, preferring more active pursuits such as windsurfing, skiing, mountaineering, and threesomes with supermodels. The offices were, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt’s comments on the national parks, for the benefit and enjoyment of the people Hart was trying to impress.

Or, in this case, impress on them how much more powerful he was than anyone he might be dealing with. Haricot was already convinced, and all of it was wasted on him. His feet hurt, his back ached, and his ass had a huge, metaphorical bite out of it from his failure to take the Tamar when he’d had a chance at Gateway.

Though how any of that could be my fault was never explained to me.

What the hell was he supposed to do? It wasn’t as if he’d had an ambush set up. The whole thing had been so spur-of-the-moment and slapdash. He’d thrown together the forces available to him and still almost managed it, but as Hart had so frequently and forcefully pointed out, close only counted in horseshoes and hand grenades.

And nuclear weapons. But no one likes that joke since the war.

The mahogany double-doors slammed open behind him and James Hart stalked into the room, his designer shoes scuffing on the tile floor, the very latest Paris fashions hanging off him as loose as a bathrobe in a style that Haricot very fervently hoped never caught on with anyone who didn’t make nine figures a year.

Hart was well into his late forties, yet he looked younger than Haricot thanks to medical treatments as expensive and exclusive as those Paris fashions, which simultaneously impressed with the wealth necessary to pull it off yet also made it much harder to take the man seriously.

And he was alone, which surprised the hell out of Haricot, since Hart had made sure to have plenty of muscle present the last time, when the epic ass-chewing had occurred. Hart brushed by Haricot and sat in the high-backed, leather-upholstered seat, barely paying attention to the former CIA spook except to wave him into a chair.

“Would you like a drink, Sean?” Hart asked in a pleasant, if preoccupied tone. The CEO rummaged around in one of the huge desk’s compartments and brought out a crystal decanter filled with something amber and alcoholic, along with two glasses.

Sean thought about it. Did he? It might be a test to see if he took his job seriously enough to turn it down. Or it might be some attempt to get him to let his guard down before Hart’s bodyguards rushed in and trussed him up for a short walk out the airlock.

Or it might just be a damned drink.

“Thank you, sir,” Haricot said, nodding.

Hart poured him three fingers of the liquor and handed it over before giving himself the same dose and offering a salute with his glass.

“What are we drinking to, sir?” Haricot asked, clinking his glass against Hart’s.

“Enlightenment, Sean.” Hart took a swallow, and Haricot followed suit, forcing back a grimace as he tasted bourbon. He hated bourbon. “Check it out.”

Hart touched his wrist, and something lit up just under the skin there. Another affectation, another cutting-edge technology most people didn’t have. An electronic tattoo linked with a phone or computer or remote controls. At the subcutaneous signal, a holographic projection sprang up against a curved glass screen behind him.

“This isn’t for public consumption,” Hart added, leaning toward Haricot and whispering conspiratorially. “I got this from my connections to Union Intelligence. And they got it from a recorded transmission sent through Gateway shortly after your little fiasco there.”

Haricot didn’t need to be told who the woman was in the video. He’d met her in person and would probably have killed her if he hadn’t been ordered to bring her in alive.

Still, I have to admit, she’s smoking hot.

“My name is Dr. Evangeline Cortez,” she said, her words clipped and precise, “of the University of California-Berkeley Xenoarchaeology department. I was recently sent on an expedition to the independent colony of Vishnu to unearth an extensive Arborist ruin there. This is nothing unusual in and of itself. There are many such ruins scattered throughout the worlds we’ve colonized, and all of them have proven to be mystifying and frustrating due to the fact that the Arborists, like us, kept all their records on electronic media which we have no way of accessing.

“This dig was different. It included elaborate diagrams etched into metal which helped us to translate the Arborist language… and read what they considered the most important parts of their history. But the most important find at the dig wasn’t about the Arborists at all. It was what they found beneath their city.”

The pleasant image of Angel Cortez was replaced by something far less pleasant, if no less intriguing. The fossilized skeleton was obviously not human, but beyond that, it was like nothing Haricot had ever seen either on Earth or the colonies, not even on tours of the Museum of Natural History as a child. It was the love child of a walrus, a kangaroo, and an alligator, but it was none of those.

“These beings called themselves The People, and they predate the end of the Arborist civilization by thousands of years. They were once the rulers of a vast empire throughout this spiral arm of the galaxy, an empire they built with their science and engineering. The worlds we now colonize were once lifeless rocks that The People terraformed to make habitable and populated with life engineered with DNA they took from Earth tens of thousands of years ago.”

“I’ll be damned,” Haricot murmured. He wasn’t sure he believed her, but it would explain a lot of things he’d wondered about these last twenty years.

“We may all be,” Hart told him. “Quiet. Listen.”

“The People didn’t die off,” Angel Cortez went on, her expression turning from professional to grim. “They didn’t kill themselves off in a war or die of some pandemic. They evacuated the Orion arm of the galaxy because it was systematically being sterilized by the automated weapons of a hive mind The People had encountered in the Sagittarius arm during their explorations. This being considered the existence of other starfaring intelligences an existential threat, so it decided to get rid of them using Sunkillers… interstellar ramjets the size of a small planet, traveling at close to the speed of light. These weapons plunge into the heart of a sun and destabilize it, causing the chains of novae that have been detected along the way to the Sagittarius arm. Each of those novae represent a world that was settled by an intelligent race with the Soong-Tierney drive, one wiped out thousands of years ago by the Sunkillers. And they’re heading our way. They’ve detected our use of the S-T drive, and they’re coming this way to do to us what they did to that nameless society thousands of light-years away.”

The woman paused, as if she was waiting for the alarmed murmuring to die down in a live audience. When she spoke again, there was a change in the set of her jaw, not quite a smile, but an expression of confidence.

“But there is hope. The People didn’t have the stomach to fight back against the Sunkillers, but they thought someone might come along who did. That’s why they left us the secret of the S-T drive.”

Hart stabbed at a control, his lips curled back in a sneer.

“I knew it. I knew that stupid bitch didn’t have the brains to come up with the drive by herself. By God, she knew how to capitalize on it, but that technology was handed to her.”

Haricot nodded, though the personal beef between Hart and Mara Soong-Tierney interested him not at all except as it impacted his job. He just wanted to see the rest of the video. As if sensing the man’s mood, Hart scowled and touched the back of his wrist, starting the recording once more.

“The People left us an archive of all their technology and historical discoveries, concealed to prevent its detection and destruction by the Sunkillers… and to prevent its discovery by those not yet ready to handle the advanced technology it offered.” She arched an eyebrow. “Frankly, us. And if there were no threat of the Sunkillers, I would be very hesitant to give this sort of potentially disastrous technology to anyone. But the enemy is coming, and if we aren’t ready for them, we’ll be just as extinct as the Arborists. You may wonder how we know all this. The truth is, we were told. By this.”

The view of the camera shifted to the worktable in front of the xenoarchaeologist, to a glowing, golden orb that seemed to draw Haricot’s eyes to it, as if there were something buried beneath its surface that he could make out if only he stared hard enough.

“This artifact was buried with the skeleton of one of The People. It’s a sentient computer system tasked with recruiting new candidates for the use of the Archive, and to judge their worthiness. It chose us.” The corner of Angel’s mouth turned up. “Which may say something about its judgment, but that’s not my decision to make. It is also one of three keys necessary to access the Archive, each of them buried beneath an Arborist ruin. That isn’t a coincidence. The Arborists knew of the existence of The People, and I think, from studying the engravings they left us on Vishnu, they knew about the Sunkillers as well, and suspected that the keys to their salvation would be where The People once dwelled.”

The camera panned back upward and zoomed in on Angel once again.

“Soon, we will have the second of the three artifacts, the keys to the Archive. We’d prefer if this could have been done as a cooperation between governments, but there are elements in our society that won’t allow that, specifically the Alliance intelligence service and the mercenaries working for Hart-Klein Consolidated.”

Haricot grimaced at hearing said out loud what was probably an open secret in the intelligence community.

“So, we’re going to get the keys ourselves and use them to access the Archive.” Angel shrugged. “Or we could die in the attempt. It’s in case of that possibility that we are leaving this message. Because whether we live or die, the Sunkillers are still out there, and someone needs to try to stop them. You don’t have much time. If you can all put aside the politics and the greed long enough, maybe you can actually save yourselves.”

The message froze on an image of Angel Cortez’s face and Hart swept it aside with a touch of his finger.

“And there it is. We knew about the artifacts, but now we know the why of it.”

“How did we know about them?” Haricot asked, emboldened by the tone of the meeting. “How did the Chinese know?”

“The Chinese knew first.” Hart tapped again at the subcutaneous controls, and another image came up on the holographic projection tank, this one of an enormous golden tablet, curving around the surface of a wall. “They discovered the same kind of Arborist message at one of their digs over a year ago. The clues in it led us to the dig on Vishnu, only we didn’t discover that from our moles in Alliance Intelligence until after they’d already sent a Sea Dragon platoon to retrieve the artifact.”

“Do you believe it then, sir?”

“Of course, I do!” Hart sounded scandalized at the suggestion he wouldn’t. “Occam’s Razor, Sean!”

“Who’s razor?” Haricot asked, frowning in confusion.

“The simplest solution is the most likely. We have known events that match up exactly to one explanation, and I am inclined to accept it.”

“Then what do we do? If there are these… Sunkillers? If they’re coming after us, maybe we should”—Haricot nearly choked on the words—“think about cooperating.”

Hart laughed, and for a second, Haricot thought the man was mocking the very idea.

“Oh, we’re definitely going to cooperate,” the CEO told him, a sly smile sliding across his too-handsome face. “Once we have all three of the artifacts and unfettered access to the Archive, we’ll make available whatever bits of it we deem necessary to destroy these Sunkiller things.”

Hart stood from his chair and stalked around the office as if he found it confining and wished he were outside, standing before a towering mountain. He raised his hands as if offering a sacrifice to the imaginary peak.

“And once we’ve helped save the human race, well… I’m sure the various governments will express their gratitude in quite a rewarding way.” He lowered his hands and shrugged. “And if they don’t, well… we still have all the information in those Archives.”

Sean Haricot chuckled in appreciation. He hadn’t always had the highest regard for James Hart, but the plan was inarguably genius. Except…

“They said there’s one left,” he reminded Hart. “Maybe we can get that one before them, but how do we get our hands on the other two?”

“By finding the third one before them,” Hart replied, rolling his eyes as if the answer was obvious. “Once we have it… we know they’ll come to get it. And you’ll be there waiting for them.” Hart tilted his head toward the mercenary, eyes narrowing. “I’ll be frank with you, after what happened at Gateway, I was inclined to have you disposed of. But upon reflection, you adapted to unforeseen circumstances better than any of my other operatives might have, and I am not a man to throw away valuable resources.”

“And if I don’t come through this time,” Haricot assumed, “then you’ll kill me.”

“Oh, Sean,” Hart said, laughing softly, “that won’t be necessary. Chase Weston and his friends have shown themselves to be highly competent at their jobs. If you fail this time, I won’t have to kill you… because they’ll do it for me.”

* * *

Continue reading for the final installment, SUNKILLER: ODYSSEY.

OceanofPDF.com

SUNKILLER: ODYSSEY

BOOK THREE

OceanofPDF.com

PROLOGUE

“We’re coming out of the Rift in ten seconds, Captain,” Lt. Kahlenberg reported.

He sounded nervous, Monica Feragni thought. She didn’t blame him. There was nothing out here, as far as they knew. Not a mine, not an outpost, not so much as a wildcat farmer who paid some independent cargo hauler to take them as far away from everyone else as possible. If anyone had ever been here, they’d never returned to tell the tale.

“Take us out, Lieutenant,” Feragni ordered.

She kept her voice calm because someone on the bridge should be calm. She wasn’t used to a bridge instead of a cockpit, nor had she completely adjusted to being a captain instead of a colonel. When she’d left the Union Space Force and transitioned into the Colonial Authority Navy, she’d been prepared for the larger ships, the larger crews, the different responsibilities, but she hadn’t been prepared for the changing rank structure and the shifting nomenclature. No more pilots. Now, she had a helm officer. No more cockpits, no more crew chiefs.

And also, no more dealing with Union politics. It was bad enough when she’d originally been commissioned in the European Union military, but once the US and the UK were added to the mix, the whole situation became a nightmare. Not that the new Colonial Authority wasn’t without its own version of politics, but most of it was above her pay grade.

A low hum was the first hint that the Charles Martel was coming out of FTL, but there was a hint of a falling sensation in her stomach as the blackness of the Rift disappeared from the main screen and the stars returned. Everyone told Feragni that it was psychological, that there was no physical effect of transitioning in and out of the Rift, but she knew what she felt.

“Slow to station keeping,” she ordered even before the image on the screen cohered into the glowing orb of a K-class star.

“Station keeping, aye,” Kahlenberg acknowledged, his fingers dancing across the touch screen at his station.

There was no roar, no stutter of maneuvering thrusters, none of the sensations the ten-year-old Monica Feragni had imagined when she’d dreamed of being an astronaut. No rockets anymore, not since Dr. Mara Soong-Tierney had unleashed her creation upon humanity. That it violated every known law of physics didn’t bother Feragni—it had given that ten-year-old her dream of the stars. But the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge had come with its own fall. Setting the nations of Earth loose on the universe and throwing their governments into utter chaos had been the spark for a war that killed tens of millions. It had also given birth to the Treaty of Luna and the Colonial Authority and guaranteed her employment.

The drive did…something. That was as close as most people could put it. It twisted spacetime, smacked it with a boat propeller was how her instructors at flight school had put it, and propelled their ship without expelling reaction mass. No reaction mass meant no mass buildup from acceleration, which meant no limit to how fast they could go except energy production. Any hull with a nuclear reactor could go faster than light, but what was more important to her current situation was the ability to stop on a dime and take a look at their surroundings before stumbling into them.

“What have we got, Uzomah?” Feragni asked her sensor tech.

The woman’s narrow, dark face was screwed up in concentration, eyes flickering up and down with the stream of data on her readout, and for a moment, Feragni was sure Uzomah hadn’t heard her.

“We knew there were six planets in the system already,” Uzomah said, finally, “but no one’s done an official survey because the only planet in the Goldilocks Zone was a super-Earth.” She finally looked up from her screen and pointed to a computer animation on the main screen that showed the system from above. The primary star was brighter than the Sun, with a narrower habitability zone, but the terrestrial giant was smack-dab in the middle of it, and Feragni assumed the blues and greens gracing the computer animation weren’t just for decoration.

“It’s got life, though, and the spectrographic readings I’m getting might mean it’s got a lighter core than Earth and has close to standard gravity.” Uzomah shrugged. “It might even be habitable for us.”

“Interesting,” Feragni admitted, “but that’s not why we’re here. Get the telescope aligned.”

“I can see the nova almost with the regular camera view,” Uzomah told her. “Hell, you might be able to see it with the naked eye from the surface of that planet. It’s only six light-years away.” Feragni cast her a baleful glare, and Uzomah raised a hand in acknowledgement. “Yes, ma’am. I’m aligning the scope now.”

“Do we really think there’s anything to this, ma’am?” Reinhardt asked, rotating his chair away from the tactical station to face her command seat. “I mean, I know the string of supernovae is peculiar, but the idea that there could actually be some alien machine doing this…”

“Whether I think it’s likely isn’t the question, Commander,” she said, leaning back in her seat, arms folded across her chest. “Our orders were to investigate, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Reinhardt sounded abashed, and she wondered if she’d come across more aggressively than she’d intended. A ship’s captain couldn’t have crew questioning her orders in combat, but neither did she want her junior officers afraid to ask questions.

“Ma’am…” Uzomah’s tone was hesitant, tremulous even, which was unlike the assertive young lieutenant.

“What is it, Jasmine? Do we need to adjust our orbital position for the telescope?”

“Ma’am, I don’t think we’re going to need to worry about the telescope. Look.” Uzomah pointed at the sensor readout on the main screen, at what could only be described as a flood of energy, a miniature supernova coming straight across the ecliptic only a few light-minutes away.

“What the hell is that?” Feragni blurted.

“I’m trying to sort that out, ma’am.” The sensor tech shook her head. “It’s one hell of an electromagnetic field, and from this, I’d say it stretches a couple light-seconds ahead of the thing. And behind it is something as big as an asteroid…a big asteroid, like Ceres. Behind that is the biggest fusion reaction I’ve seen outside the heart of a star, and the whole thing is moving at pretty damned close to the speed of light.”

A low murmur went across the bridge. That was the disadvantage of the naval model, in Feragni’s opinion. A cockpit had three people, maybe four. A bridge had a dozen, sometimes more, which meant the oohs and ahs took three times as long to make their way through the pack.

“I’ve got it on optical,” Reinhardt announced.

It wasn’t as easy as it had looked in the movies she’d watched as a kid to get an optical view of something from the external cameras, not when there was a whole solar system out there and each camera only showed a tiny portion of it, but the computer stitching software helped. This thing was big and bright enough that they almost didn’t need any magnification. If Jasmine Uzomah was right about the size of it, they were close enough to see the main body of the thing just from the reflection of the system’s primary star off of it, but the body was barely visible against the eye-searing blast of the fusion drive.

Feragni had seen the tests that the Union Space Force had done out in the belt of a fusion pulse drive. Why they bothered with it, she’d never been sure. There’d never be any use for any sort of reaction engine, not with the Soong-Tierney drive, but she supposed the Union military R&D section had enough money at their disposal and enough incentive to justify their existence that they’d allowed some researcher to build a fusion drive test bed. The Colonial Authority and the Alliance military had taken advantage of the fact that there was nowhere to hide such a thing and sent ships out to observe. It had been impressive, a star-bright flare of white, one fusion explosion after another triggered by laser ignition.

Next to this, the pulse drive had been a child’s toy, a pocket flashlight beside a searchlight. Closer to them than the sun, it outshone it on their screen, and yet resembled it not at all. It stretched across the stars, a comet the size of a planet, moving faster than she could follow, a hair’s breadth below light speed. Her head ached with the knowledge that it was already hundreds of thousands of kilometers past before the light reached her.

“What’s the course?” she asked sharply. “Where’s it heading?”

“Unless it course-corrects,” Reinhardt announced, stepping over Uzomah, since projecting courses was technically the responsibility of the tactical officer rather than the sensor tech, “which is probably impossible at its current speed and acceleration, it’s going straight into the heart of the star.”

“Oh, damn,” Feragni murmured. “How far away are we from the star?”

“About eight light-minutes, ma’am,” Kahlenberg told her, the helm officer’s voice grim. “Given the speed and last known location of the”—he seemed to struggle to find a term—“spacecraft, it’s probably already collided.”

“And how long would we have until the star explodes?”

“God alone knows, ma’am. All the science I studied at the Academy says a star that size shouldn’t even be able to go supernova. But we’ve seen it happen over and over. I’d say there’s something aboard that ship, something besides a rock hitting the star at close to the speed of light. As to what, I have no idea. It could take minutes, it could take months.”

Feragni sighed, but it was the answer she’d expected. The question had been more rhetorical. They hadn’t even been certain these things—these Sunkillers—even existed, much less how they worked. All she was certain of was that they were Bussard ramjets, scooping up their fuel from the interstellar medium, sucking in atoms of hydrogen from millions of kilometers around with their magnetic field and fusing it in order to accelerate continuously and build up a speed of close to the speed of light. It was the ultimate method of rocket transportation, the most advanced a civilization could get if they’d never developed an S-T drive system, and it was something that humanity wouldn’t have achieved for hundreds of years, if ever.

“We have to assume,” Feragni said with deliberate calm, “that it won’t take months, because if we guess that and we’re wrong, then we’ll be sitting right here when the gamma ray burst hits us.”

“Maybe we could fall back to the edge of the system, ma’am?” Reinhardt suggested. Feragni scowled at him.

“Did you fall asleep in physics class at the Academy, Hans?” she asked. “The gamma rays from the supernova will be traveling at right around the same speed as the photons. We’ll just wait longer to die.” The man’s ears reddened with a deep blush, and he mumbled an apology, but she went on. “In fact, the latest estimates are that we’ll have to be light-years away before the gamma ray burst isn’t deadly to us. We have to assume the Sunkiller worked this time, because it has over and over between here and the Sagittarian Arm of this galaxy.” Feragni motioned toward Kahlenberg. “Set course for the Wakan Tonka system. The task force will be meeting us there.”

“Aye, ma’am,” the helm officer said crisply, and the view on the main screen was shifting even before he finished the acknowledgement, as if he’d been itching to run and only needed an excuse.

“Do you think it’ll work, ma’am?” Reinhardt asked her, his voice small and hesitant, as if he was loathe to make another mistake. “The plan they have to stop them at Wakan Tonka?”

Feragni didn’t bother asking the man how he’d heard of the plan. It was classified, compartmentalized, and anyone who’d leaked it would have been subject to court-martial, but the Colonial Authority was new enough as an organization that the threat didn’t hold the same cache it might have in the Union or the Alliance military. Of course, it had been leaked. Hell, even the existence of the Sunkillers was technically classified, but the message from Dr. Cortez and the crew of the Tamar had been broadcast in the clear. Even gossip ’casts had the story now, though most people didn’t believe it.

A starbow was forming in the front screen as they accelerated to near light speed, the stars forming a rainbow ring around them. In seconds, they’d break through the light barrier into the Rift, and safety.

Safety. That’s a relative term.

“I sincerely hope so, Mr. Reinhardt,” she told him, shaking her head. “If it doesn’t, our options become…limited.”

“To what, ma’am?”

Feragni pictured Angel Cortez’s face in the video, and she frowned.

“It’s really not worth considering.”

OceanofPDF.com

1

“You’d better take good care of my baby, Andre,” Priyanka Ambedkar said, shaking a finger at the short, pudgy bald man in the greasy coveralls. “I’ve been a good, steady customer, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Pri, my darling,” the man cried, throwing up his hands as if she’d insulted his family, “my reputation is my life! Would I cheat a customer?”

“Not if you didn’t think you could get away with it.” Pri admitted, brushing strands of dark hair out of her eyes and tying it back into a ponytail. She usually kept her hair too short to require tying back, but visiting a stylist hadn’t been high on her list of priorities these last few months. “I’m sorry, Andre, I didn’t mean to bust your balls. But we’re running close to the edge here, and I can’t afford mistakes.”

The bald man barked a laugh, slapping her on the shoulder hard enough to make her stumble.

“You’re running close to the edge, Pri?” he repeated, still chuckling. “So, nothing’s changed then? Come on, girl, you’re always running close to the edge.” Andre shrugged. “Now, being wanted by the Union government is a new low even for you, but it is all the same to Andre!”

The bald man waddled around the ship, a five-foot-six emperor penguin squeezed into torn and faded work clothes, a cleaning rag across his shoulder.

“Good God!” He paused, waving at the improvised metal patching at the nose of the craft. “What have you done to her? It would have been better just to leave the cracks in the hull rather than do this sort of shoddy work! Have some self-respect!”

“Give me a break. We were pressed for time, and it was this or just wait for a micrometeorite to break through the hull and drain our air.”

Pri followed the fat man around the wedge shape of the starship, rolling her eyes as he tsked and clucked over every scar in the matte-gray hull and bemoaned her lifestyle choices. Her ship was isolated from the rest of the spacecraft at the port and from the prying eyes of pedestrians by the high sheet-metal walls of the repair stall, but she glanced instinctively off to the side every so often just to be sure.

The walls cut her off from her surroundings just as effectively. The sky was gray, but she could see nothing of the rest of the port or the city beyond it from within the stall, which was all the same to Pri. She’d seen enough of Barataria Bay. It was named for an old pirate port from the days of sail, and for good reason. Barataria was the place you went when you had nowhere else to go, when you couldn’t even afford the docking fees at Gateway station. And like most shelters for the lawless and desperate, it was a place no one else wanted. Habitable planets weren’t exactly rare, but hospitable ones were.

Barataria was a grim, cloud-sheathed place cut by rugged mountains and cursed by a background radiation born of the rich uranium veins within them. Someday, if anyone ever had the money to invest in it, those would be profitable mining operations, but for now, they just meant a higher cancer rate for the unlucky sons of bitches forced to live here. Add to that a moon uncomfortably close, a sixteen-hour rotational period, and nearly incessant thunderstorms, and you had the perfect spot for outlaws and pirates to congregate. And the perfect place for businesses catering to those people, like Andre’s no-questions-asked ship repair service.

“How long do you think it’ll take?” she pressed him, interrupting his distracted mutterings as he calculated cost.

“Not too long,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the rag. “The capacitor banks will take the most work, but we have the parts. The rest is just cosmetic. Say, four hours? Maybe six.” Andre shrugged. “I assume time is more important than cost?”

“Isn’t it always? How much?”

“Six thousand in DigCoin. Half up front, as usual.” Andre pulled a phone from his pocket and held it out expectantly.

Pri forced herself not to wince, though she badly wanted to. She hadn’t been lying when she’d told him they were running on the ragged edge. Six thousand was close to all they had left once they picked up ammo for the guns and paid the doctor who was seeing to Alex. But it wasn’t as if they had any choice. She grabbed her own device and tapped in the correct amount before touching it to Andre’s. The fat man smiled as the transfer went through, then nodded to her.

“You staying on board or heading into town to raise a little hell?”

“I don’t have enough money to raise anything rowdier than a mild heck,” she admitted. “I’ll be here.” Pri nodded at the ramp, where Chase and Angel stood watching. “Along with a few friends.”

* * *

“Can we afford this?” Angel Cortez murmured aside to Chase Weston, her shoulder resting against his, his arm pulling her close. He’d been very clingy ever since she’d bonded with the Navigator AI to save their lives during the escape from Dragon’s Egg. Not that she blamed him…or objected.

“No,” he admitted, the bristle of his close-cut beard tickling her cheek as he spoke. “It’s gonna leave us flat broke. But we don’t have any choice. We can’t go on depending on the Navigator to make the ship fly. What if you’re not on board and we need to get bailed out again? The drive has to work.”

“I have some savings,” she offered. “It’s not much, but it could help out.”

“Unless you have it in an anonymized account in DigCoin,” Chase told her, “then it can’t help. We’re wanted by the US and the Union. One of the first things they do is freeze all legitimate accounts.”

Angel bit back a curse, not just because of the lack of access to her life savings but because she hadn’t thought of it first. Chase’s shoulder shook with quiet laughter, and she squinted at him, half curious and half angry.

“What?”

“You’re angry with yourself because you didn’t have an underground account,” he said, smiling, “but you’re an academic, Angel. An archaeologist. Why do you think you should have expected any of this?”

“I love you, Chase,” she said, jabbing a finger into his chest, “but we haven’t known each other long enough for you to be able to read my mind. If you keep that up, I’ll have to start being unpredictable on purpose.”

“You mean this whole time, it’s been by accident?” he asked. He rubbed at his chest where she’d poked him. “Be gentle. The bruises still hurt.”

She nodded, rubbing at his jacket.

“Mine, too. Not that I’m complaining. I’ve learned to really appreciate body armor, and I’d rather have bruises than bullet holes.”

“You sound like my old company first sergeant.” He waggled an eyebrow at her. “That’s the only thing you have in common with my old company first sergeant, though.”

Angel rolled her eyes but couldn’t fight back a smile. She changed the subject.

“Is there anything we could do to get some money? I mean, what did you do for money before you started the executive protection business?”

“Mostly stole military intelligence data from the Alliance and sold it to the Union.” Chase shrugged. “Right now, I don’t think the Union would be too keen to do business with us.”

A chill wind swept down over the sheet metal walls for the maintenance stall and Angel shivered, hugging her arms to herself.

“Want to go back inside?” Chase asked. “It’s getting close to sunset…it can get damned cold here in the Bay after dark.”

“Is the city Barataria Bay?” she asked, looking up at him in confusion. “I thought that was the planet.”

“It’s both. This is pretty much the only city on this planet at the moment, so there’s not much point in differentiating, you know?” Chase snorted. “Someday, assuming we don’t all get wiped out by the Sunkillers, some big corporation will come in and build ski resorts on the mountains, and there’ll be a museum or a theme park or something about how this all used to be a Wild-West outlaw town.”

“What would be so wrong with that?” she wondered, tugging him back up the ramp.

The interior illumination of the utility bay was dim and sullen compared to the harsh glare of the work lights outside, but the hull cut out the wind and the gentle flow of heat from the vents cut loose a knot inside Angel’s chest.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Chase said, shrugging, looking up through the overhead as if he could see the whole universe laid out above him. “I guess there’s part of me that wants to live in a world where there’s still mystery and wild things.”

Angel walked ahead of him to the galley and poured coffee for both of them from the still-warm pot that Chief Aguilar had made before Pri had gone to dicker with the repair foreman. Angel didn’t think much of the shipboard brew, but it was better than recycled water, which was currently their only other choice.

“Sometimes I forget you were a country boy before you even joined the Army,” she said, handing him a cup. He took it black, but she dumped copious amounts of cream and sugar into hers to cut the taste. “Where in Montana are you from?”

“Kalispell,” he said, the ghost of a smile tugging at the side of his mouth. “In the summer, the whole damned place would fill up with tourists going to Glacier National Park, so me and my friends used to head out of town into the backcountry, Bob Marshall Wilderness, and backpack for days at a time, come back to restock, and do it again.”

Angel chuckled, taking a sip of the brew. It was hot and sweet, which was the best she could say for it.

“I never once went camping until my first dig,” she told him. “And that was my sophomore year as an undergrad. And honestly, it was always one of my least favorite parts of archaeology.”

“And somehow, you wound up spending almost the last twenty years hopping around from one backward colony to another.”

“God is the supreme ironist, isn’t He?” She offered a toast with her coffee cup that he returned.

“I’m surprised you still believe in God,” Chase admitted. He hesitated as if reluctant to open old wounds. “After what happened to your family, well…” He shook his head. “I might be tempted to believe things were random. It might be more comforting.”

“It was.” She let out a long sigh, settling into one of the galley chairs. “And for a long time, I fancied myself an atheist. But eventually, I decided that a universe that made sense, that was designed for some purpose, was preferable to one ruled by blind chance. And since there’s no way of knowing which is true, I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything to…keep believing.” She eyed him sidelong. “What about you?”

“What about me?” he repeated, sitting down across from her. He chugged at his coffee with the utter disregard of someone who drank it only for the caffeine and warmth and not the taste.

“I’ve heard you talk like you believe, and I’ve heard you talk like you don’t.” Angel gestured expansively with a hand. “Which is it?”

“My parents were very religious,” Chase told her, his voice low. He glanced around as if making sure Adrian Hill wasn’t nearby. The copilot was still in the cockpit. “My father was a deacon in his church. My mom ran the choir. I was expected to be an example for the other kids, a sterling character.” He grinned wryly. “I was not. I got in fights, I smoked pot, I drank, I ran around with the wrong sort of girls.”

“You?” she said with a burbling laugh. “I just can’t imagine it.”

“They weren’t happy with my life choices, and they were even less happy when I left town to join the Army. I’ve been rebelling against them so long, it’s second nature. We haven’t spoken much since I left home…not because either of us are that angry anymore, just because we fell out of the habit.” He leaned his head back against the bulkhead, letting the coffee cup rest on the table. “I suppose I was an atheist of convenience, disbelieving in God because my parents believed, and I resented them. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but that’s not true. You watch your friends die around you, it might drive you into belief or it might just harden your disbelief. It’s later that you start thinking about it. When the fighting’s over and you start wondering if you did the right thing, if you’ll ever see your friends again, if you’ll be able to look at yourself in a mirror in a year, or five years…that’s when it gets harder to be an atheist.”

Something clenched tight inside Angel’s chest, and she put a hand on top of his. Chase covered it with his free hand and squeezed. His grip was warm and rough.

“I guess,” he went on, “with years of thought put into it, that I kind of believe in Jefferson’s God.”

“As in Thomas?” she asked, shaking her head.

“Yeah. A watchmaker God who started everything in just the right way so it would come out the way He wanted but doesn’t interfere with us because he respects our free will…or maybe just doesn’t care about us as a species any more than He cares about bears or mosquitos. We’re just here, and He’s watching, an interested observer.”

“That sounds unsatisfying,” Angel told him, more honest than she would have let herself be with any of her previous boyfriends. “Impersonal.”

“I guess it is. But sometimes, that seems better than a God who sometimes gets involved but doesn’t when Russian-backed terrorists set off a nuclear weapon in a city and kill hundreds of thousands of people.”

Angel nodded.

“It’s a little harder now,” she confided, “since I know what I know.”

“You’ve known there were aliens for twenty years.” Chase shrugged. “What’s different now?”

“I knew there were aliens, but for all I knew, they could have believed in God, too. They could have had their own version not that different from ours.”

“Did the…thing tell you otherwise?” Chase seemed hesitant to say the name.

“The Navigator,” she corrected him, nodding toward their compartment, where she’d left the duffle bag with the alien artifact. It was more than an AI computer, though it was certainly that. More than a power source, though it was that, too. It was a stardrive, like the one on the Tamar, though vastly more powerful. “And through him, the Emissary. They’ve told me about the People…and about the Sunkillers.”

“No Christians, Jews, or Muslims in the whole bunch?” he guessed. He was trying to keep things light, but she caught the tension underlying the words.

“Nor Hindu or Zoroastrian or Wiccan,” Angel confirmed. “They believed in nothing greater than themselves except the idea of their own immortality. And the Sunkillers aren’t much different. They’re a hive mind—sorry, it’s a hive mind, and if it can be said to worship anything, it’s the spread of itself throughout the universe.”

“So, they don’t believe in anything, either of them. Why does that mean they’re right? I mean, look at them. You got one hive mind that doesn’t give a shit about anything but itself. Then you got a race that was so self-absorbed, they decided they were going to remake the whole damned galaxy, to play God. Neither of those seem like role models to me.” His eyes flickered down toward the table before he looked up again. “Anyway, I don’t trust those things.”

“The artifacts?”

Chase nodded.

“I know we don’t have any choice but to use them, to accept their help, but that doesn’t mean they’re being honest with us.”

“I’m not sure if they can lie,” Angel objected, but Chase waved it away.

“They’re computers. They’re created, their memories handed to them by whoever programmed them. They don’t have to be lying. Whoever made them could have lied, could have told them what they wanted us to hear.”

Angel swallowed hard. It was something she should have considered but hadn’t. And she was worried about that. Had the bond with the AI already affected her?

“Did Victor take the Emissary with him?” she asked. She was relieved when Chase shook his head.

“I wouldn’t let him. Too much chance of someone else getting their hands on it if it leaves this ship.” Chase smiled. “I think he would have stayed on the Tamar rather than leave it here, but he wanted to be with Gina, and she wasn’t going to let her sister go to the doctor without her.”

“Love conquers all,” she mused, chuckling.

Chase leaned across the table and kissed her.

“Don’t I know it.”

OceanofPDF.com

2

Victor Lee was sweating.

There was no good reason for it. The weather in Barataria Bay wasn’t quite Arctic, but it was reminiscent of northern Washington State in winter, wet and windy and miserable. It was worse at night, and even here in the office of the local doctor, where he would have expected the heat to be cranked up, it was still cold and damp.

Yet, he was sweating, nervous, a meerkat glancing fitfully around waiting for the hawk to come. He knew why, knew it was stupid, useless, yet that didn’t change anything. He paced in the small examination room while Gina stood by her sister, and Carlos “Chilly” Vazquez and Jackson “Jax” Walker sprawled out in the only two available chairs. They were rickety, ancient plastic and looked as if they might give out at any second under the weight of the former Navy SEALs, but even the prospect of watching Chilly bust his ass on the cold tile floor did nothing to allay Victor’s tension.

He wiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his hoodie, and the gray came away darker, damp. Victor wanted to take it off, but Chilly and Jax were already staring at him doubtfully, and even the older doctor cast a curious glance his way every few minutes, when his attention came off the healing wound in Alexandra Quesada’s calf. Finally, even Gina seemed to notice and put a hand on his arm, halting his endless circulation of the little chamber.

“It’s okay, Vic,” she said softly, and he found comfort in her touch as much as her words. “Try to relax.”

He nodded, though he wasn’t sure if it was in acknowledgement of what she told him or his intent to try to follow the advice.

“How’s your sister?” he asked, trying to come up with something coherent but not related to his own embarrassing separation anxiety.

“Her sister is right here,” Alex interjected dryly from the table, propped up on her elbows.

The Marine had worn utility trousers but had ripped the right-side leg of the pants off at her knee to expose the wound for the doctor rather than strip them off in front of everyone or, God forbid, wear shorts. Her hair had been short enough to stand up in spikes when Victor had first met her, but in the intervening weeks, it had grown out enough that she’d have to start brushing it soon.

“And so is her doctor,” the older woman added, looking up from her patient.

She didn’t look much like a doctor to Victor, at least not any of the ones he’d met at the university clinic back in Berkeley. She wore ragged blue jeans and an Imagine Dragons concert T-shirt from twenty-five years ago. Her graying mane stretched down her back, curly and unkempt, and her sagging jowls reminded him of a bloodhound.

“Your leg is healing nicely,” the doctor added. “You should be able to exercise normally within a few weeks, but I’d recommend not putting any strain on it for at least another two weeks.” The woman clucked like a mother hen. “You’re damned lucky the bullet didn’t tear up that muscle worse than it did, and that it didn’t hit the bone.”

“Yeah, I feel lucky, Doc,” she mumbled, her head resting back on the plastic pillow attached to the table.

Nothing else had distracted Victor from the absence of the Emissary, but this did. Alexandra’s husband, Gray Haskell, had died retrieving the Navigator artifact from the Chinese colony world of Lóng dàn. Victor hadn’t known the man well, but his death had hit Gina almost as hard as it had her sister, which meant it had affected Victor, too. Haskell had been a British Royal Marine during the war but had gone private after and worked for the same Private Military Company as Alex, Executive Options. When the company fell on hard times, both of them as well as Alex’s sister, Gina, and Chilly and Jax, had wound up working on Gateway. That was where Chase and Zack Wilson had tracked them down, recruiting them for the mission to Lóng dàn.

“You know,” Jax said softly, drawing the words out into a drawl, as if giving himself more time to bring his thoughts together, “I remember when Gray signed up for Executive Options. Captain Johansson was recruiting on Gateway and up walks this dude wearing khaki bush shorts and a boonie cap like he’d just walked out of a history vid from Rhodesia in the 1960’s.”

Chilly rumbled a laugh.

“I about busted a gut,” he admitted. “And then he opens up with that accent, and me and Bamber were trying to talk like Brits when the captain was interviewing him.”

Even Alex was laughing now, though there was still a sadness behind her eyes.

“Gray told me about that,” she said. “He was offended at first, until he found out you were SEALs…then he figured being assholes just came naturally.”

Gina was smiling, though some melancholy was behind it.

“Gray told me once that his mom and dad had tried to get him to retire after the war. His dad owns a landscaping business south of London, and he wanted Gray to come help him run it.” Gina chuckled. “He said he loved his parents, but he couldn’t think of a more boring way to spend his life, that…” Her gaze went down, unable to meet the others’. “That getting shot at on some planet light-years away was better than spreading fertilizer on some rich family’s lawn for the rest of his life.”

Victor put a hand on her shoulder and she leaned into him, her shoulders trembling. She was trying to keep herself from crying, he knew.

“He might have been a Royal Marine,” Alex said, her voice steady, eyes clear, “but he was still a Marine.”

“Um,” the doctor interrupted, seeming uncomfortable, “there’s the slight matter of my bill.”

“I gotcha, Doc,” Jax assured the woman, holding out his phone. After he tapped it against hers, he squinted at the balance and frowned. “Damn. Between this and the ship repairs, we’re cleaned out, aren’t we? Barely gonna be enough for Wilson and Aguilar to pay for supplies.”

Chilly snorted skeptically.

“Well, I hope that Army grunt and Space Force puke don’t forget to buy my chew.”

* * *

“I hope Chilly realizes,” Zack Wilson said, tossing the cardboard can up and down in his hand before tossing it into the burlap bag, “that this chewing tobacco is locally grown.” He cocked an eyebrow at Chief Warrant Officer Stefano Aguilar, who was paying the owner of the outdoor kiosk. “If he’s expecting store brand, he’s going to be shit out of luck.”

“It sure as hell costs as much as store brand,” Aguilar groused, tucking his phone away. “Come on, let’s get going.” He put his head back and sniffed at the air like a dog. “Getting dark, and unless I’m wrong, we’re gonna get some rain. Maybe freezing rain.”

The shopkeeper who’d sold them the tobacco barked a laugh.

“This your first time here, stranger?” A tangled mass of white hair topped the man’s lined and cracked face, and his left eye was milky white and dead. He gave Zack the creeps. “We get freezin’ rain every goddamned night here, eight months out of the year.”

“Wonderful,” Zack muttered, moving away from the old man as quickly as he could.

“Eh, it’s better than he deserves,” Aguilar said, and Zack frowned at the man in confusion. “The chaw,” he elaborated. “I had enough of hauling the damned SEALs around during the war. Always complaining about one thing or another.”

“You were Space Force,” Zack pointed out, shaking his head. “I thought the Navy was supposed to fly their own people around.”

“In-system, sure,” Aguilar acknowledged, wiping a raindrop off his lined, scarred face. He scowled. “But the Pentagon, in its infinite wisdom, decided that all extrasolar ships would be under the purview of the Space Force, and that meant that any time Marines or SEALs needed hauling to one of the colonies, we had to give them a ride.”

“How special for you,” Zack murmured, distracted, eyes darting around them.

Barataria Bay had never heard of zoning laws or building codes. If someone needed a warehouse, they built a warehouse out of whatever was available, usually cheap sheet metal or local wood and stone, and if it was right next to a restaurant or a block of houses, so be it. Warehouses, factories, hotels, bars, apartment houses, all jammed up against each other in a nightmare jumble with poor lighting. Shadows loomed everywhere, swallowing up the mouths of alleys, teasing at the corner of Zack’s vision with furtive movement and shifting shapes.

His SIG 9mm was tucked into a strongside holster inside his right waistband, hidden by his jacket, and he longed to rest his hand on the grip, but concealed meant concealed. Advertising the gun’s presence would negate the advantage it gave him.

I’m being paranoid. It was easy to say, but Zack couldn’t shake the feeling, the weight of someone’s stare on his back.

Chase had told him once about an article he’d read on the subject, how it had said that it wasn’t just superstition that you could feel it when someone was staring at you. Most people, the article had said, actually saw more from their peripheral vision than their brain could process, and the whites of a human eye stood out against dark backgrounds. If someone thought they were being stared at, the odds were, they were right.

It didn’t necessarily mean anything here. The place was full of grifters, con artists, pickpockets, petty thieves and a host of other annoyances that weren’t inherently dangerous. Zack had a feeling though, one he’d had before, the feeling of being stalked.

“Chief, don’t make a big deal of looking around,” he said in a conversational tone, “but I think we’re being followed.”

Aguilar tensed but managed to keep his head from jerking around.

“Where?”

“Eight o’clock, about twenty-five yards back.” Zack hadn’t seen them, but he knew that was where they were. “You got a gun?” He should have asked before they left, but the arrangement of who was going where was a last-minute thing.

“I may be Space Force,” Aguilar rumbled, pulling open his jacket to show a handgun grip hanging beneath his left armpit, “but I’ve been doing this a while. You won’t catch me outside the Tamar unless I’m packing.”

“Watch our backs,” Zack told him, touching his ear bud. “I gotta make a call.”

* * *

“Are you sure?” Chase asked, staring at the bulkhead as if he could see the street around Zack and Aguilar through it.

“Sure about what?” Zack shot back, his voice staticky and distant. Barataria Bay had the cheapest, most rudimentary satellite comms system anywhere that actually claimed such a thing, and the sheet metal construction everywhere prevented direct-line radio signals. There was a system of cell towers, but those required a substantial down payment that they couldn’t currently afford. “That we’re being followed? Hell, yes. I’m not a Goddamned buck private. That they mean us harm? Well, this is Barataria Bay, so what do you think?”

Chase sighed, trying to keep in mind that Zack and Chief Aguilar were out there alone, which was enough to make anyone short-tempered.

“You know what I mean,” he said.

“Do I know it’s because of who we are and the fact we’re…in demand?” Zack guessed. “Well, who knows? Do I want to take that chance? No, I sure as hell don’t.”

“Fair enough,” Chase admitted. He motioned for Angel to follow him back to the utility bay, not wanting to tell her the whole story in front of the repair workers, who were still digging into the power cables running to the cockpit. “Try to keep coming in this direction and make yourself small.”

Chase tapped a lock code into the weapons locker, pulled out a pair of SIG 9mm pistols, and handed one back to Angel before he scooped up a double handful of loaded magazines.

“We’re coming to you.”

Pri stood at the rear of the utility bay, keeping a close eye on the repair crew working on the drive pod, but she blinked when she looked up and saw the two of them holstering their handguns.

“What?” she asked, glancing back at the workers to make sure none of them was paying attention.

“Call Chilly and Jax,” Chase said, “tell them someone is tailing Zack and the Chief, and they might want to think about watching their six on the way back.” He nodded toward Angel. “We’re going to see if we can help out.”

She nodded and at least didn’t bother to tell him to be careful. He couldn’t help not sharing the courtesy, though.

“If this is what it could be,” he warned her, “well…they’ll know where you are.”

Pri sighed, crossing her arms and glaring at him.

“Yes, mother. I’ll keep my eyes open.”

Chase nodded, refraining from any further useless admonitions before he followed Angel down the ramp.

“Thanks, by the way,” Angel said softly, pausing to let him check the other side of the exit from the maintenance bay.

The light in the covered walkway was dim and flickering, the hallway empty except for a janitor in ragged clothes, sweeping trash ahead of him, probably paid in food or a corner to sleep in. Chase watched him for a moment until he disappeared down the corridor in the opposite direction, then turned back to Angel.

“Thanks for what?” he asked.

“You didn’t even think about it,” she clarified. “About whether you should take me with you.”

He blinked, realizing she was right.

“I guess I didn’t.” He grinned aside, then paused at the exit to the street.

Dusk was descending quickly, much quicker than anywhere he’d been on Earth, bathing the streets in darkness even as streetlights flickered to life. Everyone in the city seemed suspicious, and most were, but none seemed particularly suspicious about him. Chase stepped out into the street, and Angel backed out behind him, keeping her eye on their six o’clock.

“Does that make me a good boyfriend or a bad one?” he wondered. He’d tucked his 9mm into the pocket of his jacket, his fingers wrapped around the grip, not wanting to even bother with a holster. Holsters were when you didn’t know a threat was coming. He wanted the weapon in his hand.

“It makes both of us too old to use terms like boyfriend or girlfriend,” she said. “But given that you’re a professional, I appreciate the trust.”

Chase slowed for a second, checking the map on the screen of his phone. He’d been to Barataria Bay before, but that didn’t mean he was familiar enough with the place to know every nook and cranny. The city wasn’t huge, barely twenty thousand permanent residents and maybe that many again in transients, but it was spread out, tangled, an unintentional, thoughtless labyrinth. Even labyrinths had maps, though, especially when some foresightful entrepreneur figured out they could make money on it by periodic drone flights fed into a cartography app.

Zack and Chief Aguilar were less than two miles away to the north, while the doctor’s office was a mile east. Part of him wanted to check on Alex and the others first since they had Victor with them, and without Victor they weren’t going to find the Archive. But he knew there was enemy action with the two men on their own, and while Alex might be nursing an injury, she could still shoot back. So could Victor for that matter.

“This way,” he told Angel, speeding up to a jog. It was a risk. Jogging might mean drawing more attention to themselves, but arriving two minutes too late was also a risk.

The warm lights of restaurants, brothels and bars flitted by on either side of the road, as close to a zoning district as the city had, a matter of practicality—the hospitality industry was close to the port. Prostitutes of both sexes called out invitations to ship crews stumbling drunkenly along, a sight that wouldn’t have seemed odd in the original Barataria Bay three hundred years ago.

“Hey, big boy, what’s your hurry?” one of them shouted at him. “Come on in and have a good time! Bring your girlfriend with you!”

“I’m too old to use terms like boyfriend and girlfriend!” he yelled back. “My girlfriend told me so!”

“If we weren’t carrying guns,” Angel hissed at him, just the slightest hint of an out-of-breath pant in her voice, “I’d knock you right on your ass.”

“This way,” he told her, ignoring the threat and curving to the left.

They left the businesses and the bright lights behind them. Ahead were townhouses and apartments, some little more than shacks built one on top of the other, crude, wooden staircases going up the outside to give access to the upper floors. Lights flickered from inside windows, and streetlights glowed back in sullen agreement, the mist rolling in along with a gentle rain diffusing the rays, giving the street a haunted atmosphere.

Chase slowed his pace as he tasted the rain on his lips and blinked it out of his eyes, wishing he’d taken the time to grab night-vision goggles. There could be a dozen enemies concealed in any of the side streets, and he’d never see them. He was so occupied peering into the darkness, he nearly jumped when Angel backed into him.

“What?” he demanded, glancing back.

“I think,” she told him, pointing behind them, “we have company.”

The figures were dark, cloaked in shadow, ghosts except spirits wouldn’t bother carrying sawed-off shotguns.

“Zack,” Chase said, touching his ear bud, “you might have to wait a bit for that backup. I think we got trouble.”

OceanofPDF.com

3

“I am getting so damned tired of running,” Zack said, half to himself, as he pulled Chief Aguilar to the left just ahead of a spray of bullets.

The rounds smacked into the red brick facing of a storefront, one that was fortunately already shut down for the night, cratering the surface but not penetrating far. The gunshots were muted, not exactly silent but softer than Zack would have expected.

Suppressed pistol-caliber submachine guns. The analysis was clinical, dispassionate, not at all reflecting the fear gnawing at his insides. He kept his hold on Aguilar’s arm and pulled him into a narrow alleyway, then leaned out and snapped two shots at the closest of their pursuers. Zack was a fair hand with a pistol, but the night was cloaked in fog and rain. He wasn’t certain he’d missed, but he would have been willing to bet the money he’d spent on the groceries he’d had to dump on the street that the 9mm slugs had hit nothing but paving stones.

“What’s the alternative?” Aguilar panted, clutching his beat-up old Glock like a totem. The old chief warrant officer was tough as nails, but he was also well past forty and spent all his time shipboard. Running on a treadmill was better than nothing, but it was no substitute for the real thing, and Aguilar was out of breath from their sprint through the bowels of the city. “I got two spare mags with me, and there’re at least six of them out there.”

Zack checked the magazine of his pistol, sliding it out and examining the witness holes, then slapped it back into the well. Ten rounds, and two spares, just like Aguilar. Not enough for a drawn-out firefight. The alley was dark and shallow, but not so dark that he missed the ladder bolted to the side of the store, running up to the roof. For what, he wasn’t sure—maybe maintenance, maybe cleaning.

“Chief,” he said, “give me thirty seconds, then fire off a few shots and get them heading toward this alley.”

Aguilar goggled at him.

“And how, exactly, is that supposed to work out for me, Army boy?”

“Better than sitting here and running out of ammo.”

Zack didn’t argue the point further, just stuck his SIG back into its holster and jumped onto the ladder. It was old, rusted metal and he bit back a curse as it cut into his palm.

Good thing I got a tetanus booster when Hart-Klein hired me.

That and the signing bonus he hadn’t earned out were all the positives he had in his heart for HKC. Zack was more careful with his next handhold and put most of the weight onto the soles of his combat boots as he scrambled up the two stories to the roof. His first step was into a puddle three inches deep, and he thought maybe the reason for the ladder was to keep the drainage system repaired, but the owner had obviously been shirking their duties.

Hoping the roof wouldn’t collapse under his weight, Zack sloshed to the forward edge, facing the street just as the crack of pistol shots from below reached him. Visibility was marginally better from up here than at street level because the few lights shining were aimed downward, and what had seemed like dark smudges from below cohered into men and women in dark clothing, maybe combat utilities or maybe just dark-colored work clothes. No helmets, no night-vision goggles, and no body armor.

Not Alliance then, and likely not Hart-Klein mercenaries, either. Who, then?

Dead assholes, that’s who.

The crimson reticle of his SIG’s electronic sight floated over the nearest of them, following the slight rocking as the man fired his submachine gun at Aguilar’s position. Zack let out a breath and squeezed the trigger. The recoil, the report were a surprise when they came, just the way his marksmanship instructors had taught him, but they were an even bigger surprise to that loser with the submachine gun. The man staggered backward, clutching at his throat, and Zack realized he’d shot a little high. It worked out just as well, since the automatic weapon clattered to the pavement, quickly followed by its owner.

Zack had to work quickly. Down there, in the dark, the others wouldn’t immediately realize what had happened, and he had to transition to the next target before they did.

There. Another of the shooters, a woman he thought, or if not, a small and slender man with braided hair. She’d noticed Zack’s first target going down and was running over to him, her weapon bouncing against her hip as she moved. Transitory guilt tugged at Zack’s conscience. She wasn’t actively shooting at the moment, was going to help one of her squad mates. And she was a woman, which shouldn’t have mattered to him but still did, even after all the attempts the Army had made to erase the distinction.

He sighed and emptied his magazine at her.

If she wanted to live through the day, she shouldn’t have tried to kill us.

He’d aimed for center mass, though he couldn’t be sure if he’d hit it. All he knew was that she stumbled to the ground, fell to her side, and wasn’t moving. Anything that kept her out of the fight was good enough. That was it, though, all the advantage he was going to get from surprise. Two of the survivors sprayed the edge of the rooftop with automatic fire, and Zack ducked back from it, pinpricks on his neck from flying bits of debris as close as he was willing to come to getting shot.

Below, Aguilar added his antique Glock to the fray again, and Zack was still close enough to the edge to see another of the shooters fall. That was enough for them. These guys weren’t a Sea Dragon strike team or a Ranger squad. If not amateurs, they at least lacked the motivation of dedicated patriots and if he had to make a guess, he would have said they were in it for the money. Losing half their squad in a matter of seconds must have made whatever money they were being offered seem like not enough because the other three beat feet, retreating back up the street, spraying gunfire randomly to cover their tracks.

They could have saved the ammo because Zack had no intention of trying to hunt them down. He ejected his empty mag, caught it, and tucked it into a thigh pocket before he fished out a spare and slapped it home. Discarding spent mags was for employed soldiers and rich people. God alone knew when they were going to get more.

* * *

Chase wasn’t exactly a fast-draw, and neither was he a trick shot, but there were times when reflexes and training and plain old luck accomplished things that intention never could. The snap shot he fired by instinct the second he saw one of the black-shrouded figures raise their gun should have missed. It was dark and raining, and the man was a good twenty yards away, but these things happened.

It wasn’t a center-mass hit, but the man’s right shoulder jerked backward as the round took him high, and the shotgun blast that would have taken either Chase or Angel in the face instead sailed into the night, bound for an arcing trajectory that would land it on someone’s roof.

Chase didn’t try to follow it up. Too many of them to concentrate on one target, or even aim. He emptied his magazine in their general direction and was vaguely aware of Angel doing the same, but neither of them stuck around to see if they’d hit anything else.

Running. Jesus God, if someone had told me how much running I’d have to do, I’d never have become a soldier.

Half the streets in Barataria were dirt roads, and his boots slipped in the mud, nearly sending him sprawling, but Angel was there to catch his arm and pull him back to his feet. Thunder echoed off the sheet metal walls of buildings on either side of the boulevard as buckshot chased the two of them into the night, but none of the pellets hit, miracle of miracles.

Well, not a miracle. Dark night plus the fact that they’re probably scared shitless because we fired like thirty shots at them.

Running straight ahead was an invitation for their luck to run out, so Chase led Angel down the first side street, not trying to talk, definitely not trying to plan, just wanting to put as much room between them and the hunters as possible. No one was staring this time. The rain had driven all the prostitutes and barkers and hawkers inside, and every pedestrian Chase spotted had their head buried under the hood of a rain jacket or beneath an umbrella. If any of them noticed the two crazy offworlders sprinting through the mud with guns in their hands, they must have decided it was healthier to ignore it.

But staying out here does make us stand out.

The nearest lights were from a bar. Chase slowed to a jog and tucked his gun away inside his belt, covering it with his jacket, and gestured for Angel to do the same. It was a reckless, stupid way to carry a loaded firearm, but as Grandma Weston used to say, needs must when the devil drives. Chase stopped just outside the door to the bar where he tried his best to shake off the excess water from his jacket and scrape the mud from his boots, but the bouncer still gave them both a dirty look when they passed through, still dripping on the sanded wood floor.

The place was as much a casino as a bar, the computer animation from video slot machines lined up six abreast down the center of the floor flashing bright enough to induce seizures. These people would have been in big trouble with OSHA, if such a thing had existed out here.

“What are we doing here?” Angel hissed in his ear, following him up to a very old-fashioned bar of polished oak.

“Hiding.” There were two empty stools together near the right end of the bar, nearest to the front door, and he guided her toward them, making a face as his damp pants hit the leather.

The bartenders were young, probably still in their late teens, and for all he knew, they could have been born here, or at least grown up in the Bay. Chase tried to imagine what that would be like and found he didn’t want to. One of the kids, a boy with long, greasy hair and a ghost of a mustache, regarded them with dull, lifeless eyes.

“Two drink minimum,” he informed them as if he had to repeat the same words a hundred times a day every day of his life.

“Can we afford that?” Angel wondered. She fiddled absently with the back of her jacket, nervously trying to hide the lines of the concealed handgun. It was a rookie mistake, common to people who rarely carried a gun concealed, but Chase didn’t bother trying to correct her. In here, no one would care.

“Not really,” he admitted, “but I always keep some emergency cash tucked into a separate account.”

And this was as much of an emergency as could be solved with that tiny amount of DigCoins.

“You have any dark ale?” he asked the kid.

“It’s locally brewed,” the boy told him, making it sound like an apology.

“Two of them.” He eyed Angel.

“Two shots of tequila,” she said.

The price the kid quoted was enough to make the hackles rise on the back of Chase’s neck, a relic of his father’s frugality, but he paid without complaint, not wanting to attract attention, then kept his phone out and tried to contact Zack again. There was no answer, which could mean the man was in an area sheltered from satellite signals, or could mean the heavy clouds were blocking them, or could mean he was dead. He tried to get ahold of Jax, Chilly, and Alex and got the same result, with the same possibilities.

“Nothing?” Angel asked, and he shook his head. “We have to go find them.”

“We need to think.” He leaned in toward her ear, speaking softly enough that the ringing and chiming of the slot machines and the buzz of conversation would drown out his words past the distance between them. “This was a setup. Whoever was following Zack and the Chief alerted them on purpose so they’d call for backup. We can’t charge out there or we’ll be giving them exactly what they want.” He sighed. “We’ll give it a couple minutes and then check and see if we lost them.”

Angel looked past him and her eyes went wide.

“I don’t think we’ll have to wait that long.”

There were three of them, all dripping wet, which wouldn’t have roused his suspicions except that all of them were dressed in black combat utilities, the sort neither the Union nor the Alliance issued, but that were very popular among private security and mercenaries…mostly the amateurs who’d never actually served in the military. And Chase was sure none of these three had ever spent a day in anyone’s military. They had the hollow-eyed, twitchy look of men who’d lived their lives on the wrong side of the law, guns for hire.

None of them was carrying the sawed-off shotguns they’d been armed with outside, but that was no surprise. Even here, they couldn’t expect to be allowed to take those into a bar. That didn’t mean they weren’t concealing handguns, or that they’d hesitate to use them even in a crowded casino.

They hesitated at the doorway, two of them scanning the crowd while the third, who seemed to be their leader, talked to the bouncer.

“Let’s move,” Chase hissed, sliding off his stool, one hand on Angel’s shoulder, the other slipping under his jacket toward his 9mm as he guided her away from the bar.

“Hey, mister!” the bartender called after them. “You forgot your drinks!”

That cut it, and Chase took back all the sympathy he’d felt for the kid as the three gunmen turned toward them as one. The only place to hide was the casino, the slot machines, behind a kaleidoscope of color and light, covered by the distraction of computer sound effects and the complaints of the losers…and the much more occasional elated yell of winners.

Arrayed around the slots were the older, more conventional games—roulette, craps, poker, blackjack—all requiring trained dealers to fleece the customers out of their money rather than allowing a computer algorithm to do it at sunk cost. Unlike the computerized games, these drew crowds of onlookers as well as players, and Chase tried to blend into the throng of vicarious gamblers watching a winning streak by a fat man with purple hair and a fringed white jacket at a craps table.

One of the watchers was a tall man wearing the characteristic flashy clothes of a pirate crew, his shaven head gleaming pink and blue in the flashing lights from the slot machines except where a spider-web tattoo covered it. Chase pulled Angel into the big man’s shadow, hoping his bulk would conceal them. He resisted an urge to peek around the pirate’s bulging shoulders and see what the hit team was doing. They’d feel his eyes even if they didn’t see him.

If the gunmen were smart, they’d just go back outside and wait Chase and Angel out. It would be the safe play and they knew the two of them couldn’t stay there long. Unfortunately for everyone involved, smart people didn’t generally become hired killers.

“Hey, you!” The voice was rough and raspy, like the man yelling had been gargling with broken glass, and Chase didn’t have to look to know it was the one he’d pegged as the leader of the three.

Exclaimed curses and surprised shouts accompanied a flurry of movement as people scattered, and there could only be one reason for that.

“Down!” Chase warned Angel, taking his own advice and crouching low beside the craps table just before the first gunshot.

The first, but not the last. This was Barataria Bay. The interior of the casino exploded with a reverberation of rolling thunder, loud enough that Chase knew his hearing would suffer from the onslaught on the off chance he survived. His own weapon had jumped into his hand as if it had a mind of its own, and when the big pirate toppled backward to the floor, a felled tree crashing in a forest where all could see but no one cared, Chase pushed the 9mm ahead of him into the gap and fired at the first flash of dull-black fatigues.

He hit what he was aiming at, but he wasn’t the first nor the last. The one he’d branded the leader was a rail-thin, whipcord of a man with stringy blond hair and a handlebar mustache, and it seemed improbable that someone so lean could take that many hits to the torso without going down, but Chase couldn’t argue with his own eyes. The bouncers, the bartender, the patrons were all armed and all shooting at the source of their troubles, and Handlebar took the brunt of it. He staggered backward and almost reached the door before his legs finally gave out and he smacked into the hardwood floor face-first.

As if the man’s collapse had triggered a stampede, the crowd made a mad dash for the door, and Chase grabbed Angel by the hand, joining in the rush. It felt like the one time he’d gone body-surfing at Pensacola Beach when he was on leave after graduating Ranger School. He hadn’t been about to go home, not when his parents and the sheriff all hadn’t wanted him around, and when one of his fellow graduates had suggested the beach, he’d been all for it. Throwing himself into that crowd held the same sensation of giving his fate up to the whims of chance, the lack of control and the imminence of disaster.

Washing out onto the street was a good deal more dangerous than crashing into the hard-pack sand, if just as disorienting. The crowd scattered and Chase selected the same route as the majority of them, heading straight down the road toward the port. Angel didn’t object, but he could tell from the expression on her face she wanted to.

Chase wasn’t happy about it, but with no comms, the two of them could wander the town forever without finding anyone except the people trying to kill them. He just had to hope Pri had realized they’d gone dark and had the ship ready to go.

OceanofPDF.com

4

Priyanka stared over the repair worker’s shoulder and scowled.

“What in the living hell are you doing?” she demanded, channeling Chief Aguilar in his worst mood.

The tech was a weaselly little man who practically swam in his oversized coveralls, and he jumped at the question, his torque wrench slipping out of his hand and clattering to the deck as his eyes went wide.

“What?” The word was defensive, but the look on the man’s face was pure guilt written in huge letters.

“You’ve been finished with the power connection for a good ten minutes,” she accused, jabbing a finger down at him, “but you’ve just been sitting there, not putting the panel back together!”

He started to object, but Pri stalked down to the next power junction and crouched behind the tech working there, then shoved him aside when he tried to block her view.

“And you’re doing the same damned thing!” This one said nothing, though his jaw worked as if he wanted to. “One of you assholes better start talking,” she warned, “or I’ll take off and toss you both right out of the belly ramp at ten thousand feet! Where the hell is Andre?”

She was angrier at herself than the two wrench-turners. She should have noticed this sooner, but she’d been wrapped up in watching the footage from the drone Hill had launched to watch the approaches from around the maintenance stall.

“Mr. Andre went to answer a call,” the first man attempted, the words sounding very rehearsed. “He told me to tell you he’d be back to settle up any unforeseen expenses once we had things put back together, and….”

Pri rarely lost her temper, but some thumb-fingered civilian messing with her boat was the one thing that could drive her over the edge. She slammed the sole of her combat boot into the tech’s chest, sending him crashing to the deck, the breath going out of him in a whoosh. His face turned red and he tried to wriggle away, but the sight of the muzzle of her SIG pointing right between his eyes was enough to freeze him in mid-motion. The other worker tried to slide away, edging across the utility bay toward the ramp, but she intercepted him with a glare.

“Move one more inch and your buddy gets a third eye,” she warned, unsure if she would go through with it. It was one thing to blow things up from half a mile away with a 30mm cannon, quite another to spread someone’s brains all over the deck. “Where is Andre and why are you two sorry assholes stalling?”

“He told us to!” the one pinned by her combat boot wheezed, hands up in front of him. “Don’t kill me! He told us to hold you up for a few minutes, said he’d pay us extra! He didn’t say why, honest to God! Please don’t kill me!”

“Adrian!” she bellowed, ignoring the man’s pleas. “Get the drive running and get us in the air!”

“Yes, ma’am, Captain!” the copilot yelled back from the cockpit. “Want me to pull back the drone first?”

“Just leave it! Get us out of here!”

She pulled her foot off the worker’s chest and gestured with the SIG.

“Both of you, get out! The ramp’s closing in ten seconds, and if you’re not out of it before then, I start shooting!”

That was all the encouragement the two men needed. She’d barely had time to push the control to raise the belly ramp before both of them were pounding down it, throwing themselves into the night. She waited until the ramp was high enough that she didn’t have to worry about any unwelcome company boarding before she checked their work one last time. The power junctions were repaired, and the panels could be replaced later. But if Andre had been screwing with her and the drive components hadn’t been replaced…

The ship lurched into the air, proving her fear unfounded. She shook her head and jogged up to the cockpit.

Why had Andre been trying to stall?

“Cap!” The stress in Hill’s voice answered her question before she even reached her seat. “We got a gunship coming in hot!”

“Of course we do.”

She didn’t even try to fasten her safety restraints, just fell into the pilot’s seat, took over the controls, and jerked the Tamar into a roll as she goosed the drive. She nearly wasn’t fast enough. The rockets were crude and cheap, and wouldn’t do much against a gunship in flight, but they would have torn the Tamar to pieces if they’d caught her on the ground. The warheads ripped through the sheet metal walls with a gut-deep concussion Pri could feel from a hundred yards away, sending a black cloud billowing over the edge of the bay.

The attacking boat was nothing to write home about, not even a military surplus shell like the Tamar. The main hull of the thing had started life as a submarine, which was how a lot of the first private starships had been built. Most weren’t around anymore, but the ones that were had been auctioned off for junk and resold, sometimes to cutouts for bandits and pirates. The thing was barely worthy of being called a spaceship and certainly wasn’t worthy of taking on the Tamar.

They still tried their best, she had to hand that to them. The rocket pods sprayed a gush of sparks and smoke, launching everything they had in a desperate attempt to overwhelm the Tamar, but the solid-fuel motors had to obey Newton’s laws while the Tamar’s S-T drive was exempt. Priyanka yanked the ship into a steep climb at the equivalent of a hundred gravities of acceleration, and the rockets spiraled out of control, their target lock gone. The enemy gunship darted after them, a red icon of radar, LIDAR, and thermal data on the tactical screen. The thermal readout flared at the nose of the ship, and Pri assumed they were firing a cannon or heavy machine gun, but the shells faced the same limitations as the rockets, and she paid them no mind.

“Anything else on the scope?” she asked Hill, her attention focused on avoiding any other aircraft and ignoring the outraged squawks from the traffic control center.

“Just a bunch of pissed-off locals,” he told her, sounding more annoyed than worried. “No sign of anything else interested in killing us. This is strictly amateur hour.” He shook his head. “It’s almost not worth shooting them down.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, “but I’ll do it anyway. Chief’s not here, so work the rear guns.”

“Chief’s gonna hate it that I touched his Vulcans,” Hill said, grinning as he switched to Aguilar’s seat. He shook his head. “Stupid assholes aren’t even trying to run an avoidance pattern. Haven’t they ever been in a dogfight before?”

“Not against us. Money’s tight so shoot straight.”

“Jeez, you take all the fun out of it,” he murmured in a distracted tone that took the edge off the whine. “Keep it steady. Morons are riding right up our asses like they think they’re going to ram us. Let’s get this just right, so we don’t have to file an expense report.”

The 20mm Vulcan cleared its throat, the nudge against the rear of the Tamar barely registering, and Pri watched the slapdash gunboat expectantly, waiting for it to tumble out of the sky. Instead, it slewed to the right and curved away from them but stayed in the air and she cursed.

“Dammit, Adrian.”

“Not my fault,” the man insisted, raising his hands as if he hadn’t been the one to fire the rounds. “It was a direct hit. I think they’ve welded extra armor to the nose. Twenty mike-mike isn’t enough to penetrate it.”

Pri wanted to argue the point, but it made sense. Advanced weapons were expensive, but steel plating was cheap and if the other crew cared more about being bulletproof than speed and agility, it was an easy way to make the aging ship more durable.

“Fine,” she sighed. “I’ll do it myself.”

If they had added armor, she was willing to bet they hadn’t upgraded their reactor. High-output fission reactors were as expensive and hard to get as modern weapons. Which meant they couldn’t maneuver as fast or as well as she could, though there were some limitations even excess power couldn’t overcome, atmospheric friction being one of them. She could stop the Tamar on a dime and give back change, but they were still only a few thousand feet up, and if she tried to turn the ship end for end too quickly, the turbulence from the thick air this low would send her tumbling out of control. She couldn’t just overpower them, she had to outthink them.

Fortunately, that’s another department where they’re outclassed.

There was a maneuver she’d learned in flight school that had its origins in the tactics of propeller-driven fighters from over a century ago, something called a Split-S. It involved a roll and a dive, leveling out at a lower altitude, and going the opposite direction, and it was even easier to perform in a bird with an S-T drive, but it wasn’t something any pilot who hadn’t gone through military training would know.

She nudged the controls, stroking them gently, a mother’s hands cradling her infant, and the ship rewarded her with the smoothest of rolls, the sharpest of dives. The enemy gunboat couldn’t have kept up even if the pilot had any idea what she was trying to do, and they clearly didn’t. Their spin was haphazard, their dive the jerky, listless motion of a novice. In seconds, she was coming up from beneath them, just out of the firing arc of whatever obsolete chin gun they mounted.

But they were right in her crosshairs for just long enough. The twin 30mm GAU rotary cannons coughed briefly, three or four rounds spitting out of each, enough backward force to jolt the Tamar in mid-air, and this time, the converted submarine didn’t shrug the hit off. Smoke poured from gaps in her hull, the death throes of her turbines, and the ancient, cobbled-together boat nosed in, a dart heading straight for the ground.

“Hope that doesn’t hit any innocent people down there,” she murmured. Hill scoffed.

“Cap, this is Barataria Bay. There are no innocent people down there.”

* * *

“There’s something wrong,” Gina insisted, holding up her cell phone as if it were the chief exhibit in a murder trial. “I can’t get ahold of the Tamar, or Chase or Zack.”

“It’s the weather,” Chilly declared, scowling up at the storm clouds dumping on them. Being a sailor, he’d brought along a rain jacket and had thrown up the hood to shield him from the downpour, but no one else had and they were all soaked through. “The clouds are blocking out the satellite signal…which ain’t that impressive to begin with. They had better communications satellites on Earth fifty years ago.”

“Why didn’t we pay for the local cell network?” Victor asked, his tone close to a whine because everything he said seemed close to a whine unless it was that freaky alien computer thing talking through him. Chilly was pruriently curious as to which of the two was in charge when the kid did the nasty with Gina, the man or the machine.

She could do so much better than him. It wasn’t like she was family, but Alex and Chilly had been through the shit together, and he felt like he had a vested interest in not seeing her sister screw up her life. But no one listens to Chilly. I’m just the loud, drunk uncle who embarrasses everyone at family get-togethers. But you mark my words, he’s going to break Gina’s heart.

“Because it costs money we don’t have,” Jax explained with exaggerated patience. “You remember the part about how we had to pay for repairing the ship and Alex, right? You want to eat, right? Because right now, it’s the choice between eating and paying for better cell service.”

Chilly raised an eyebrow. Jax was usually the even-tempered one who never lost his cool. Maybe so much time as a civilian had made him less tolerant of getting wet.

“We’re wanted by the Alliance and the Union,” Victor shot back, showing more spine than Chilly had thought the kid was capable of, “and we’re wandering around the biggest pirate and outlaw hideout in the galaxy, and you don’t think it’s important that we should be able to talk to each other?”

“It’ll be okay,” Alex assured him and her sister, squeezing Gina’s shoulder. “We’re almost to the port anyway.” She grinned despite the rain dripping out of her hair and down her face. “I’m the one who should be bitching. I have to limp this whole way because you assholes were too cheap to even pay for a taxi.”

“Shit,” Chilly said. “You’d rather be soaked than take one of the cabs here, trust me. I was talking to a dude back on Gateway who spent some time here and he said the cab drivers here are bigger pirates than the actual pirates. They’ll rob you blind, or even sell you out to local bandits. I’d rather walk through a damn flood than trust one of those guys.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Alex told him, “since you’re the only one with a raincoat.”

She exaggerated her limp, dragging her wounded leg as if she should be accompanied by two Revolutionary War soldiers with a fife and drum. Chilly rolled his eyes and stripped off the jacket.

“Fine, here, you take it.” Chilly shoved it at her, already regretting the gesture. The rain matted his hair and ran down into his beard and he shivered. “I’m surrounded by freaking whiners.”

“You’re in fit company then,” Jax told him.

“Thanks, Chilly,” Alex said, grinning churlishly at him as she pulled the hood over her head. “You’re a saint.”

Chilly scowled and pulled his pistol and its paddle holster out of his waistband. He’d had his shirt tucked in and the gun concealed by the jacket, and now without the covering garment, he intended to pull his shirt out of his jeans and replace the holster. He had the pistol’s grip in his right hand and automatically scanned the streets around him to make sure no one was watching him, from instinct rather than any logical concern, since no one in Barataria would give a damn if he was armed. The instinct saved his life.

They’d been passing by one of the rows of townhouses built along the route from the doctor’s office back to the port, each separated from the next by a blind alley, closed at the other end by the fence the townhouses shared at the rear. Out of the nearest of the alleys, four shadowed figures rushed, cloaked in darkness, their outlines obscured by black clothing. But one detail Chilly made out clearly was the shape of the AK47 in the hands of the one in the lead. He’d seen its like among the ranks of terrorist groups around the world a lifetime ago, and since then in the hands of bandits and revolutionaries on a dozen colony worlds. It was simple to fabricate and maintain, easy to shoot and nearly indestructible.

The cool analysis was background music to the clashing cymbals of reflex and training taking over. Chilly stripped the paddle holster off the front of his SIG and had nearly emptied the magazine before the first of the dark figures was all the way out of the alley. His own gunshots sounded distant, a phenomenon Jax referred to as auditory exclusion when he was trying to impress everyone with how smart he was. It was accompanied by tunnel vision and a subjective sense of time slowing down. Jax called that tachypsychia, which sounded to Chilly like a skin disease. All of them were symptoms of a flood of adrenaline, and Chilly kept that in mind because they each had drawbacks, mostly involving ignoring threats from different directions.

The slide on his SIG locking open was the first indication Chilly had that he’d emptied the magazine, and even as he clawed at the back pocket of his jeans for a spare, he realized that both of the backup magazines were in the rain jacket he’d given to Alex. There was no time to retrieve them, no time to do anything except let his perceptions catch up with reality.

The volley of shots he’d fired had not, at least, gone to waste. The man with the AK was face down in the mud, and the woman directly behind him had collapsed to a knee, her sawed-off shotgun clattering to the ground as she clutched at her neck. There were two more behind them and Chilly tensed up, convinced he’d made his last mistake and was about to pay for it with his life.

But Jax had his back, the same way he always did, stepping past him and laying down a withering hail of fire from his own handgun, then switching magazines like he was recording a training video for a close quarters battle class and covering the two even after they were both slumped, bleeding and wheezing their last breaths.

Chilly almost relaxed until another flurry of shots from behind him spun him around, and he saw two more black-clad figures dropping their guns and trying to turn and run. One of them, a woman Chilly thought, didn’t make it far, going down to her hands and knees, blood pouring from her mouth. The other, a younger man with a shaved head covered in tattoos, didn’t seem to be wounded but did appear very ready to abandon his mission and his fellows in an effort to get away. Alex had fired the volley that had taken down the woman, and the Marine growled as she swapped magazines, apparently angry that she’d missed the second shooter.

“Wait!” Jax told her. “Take him alive!”

Chilly wanted to yell at the man, ask him what he was thinking, and he also wanted to ask who he was ordering to take the man alive since Chilly wasn’t about to chase the gunman down and Alex certainly couldn’t. But the second question was answered when Gina took off after the last of the attackers at a dead sprint.

“Gina, wait!” Victor called, then followed after her.

Chilly squawked wordlessly in outrage that everything could have gone so badly so quickly, that he was actually going to have to run through the rain-flooded streets after a shooter who might well be leading them into another ambush. There was nothing else to do, though. He ran after the two civilians, only realizing a few seconds in that he was still holding an empty gun.

OceanofPDF.com

5

“Oh, shit,” Chase muttered, staring at the billows of smoke rising over the maintenance bay.

“They got away,” Angel told him, squeezing his arm.

He tried to share her optimism, but the maintenance bay was a smoldering ruin, the twenty-foot walls collapsed and shredded, burying the bay in wreckage. He didn’t think the Tamar was under there, but if the attack had caught her on the ground…

“Chase!”

He spun around, pistol at high ready, but relaxed not just at a recognition of the voice calling his name but at the familiar, long-legged gait of Zack Wilson. Chief Aguilar was limping along behind him, looking as happy to be out of the rain as he was worried that the ship was gone.

“Oh, thank God,” Chase sighed, clapping the bigger man on the shoulder. “I was scared shitless that we’d left you guys hanging out to dry.”

“There ain’t a damned thing dry about either of us,” Aguilar assured him, shaking out his jacket and sending droplets of water spraying in every direction. “Have you been able to contact the ship?”

“Or the others?” Zack added. “We’ve had nothing but static the whole way back here.”

“Nothing.” Chase shook his head. “Assuming the Tamar isn’t buried under all that shit”—he waved at the smoking wreckage—“then I have no idea where she is.”

A crashing boom sounded far above them, and Chase shared a look with Zack and Aguilar, the knowledge that what they’d heard wasn’t thunder. Chase sprinted back into the rain, willing to endure the soaking to get a look at the sky. He blinked water droplets out of his eyes and searched from horizon to horizon, searching for something, anything through the black overcast.

“There!”

Chase pointed to the west, to what might have been the glow of lightning, but wasn’t. He’d seen dogfights from the ground before, and there was a quality to them he couldn’t forget.

“At least she got off the ground before they blew this place up,” Aguilar said, shielding his face with both hands, watching the show. “If this is the Alliance…”

“It’s not,” Chase declared. “I saw these guys close up. They’re not military.”

“If that’s so, then this shouldn’t take too long.”

His words might have been some ancient magic spell, because nearly before he’d finished speaking, a larger, more spectacular flash lit up the clouds and something dark and angular began tumbling out of the sky. Chase’s breath caught in his throat at the sight, imagining it was the Tamar spiraling downward, helpless. That instinctive fear was replaced by a deeper, more selfish type when the falling spacecraft loomed larger, closer, coming down straight into the middle of the city…straight at him.

Chase glanced around, trying to find the best place to run, any place to run, but stopped when he noticed Aguilar wasn’t trying to bolt. If anyone could estimate where a ship was coming down, it was the chief, and if Aguilar wasn’t worried, he wouldn’t be either.

“That’s not the Tamar,” the older man declared, squinting into the night. “It’s old, twenty-five years, minimum, right at the beginning of the S-T drive exodus. Converted submarine. Piece of shit. No wonder Cap brought it down so easy.” He sniffed. “Gonna hit about half a mile from here, I think.”

“You think?” Zack asked, eyes wide, twitching as if he wanted to bolt. “That’s a hell of a thing to guess at, Chief!”

“I didn’t say I was guessing,” Aguilar growled.

Chase was still staring between the two of them when the ship crashed. He’d been in Myanmar once during the war when an earthquake had hit, and it hadn’t felt too different than this. The ground shook, and the wreckage of the maintenance bay shifted with the movement, and so did Chase, nearly losing his footing. No fire, no flames, at least not yet. Starships didn’t run on rocket fuel, and unless the thing had been packed with explosives, it wasn’t going to blow up. Even the nuclear reactor was probably a particle bed design because no sane person would use anything else in a starship that might have to make rough landings.

This landing had been more than rough. A cloud of dust and debris rose hundreds of yards above the city, blending with the rain clouds, and above the rumbling of collapsing buildings came the screams. Guilt clutched at Chase’s gut, the feeling he’d somehow brought this down on them, that the deaths were partially his fault. He shoved the thought down. There was no time for it.

“Pri, do you copy?” he yelled, trying to overcome the static and the rain by shouting, as ridiculous as he knew that was. “Pri, are you there?”

“…read you, Chase.” Pri’s transmission came through crackling and breaking up, but at least it came through. “Is everyone okay?”

“I have Zack and the Chief,” he told her, “but we haven’t found Vic and Alex and the others. There’s a whole platoon of goons down here, but it’s strictly amateur hour.”

“I gathered that from the piece of shit we just popped. I’m coming down to pick you up. Get to the open field past the port, and I’ll make one more run over the town and see if I can get ahold of Vic and the others.”

Chase’s instinct was to argue with her, to insist on finding them himself, but he knew Pri was right, that she could cover the city in minutes.

“Copy that. We’ll meet you there.”

* * *

Chilly Vazquez truly hated running. He’d done it his whole career in the Navy, of course, because that had been the job. Running in training for BUD/S, running in BUD/S, running during selection for the teams, running to stay in shape, and the whole damned time, he hated every minute of it. He’d sworn to himself when he got out that this was it, that he was only going to run if someone with more guns was chasing him.

He sure as hell hadn’t intended to go running after a couple dumbass kids who thought they were commandos. He’d lost sight of the surviving gunman and Gina, who could run surprisingly fast, but the kid was still visible through the fog, if just barely. Chilly pounded the pavement, the soles of his old combat boots splashing through puddles with each step, the stress of each impact a jackhammer on his knees and lower back.

Cardio. I should do some damned cardio. Weights were all good, but he had to get rid of this gut if he was going to keep this shit up without permanently screwing up his joints. Chilly spat rainwater and kicked it up a gear, drawing on the same determination and compartmentalization of the pain that had gotten him through all the running back in the day, pushing the damage ahead to a middle age he thought he’d never reach.

I should have been so lucky.

He was wondering just how long this whole marathon was going to go on when a flurry of motion caught his eye from a spray of light just ahead, in the lee of a warehouse. Gina and the gunman were tangled up on the ground, her legs still twisted around his, and Chilly guessed she’d done a running sweep, which was an impressive move.

Alex must have taught her that.

But the guy was desperate, and desperation gave people strength. He tossed the girl off of him and tried to struggle back to his feet and strike at her at the same time. Chilly wasn’t close enough to intervene, but Victor cried out and threw himself onto the man, swinging wildly but with a desperate strength of his own. The smack of fist against flesh penetrated the grunting and cursing and the dampening wash of the rain. The gunman’s head snapped back, bouncing off the punch and against the pavement.

Victor’s eyes were wide, the whites visible even in the shadowy darkness as he swung over and over, sending blood flying from the other man’s nose and lips. Chilly rushed forward, grabbed the kid’s arm, and pulled him up short.

“Easy, kid!” Chilly said, wrapping his arms around him. “Easy! Jax wanted him alive! We can’t pump him for intel if you beat his brains in!”

Victor shook himself like a dog, as if he was coming back to himself, then nodded and pushed up off the lolling gunman. Gina rolled to her feet with the grace of a gymnast and helped Victor to his feet. Chilly grabbed the gunman and rolled him onto his belly, then pulled a flex cuff out of his thigh pocket. He always kept one handy, a habit he’d developed in the SEALs and kept up as a security guard on Gateway, and was happy he’d maintained it because it would make dealing with this goon easier.

Jax always has to do the intelligence-gathering shit, like he’s some kind of officer.

“Come on, asshole,” Chilly grunted, yanking the man to his feet.

The gunman’s eyes were still out of focus, and Chilly guessed he was nursing a concussion. Something like that could kill a man if it was bad enough, sometimes immediately and sometimes hours later when they thought they were over it. Chilly would have worried, but the guy had tried to kill him, and he just didn’t give a damn.

“What do we do now?” Victor asked. It was a dumb question, but he was almost as stunned as the guy he’d punched.

“We take this idiot back to the ship,” Chilly said with strained patience.

Jax and Alex were coming around the corner, too late to do anything useful, and Chilly sighed. As usual.

“There’s something going on up there,” Alex said, leaning against Jax who was half-carrying her. She pointed at the sky as if Chilly wouldn’t understand what “up there” meant without visual cues. “I think it’s a dogfight!”

“And how the hell would you know what a dogfight looks like?” Chilly demanded.

As if God Himself were answering for Alex, a starship fell out of the sky right on top of them. Not exactly on top of them—it had to be at least a few hundred yards away—but it sure seemed that way to Chilly. The massive black shape of the thing, cylindrical like an old-time submarine, bore down as if it were a finger aiming at him, and when it impacted, the sound and the concussion hit him as one, slamming into his chest, a baseball bat swung by a major league player. Chilly’s shoulders hit the mud, forcing the air out of him in a pained wheeze, and he suddenly forgot all about the pain in his knees and back, just trying to breathe.

He didn’t know what to expect, couldn’t see anything except the flashes of light washing through his vision, and he clenched up, waiting for an explosion, nuclear or otherwise, to burn him up. When it didn’t come after ten seconds, he pried open his eyes. It was darker than it had been. The light from the doorway of the building had been extinguished because the doorway wasn’t standing anymore, and neither was the front wall. Sparks crackled somewhere inside the building where electrical wires had been exposed and dust rose despite the rain’s best attempts to tamp it down. Something rumbled in the distance, though Chilly wasn’t sure if it was external or just the roaring in his ears.

“What. The. Fuck.”

“I told you it was a dogfight,” Alex said, pushing herself to her feet, mud clinging to her jacket and pants. “Something just crashed.”

“Well, no shit, Sherlock,” Chilly muttered, rolling over onto his side and wincing at the cramped muscles in his back and shoulders.

Wait a second. The prisoner. Where was the prisoner?

He hadn’t gone far. The man had been nursing a concussion when they’d captured him, and the shockwave from the crash hadn’t done him any more good than it had the storefront. His head lolled, and his eyes were even less focused now than they had been, but he was still alive and would probably be coherent at some point. Chilly grabbed him by the arm and hauled him up.

“That was a starship crashing?” Victor asked, holding tight to Gina’s hand, as if she’d float away if he let go. The kid did care about her, Chilly had to admit. Maybe he was too hard on him.

“Yeah, that was a starship crashing,” Jax said, wiping vainly at the mud and dirt caked into his pants. “And I hope to God it wasn’t the Tamar, or we’re stranded here.”

“It wasn’t,” Chilly told him. “I saw it. It was shaped different, bigger but older. I think Pri shot it down.”

“She’s not going to be at the maintenance bay,” Victor said, which Chilly thought was pretty damned obvious. “Where do we go now?”

“Back to the port,” Gina suggested. “It’s the only place she can land.”

“Makes sense to me,” Alex agreed, limping over to Jax and leaning against his shoulder.

Around them, people were straggling out of their houses, stunned, staring at the sky, the street as if they could put a location to the source of the collapsed walls and broken windows. There was nothing to see but rain…and them.

“Let’s get to the port,” Chilly suggested, “before someone decides we’re the ones who brought this shit down on their heads.” He scowled at Alex. “And you, Marine…reach into my jacket pocket and give me a spare magazine.” He shook the manacled prisoner by the back of the man’s fatigue jacket. “I’m not hauling this asshole around one more step with an empty gun.”

OceanofPDF.com

6

Chase pushed down relief and stress and post-adrenaline-dump shakes and put his game face on. It took a couple minutes. This hadn’t been the worst gunfight he’d ever been in, nor the tenth worst, nor the twentieth, but it didn’t have to be. He’d shot people and they’d shot at him, and that was enough to dose his system with the most addictive drug he’d ever known.

And withdrawal was a bitch. His hands were shaking, and he had to close his eyes and clench them into fists before he could get his breathing back under control. Chase remembered what his old first sergeant had told him and imagined a boreal forest like the ones back home, an azure glacial lake, and the sun shining down on him. Peace. Serenity.

When he opened his eyes again, he’d regained control. The same couldn’t be said for their prisoner. The man had come fully back to his senses a few minutes after Chilly and the others had dragged him up the ramp to the ship, but they hadn’t given the prisoner the time to figure out what was happening before Zack had slipped a black hood over the man’s head, zip-tied his ankles together, and thrown him into an empty storage locker.

He’d stayed there for the short flight before Chase and Zack had put on pressure suits and dragged the prisoner out onto the deck. The man jerked away from their gloved hands and tried to fight but only wound up on his side, blind and helpless. Zack leaned down and yanked the hood off the man’s face.

The prisoner was a younger man, painfully skinny, with his head shaved close to the scalp, making it a canvas for whatever backwater tattoo artist had done their work on it. Snakes, Chase observed. Cobras, rattlers, something that might have been a coral snake except the artist had gotten the colors wrong.

Red touch black, good for Jack. Red touch yellow, kill a fellow.

This one had the red touching the black. Maybe a mistake by the artist, maybe some philosophical statement about things not being as they seemed. But things were exactly as they seemed for this poor bastard.

“Where am I?” he demanded, his Australian accent strong.

“You’re on the ship of the people you just tried to kill,” Chase informed him. “Me being one of them. What’s your name?”

The man’s dark eyes flickered between the two of them, then settled on the emergency air seal across the back of the utility bay.

“Why are you in space suits?”

“What’s your name?” Chase repeated, keeping his voice neutral. His face would be invisible to the man through the visor of the spacesuit and making the prisoner think Zack and he were faceless, emotionless robots who would think nothing of killing him.

“I ain’t telling you assholes a damned thing,” the man insisted, scooting into a seated position as best he could, trying to get away from them but coming up short against the bulkhead…and the airlock door. “Why the hell are you wearing space suits? Where am I?” He shifted again and frowned. “The gravity feels funny.”

“That’s because we’re on the moon,” Chase said matter-of-factly. “Barataria’s moon. I don’t know what the locals call it.”

“This place ain’t what you’d think of as sophisticated or imaginative,” Zack pointed out. “I’m pretty sure they just call it ‘the moon.’ You know?”

“You’re probably right. So, we’re on the moon. Nice, flat little plain beside a mountain.” Chase hit a control on the bulkhead, and the small display screen flickered to life, showing the view outside the airlock courtesy of an external camera.

It was daytime on this side of the moon at the moment, and the light of the local sun was harsh and unfiltered by atmosphere, throwing long, hard-lined shadows from everything. The shadow of the Tamar fell on white sand that seemed to stretch forever before it ended in the distant mountains.

“It’s kind of beautiful, in a way,” Zack put in. “I mean, not beautiful like a beach in Hawaii, but more like the endless nothingness of the Sahara or Death Valley or Antarctica beautiful. Like, it’ll kill you in seconds, but it’s just awesome, too.”

“Why are we on the fucking moon?” the Aussie screeched, trying to stand up but losing his balance again and falling back to his butt with comical slowness in the low lunar gravity. “Why are you in fucking space suits?”

“We want to know who you are,” Chase said, “and why you were coming after us. You’re not intelligence, and you’re not corporate mercs, so who are you?”

The Aussie’s face screwed up in something that might have been intended to be resolve, though the man’s quivering lower lips spoiled the effect.

“Go to hell.”

“Maybe I will,” Chase admitted, grabbing the prisoner by the shoulder and holding tight despite the man’s attempts to wriggle free. “But you’ll be there waiting for me.”

Zack banged his fist against a button set into the bulkhead, and the inner airlock door swung inward, revealing the bare gray metal of the inside of the lock. Chase tossed the prisoner through the open hatch and both men blocked him from escaping. The defiance in the man’s eyes was replaced by desperation, as if someone had flipped a switch as he seemed to finally realize what they intended.

“No! No, man, don’t do this to me! I was just doing a job! It was nothing personal!”

“People say that,” Zack replied, stabbing a finger at the man, “but it feels really personal.”

“If I tell you, will you let me go?” The man couldn’t beg properly, not with his hands tied behind his back, but Chase could tell he would have if he could have managed it. “You got to promise not to kill me.”

“If you give us something useful that doesn’t sound like bullshit,” Zack assured him, “we’ll drop you back on the planet. If I think you’re lying, you take a short walk out of the airlock.”

“You said it was a job,” Chase interjected. “A job for who? Who do you work for?”

The prisoner’s gaze danced around as if he was afraid someone would overhear.

“Couteau Rouge.” He shook his head. “I only started working for them a few days ago! They came here—to Barataria, I mean—a couple days ago, just a few recruiters, and started hiring people for this job.”

“What the hell is a Couteau Rouge?” Chase wondered. It sounded French, and he knew that he would be totally lost if he’d been forced to try to spell it.

“Private military company,” Zack supplied, his tone grim. “Mercs. Out of Algeria, originally. They’ve got a bad rep, and this is exactly the reason why. They can only get work by bidding lower than anyone else, so they don’t want to pay trained vets. Instead, they send recruiters out to the worlds where they get a contract and hire low-life criminals and thugs to do their dirty work and hope most of them get killed in the process.”

“Which is exactly how it worked out this time,” Chase concluded. “But why are these Algerian mercs after us?” The prisoner said nothing, and Chase poked a finger into the man’s chest, knocking him backward onto his butt. “I was talking to you, asshole. Why us?”

“You guys got a huge price on your head,” the man spluttered, eyes wide. “Didn’t you know? The US government has a dead-or-alive reward of two mill for Chase Weston, and another million for the rest of the crew. On top of that, the Union Council has a half-million in DigCoin out on the Tamar and her crew, and someone anonymously offered to match it, from what I heard.” He looked between the two of them. “You guys are worth a fortune.”

“Son of a bitch,” Zack murmured. He turned to Chase, as if he’d forgotten all about the prisoner. “You know what this means, right?”

“Yeah,” Chase replied glumly. “It means we’re eating our emergency rations for the foreseeable future.”

* * *

“Well, this is a real kick in the ass,” Chilly said, knocking back a slug of cheap tequila. “All the shit we’ve done, and now we got damned headhunters after us.”

“I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,” Angel told him, chin resting on her hands. “It tastes like gasoline. Couldn’t you have picked up some Patron or Jose Cuervo?”

“Not on Barataria Bay,” Jax said, barking a sharp laugh. “All the good stuff on the ship is gone. We’re lucky we even managed to hold onto this stuff through the shootout and chase and all that.”

“Not like Wilson and the chief,” Chilly growled, glaring at Zack across the galley. “They couldn’t even hold onto a single can of chew.”

“Hey, Squidward,” Zack drawled, shooting Chilly a bird, “I miss the food we were carrying a hell of a lot more than that shitty local-grown tobacco. That shit’ll kill you, anyway.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’ll have to wait that long.” Chilly slammed the shot glass down on the plastic table. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re all wanted dead or alive, with a price on our heads big enough to attract every wannabe bounty hunter and merc in the galaxy.”

“I really thought,” Angel said, staring morosely at the bulkhead, “that the message I sent would do some good.” She felt like an idiot. She’d spent so much time arguing to send the damned message, to try to do something to make sure there was hope even if they couldn’t get the Navigator off of Dragon’s Egg. “No one believed us.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure they didn’t believe us,” Chase said, leaning his shoulder against hers. It was just the barest of touches, but she felt his strength, his warmth through the contact, and gave him a wan smile of gratitude. “I don’t doubt for one second that the Alliance believes it. They were already after the artifact way back on Vishnu. They have to know at least some of this already.” He shrugged. “And if the Alliance knows, someone in the CIA or Union military intelligence at least suspects.”

“Then why the price on our heads?” Gina asked. The younger woman didn’t sound so much distraught as she did offended. She paced between the tables, fists clenching. “Why would they basically hire people to kill us if they think we’re telling the truth?”

“I said they might believe us,” Chase corrected her, his tone mild rather than reproving. “That doesn’t mean they know we’re telling the truth about everything. As far as the US government knows, I killed one of their embassy staff on Farragut in cold blood. And if they do believe that we have one of the artifacts, much less two, in their eyes, that puts a priceless alien technology that might be incredibly dangerous in the hands of a terrorist.”

“Shit,” Priyanka moaned, massaging her temples. “They won’t just put a price on us, then. They’ll send special ops teams, CIA kill squads…the whole nine yards. We won’t be able to show our faces anywhere.” She glowered at Chase. “We’re damned lucky Andre’s people actually reloaded our fuel rods and fixed the damage. I know he had to be taking money under the table from Couteau Rouge—hell, he’s probably the one who told them we were coming.”

“You know Andre,” Hill told her, for once not stuck in the cockpit. Aguilar was up there instead, and Angel had already decided she preferred the copilot at the controls. “He probably wanted to make sure he got our money for the repairs and refuel. Old bastard most likely thought he could take our ship after the mercs killed us. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reason he called them to begin with.”

“Be that as it may,” Alex put in, her leg propped up on a chair, “the question is what we’re going to do now. We aren’t going to be getting any more supplies, and we aren’t getting any help or support from the government.”

“Then we go it alone.” Victor Lee’s voice was firm, confident.

He had the duffle bag, of course, and his hand rested on the Emissary. The gold glow of the egg-shaped object was a semi-permanent glint on his features now, as if the alien AI had become a part of him. Angel shivered, wrapping her arms around herself with a sudden chill. That wasn’t going to be her. She’d promised Chase, promised herself and now she promised God.

And yet…the thought of bonding with the Navigator was a comfort. There was knowledge to be had there, certainty. Angel gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate on what Victor was saying.

“We can find it on our own. Between me and the Navigator, we should be able to trace its energy. I have an idea of where it is already. Not an exact location, but a system…probably a planet, since we know the People hid them on habitable worlds.”

“Are you just gonna keep us in suspense, kid?” Hill wondered. “What’s it gonna be this time? Farragut? Or maybe back on Earth, smack-dab in the middle of mainland China?”

“Adelaar,” Victor said, not rising to the bait. “It’s thirteen light-years from here.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Pri said. “Independent colony originally settled by Dutch expatriates fleeing the rising water levels. Lots of different settlers now because it’s got a lot of land in the temperate zone.” She frowned, eyes narrowing as if she was trying to remember what she’d read of the place and was too proud to check her phone. “I think there’s maybe a hundred thousand people on the planet, total.”

Angel looked up suddenly, a memory striking her as if it were a light bulb appearing over her head like one of the old cartoons her mother used to watch.

“You know what else it has?” she said, grinning. “An Arborist settlement. And an archaeological dig, run by the University of Athens. I was at a lecture three years ago by one of the chief xenoarchaeologists there.”

“Then I guess we’re headed to the right place,” Chase declared, standing as if that decided things and the meeting was adjourned.

Assume the close was the way her stepfather would have put it, from his days as a realtor.

“And that’s it?” Chilly wondered, tequila in his tone as well as on his breath. “We just do this without anyone else? We go get the Archive and then what? They’ll treat us like fucking royalty?” He laughed without humor and looked at them askance. “You guys are all forgetting one part of this. Getting the Archive means that the big brains can go over all that shit and come up with a plan to stop the Sunkillers. As smart as some of you are, ain’t none of us big enough brains to do that. Eventually, we have to get help.”

“What do you suggest then, Chief Petty Officer Vazquez?” Jax asked, annoyance thick in his words. “You know the old rule on the team. You bitch about something, you better have a way to make it better.”

“That’s simple,” Chilly insisted, pounding a big hand on the table so hard that it knocked the shot glass off the side. Jax caught it with a reflex that spoke of years of cleaning up Chilly’s messes. “We have two of the Goddamned things now. We’re about to get a third, maybe, if everything goes right.” This time when he laughed, there was true humor in it, as if he’d said something hilarious. “I can’t believe I even said that. But if we get this third one, then we need to just dump this mess in the government’s lap. Somewhere public, maybe. Someone who won’t be CIA or covert ops. Like you just walk the artifacts right into the State Department or something. Right into DC.”

“There’s that whole part about them wanting to kill me,” Chase reminded him.

“Not you, you ground-pounder dummy.” Chilly rolled his eyes. “Angel and Vic. Just the two of them. He’s a kid with no record, she’s a respected academic. Maybe we drop them somewhere they can get a shuttle down to Washington. They show the politicians those alien thingies, someone is going to have to listen.”

“No,” Chase said, his glare as hard as the core of a nuclear reactor. Angel had never seen the man look this angry.

“Are we serious about doing whatever it takes to stop the Sunkillers and save everyone or aren’t we?” Chilly demanded, sitting forward in his chair, hands waving animatedly.

“If we turn Vic and Angel over,” Chase replied, a hint of a growl deep in his throat below the words, “then they’re at the mercy of the government. And don’t pretend you don’t know what the government’s capable of…any government. They could pump them full of drugs to try to control them or hell, dissect them to figure out what makes them tick. It’s not happening.”

“Right, I get it.” Chilly pushed out of his chair, the plastic scraping against the metal deck plates. “Everyone’s expendable except the chick you’ve got the hots for and her friend.”

Chilly Vazquez was a big man, somewhere north of two hundred twenty pounds, but when Chase grabbed him by the front of his jacket and lifted, the former SEAL’s boot soles cleared the deck and hung there an inch off the ground. Chase had his jacket off and the muscles in his forearms were corded and taut, the veins in his forehead standing out as his teeth clenched.

“You’ve got a big fucking mouth, Vazquez,” Chase told him, some of the strain of lifting the heavy-set man finding its way into his voice. “But I’ll tell you what, you want to back it up, we can see who remembers the most of their unarmed combat training any time you like.”

“He didn’t mean anything, Chase,” Jax said, putting a hand on the man’s arm, forcing it downward until Chilly’s boot soles touched the deck again. “Tell the man you didn’t mean anything, Carlos.”

“Naw,” Chilly said, his face just a little paler. “I didn’t mean anything. I’m just pissed off.”

Angel took Chase’s hand in hers, brought it away from Chilly’s jacket, and squeezed it hard.

“Right,” Chase said, still glaring at Chilly. “I think we’re all a little pissed off.” His jaw muscles worked as if he were chewing up the words before he spat them out. “We go get this last artifact, then we’ll know where the Archive is and how hard it’s going to be to retrieve it. After that, we can make up our minds what’s the smartest thing to do. Is everyone good with that?”

“Yeah, man,” Chilly assured him. “Totally.”

The others were nodding, too, but Pri’s eyebrow cocked upward as she watched Chase. Angel wondered what the woman was thinking.

“I’ll get a course laid in,” was all the pilot said. “It’ll take a few days. Everyone should try to get some rest.”

The others filtered out, leaving Angel alone with Chase.

“He’s right about one thing,” she said.

Chase’s head snapped around, and he looked at her with disbelief.

Angel shrugged. “We are all expendable. It has to be that way.”

“I know,” the man sighed, taking her in his arms, then resting his forehead against hers. “And if it comes down to it, if that’s the only way to save everything, then we have to do it. But that’s a last resort, Angel. The very last. I love you. And I’m not giving you up, even if it’s the end of the world.”

She kissed him and led him back to their cabin, trying to look upbeat. But all she could think was that it might be so much worse than just the end of the world.

OceanofPDF.com

7

“Are we sure this registration’s going to hold up?” Chase asked Pri for what he realized was probably the fifth time in the last two hours.

“Hell, no, I’m not sure,” she snapped, eyeing him sidelong. “And I get less sure every time you ask me. Now zip it up and let me land this thing.”

Hill chuckled from the right seat and anger flared in Chase’s gut, but he kept his mouth shut. Pri was right. Either their last spoofed registration would hold up under the scrutiny of Adelaar’s traffic control or it wouldn’t. He concentrated on the planet itself.

Adelaar, as Pri had said, was a beautiful place, very Earthlike except there was a bit more water and the continents were smaller. The cynical, glass-half-empty side of him reflected that the larger oceans would probably give rise to some killer hurricanes in season. Fortunately for them, it didn’t look like storm season on this side of the world, at least if the lack of thick clouds was any indication.

Why did they do it? Chase couldn’t keep the question out of his thoughts. Why did the People terraform all these worlds and then fill them with Earth-based life? The Emissary had told them it was out of the goodness of their little alien hearts, but Chase couldn’t bring himself to accept that. Maybe he was judging them by human standards, and maybe that was a mistake, but any humanoid race with limited resources who chose to use those to make more habitable worlds than they needed and stock them for future generations did it for a reason.

Religion? Could be. Humans did all sorts of weird shit in the name of religion. They built pyramids and cathedrals, went on pilgrimages and hajes. Why should aliens be any different?

Hubris? Again, not unheard of, though it didn’t have the staying power of religion.

“Roger that, privateer Absaroka,” the traffic controller replied to an inquiry Chase hadn’t heard, lost in his musings. “You’re cleared to land at the Nieuw Eindhoven port, berth three-seven.”

“That was quick and painless,” Hill said, sniffing. “Must mean something’s up.”

“Thank you, Little Miss Happiness,” Pri said, angling the ship down into the atmosphere. She looked away from the main screen for a moment, giving Chase a sidelong glance. “You guys have a plan once we get there, or should I just sit around at the port waiting to pull your ass out of the fire as usual?”

“We do have a plan,” Chase assured her. “We’re going to rent a flyer big enough to haul all of us to the dig site, head out there and hope to hell that Angel can schmooze the Greeks into letting us take a look at the site.” He shrugged. “She should be able to do it. I doubt they’ll know she’s involved with all this or wanted by the US and the Union and the Alliance and probably the freaking SPCA for all I know. Then, we find the artifact, the Gatekeeper Vic says it’s called, and smuggle it out of there without them seeing it, then fly it right back to the port and we’re out of here.”

“That simple, huh?” Aguilar asked from behind them. “Just fly it right out?”

“I said that’s the plan,” Chase corrected him. The black of space had turned to the blue of daylight on the main screen, and wind buffeted the ship as it descended into the atmosphere. “So, yeah, I want you to sit around at the port and wait to pull our asses out of the fire. As usual.”

* * *

“This thing is a piece of shit,” Zack opined, sliding into the pleather driver’s seat of the flyer.

Chase didn’t necessarily disagree. Flyers were a hybrid between a spaceship and an airplane, built with the basic aerodynamics for atmospheric flight but powered by a small S-T drive. Most of them had a sleek, angular look to them, but this one was a blob, a patched-together flattened football shape, and God alone knew what shape it had started as.

“It’s what we could afford,” Chase told him, standing outside the open gull wing door of the front passenger’s side, waiting until the others clambered into the remaining two rows of seats. Angel and Victor were right behind him, both of them carrying their bonded artifacts in shoulder bags, while Chilly, Jax, and Alex squeezed into the rearmost row. Alex said her leg was feeling good enough to handle some action, though Chase wasn’t so sure. The truth was, they just didn’t have enough people at hand to leave her behind.

It had been hard enough talking Gina into staying behind. The girl seemed convinced she was an honorary Marine because she’d slide-tackled the hired gun on Barataria and had bugged her sister and Chase for hours to give her a gun and take her along. Pri had come to the rescue, asking her to stay and help her out with the reactor, to double-check the repairs Andre and his people had done.

Chase gave the spaceport one last look across the paved lot between the entrance gate and the rental offices. The Tamar was just visible between a pair of cargo shuttles, a hint of matte gray against their gleaming silver, a half a mile away yet seeming unreachable. There was no customs, no security at the port, which was convenient but not surprising. Most people didn’t migrate to the star colonies so they could have the same restrictions they had back on Earth. They could likely have still brought their personal weapons with them either way, but the lack of customs meant no official eyes would be running their images through facial recognition, like they would have on a Union colony world.

That should have comforted him. If their cover registration held up, they would be anonymous, untraceable. It didn’t. They should have been untraceable on Barataria, but someone had found them, someone had reported them. The weak link in their whole plan was the Greek dig team. If even one of them had read a report about the assassination on Farragut and connected Angel to him and the Tamar, all it would take was one call to the Colonial Authority outpost on the planet’s moon and they’d be screwed.

The doors slamming on the rear seats brought him back to the present. Chase shook his head free of the worry and pulled himself up into the seat beside Zack. There was a button set in the dashboard in front of him to close the door, but when he pushed it, the motor whined in protest and nothing happened.

“I told you,” Zack said, shaking his head.

Chase sighed, stretched a hand upward, and grabbed the manual handle to pull the door shut with good old muscle power. It took two tries to get it to latch, and he hoped to hell that it didn’t fly open while they were in the air. He was still hunting for the safety harness when Zack powered the car up and it jumped off the ground like a scalded dog and shot toward the horizon so fast that the city blurred around it. Chase finished buckling in and glared at Zack.

“Weren’t you the one who’s been telling me this thing is a piece of shit? Shouldn’t we be going a little slower?”

“The drive’s a simple enough thing,” Zack said, shrugging, hands light on the controls. “There ain’t much that can go wrong on a Soong-Tierney drive unless you blow it to pieces or pull the power feed. And the batteries are charged, which is the other half of the equation. As long as there isn’t a loose connection, we’re golden as far as staying in the air goes.” He shot Chase a grin. “It’s still a piece of shit.”

Chase grunted and twisted around in his seat, eyeing Victor and Angel. Both were touching their bonded AIs, and the sight made something turn inside his stomach.

“Any idea of a direction?”

Vic frowned, which was unusual when he was bonded with the Emissary. Usually, he seemed utterly calm and content when he was in communion with the alien computer, no matter how hectic and dangerous things got.

“Not precisely,” he admitted. “I’m afraid the Gatekeeper may be buried more deeply than either the Emissary or the Navigator. If that’s the case, it might take us more time and effort to reach it.”

“You’re sure it’s here, right?” Chilly asked from behind them, leaning across the seat. “I mean, we did fly almost a week to get here.”

“It’s strange,” Angel said, and the timbre of her voice was different enough that Chase knew it was the Navigator speaking through her. “Before we landed, I was sure that the Gatekeeper was fixed at what we now know was the dig site. Now…it’s less certain. I feel as if the Gatekeeper may have been moved.”

“Oh, shit,” Alex murmured, rubbing a hand over her face. “Did the damned Alliance already get here?”

“Not necessarily,” Angel said, and this time it was Angel. “This is an archaeological dig, remember. The crew from the University of Athens could have found it and moved it. If they did, it can’t have been far.” Her eyes clouded over as she communed again with the AI. “We can still feel it somewhere nearby. Maybe to the city.”

“So, we turn around?” Zack wondered, motioning ahead of them. It was mid-morning, and the sun was rising above the hills outside of town. “We’ll be there in like ten minutes.”

“No,” Chase told him, turning back to the front. “We’ll go take a look at the dig first. There’ll probably be people still there, even if they moved the artifact. We can ask them.” He shrugged and looked back at Angel. “You can ask them where they took it.”

“Hey, what’s that?” Zack asked, pointing downward.

They were about one hundred feet up, staying low to avoid attracting attention, low enough to see the four locals standing around the tractor in the middle of the field. Zack had throttled back the drive, and the surrounding farmland was no longer a blur, sharpening into fields of golden wheat that reminded Chase of his boyhood home. The endless fields were intersected by gravel roads. A pickup truck was parked at the closest of them, the ride that had brought the workers to the tractor.

“We’re only about four miles from the dig,” Chase estimated. “Set down next to them. They’ve probably driven by it a dozen times.”

“Copy that,” Zack said, taking the car down. It creaked at the pressure of the air against its lifting surfaces, and Chase worried for a moment that the stubby wings might fall right off before Zack could actually bring the thing down.

The farmers on the ground looked worried, too, pointing and yelling as the car came in right behind their tractor and using the trampled grain it had left behind as a landing zone. The skids beneath the car settled onto the flattened wheat and the bare ground to either side of it, and Chase hit the door-open button, hoping against hope that the motor might work better the other direction. It didn’t.

“Shit,” he sighed, wedging a foot against the door and pushing it upward.

“We got a story for them?” Zack asked as he opened his own door.

“I’m just gonna wing it.”

The four locals were dressed like the most stereotypical hayseeds Chase had ever seen in Montana or Idaho, right down to broad-brimmed hats and denim overalls. One was a woman, but she was as burly and covered in grease and dirt as the men, and they were all fairly young.

“You need some help?” one of them asked, a blond kid with long, stringy hair and a beard. He spoke English with a weird, almost-German accent that Chase assumed was Dutch.

“Hi,” Chase said, smiling more broadly than he had since he was a teenager. It made his face hurt. “I’m sorry to bother you, but we’re from the University of California Berkeley Xenoarchaeology department, here to investigate the alien ruins near here. We thought we had the right coordinates to the place, but we’ve been circling the area for a while, and we can’t seem to find it. We were wondering if maybe you had any idea which way it was?”

It seemed like a lame story, but it was the best Chase had been able to come up with. The farm kids looked at each other and spoke softly in their own language before they turned back to him.

“It’s about four miles west,” the blond told them. “But we don’t understand.” He motioned between the four of them as if Chase didn’t get who it was that didn’t understand. “Those Greek professors shut the dig down months ago. We talked to them when they were leaving because they used to hire us and others to use our tractors to haul heavier rubble away for them. They said they ran out of funding for the site and had to return to Earth.”

“Uh, yeah,” Chase agreed, trying to keep his line of bullshit going despite the cold chill climbing up his back at the revelation. “We know. We’re…taking over for them. Going to continue the dig for UC Berkeley.”

“So, those other men are with your group, too?” the girl asked, frowning. Her accent was thicker than the blond man’s, barely understandable.

“What other men?”

“There were a couple of aircars full of people,” she explained. “Maybe a week ago?” She looked to her friends for confirmation.

“Maybe two,” the blond put in, shrugging. “I think it was two.”

“Two, then,” the girl went on. “They went in, and they were digging for days before they left. But they took off a couple days ago, and we haven’t seen them near the site since.”

Zack cursed softly, but Chase kept his own face neutral.

“Oh, yeah, them. They were from an earlier group, but we’re taking over now. Thanks for your help.”

The kids tried to say goodbye, but Chase was already back in the cab of the aircar, struggling with the door again.

“You all hear that?” he asked the others.

“They took it,” Victor declared. “But they didn’t take it far. It’s still here.”

“Yeah, they took it,” Chase agreed. “But who are they? The CIA? The Alliance?”

“My money’s on Hart-Klein,” Zack said, not waiting until his door was closed to goose the car back into the air. “I don’t think they’ve forgotten about us or about the artifacts.”

“Can you tell if someone has bonded with the Gatekeeper?” Chase asked, looking between Angel and Victor.

“We could,” Victor assured him. “They haven’t.”

“Back to the port?” Zack asked, and Chase thought there was hope in his voice.

“If you take us to the spot where the Gatekeeper was,” Victor suggested, “we might be able to get a better idea of which way it’s gone.”

Zack cast a questioning glance at Chase and he shrugged.

“It’s only four miles. Take us over it, and we’ll let them try to get a fix.”

Zack sighed but spun the car around and headed back to the west. Their surroundings blurred once more and the farmland gave way to rockier, drier terrain.

“Due north,” Victor advised.

“I know which way it is,” Zack growled. “Just because we told those kids we were lost doesn’t mean we were actually lost.”

But the big man did nudge the controls to the north slightly, and Chase struggled not to laugh. It was the only part of this he found amusing. The artifact was close, Victor had said, but what was close? Stuck in an office in downtown New Eindhoven? On a starship in low orbit? Could they track the thing down before it left the system?

“There it is,” Angel said. “On the left, in that hollow.”

It was bigger than he thought it would be, bigger than the two digs he’d seen already, on Vishnu and Dragon’s Egg. From two hundred feet up, the chain link fence the Greeks had put up around the site was a circle describing at least half a mile, and scattered around it were prefab buildings, arrayed in clusters centered on the largest structure. There were fresh dig holes scattered around the place, dirt turned up by excavators in just the last few days.

“Those weren’t dug by professionals,” Angel said, disdain thick in her voice. “Someone just plowed them up with a tractor. Bastards. Priceless relics, and they just smashed them.”

“Take us lower, Zack,” Chase said. “I want to get a look at the front.”

The low pass revealed that most of the buildings were closed, boarded up with warning signs posted in white and yellow on the plywood panels. All except the main building. There had once been boards up over its doors and windows, but they’d been torn off, their remains scattered on the bare, rock-strewn dirt. The doors hung open, flapping in the strong, steady breeze coming out of the east.

“Are we close enough now?” Chase asked Victor and Angel. “Can you figure out where the thing is?”

“One second,” Victor said, eyes closed, one hand up in a forestalling gesture, the other resting on the Emissary. “Keep the car right here.”

“Sure,” Zack said. “Because that’s so easy.”

The car vibrated and groaned as it hovered fifty feet off the ground, protesting against a maneuver it wasn’t built for aerodynamically. Zack kept it in place, tightening his grip on the controls, muttering epithets as he fought to stay level.

“I’ve got it,” Angel and Victor said together, opening their eyes at the same time, and Chase winced. Victor did the talking after that, which was a relief. “The Gatekeeper is moving. He was to the southeast, probably somewhere in the city, but now he’s ascending, leaving the atmosphere.”

“Shit,” Chilly moaned, smacking a palm against the back of the seat in front of him. “How could we be so Goddamned close? If we’d been here a day or two earlier, we could have gotten it!”

Chase frowned, and the expression was matched by Angel and Victor.

“That’s not likely,” Victor put Chase’s thoughts into words. “The odds that they’d find it and remove it just as we got here are exceedingly low.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Zack asked, giving up on the hover and pulling the car around in a slow circle. “It’s what happened.”

“No, it’s not,” Chase said, his mouth suddenly dry. “They got the artifact two weeks ago. They’ve been waiting.”

“For what?”

“For us,” Victor answered. He jabbed a finger off to the east. Chase followed the gesture to a point on the horizon, a gray shape growing with each second.

“And they’re coming now.”

OceanofPDF.com

8

“It’s a gunship!” Jax declared, turned in his seat, staring behind them. “Shit, it’s a gunship! It’s gaining on us!”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Zack told him. “This thing runs on freaking car batteries. That gunship has a nuclear reactor.”

As fast as they could still seemed pretty fast to Chase. The horizon was rushing up to meet him at over two hundred miles an hour, fast enough to tax the car’s aerodynamics, shaking it as if the vehicle was as nervous about their speed as he was.

“They’re about to get a lot closer, too,” Zack added, his knuckles white on the controls. “If we’re gonna head back to the spaceport without circumnavigating the whole planet, I gotta turn this damned thing around at some point.”

He didn’t have to finish. The gunship couldn’t turn as tight as the car, but with their reactor, they could build up speed more quickly. Chase touched his ear bud, his phone already programmed to contact the ship.

“Pri, do you copy?”

Nothing but the labored hum of the aircar’s S-T drive answered, and the seconds of silence convinced him that they were being jammed again before he realized it was impossible. The gunship was too low, and there were no other ships close enough to be transmitting on a broad spectrum.

“Tamar,” he said, trying again, “do you read me?”

“We’re here, Weston.” Hill, not Pri, but Chase had never been so happy to hear the copilot’s voice. “Cap had to go to the little girl’s room. You guys on your way back yet?”

“We have a bogie on our six, and we need support ASAP. Home in on my signal and come take this asshole out.”

“Chase.” Pri this time, out of breath as if she’d heard the transmission and ran back from the bathroom. “You said you got a gunship on your ass?”

“We got a good lead on them, but they’ll be on us in less than a minute.” The last word went up in pitch as Zack took the car into as tight a turn as the old, cobbled-together body could handle. Metal groaned, plastic creaked, and centrifugal force pressed Chase’s shoulder against the door hard enough that he worried the thing would pop open. He checked the rear camera, and the pursuing gunship was even closer. “Much less than a minute.”

“We’re on our way,” she assured him. “I’m powering up. No, Adrian, to hell with traffic control. They can prosecute the fake name I used for the fake registration.” A pause, and Chase imagined her feeding power to the drive, the ship rising, adding his good wishes to the nuclear reactor.

“What’s your ETA?” he asked, trying to estimate how long it would take the pursuing vessel to get into gun range. They wouldn’t use a missile. They’d want Victor and Angel alive, would want their artifacts intact. They’d try to take out the car’s control surfaces or her drive, though that might still wind up with them dead.

“Just pulling up out of the landing field now. Give me a second to get a reading on your location.”

The car had straightened out of its turn and was heading back toward the port, accelerating as fast as the battery could manage, but the gunship was already coming out of the end of the curve, and once it got on their tail again, the only question would be whether the enemy bird would come up from below or down right on top of them.

“Is that a literal second?” he wondered. “Because we may not have much more than that.”

“Oh, shit!”

Chase’s earbud had an automatic dampening feature that governed the volume, and he knew that was the only reason Priyanka’s shout didn’t deafen him.

“Chase, we got a gunship coming in hot…”

And then her voice cut off along with the transmission. Chase’s stomach fell, and it had nothing to do with the maneuvering Zack was putting the car through. He was worried about Pri, but she could take care of herself a lot longer than they’d be able to.

“Angel,” he said, grasping at any straw that came to hand, “you and the Navigator acted as a drive for the Tamar. Can you do the same thing for this car?”

Chase didn’t look back at her because he didn’t want to see it when she communed with the artifact, but he could tell from her voice when she answered that she was speaking for both of them.

“I can,” the AI and the woman he loved said as one being, “but we’re constrained by the limiting factors of friction, and the aerodynamics of this car are suboptimal. I can buy us some time.” She touched Chase’s shoulder, and now he did look back. There was a warning in her eye. “You should hold on.”

“Oh, joy,” Zack moaned, clutching the control yoke, his face going pale.

Something happened. Chase wanted to say that the glow from the open duffle had gotten brighter, but that might have been his imagination, just like the shimmering in the air around Angel might have just been his eyes playing tricks on him. It also might have been the Navigator twisting the very fabric of spacetime around them, distorting reality as it fed power to the S-T drive field.

Chase barely had time to turn back to the front before the car leapt forward, clawing at the air like a cheetah sprinting after a gazelle. The car had vibrated from the buffeting of the wind before, but now it screamed in protest, threatening to shake itself to pieces, the windscreen oscillating so violently that Chase could barely see out of it.

“Hold on, she says,” Zack grumbled. “If we hit another car or a ship, there won’t be one scrap of us holding onto another.”

“They’re still right on us,” Chilly called from the back. “Not as close, but they’re still keeping up.”

“I can’t lose them,” Angel reminded Chase. “The best I can do is go faster than any bullets they could shoot at us.”

“They’re about twenty times bigger than us and covered with armor,” Alex pointed out. She wasn’t panicking, Chase thought, not exactly, but cracks of strain broke in her voice. “They don’t have to shoot at us, they can just come down right on top of us and force us to land…or crash.”

“Vic,” Chase said, another idea coming to him, “what you did to that Chinese archaeologist back on Lóng dàn—do you think you could do it to the pilot of the gunship? Just take him out with your brain?”

Victor scowled at him, and Chase wasn’t sure if it was the grad student or the ancient computer who was disgusted with his suggestion.

“Sure, as long as you can get me close enough that I can draw all their attention to me and single them out from everyone else on the ship. No problem.”

“We just have to stay in the air,” Zack said, “and hope Pri can get to us.”

* * *

“Oh, shit!” Pri blurted, yanking back on the control yoke.

An angry line of tracers sliced through the air where they’d been a moment before, chewing up concrete before they speared into the passenger shuttle parked beside them. The smaller ship shuddered and thrashed under the hail of cannon rounds, gouts of smoke rising from its broken fuselage, its landing gear collapsing beneath it.

The scene played out in a second, though the surge of adrenaline ran it in slow motion for the theater of her mind, making it seem as if the Tamar would never get clear of the landing zone until her perception caught up with reality and the ship surged away from the destruction.

“Gunship!” Hill snapped, as if she hadn’t realized that already. “And this one ain’t no converted submarine.”

He was right about that, at least. Things were moving too fast for her to concentrate on any one detail, but she’d seen enough of the design to recognize it in one flash of realization. The angular lines, the stubby wings, the wedge-shaped nose told a story, one drilled into her during starship identification classes in flight school. Class D3 body gunship, newer than the Tamar but not current military design. A relic from the war, but not one available for military surplus sale to individuals…but maybe to a corporation.

Hart-Klein.

The thoughts, the judgements all raced through her mind in a fraction of a second, background noise to her instinctive actions as she spun the ship around, slewing sideways out of the line of fire and bringing her own weapons to bear.

“Chase,” she said, realizing she still had the man on the line, “we got a gunship coming in hot…”

She thumbed the trigger of the 30mm Vulcans, and the recoil from the twin guns pushed the Tamar backward, the guttural roar and the ringing vibrations drowning out her next words. She’d shot from the hip, lacking the time or the stability to settle the targeting reticle on the center of the D3, firing as the guns came to bear.

The 30mm slugs were a mix of depleted uranium and tungsten core, some relics from the war, others fabricated on the gray market by asteroid miners. There wasn’t much difference between the two in practice, each capable of slicing through the thickest armor a ship that size could carry, or blowing huge chunks out of the spaceport offices. They mostly achieved the latter, sprays of powdered concrete marking the passage of the huge slugs as they took the corner off the north side of the building. Another two rounds mangled the vertical stabilizer of a cargo shuttle, and Pri was suddenly very glad their registration was fake.

The D3 class rocked sideways, a shower of sparks and an eruption of powdered metal converted to burning vapor, telling Pri she’d managed to score a hit on the enemy ship almost as if by divine intervention. The surge of jubilation was replaced by a frozen ball of lead sinking into her gut when the enemy’s nose swung around her way and their cannon spoke again.

Pri jerked the controls upward and to port but not quite fast enough. Pri had been in a car accident once as a little girl, her father’s Toyota taking on a Kia head-on, and the cannon round hitting the nose of the Tamar could have been the vengeful spirit of that South Korean import seeking retribution. No airbags blew this time, but if the Tamar had tires, they would have been screeching as Pri fed power to the drive, and their ship exploded out of the city as if she’d been shot from that D3’s cannon.

“We’re running?” Gina asked, sounding surprised. Pri was surprised as well—the girl hadn’t been in the cockpit ten seconds ago.

“We’re not running,” Pri corrected her, shutting down the frequency from traffic control to silence the outraged squawking coming over the radio. “We’re assaulting retrograde. They can afford to take shots. We can’t.”

It was mid-morning, and the port was a busy one, abuzz with activity, transports, aircars, and departing and arriving ships cluttering the skyscape, and the collision-avoidance alarms were ringing for attention one atop another until she had to silence those as well.

“Boss, there’s a freighter right there…” Hill began before she cut him off by turning the Tamar on end and zipping between the incoming cargo boat and the battered port office tower.

“I see him.”

A glance at the view from the rear cameras showed her that the enemy hadn’t, or if they had, they hadn’t considered it an obstacle. The pilot of the D3 bird knew as well as Pri did that just as soon as the Tamar was clear of the traffic, she’d no longer be vulnerable to their gunfire from the rear, and they’d apparently decided that quantity was superior to quality. Twin cannons flared on either side of the bandit’s nose, spitting out at least a dozen rounds in less than a second.

There was very little chance they could pull off a critical hit on the Tamar, not as fast and erratically as the ship was flying, but the bandit did manage to blow the portside wing off the freighter. The flash of the cannon rounds exploding teased at the edge of Pri’s vision, and then she lost sight of the civilian ship, the few tall buildings in Nieuw Eindhoven flashing by on either side as the Tamar blew by the edge of town at only fifty feet off the streets. A car ran off the road and a cloud of dust rose behind them, half-concealing the chaos in their wake.

“Oh, boy,” Hill said, chuckling softly, “I bet we left a lot of broken windows back there.”

He was probably right, given the fact that the ship had gone supersonic just past the spaceport, and a pang of guilt stung at Pri’s conscience. This wasn’t Barataria Bay, filled with pirates and outlaws. These were innocent civilians, and they didn’t deserve this.

Hell, I don’t deserve it, either.

She kept the Tamar low and followed the road out of the city, a straight shot through the farm fields for miles before it twisted into the foothills. They were still behind her, but the opportunity for a quick kill on either side had been lost. They’d traded punches and now they were in the long game.

“Chief,” she said, not looking away from the screen, “damage report.”

“I got it,” Gina said, surprising her. “The armor plating on the port bow is cracked. Badly. But it did its job, and the hull is still intact. We lost a camera and a pressure sensor, but other than that, it’s nothing any competent welder couldn’t fix.”

“If we could afford to pay a competent welder,” Hill interjected.

“You know how to weld, Adrian,” Pri reminded him.

“Yeah, but I’m not competent.” The copilot laughed softly at his own joke. “They’re three klicks back and holding steady. If they wanna gain on us, though, all they gotta do is go higher.”

“And if they go higher, so do I,” Pri assured him.

The plains were a carpet of yellow and green below them, rushing by so fast she couldn’t even separate the farmhouses and barns and silos from the terrain. One slip, just a single miscalculation at this altitude, and Pri would plant the nose of the ship into the ground. They’d all be dead in an instant, before any of them knew what had happened.

Is it wrong that I find that exciting?

“She’s going to wait until we reach the mountains and try to use them as a choke point. We’ll have to either pull up or slow down, and either way, she thinks she’ll have us.”

“How do you know the other pilot is a woman?” Gina wondered, and Pri chuckled.

“I don’t, but it’s a tradition to refer to ships as female.”

“It’s against Space Force regulations,” Aguilar said mildly, as if he were quoting a manual. “Officially, it’s considered sexist and regressive.”

“Well, I guess that’s just one more reason I’m not in the Space Force anymore,” Pri said.

The hills were rising beneath them, forcing her altitude higher. She watched the bandit, knowing what the pilot would be thinking. Knowing when they’d make their move, expecting her to pull up. Instead, she curved to the left, following the river. It descended from its source high in the tallest mountain range on the continent, winding its way down the hills before it skirted the edge of the farmlands and headed out to sea. And along its course, it cut right through the sandstone highlands, a path worn through two hundred feet of rock, eroded two hundred yards wide and stretching on for twenty miles. A canyon just big enough to fit the Tamar.

“Tell me we’re not doing this,” Hill begged her, but she didn’t bother answering, letting her actions speak for her.

Water sprayed in a tail behind her, and ungulates dove for cover on either side of the river as she passed only thirty or forty feet overhead, the wingtips of the Tamar almost seeming to scrape the walls of the canyon as they entered. That was an optical illusion. Pri was certain they had at least twenty feet on either side, and there’d be more as the canyon widened out.

“I was crew chief for a pilot fresh out of flight school once,” Aguilar said, his words drowning out Hill’s mewling whine. “Academy grad. That’s the US Air Force Academy, not the new Union Academy, mind. She was one of the first to fly the old Class B gunships when they first came out. She took one into the Grand Canyon, buzzed it real low like this.”

“And they didn’t kick her out on her ass?” Pri asked. “I’m shocked.”

“They were going to. But then the war broke out and they needed every pilot, especially the crazy ones.”

Pri laughed, a burbling sound that she was surprised to hear come out of her own mouth.

“Damn lucky for me.” Pri’s smile tightened along with her grip on the steering yoke as a wind gust swung the Tamar toward the left-hand wall of the canyon, and she coaxed it back to the center. “Adrian, I don’t want to be looking away from the road just now. You’d best be telling me what that asshole behind us is doing.”

“They’re coming in high, overhead,” Hill told her. “About eleven o’clock, a klick back and three hundred meters up.”

“Why do you guys use metric half the time and Imperials the other half?” Gina blurted.

It was an inane thing to ask and a horrible time to ask it, which Pri thought probably meant the younger woman was nervous and scared, though probably not for herself. Victor was in the aircar and she had to know how much danger he was in with a gunship on his tail…and they couldn’t help him until they shook this bandit. Pri didn’t bother to answer, but Aguilar did.

“Military has used metric system since 1957,” the chief growled. “But being as how we’re Americans, whenever we’re not doing something official, we still use feet and pounds and shit.”

“’Murica,” Hill grunted. “Fuck, yeah. By the way, five hundred meters back now, one hundred meters up. I think she’s going to try to catch you at a narrow point in the canyon, then angle down and open fire when you have to throttle back.”

“Of course, she is. It’s exactly what I would do.” Pri grinned. “She won’t do it as well as I would, but it’s the right thing to do.”

“So, what are we going to do?” Gina asked.

“We’re gonna slow down just a little bit,” Pri said, “because the narrow part is coming up in just a few seconds.” Pri throttled back the drive, and the rocks blurring by on either side clarified into a geological strata she could have read if she’d paid better attention in her high school science class. I think that’s the Vishnu schist. Or was that just in the Grand Canyon? “And she’s going to wait for the count of five I think…I’d go to five. Get ready, Chief.”

Just a little slower. Make things easier for that other pilot. Pri had no idea who they were, but she imagined the woman as a stuck-up bitch, full of herself because she was a pilot, lording it over the rest of her crew, making sure they knew how much more money she was making than they were. Overconfident. Not like me at all.

Pri laughed and pulled up on the controls, bringing the Tamar straight up, her aft end skimming the surface of the river before she could shed her forward momentum and explode straight up. It was a desperate maneuver, something no flight school instructor would have ever let her get away with, which was why it was so totally unexpected. It gave her a grand total of two seconds, just enough time for the Tamar’s GAU8 cannons to spit out three dozen rounds. They could have fired a hundred and forty, if she and the chief hadn’t reduced their cyclic rate. 30mm rounds weren’t cheap.

Three dozen was enough. She’d wanted the drive module, but she’d fired a hair too soon for that and put the holes right through the cockpit. The ship kept moving, and even though she was ninety percent sure that the shots had taken out the pilot and the controls, she pulled in front of the ship, giving Aguilar enough time to line up the rear guns.

“Now, Chief.”

The 30mm cannons had driven her backward, but the 20mm Vulcans kicked her in the pants. They did more to the D3 gunship. If the holes punched through her belly hadn’t taken out the cockpit, the ones crackling across her nose surely did the trick. The bandit had already been angled downward, and there was no one to correct that course. Pri paused the Tamar in mid-air, watching as the bandit nosed into the canyon.

Pri had watched old movies about fighter jet dogfights as a kid, when she’d dreamed of being a pilot, and she missed the big, flashy explosions that had claimed the bad guys. There was no explosion here, just a spray of water, a billow of steam, and then a tornado of loose metal coming off the ship as it pinwheeled head over heels, tearing itself apart. It took a good ten seconds for the ship to come to rest three hundred yards down the canyon.

Three hundred meters.

“All right,” Pri said, throwing a grin at Gina to settle the girl down. “Let’s go get them.”

OceanofPDF.com

9

“Jesus, this thing is going to shake itself to pieces!” Chilly said.

The man was loud, but he wasn’t wrong. The aircar’s dashboard was splitting at the seams, and before the last word was out of his mouth, one of the control surfaces ripped off the nose of the vehicle and flew backward.

“That’s not good,” Zack declared, his voice a guitar string stretched too taut, hands shaking along with the steering controls. “I’m not going to be able to keep her up much longer.”

Chase shut out the vibration, the roar of the wind, the crack of the plastic windscreen as it shook and rattled, and tried to come up with a strategy, or at least a tactic. According to his phone, the aircar was ten miles outside the city, heading parallel on what the locals called the Wastes, a rocky badland not good for farming, mining or pretty much anything else. Black rock passed by beneath them, the remains of an ancient volcanic eruption. The gunship was off to their east, turning north or south would bring them into the enemy’s firing arc, and their only option to run was west out to sea.

The situation, as his old company commander used to say, was less than ideal.

“Turn north,” he told Zack.

“That’s…”

“Just do it.”

“You’re the boss,” Zack said with a shrug.

The curve was painfully slow, even with Angel and her bonded AI adding to their speed, the black rock sparkling below them in the midday sun, a curtain pulled across his perceptions, trying to hide how close to death they were. Chase turned in his seat, trying to catch sight of the gunship and finally spotted it, far too close, its nose swinging around and the cannon there flaring briefly.

Something tore at the rear of the aircar, an explosion of heat and sound that spun the car end for end, and Chase wasn’t sure if the screams coming from the back were human or metal.

“Angel, hit the gas!” he yelled. “As much power as you can give for three seconds!”

It was a risk. The burst of energy could have torn the vehicle apart, could have sent it tumbling to the ground out of control, but there was no other choice, not if they wanted to avoid heading out over the ocean. The car shook, but miraculously, held together and rocketed back inland, leaving the gunship to make the turn at a significantly slower pace.

“Goddammit!” Chilly yelled over the rush of air through gaps in the car’s passenger compartment. “That hurt!”

“Are you hit?” Chase asked him.

“Shrapnel right through my damned hip!”

“Me, too,” Jax said through clenched teeth, one hand pressed to his shoulder. “I don’t think it’s too bad, but it sucks.”

“Alex?” Chase asked.

“I’m good,” she assured him, leaning over Chilly, checking his wound. “Oh, Christ, Chilly, it’s just a damned scratch, you whiner. You’re barely going to need staples.”

“Well, it freaking hurts!”

“I think I’m hit as well,” Victor said with preternatural calm, holding up his left arm. Blood covered the sleeve of his jacket over his bicep, the red stain spreading slowly from a jagged tear.

“Shit,” Chase sighed. His decision had caused this, but there was no right choice. Chase pulled a field dressing from his pocket and motioned for Victor to lean forward. “Take off your jacket.”

It had to hurt like hell to pull the garment off over the protruding sliver of plastic from the windscreen but Victor showed no pain, which had to be one of the benefits of his bond with the Emissary. Angel said nothing, totally involved with the efforts of the Navigator to keep the aircar ahead of the gunship, didn’t even look at them as Chase grabbed the end of the sliver and worked it free. Victor grunted softly when the jagged end of the fragment came loose of his flesh, stray blood droplets spattering Chase’s hands.

Yeah, that’s not symbolic or anything.

He tossed the fragment aside and wrapped the field dressing around the wound, pulling it tight and knotting it until the bleeding stopped. He was about to warn Victor that it was going to hurt, but it was a waste of time. The Emissary wouldn’t let him hurt.

“We’re still running ahead of the ship,” Alex reported, working on Jax’s shoulder. “But there’s no way we’re going to lose it.” She cocked an eyebrow at Chase. “You want I should start shooting out the back window? All I got is this 9mm, but at least it’ll make me feel better.”

“Chase, are you still there?” Pri’s voice had never sounded so good to Chase and he fell back into his seat, sighing heavily.

“Pri, are you guys okay?” He yelled the question, trying to make sure he was heard over the rush of the wind whistling through the cracks in the windows.

“We had a problem, but I took care of her. What’s your situation?”

“We’re running ahead of what looks like a D3-class gunship, but just barely.”

“I’d like to know how the hell you’re doing that,” Pri said, “considering you’re in a piece of junk rental aircar.”

“Angel and her friend. But we can’t go any faster without this thing falling to pieces and we’ve already got three wounded. We need you to come get us.”

“I see you, Chase. We’re on our way.”

* * *

“Thirty klicks north by northwest,” Hill supplied, squinting at the readout from the communications display. “Given their speed, we can rendezvous in maybe five minutes, give or take.”

“Rendezvousing isn’t the hard part, Adrian,” she told him, opening the throttle another few degrees. “That gunship on them is. We can take it out, but I’m worried they’re going to get caught in that fight. And that car doesn’t have the slightest bit of armor.”

“No choice,” Aguilar said, shrugging. “We’ll open up on the gunship and have them peel off, then we can take our time with this asshole and finish him off while they take cover on the ground.”

“Good a plan as we’re going to get,” Pri agreed. “Gina, you radio them and let them know.”

It would give the girl something to do. Her eyes had gone wide when Chase had reported three people injured, and Pri was sure she was picturing Victor bleeding out in the seat of the aircar. Gina nodded, the motion jerky and spastic, and stabbed at the controls on the comm board.

“Chase, can you hear me? This is Gina.”

“You got me, Gina.” Chase’s voice was nearly as taut and tense as hers. “Vic is okay. He caught a little shrapnel in the arm, but he’s fine.”

Pri couldn’t help but smile despite the situation. Chase Weston being sensitive to the feelings of other people? Maybe true love really could work miracles.

“Thank you,” Gina said. “We should be catching up to you in a couple minutes. We’re going to try to distract the ship while you land and take cover. After Priyanka shoots this guy down, we’ll come back and pick you up, okay?”

“Copy that. I’ll be happy as hell to get out of this thing. But I don’t think we’re getting our security deposit back.”

“We got bogies coming in, Cap,” Hill announced, just a half-second before she saw the radar and lidar readings herself. “Three of them, coming in high and fast. I think they’re deorbiting.”

“We have an ID?” she demanded, cold tendrils creeping down her back, worst-case scenarios working their way through her imagination. It could be the Colonial Authority. If the traffic control center had called them, they might have sent interceptors to take everyone into custody. That was the best-case scenario.

“Radar and lidar signatures match D3-class gunships,” Hill told her, killing off that hope. “If this is HKC, they aren’t holding anything back. Estimated intercept in ten minutes.”

Pri wanted to curse, wanted to pound her fist on the control console, but she was a combat pilot and she did not lose her cool.

We don’t have time to take down the gunship, which means we don’t have time to touch down and pick up the others.

Pri sucked in a deep breath, all her lines of speculation settling on the same conclusion…and she didn’t like it. She smacked the communications console like it owed her money.

“Chase,” she said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to go with plan B.”

* * *

“You want me to do what?” Zack yelped as if Chase had kicked him in the balls.

“You just have to steer it straight, Zack,” Chase told him, trying to be soothing. His first instinct was to tell the big man to Ranger up and stop whining, but Zack was flying the car, and Chase figured he didn’t need any more stress. “Angel and the Navigator will do the hard part, stopping us in time.”

“Sure, I got the easy part,” he sneered, eyes darting side to side as if he wanted to look at Chase while he talked to him but didn’t dare look away from the rolling hills just fifty feet below them. “All I have to do is fly this fucking thing into the Tamar’s utility bay. By the way, how wide is that bay, Chase? You got a concrete number for me? Because this car is ten feet, six inches.”

“How the hell do you know the car is ten and a half feet wide?” Chilly demanded from the rear seat. Apparently, the hip injury wasn’t painful enough to shut him up. But then, nothing is.

“Because I got bored while you were finishing up the rental agreement and read the owner’s manual,” Zack told him. “How wide is the damned utility bay door?”

“Three meters,” Victor told him. Chase frowned at the grad student. “The Emissary accessed the ship’s computers a few times. He knows.”

“Unless I’m doing the math wrong,” Zack growled, “that’s about fifteen inches too narrow.”

“The bay’s built for cargo,” Chase said, holding up his hands as if he could restrain the man’s panic. “This car, as you so eloquently put it, is a piece of shit. The engine has gotta be no more than two meters across, right? We’ll be fine.”

Zack nodded, but the man was scared, and Chase knew it wasn’t the prospect of death. It was the idea of screwing up, of him getting all of them killed, and more than that, the fact that he was a groundpounder who was only flying the aircar because Chase had wanted his attention focused on the dig. Not a one of them was a pilot, and if Chase had been behind the wheel, he would have been just as nervous.

“Just fly straight, Sgt. Wilson,” he said.

“Where the hell is the ship?” Chilly asked, staring out what was left of the back window. “All I see back there is the bad guys.”

“That’s not the direction they’re coming from,” Chase said, noticing the glint off gray metal a mile ahead of the aircar. “Get ready.”

A 30mm cannon flared on the port bow of the Tamar, the light trailed by the gut-punch sound of God clearing His throat. Chase imagined he could see the slugs zipping by the car, but that was probably just an illusion. The Hart-Klein gunship saw them, though, or inferred their existence by the muzzle flash from the rotary cannons, and pulled off sharply to the port. It wasn’t much and wouldn’t last long, but it was all they were going to get.

The Tamar spun on her axis, shedding speed, her ramp already opening. She was impossibly far away, the cargo bay a pinprick against the sky that they’d never be able to aim for much less penetrate, until she rushed up on them, bay yawning open, large enough to swallow them.

Almost.

“Hold on!” It was an inane, stupid thing to say, but Chase felt the need to say something, even if it was useless.

Metal screamed and plastic shrieked, and Chase was thrown forward against his safety harness as the car squeezed through an entrance a foot too narrow to accept it. A giant foot kicked Chase in the stomach, his restraints biting into his shoulders and waist, and he squeezed his eyes shut, anticipating the car slamming into the front of the cargo bay and going right through it to the cockpit, taking down the Tamar and ending their trip quite abruptly. Just one more mute, inglorious saga no one would remember, dead soldiers on a forgotten battlefield.

But the car had stopped and the ramp ground upward behind them, the motor protesting at the mistreatment it had received.

“Is everyone okay?” he rasped, trying to assess himself as well. Nothing broken, nothing that hurt anyone worse than anything else. If he had internal bleeding, it was the quiet, painless kind that would kill him before he knew it.

Everyone else was moving, at least, though none of them seemed particularly happy about their landing. A few had already been bloody, and he couldn’t tell if any of it was fresh.

“Okay is pretty far from the word I’d use,” Chilly griped from the back, “but I’ll live.”

“Chase,” Angel said, her eyes focused on the reality around her once again, though he could still see the vestiges of the Navigator behind them. “We have to get to the cockpit.”

The emergency air seal was down, and Chase wondered if the hull was still intact after their entry maneuver, and how long they’d have to get into suits if it wasn’t. But the seal shuddered and rose with a squeal of damaged, overworked motors, revealing Chief Aguilar waiting behind it. He wasn’t wearing a spacesuit, so Chase assumed he had at least some confidence in the ship’s ability to remain airtight.

Chase didn’t bother hitting the control to open his door. Even if the recalcitrant motor would have chosen this chance to do its stuff, there wasn’t room on either side for it to open. The windshield was cracked and splintered and seemed about halfway out of its frame already, and it gave way to three blows from the soles of his boots, peeling away and sliding down the hood.

Chase’s back spasmed as he clambered awkwardly out of his seat, pushing himself out against the dashboard, thankful for the gloves protecting his hands from the tiny particles of the windshield. They weren’t razor-sharp, made from safety glass, but they would have dug in just the same without the leather saving his palms.

“Anybody hurt?” Aguilar asked, hopping down onto the hood and giving Zack a hand as the big man squeezed out past the steering wheel.

“We all hurt,” Zack said, rolling off the side of the hood. “But I don’t know if anyone is hurt that bad.”

“We need to get Chilly, Jax, and Vic to the medical bay and get them stapled up.”

“It can wait,” Victor declared, climbing out unassisted despite his arm wound and the duffle bag hanging around his neck. “I’m going with you to the cockpit.”

Chase didn’t bother to argue, just braced a foot on the dashboard and offered Angel a hand. He was sure she didn’t need it, if the Navigator was giving her the same strength and indifference to pain as Victor, but she took it anyway and he helped her out onto the hood.

“Get the others out,” Chase told Zack and Aguilar. “We have to get up to the cockpit.”

Chase limped up the ramp toward the cockpit, not one hundred percent sure what exactly he’d injured since his whole right leg felt as if someone had gone to work on it with a baseball bat.

“You guys made a real mess of the cargo bay,” Hill complained as the three of them ducked into the cockpit. “And I don’t know if you got the memo, but we don’t have any money left for repairs.”

Chase ignored the copilot’s grousing, paying attention to the view on the front screen instead. The mid-day blue of the Adelaar sky was darkening as they ascended, which meant they were almost out of the atmosphere.

“Where are the bandits?” he asked, falling into one of the open seats to the side of the pilot’s console.

“Too damned close,” Pri told him, motioning at the radar and lidar signatures on the tactical board. “We have about a ten-second lead on the one who was chasing you, which would be enough if he was it. But the others have moved into blocking positions to keep us from reaching safe jump distance, and we’ll be in gun range in about one minute.” She shrugged. “I’m running avoidance patterns, but that’ll only work until they get to point-blank. Then we’re toast. There’s no way around them.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Angel assured her. She turned to Victor. “A little help?”

“Of course.” Victor offered her a hand…the one from his wounded arm, though moving it didn’t seem to cause him any discomfort.

The two closed their eyes and the artifacts glowed brighter, though not as if the sheer level of illumination had increased but more like Chase simply noticed the light more clearly.

“They were waiting for us,” he told Pri. “This whole thing was a trap. They even kept the damned artifact in the area so we wouldn’t suspect anything.”

“It was Hart-Klein,” she agreed. “Had to be. If it was the Alliance, they wouldn’t have taken the chance of keeping the artifact around. They might not even know Vic and Angel can sense them.”

“If it had been the Alliance,” Hill piped up uninvited, “they wouldn’t have stuck around at all. They wouldn’t need to. They’d just go to the Colonial Authority, say ‘look, we got one of the artifacts. If those civilians really want to help, they’ll give us the other two and we can save everyone.’ They’re a government and they can do shit like that.”

“He’s right,” Pri admitted, though Chase thought it was with reluctance. “HKC wants the artifacts in hand so they can get the Archive themselves…then the Union and the Alliance will have to come to them if they want to stop the Sunkillers.”

“We’re ready,” Angel said. “You’ll still need to guide the ship.”

Pri’s knuckles went white on the steering yoke and she nodded to Angel and Victor. They said nothing, just kept their eyes closed as the glow from the artifacts enveloped the both of them, joining them where their hands were clasped. Chase wondered if he should feel jealous, but that idea was lost in the tunnel of fire enclosing the Tamar.

“What the hell is that?” he blurted, unable to look away until the ship emerged from the coruscating white cylinder and into the star-filled blackness.

“That,” Pri told him, “was friction turning the atmosphere to a plasma around us. And it should have burned us to a crisp. I suppose we have our alien computer friends to thank for that.”

Neither Angel nor Vic bothered to reply, still in their trance. Chase didn’t bother asking them about it, not expecting an answer and not wanting to distract them. Pri was otherwise occupied, guiding the ship under the propulsion from the artifacts, and he definitely didn’t want to distract her.

“Adrian,” he said, squinting at the sensor readouts, trying to make heads or tails of them, “where are they?”

The copilot cackled, sitting back in his chair, hands resting on his stomach.

“They’re sitting in orbit with their dicks in their hands. We just blew by them faster than should be possible according to the severely twisted laws of physics as we know them. I’d be running the rear guns for the chief, but honest to God, we’re going too fast to use them.”

As if to confirm Hill’s words, the stars on the screen twisted into a rainbow ring, stretched out forever, then gathered together in a white mass at the front of the ship. There would be, he knew, another one behind them, with stars breaking loose from the one in front to streak backward to the one behind.

“You know about relativity, Chase?” Pri asked him. “Time dilation and all that?”

“Vaguely,” he told her, shaking his head, wondering where the conversation was headed.

“Then you know that every time we do this, time passes slower for us than it does for those good folk traveling at a more reasonable speed.” She shrugged. “Not by much, because all those effects sort of disappear when we hit the Rift. But I have to confess, sometimes I think about not going into the Rift, just riding the relativistic wave for a month or two. With the drive, we could get really close to light speed. Close enough that just a month would be years on the outside. Maybe even decades. We could just pop back out and maybe all the nasty bullshit everyone’s trying to do to each other would be over.”

Chase blinked, not used to that kind of talk from Pri. He wanted to say something profound, something that would make her feel better, but he’d been sitting in an aircar, waiting for someone to kill him for nearly an hour and all he could come up with was the truth.

“Without the nasty bullshit,” Chase pointed out, “we wouldn’t have a job.”

The white mass collapsed in on itself and swallowed everything in blackness, including them.

OceanofPDF.com

INTERLUDE

THE WAKAN TONKA SYSTEM

50 LIGHT-YEARS FROM EARTH

“No one going to complain about us wasting their asteroids?” Captain Monica Feragni asked, anchored to the deck by a hand on the bridge railing.

It was ironic for an officer in the Colonial Authority Navy, but she didn’t care for free-fall. It wasn’t something starship crews had to deal with often, since one of the side-benefits of the S-T drive was artificial gravity, but that only worked when the drive was in use. Sitting here in a polar orbit around Wakan Tonka, the second planet out from the local sun, they were at the mercy of Isaac Newton…and maybe Albert Einstein, she supposed.

Though old Albert would have shit a brick if he’d seen a Soong-Tierney drive. That Sunkiller, though…that was something he would have had no trouble accepting. It obeyed all the rules of the universe Einstein had accepted as ironclad, staying firmly beneath the speed of light and making its inexorable, relativistic way toward the system’s G-class sun.

“This system has a grand total of one hundred human inhabitants, not counting us,” Commander Davidson replied over the open comms, his Scottish burr booming across the bridge. “And that’s including every single researcher and crewmember on the outpost of the habitable.” His face filled a corner of the main screen, plain and lined and ugly. He scowled. “Of course, calling that world habitable is stretching the word. The most pleasant place on the whole planet is reminiscent of Svalbard, if you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting that island.”

“I have not,” she confessed, cutting him off, grateful that his ship was close enough to keep the speed-of-light delay short and prevent the possibility of their conversations stepping on each other. “How long before impact?”

“It already happened,” he told her, shrugging. “We’ll see it in about five minutes.”

“About?” she repeated, cocking an eyebrow. “You’re an engineer, Commander. I expected at least a countdown.”

“Ma’am,” he said, spreading his hands apologetically, though most of the gesture happened outside the video pickup, “we’re talking four rocks the size of the Isle of Man, each of them propelled by a full dozen autonomously piloted S-T drive tugs and the whole thing thrown together in the space of a few weeks. If everything goes right…” The older man laughed softly. “Sorry, ma’am, I can’t believe I said that. But in the unlikely event that happens, then all four rocks should have converged in the path of the weapon, on the other side of the system’s primary star, eleven minutes ago. Which makes it another four minutes and forty-four seconds before the light from said encounter reaches us.”

“You sure we couldn’t have watched from closer to the target?” she asked, though she knew the answer he’d give.

“Sure, so long as you don’t mind taking a fatal dose of radiation from the boggart’s electromagnetic scoops.” Davidson snorted. “Remember, the fields reach out hundreds of thousands of kilometers in a 180-degree arc in front of the thing. We get too close, it’ll be a competition to see whether we have our organs fried before the fields rip our ships apart.”

Feragni scowled, sure that there was a happy medium in there somewhere that would have allowed them a closer vantage point, but the high command, in its infinite wisdom, had made Davidson the lead for the interdiction operation. It galled her. The task force was her baby, her idea. Eighty gunships, ten of the largest cargo haulers in the CA arsenal loaded down with every conceivable piece of equipment she could think of that had been available at short notice, and a crew of scientists and engineers numbering into the hundreds. It didn’t sound like much compared to the wartime fleets of the Union or the Alliance, but it was every ship that could be spared from patrol duty and they’d trusted what might be the most important operation in the history of manned space flight to her.

They were arrayed around the Charles Martel in a globular cluster, a defensive formation that would do them not a single bit of good against the Sunkiller, but it sure looked pretty seen from the camera drones zipping around their perimeter.

“Ma’am,” Jasmine Uzomah said, pointing at the screen, “we’re getting the feed from the drones.”

The visual was impressive, the feed from the cameras on the tugs synched and stitched together via software with the video from the free-floating drones the tugs had launched along their route. The panoramic view spread a sea of stars across the upper half of the screen, then curved around the perimeter of the bridge, and Feragni had to search from one edge to the other, past the massive tumbling mountains of rock that were the asteroids to a single star in the distance. Except it wasn’t a star, and it wouldn’t be in the distance for long.

The asteroids were just as impressive as Davidson had implied, the largest of them forty miles across, the smallest a bit more than half of that. Each was solid nickel-iron, worth millions of Dig-Coins each if a mining company had taken the time and expense to exploit them. But they’d never get the chance.

“Tell me this will work, Commander,” she said softly, not knowing whether the audio pickup would even detect the words, much less transmit them to Davidson. Miraculously, it did.

“Every simulation says it should work, Captain,” the engineer assured her. “These things, these Sunkillers, they’re huge and insanely powerful, but four rocks this size…there’s no way they can deflect these even with that magnetic field, particularly as fast as the tugs have them going.” Davidson grinned. “And we both better hope it works. Each of those tugs is mounted with a nuclear reactor big enough to power a city. That’s tens of millions down the drain. I’m frankly shocked that the CA authorized us to use them.”

“They were donated,” she explained, “by the Union government.” She tilted her head in a shrug. “By the United States, if you want to cut through the bullshit. They know what’s at stake as much as we do. They’d be out here themselves except they don’t want the Alliance nosing around.”

“Yes, well, I’m happy to have them, and I’ll buy one of my American counterparts a drink when we return with the good news.” Davidson glanced aside and looked at the screen on his own ship. “Any second now.”

The Sunkiller leapt forward and transformed from a distant star to a monstrous beast, part force of nature and part technological terror, a Frankenstein’s monster constructed by an inhuman imagination. Feragni’s mind kept trying to make the thing smaller, as if the threat of it was less believable, less imminent if she acknowledged how huge the thing was.

Steady, woman. You already knew it was so damned big we had to throw asteroids at it to have a hope of stopping it.

The feed from the tugs ended abruptly, the view shifting backward to the drones arrayed farther out.

“The EM field took out the electronics on the tugs,” Davidson said, calm as if he were teaching a class at the Academy. “Not unexpected. They aren’t needed at this point, anyway.”

I’d be happier with them just the same.

It looked as if no distance at all separated the Sunkiller from the asteroids, yet it still had to be hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Feragni didn’t know what to expect when the thing collided with them. An explosion? It was possible, if only from the sheer kinetic energy meeting head-to-head. The alien ship and the asteroids would likely be converted to a plasma, a nebula that outshone the sun, and the best part was that the momentum of each would cancel the other out, and that plasma wouldn’t damage the planet.

Theoretically.

Another, less pleasant scenario was that the momentum would not be canceled out and Wakan Tonka would be bathed with ionizing radiation, rendering the surface sterile. That would be suboptimal, but at least it would give them an idea how to fight the Sunkillers the next time around…before they reached Earth.

Of all those possibilities, what actually happened was the one thing Feragni would never have imagined. The Sunkiller was thousands of kilometers away from the asteroids when a spear of light brighter than the sun, brighter than its own drive, flashed out and intercepted the first rock in the formation.

“Bloody hell!” Davidson exclaimed, and might have sworn more colorfully, but Feragni couldn’t hear it because EM interference buried his transmission in static.

The asteroid didn’t exactly explode. More accurately, it sublimated. Metal turned to gas and gas became plasma until there was nothing metal left but a glowing cloud, and before the cloud could spread, the beam of energy had moved onto the next rock.

“Gott im Himmel,” Reinhardt murmured, crossing himself.

“What is that?” Kahlenberg blurted, as if Reinhardt’s exclamation had flipped a switch and now everyone could express their disbelief and horror.

“Laser, probably,” Feragni said, her tone detached and clinical, as if it was coming from someone else and had no relation at all to the raw fear roiling inside her stomach. “Though I suppose it could be some sort of particle beam weapon. But I’d be willing to bet it’s a laser drawing photons directly off the fusion reaction in her engines.”

The second asteroid disappeared in a cloud of ionized gas, but the gas didn’t stay in a nebulous, diffuse cloud. It twisted into a DNA spiral, heading inward toward the vast, electromagnetic maw of the Sunkiller, which was swallowed up. Fuel for the drive.

You’re welcome.

By the time the third of the massive, mountain-range-sized rocks disappeared under the merciless gaze of the fusion-powered Medusa, Feragni had made her decision. Davidson may have been in charge of the engineering project, but tactical command was hers.

“Lt. Seydoux,” she said, putting an edge to her voice to get the Communications officer to look away from the looming disaster on the screen and pay attention to her, “patch me through to the entire task force.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the young officer said immediately. “I can’t swear the transmission will get through to all of them with the EM interference, but I’ll signal for each to pass it on to the next.” He nodded to her, tapping his ear, signaling that she was live.

“Attention all task force vessels,” Feragni said, “pull out immediately, full power. We’ll regroup at Farragut.”

Which meant that they were going to have to go back to the Union, hat in hand, and ask for help again. She would almost rather let the damned aliens destroy the Earth.

OceanofPDF.com

10

Sean Haricot leaned against the clear plastic case and stared down at the artifact, trying not to listen to the inane chatter from the soldiers-for-hire lounging in the starship’s cargo bay, trying to pass the long hours in Rift transit.

“That thing is freaking me out,” one of them said. Haricot couldn’t even remember the man’s name, though he’d come to think of him as Bubba due to an accent that had to have originated somewhere in the American deep south. “It’s like from that movie where the guy with the whip finds Noah’s ark.”

“It wasn’t Noah’s ark, you moron,” his friend said. Haricot didn’t know his name either, but New Jersey sounded like an appropriate sobriquet. “It was the ark of the covenant.”

“It’s still all that God stuff, man,” Bubba complained. “I ain’t comfortable around it. Never liked church.”

“Church?” New Jersey repeated. “What the hell does church have to do with aliens?”

“I don’t know, man. Some of the guys have been saying that the aliens like, made the planets and shit.”

“You mean terraformed them, but sure. What does that have to do with church?”

“It’s just like, what if they’re angels or something? Like, what if God told them to do it? And this thing is just like that Noah’s ark of covenant?”

“Oh, Jesus, shut the hell up.”

Bubba did, for which Haricot was grateful. But the oaf had been right about one thing. The artifact was enough to give anyone the creeps. The Gatekeeper, Angel Cortez had called it in the message she’d sent, though it wasn’t clear why. To him, it didn’t look much like it kept anything, gates or not. It was about the size and shape of a shot-put, though he’d never seen a shot-put made of solid jade and glowing a bright green. If he stared at that glow long enough, he imagined he could see images in the glow, but he was sure that was just his imagination.

“At least we got the thing,” Javier Dominguez said, an unconvincing optimism in his voice as he motioned at the artifact. “I mean, it could have been worse.”

It was with some effort that Haricot kept himself from punching the burly, tattooed man right in the face. Dominguez wasn’t a bad soldier and had proved a competent tactical commander in the field…not that he’d had anything to do on this trip.

“He can’t blame me for this,” Haricot murmured, not caring whether Dominguez or the others in the strike team scattered around the ship’s cargo bay heard him. “This was all on the damned pilots. I can’t fly a gunship and those assholes never landed that car. There was nothing I could do.” Swearing, he smacked a fist against the plastic container, but the artifact didn’t move an inch. “Fucking Chase Weston! If he’d landed the car, I would have had him. I would have killed that shitheel with my bare hands.”

“Um…Mr. Haricot?” The voice was small and meek, much like the man behind it. Somewhere between sixty and dead, the little man wore an improbable tweed jacket and wide-brimmed hat and smelled of the hair oil that kept his gray mane slicked back. “I think it might be a bad idea to…disturb the artifact.”

“Do you now, Dr. Walston?” Haricot growled. “Well, I will keep that in mind. But maybe if you could have figured out how to use this thing, we would be flying back home with three priceless alien gadgets instead of just one.”

“Mr. Haricot,” Walston said, face going pale, “I am a xenoarchaeologist, not a physicist nor a biologist, and I am not going to be the first human to attempt contact with an alien machine that may or may not also be an artificial intelligence. I am not a young man anymore, and perhaps that should mean I am more ready to sacrifice my life for the greater good, but in fact, it means I am acutely aware of how few years I have left, and I am loathe to end them on something as potentially futile and disastrous as that.” Walston shuddered. “Why, for all we know, even touching that thing could have killed us all. No, much smarter to bring it back to a fully equipped lab and study it under controlled conditions.”

‘Yeah, well, you’re the scientist, Doc,” Haricot admitted. “I’m just the poor son of a bitch whose career and possibly life depend on delivering all three of the artifacts to Mr. Hart.”

“Hey,” Dominguez rumbled, his scarred face screwed up in confusion, arms folded over his massive chest, “I know you work for Hart, but whatever happened to Klein? I mean, it’s Hart-Klein, right?”

Haricot sighed, regarding the mercenary balefully. He could have just ignored the man, but good help was hard to find, and there was no point in alienating Dominguez over something trivial.

“Loretta Klein was the heir to a fortune in uranium deposits. She bought into James Hart’s father’s vision well before the war, then had the good grace to die young. Her children have very generous stipends and the family name on the company and Mr. Hart has everything else.”

“So, he just had the whole thing handed to him, huh?” Dominguez grunted. “Typical.”

“He’s the boss, Dominguez,” Haricot growled in warning. “He even sniffs you dissing him, you’re gonna be lucky to find work shoveling shit on a colony world.”

“Yes, sir.” Dominguez sounded abashed, shrinking in on himself until he almost seemed as small as a normal person. “Do you think he’s gonna come down on you because we didn’t get the other artifacts?”

“God only knows.” Haricot wanted to hit the plastic container again but stopped with his fist cocked halfway back at a quelling glare from Walston. “The one thing we have going for us is, we know Weston and his friends’ll be looking for this one. If we play it smart, we can lure them right back in.”

“This Weston is that stupid?” Dominguez asked, an eyebrow raising. “He’s got to know this was a trap. If we give him another chance to steal the alien basketball there, you can’t believe he’ll step right into it again.”

“That’s the thing,” Haricot replied, his smile thin and predatory. He finally felt some satisfaction. “What other choice does he have? He can’t turn himself in because he’s wanted by the Union and the Alliance. He can’t run because he doesn’t have any money or anywhere to go.”

Haricot laughed, a harsh rasp.

“Where does he have left to go?”

* * *

Angel Cortez rubbed at her temples, eyes squeezed shut. The unrelenting pain in her head was probably incipient whiplash from the crash of the aircar. That was the glass-half-full explanation, the one she wanted to believe. The other possibility was more frightening, that the pain was the result of withdrawals. She hadn’t touched the Navigator since they’d used it to take the Tamar into the Rift, two hours ago.

The wreckage of the rental vehicle was a twisted, ruined reminder of their failure, mocking them with shards of broken metal and plastic, making her wish they could stop right now and push the damned thing out of the utility bay. She’d even suggested it, but Priyanka had told her that if they opened the belly ramp, they wouldn’t be able to close it again until after it was repaired.

“We can’t keep doing this shit,” Zack Wilson declared flatly, staring at the deck with a numb, shell-shocked expression. An emergency ration was open and steaming on the galley table in front of him, but the big man ignored it, ignored the water bottle beside it, even though Angel had already told him twice that he needed hydration.

“What?” Chilly asked. “Getting our asses kicked?” The former SEAL was leaning against the bulkhead, claiming that sitting in the galley chairs made his wounded hip hurt.

“That too,” Zack acknowledged, finally looking up. His gaze darted around the compartment and finally settled on Chase. “But no, I mean we can’t keep doing this on our own.”

Chase Weston was slumped in the seat beside Angel, eyes closed, breathing evenly. He’d managed to get a shower and change clothes, but he hadn’t said a word since. Angel would have bet the man was asleep, but he shook himself and responded to his old friend.

“Agreed. Anyone have any suggestions how we change that?” Chase shook his head. “Because I’m fresh out of ideas.”

“Was that Hart-Klein back on Adelaar?” Victor asked. He’d left the Emissary behind in his compartment, and the comfort the AI had given him had vanished. Every time the grad student moved, he winced and put a hand over his bicep. Gina sat beside him, rubbing at his shoulder but Angel wasn’t even sure if Victor noticed her.

“Of course, it was Hart-Klein,” Pri grunted. She’d worn a disgruntled frown ever since the escape, though Angel wasn’t sure if it was more because of the unsuccessful operation or the damage to her ship. “Who the hell else could it be? The CIA wouldn’t be using surplus Space Force gunships and neither would the Alliance. HKC had the damned trap baited and we fell for it.”

“They’ve probably been sending teams out,” Chase agreed, “scouring every single Arborist ruin ever since we sent that message out.”

Cold anger flared in Angel’s gut and she speared Chase with a glare.

“Are you saying this is my fault?”

“It’s no one’s fault but James Hart,” he said, not even flinching from her wrath. Part of her was comforted that he wasn’t scared off when she got mad, but there was a perverse child squatting somewhere in the back of her mind that resented the fact that she couldn’t intimidate him. “But we have to face facts. HKC knows everything about the artifacts and they have the Gatekeeper.”

“But they haven’t bonded with it yet,” Victor said, frowning. “That’s what the Emissary said.”

“Why not?” Alex wondered. She, at least, seemed more even-keeled than the others, and Angel thought it was because the action, the danger, had distracted her from the loss of her husband. “Why wouldn’t they bond with it?”

“Maybe because they’re smarter than we are,” Chief Aguilar murmured, staring at Victor with hooded eyes.

“Or at least more cautious,” Pri agreed.

Angel fought down the sharp retort making its way up and tried at least to make her response more civil.

“If Victor had been more cautious,” she ground out, “Chase and I would be in a Chinese black site being tortured for the rest of our lives. If I had been more cautious, then we’d all be dead, blown out of the sky. More than once. I think you’d all do well to remember that before you start throwing blame around.”

Chase covered her hand with his and squeezed, and her first instinct was to pull away, that he was being condescending. She very deliberately didn’t. She either trusted and loved Chase Weston or she didn’t, and she wasn’t going to decide that she didn’t when they were all at their lowest and no one was thinking clearly.

“I don’t want to blame anyone,” Pri insisted, though the mulish look on her face told Angel she could believe that or not at her leisure. “But the point still stands. We can’t keep trying to do this on our own. We’ve got no resources left, no friends left that we can trust.” At the last, she slammed her palm against the bulkhead. “Besides the people on this ship, I think pretty much everyone wants us dead or in jail.”

Angel sucked in a breath, knowing what reception her next suggestion was going to get, but making it anyway.

“I still say we should try the Colonial Authority. Of everyone out there, they’re the ones most likely to hear us out.”

“It’s not a question of hearing us out,” Pri said, “it’s a question of them trusting us. They might believe most of what you said in that message, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t throw us all in a holding cell and kick the decision up the chain until it reaches someone willing to curry favor with the Union or the Alliance by turning us in to one or the other of them.”

“We could go to the Colonial Authority,” Chase said, “but only if we have the Archive. We could just hand it to them and I’m pretty sure everyone would lose interest in us.”

“Well, we don’t have the damned Archive,” Chilly said. “And without the third artifact, we’re not going to get it. You think the CA will help us steal it back from Hart-Klein? ‘Cause I don’t think those stuffed shirts are going to be on board with that. Hell, I’m not sure even the CIA would do that. You’d have to find someone with huge brass balls and a big fat grudge against James Hart to pull that off.”

“That ain’t helping anything, Chilly,” Alex sighed. “You know the drill. If you don’t have a suggestion, don’t bitch…”

Then Jax started in, and Zack began complaining about how much Chilly talked without saying anything, but Angel wasn’t really listening. She was looking at Chase. She’d only known the man a few months, but she figured she knew him well enough to know when something was churning inside his mind. He was staring at the bulkhead, eyes unfocused, frowning in what could only be deep thought.

“What is it?” Angel prompted. She hadn’t meant to ask so loudly, but everyone stopped talking and stared at her. She wasn’t a little girl anymore—she didn’t blush or shrink, just waited for Chase. Finally, he looked up, a hint of a grin passing across his face.

“I think we’re all forgetting something,” he said. Chase pushed himself up from his seat and paced around the galley, filled with a sudden nervous energy. “I mean, we all know it, the Emissary told us weeks ago, but none of us has put a lot of thought into it.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Chase?” Zack asked him, shaking his head.

Chase threw up his hands, laughing sharply.

“Think, Sgt. Wilson!” He tapped the side of his head. “Use that brain God gave you. Who else do we know of who definitely had contact with the People? Who definitely got a visit from an AI? Someone who has resources, money, ships and her own fucking orbital city? And who has a good reason to dislike Hart-Klein?”

Angel realized her mouth was hanging open. Of course. It was so damned obvious.

“I give up,” Chilly said, hands raised in surrender. “Who the fuck do you mean?”

Vic was smiling, nodding eagerly, looking less bothered by the separation from the Emissary.

“That’s brilliant,” he admitted. “How did I not think of that?”

Chilly looked as if he were about to burst a blood vessel, and Jax took mercy on him.

“Chill, who invented the drive?”

“The aliens,” Chilly said, staring at his friend as if the answer was obvious.

“Right. And who didn’t invent the drive but made a shitload of money on it anyway?”

The scales fell away from Chilly’s eyes.

“Holy shit,” he murmured.

“That’s right,” Chase agreed. “And that’s who we need to talk to. Mara Soong-Tierney.”

OceanofPDF.com

11

Leaves crunched under Mara Soong-Tierney’s bare feet, the gentle, fall breeze riding the razor’s edge between bracing and chilly, just enough to make her knitted shawl comfortable around her shoulders. Tree branches moaned softly at the touch of the wind, shadows shifting on the forest floor as the afternoon sun wended a path through them. The scents of pine and maple and oak were rich in that breeze, the smells of home. In the distance, a barred owl demanded “who cooks for you?”

Mara’s instinct was to watch the ground, to make sure of her footing and be on guard against stepping on a sharp twig or rock, but she ignored it and looked at the sky instead. White, puffy clouds floated high above, vagrants in the spectacular afternoon blue. It was the kind of day she remembered from her youth in rural North Carolina, when she and her sisters would wander through the woods behind their house.

Except for the bugs. There’d always been bugs in the woods, even in the early fall. Mara stopped walking and frowned, pulling her phone out of a pocket in her jeans. She touched a button and spoke softly, as if afraid to disturb the forest.

“Message to Gene Chauncey in the ViR Programming department. Add insect sounds to simulation Soong-Tierney 14.”

Mara put the device away and tried to continue her walk, but the illusion was shattered. She scowled, closing her eyes.

“End simulation,” she commanded. She kept her eyes shut. Watching the projection end, seeing the world shimmer and die, was too disconcerting. If she witnessed it every time, she’d lose the immersion.

“Confirmed,” a cheerful, female voice replied. “Simulation ended.”

Mara’s frown deepened. She’d have to ask Chauncey to do something about that voice, too. If the owner of it had worked for Mara in real life, she’d have fired her. Mara opened her eyes and was greeted by an empty room. The walls were gray with the slight gloss of the projection screens, while the floor was a series of treadmills, adorned here and there with the crinkled paper that simulated leaves and detritus underfoot.

It was all a proof of concept, or at least that was what she told the accountants. A test to see if upper middle-class families would pay to have a slice of their favorite outdoor scene tucked nice and safe and convenient into a room of their house. That was a lie, of course. It was, instead, a multimillion-dollar personal mental health retreat for her.

She’d been cooped up on this orbital city for over a decade and she’d thought, once, that there was nothing at all she’d miss about Earth. She’d been wrong. Humans weren’t meant for tin cans surrounded by a vacuum, and if it had taken her nearly ten years to figure that out, well, at least she had the money to fix it.

“Ma’am.” The voice coming over the speakers was soft, hesitant, meek. She didn’t have to ask who it was. There was no mistaking it for anyone else.

“Mark, I believe my standing orders are that I am not to be disturbed for any reason from 1500-1800 on Tuesdays. Was there something less than clear about my instructions?”

“No, ma’am,” Mark Kopecky said briskly. “It was also clear that there was one exception to that rule.”

Mara blinked, understanding immediately what he meant.

“The artifacts?”

“There’s a ship asking to dock with Maya Station. The registration is nominally that of the privateer Starcrossed, but the captain claims that she’s Priyanka Ambedkar and that the ship is the Tamar. She says that Chase Weston and Dr. Evangeline Cortez are on board…as are two of the three artifacts Dr. Cortez described in her message a few weeks ago.”

Mara walked as she listened, the door to the ViR simulator hissing open at her approach and at the RFID chip embedded under the skin of her left shoulder. The corridors outside the chamber were empty. No one but her haunted this area except the technicians, and they knew better than to come around while the chamber was in use.

“Can you confirm it’s them?” she demanded, her toes clinging at the shag carpeting. Most of the flooring had been bare metal when the station was built, as if this were a 1960s science fiction movie, but she’d corrected that soon enough. The entire station was her home, as well as the headquarters of Soong-Tierney LLC, and if she wanted to be able to walk barefoot in her home, by Waheguru, she’d have shag carpeting on a space station.

“The ship matches the description put out by the Union military and the US government for the Tamar. I think it’s likely that she is who she says she is. Whether or not there are any artifacts aboard…”

“Allow them to dock,” she decided, “but keep them under our defensive turrets the whole time. Once they’re aboard, escort the crew and passengers to a secure room. Make sure they’re disarmed first, of course, and search the ship.”

“And if the artifacts are aboard?”

It wasn’t a bad question. Perhaps she should think about promoting Kopecky.

“Allow the crew to bring them along…in a closed container. Under no circumstances are any of them or any of our people to touch them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Message me the location once they’re on board,” she told the man. “I’m on my way.”

* * *

“I don’t like letting those corporate assholes crawl all over my ship,” Priyanka grumbled around a mouthful of pasta.

“I notice that hasn’t kept you from taking up their offer of dinner,” Chase said, the corner of his mouth turning up. He hadn’t either, of course. Not much remained of the burger they’d served him, a few scraps of bun and lettuce scattered about the plate. The room where they’d been taken was a cross between a hotel suite and a prison cell, but at least it had plenty of table space.

“You think I’m nuts?” Pri asked, goggling at him. “We haven’t had anything but prepackaged emergency rations in over a week. I’d take the meal if it had been HKC offering it. But I still don’t like people pawing at my ship.”

Chase nudged Angel, bringing her attention back from the pizza she’d requested.

“When the bills come due,” he confided, “she’s always quick to remind me that I own a share of the Tamar and have financial responsibilities. Every other time, it’s her ship.”

“At least they let us bring the artifacts with us,” Angel said, not seeming to appreciate the humor. She nodded at the two duffle bags resting on a table beside the door. They’d been expressly instructed to leave them there and not try to touch them, but they hadn’t been taken away.

“I’d feel better if they’d let me keep my gun,” Chilly said. He’d polished off his steak so quickly, Chase thought he might have inhaled it. He’d ignored the salad the servers had delivered along with it.

“Yeah, that would be a reasonable thing to expect.” Jax shot his friend a glare. “A bunch of outlaws come aboard their station claiming to be in possession of dangerous alien technology, I’m sure letting us carry weapons is no problem at all.”

“They didn’t even leave me a damned pocket knife.”

“The artifacts aren’t any use to her,” Victor pointed out, “without us. Angel and me.”

He, of all of them, had merely picked at his food. It was some Vietnamese dish and looked good to Chase, but Victor had finished less than a third of it. Gina grabbed some on her fork, having eaten her own meal in minutes.

“We know that,” Gina told him, “but do they? It’s not like it was in the message.”

“And even if they do know,” Angel said, “it’s not like they couldn’t try to force us to work for them.”

“Or kill us,” Victor acknowledged morosely, “and see if they can get the Emissary and the Navigator to bond with someone else once we’re dead.”

“That wouldn’t work and you know it.”

Chase was halfway out of his seat, hand reaching for a handgun he wasn’t carrying, before he realized the door to the compartment had opened and a short, slightly built older woman had walked through it without any of them noticing. She was dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and sandals, which seemed awfully casual to him given the circumstances, and she was carrying one of those voluminous leather purses that he’d seen rich women and women who wanted people to think they were rich toting around when he was a kid.

“Who are you?” Chilly blurted, coming to his feet, revealing the stains from his dinner on the belly of his fatigue shirt.

“That’s Mara Soong-Tierney,” Angel said, not seeming the least bit surprised by the woman’s appearance. “You don’t look that much different than the last news photo I saw of you fifteen years ago.”

Chase did a double-take, giving the older woman a closer look. When she walked in, he’d judged her to be no older than fifty, but now he had to reassess. Mara Soong-Tierney had been in her early forties when she sprang the drive on the world. That would make her late sixties now, but aside from a bit of gray at her temples, she might still have been that physicist in her prime.

“Thank you, Dr. Cortez,” Mara said, nodding. “You have the face of a woman who’ll age well, I think.” She smiled thinly. “Or who would have aged well.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Chase demanded. Behind Mara Soong-Tierney, a security officer in full armor took a half-step forward, hand going to his sidearm, but the woman gave him a quelling look.

“And what did you mean it wouldn’t work?” Victor added.

Everyone was standing now, though Chilly was still favoring his hip where the shrapnel had penetrated.

“I mean exactly what you think I mean,” Mara said, pacing in front of them, arms crossed, regarding each in turn and passing judgements Chase could see behind her dark eyes. “The artifacts of the People bond for life. Once you’ve connected with one, there are no do-overs.” Her gaze flitted back across them and she settled on Angel and Victor. “You two, I suspect. If I were to kill you, which is unlikely, or if James Hart were to have you assassinated—much more likely—then the artifacts would be useless to anyone else.”

“That’s what they’ve told us,” Victor acknowledged. Chase couldn’t tell whether the younger man was relieved at Mara’s words or disappointed.

“What about the other thing?” Chase asked, not giving up so easily. “What did you mean Angel would have aged well?”

Mara eyed him with something that might have been pity.

“Once a human has bonded with one of the artifacts, there are certain…benefits, I suppose.” She shrugged. “Side-effects, you might call them. You may have noticed some already. You heal more quickly, and injuries cause less pain. You’re able to recall things more clearly, not quite an eidetic memory, but close. As if your mind has been somehow sharpened.”

Angel nodded and Chase swallowed hard. This was coming far too close to confirming his deepest fears, that bonding with the Navigator had permanently changed her.

“And one other thing,” Mara went on, coming almost nose-to-nose with Angel Cortez, although Angel was five or six inches taller. “Something I wasn’t aware of for quite some time. When you bond with an artifact of the People, well…” She shrugged. “You stop aging.” Mara chuckled softly. “It would be nice if the things reversed the aging process, but alas, that was not to be. But the way you look now, well, you’ll look that way for the rest of your life. And for all I know, that might well be a very, very long time.”

“And how do you know all this shit, lady?” Alex wondered. The words sounded bellicose, but the tone wasn’t. It was curious, rather, perhaps suspicious. Chase thought he already knew the answer, but he didn’t expect Mara Soong-Tierney to give it.

The older woman offered Alex a smile, then pulled open the fastenings of that oversized shoulder bag…and pulled out something small and faceted, a gem the size of Chase’s fist, glowing a soft white from the inside. He didn’t need to ask what it was. He knew instinctively. He’d seen two of them already.

“Holy shit.”

OceanofPDF.com

12

“So, that’s an alien artifact,” James Hart said softly, trailing his fingertips across the clear plastic of the container. “It looks like a bedazzled shot-put.”

“That’s what I thought,” Sean Haricot agreed, watching his boss with arms crossed, affecting a casual indifference belied by the quivering mass of ice deep inside his gut.

Haricot was painfully aware of the security officers surrounding them in the office that were tactically positioned on all sides of him. Haricot had left his gun on the ship because Hart didn’t allow anyone around him to be armed except his personal guard detail.

Bunch of toady ass-kissers. He knew Vernon Cronin, the head of the detail. Former Australian SAS, and most of those he’d run into were true badasses, but not this one. Cronin told Hart what he wanted to hear, made him feel like he couldn’t trust anyone else. It made sense, and Haricot was self-aware enough to realize that part of his resentment was envy. Cronin had a guaranteed gig until his cushy retirement.

“It’s damned impressive,” Hart admitted, turning back to Haricot. “You know what would be more impressive, Sean? If there were three of them. If you’d done your fucking job.”

Anger warred with fear inside Haricot’s chest, and reason managed to fight them both down and kept his voice level.

“Sir, I’m a spy. When you give me combat pilots in their own gunships and put them on an aircar, I expect them to do their job and force it down.”

“So, it’s someone else’s fault again, is it, Sean?” Hart asked, tilting his head to the side, eyeing the man with obvious doubt.

“If Weston had landed that car, sir, I would have been all over him. And if I’d failed to get him, you would be perfectly justified in blaming me for what happened.” Haricot’s tone was strident, and he took a deep breath, trying to keep it under control. “But he didn’t. He’s an arrogant asshole, but he’s not stupid. He wouldn’t still be alive if he was. He smelled a trap and he just circled around and took off. I suggested we leave the artifact in place until we had him, and I’m pretty sure the fact that the site looked disturbed was one of the things that warned him off.”

“Oh, so now it’s my fault,” Hart said, staring at him archly, and Haricot sensed he’d taken the wrong tack.

“No, sir,” he said firmly. “It’s not your fault and it’s not my fault. In combat, things happen. The enemy has a say and most of the time, what we have planned isn’t the way it goes. I had a plan, I had a back-up plan, but neither of them worked. That Ambedkar woman was a better pilot than our people, and the artifact that they stole from the Alliance means they can outrun us once they get out of the atmosphere.” He shrugged. “It was a chance from the beginning, but it was the only one we had.”

Hart regarded him coolly, no emotion showing through his clear, chill blue eyes, and for a long moment, Haricot thought his argument had been for naught, that his boss was going to order that kiss-ass Cronin to put him out through an airlock and that would be it. He’d fight, of course. He’d gone through too much to go down without taking a few of them with him. But there were four of them and one of him, and he’d be just as dead after all the shouting.

But then James Hart smiled and though Haricot wasn’t a lifelong friend of the man, he thought he knew him well enough to recognize that smile as pleasant.

“All right, Sean. It goes against my better judgment to reward failure, but I also know that…well, let’s say firing an employee every time they have a setback is a good way to find yourself without any good employees. So, let’s say I’m going to give you another chance. What then? What’s your plan from here?”

Haricot let loose a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding and very carefully didn’t gasp in the next lungful of air.

“Look, if that message Cortez sent out was the truth and not just a load of bullshit, then the two artifacts she and Weston have are worthless without this one.” He jabbed a finger at the glowing round ball. “They’re going to come after it. It’s only a matter of time. And when they do, we’ve got them.”

“Are you serious?” Hart asked, eyeing him sidelong. “Do you really think they’ll be that stupid? They nearly got themselves killed coming after this before. Now, they know I have it. How could they think they’d be able to take it from me? Their best bet would be to go to the government.” He shrugged, laughing softly. “Of course, that would be our best bet as well, since the government would come straight to us.”

“And they know that, sir,” Haricot told him. “Like I said, they’re not stupid. They can’t go anywhere else for help. Their only play would be to run, but I know this Weston. I’ve read his psych profile from just before his discharge. He thinks he’s some sort of hero. Never got over being a Ranger, never really got over the war. He can’t give up and he can’t run. He’s coming this way, eventually. When he does, we’ll have the rest of the things, and there’ll be nothing the Union or the Alliance can do but come to us.”

* * *

Angel tried to ask the obvious questions, but so did everyone else, all at once, and anything intelligent was lost in a maelstrom of pure noise until Mara Soong-Tierney raised her hands, one of them still filled with the artifact.

The pulsing white light from the thing seemed to hypnotize the others into silence, though it only made Angel impatient.

“Quiet, please,” Mara demanded, “and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

She walked to one of the empty chairs across the table from Angel and fell into it, then set the artifact on the table in front of her. Mara seemed to suddenly remember the security detail who had come in the door behind her, and she nodded to the four men.

“Wait for me outside. Close the door.”

“But, ma’am…” the one who’d tried to come to her defense before objected. She cut him off with a slash of her hand.

“Do as I say. Outside.”

The guard hesitated a second longer than Angel thought was respectful, but under the withering gaze of the tiny woman, he and the others filed out the door and shut it behind them. It slid closed with the hum of well-tended motors, as automatic and futuristic as anything else they’d seen on the station.

“Do you know why Maya Station is designed as it is, Dr. Cortez?” Mara asked her.

“Sorry?” Angel shook her head, uncomprehending.

“You saw it on the way in, I assume.” Mara touched a control on her watch, and a screen built into the wall flickered to life, showing an image of Maya Station. It was a shining, metal cylinder a mile long, built from lunar regolith. What it was not was a wheel, rotating for centrifugal gravity like Gateway or the other space stations they’d seen, yet the fact they were standing was proof there was some sort of gravitational field.

“You’re using the S-T drive for gravity,” Priyanka said. Angel wasn’t surprised that she would be the first to come up with the solution since she knew more about the drive than the rest of them. “But how? I’m no physicist, but as far as I know, the drive only generates the gravity field when it’s powered up and accelerating.”

“And it is,” Mara told her. “It’s insanely complicated, requiring some of the most sophisticated automated navigational systems ever built, but this station is constantly under the drive field, making minor adjustments into lower and higher orbits. And you know why that is?”

Angel did. The answer came to her in a flash of insight, accompanied by a tinge of fear, suspicion that her exposure to the Navigator was the reason.

“This isn’t a station,” she said. “It’s a starship.”

“Very good.” Mara smiled. “And this has been under construction since the day after Soong-Tierney LLC had its IPO.”

“Is that one of the keys?” Victor cut in, pointing to the glowing, faceted artifact.

“No. The keys are special, left where they were as a test, for us or anyone else who might find them. This…” Mara caressed the surface of the artifact, eyes half-closing as if the contact was rapturous. “This is a Messenger.” Angel could hear the capital letter at the front of the word. “Something the People sent out before they left, not just to us but to every intelligent species they had identified.” She tilted her head in a shrug. “Of course, most of them didn’t survive. And some never developed a technological civilization. But the message was there for all of them.”

“It told you how to build the drive,” Angel assumed.

“It told me more than that. It told me the whole story, about the People, the Sunkillers, and the Archive. But it couldn’t tell me how to find them, just that we were all destined for destruction without them.”

“And you built this ship so you could get away before the Sunkillers came,” Chase said.

“Not just me,” Mara told him, spreading her hands. “This ship is a mile long. There’s room on board for thousands of people, food, supplies, animals…enough for the human race to start over. If need be.”

“How did it know to find you, specifically?” Angel asked. “I mean, it could have happened upon a plumber in Zimbabwe.”

“It found a farmer in Guadalajara.” Mara chuckled. “But the Messenger is as sentient as the AIs in the key artifacts. It wanted to be used, wanted to find someone who wouldn’t just build the drive, but make sure the drive was spread as far and wide as possible. I happened to be teaching at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, and I was very surprised when Miguel came to see me.”

“And the part where you became the richest person in the world in the process,” Angel said, cocking an eyebrow, “was just a happy side-effect?”

“That was my idea,” the woman confessed without a shred of regret or shame in her tone. “Initially, I’d planned to simply release the plans on the internet, but then I began thinking about the Sunkillers. There was no guarantee I’d find the keys, and if I didn’t, they’d be coming eventually, and I’d have no way to stop them.”

“You needed the money to build this ship,” Angel presumed. “You wanted a way out.”

“I have a way out. The same way the People chose. Running somewhere it’ll take the Sunkillers too long to reach at just under the speed of light.”

“Something about that never made sense to me,” Priyanka admitted, as if she wasn’t surprised by any of this.

“Just one thing?” Hill asked, barking a scornful laugh.

“Shut up, Adrian. The one thing that doesn’t make sense to me is why the Sunkillers don’t use the drive.” She spread her hands. “Think about it. They…”

“It,” Mara corrected.

“It knows the drive exists. It’s smart enough to build those Bussard ramjets we heard about, which are probably hundreds of years ahead of us, maybe a thousand, but it couldn’t reverse-engineer the drive?”

“All the AIs know is what the People knew,” Victor reminded her.

“What the People chose to tell them,” Mara corrected. “Never forget, these aren’t humans, and they’re not strictly speaking living beings. They’re able to think and reason like a living being, but everything they know, they were programmed to know. As to why the Sunkiller hive mind wouldn’t use the drive, who can say? It’s hard enough to predict what humans will do, much less aliens, much less an alien hive mind thousands of light-years away.” She frowned, her gaze fixed on the floor for a moment. “I gave Earth the stars, the ability to get all the resources we needed from outer space with no pollution, no scarcity, habitable worlds scattered throughout this spiral arm, and what did they do? They went to war. They killed millions of people, and over what? To see who could control the most of nearly limitless resources?”

“People are stupid,” Chase said. “That much I think all of us can agree on. But do they all deserve to die? Because that’s what’s going to happen if we don’t get the Archive.”

“I know why you’re here,” Mara told him, pulling one leg up onto the chair, her foot propped at the edge in casual familiarity. “I am not without my resources, even within the Hart-Klein corporation. They have the Gatekeeper.”

“We have to get it back,” Angel said. “Hart-Klein…”

“James Hart and his goons want you to come and get it,” Mara interrupted, laughing. It was a pleasant sound, as if they were having a friendly conversation about something trivial. “It’s the only way they can get the other two artifacts. You’re walking right into their hands.”

“What other choice do we have?” Chase asked her. “We can’t just turn it over to the Union or even the US government. You know what they’d do to Vic and Angel once they found out they were the only ones who could bond with the artifacts. They’d never let them go. Hell, they’d probably wind up cutting a deal with HKC for the last key and put them in charge of the whole damned thing.”

“I know where it’s being kept.” Mara steepled her fingers, regarding Chase over the tips. “It’s here, in the Solar System, at their orbital headquarters.” She shrugged. “No safer place…or so they think.”

“You know what’s at stake,” Angel said, trying not to sound as if she was begging, even though she was. “You know more than anyone else could. Will you help us?”

Mara tilted her head back, closing her eyes, the tension in her shoulders leaving in a sigh.

“It’ll cost a shitload of money,” she said, “and probably cost a lot of people their lives.” Her smile was thin and humorless. “And if the last twenty-five years have shown anything, it’s my willingness to sacrifice both.”

OceanofPDF.com

13

“I’m Captain Alana Kane,” the tall woman said, offering a hand.

Her grip was strong, not surprisingly so for someone her size, but impressive nonetheless. Chase shook her hand and nodded a greeting.

“Sgt. Chase Weston.” He grinned crookedly. “I feel like I should be saluting.”

“No need.” It had been a joke, but Kane didn’t seem to have the capacity for humor. Her face was a cold, unemotional mask, her dark eyes unreadable and impersonal, even her hair cut to a fuzz barely concealing her scalp. “I’m afraid I gave up the military rank to acquire a bit more job security.”

“You quit when the Union took over?” he asked, reassessing her age. He’d judged her to be no older than thirty, but if she’d been in the US Army…

“No, not that long ago,” she corrected him. “I’m prior-enlisted, was a PFC during the war, then went through OCS after. I’d just been commissioned when the Union absorbed the US and European militaries and I wasn’t about to give that up.”

Chase waited, but the woman didn’t seem about to elaborate anymore, and he turned his attention to her platoon, which was pouring into the briefing room like they were on a raid mission. No armor, no weapons, just the gray utility fatigues of the Soong-Tierney Security Force, which was a fancy way of saying they were corporate mercenaries, but the intensity on their faces was as palpable as if they were rushing in under fire. Flight crews squeezed in around the edges, some leaning against the wall, some taking the available chairs.

“This is probably the biggest unit I’ve been a part of since the war,” Chase mused, nodding toward the thirty-six men and women taking up positions around the perimeter of the oval-shaped room, standing at ease as if they were on a parade field.

He wasn’t the only one staring. Chilly was seated at one of the tables clustered in the center of the chamber, chuckling openly, while Jax watched in silent amusement. Zack leaned back in his chair, eyes half-closed but a faint grin passing across his face, while Alex just watched the influx of prior-service mercenaries filing in from under raised eyebrows.

It could have been the prelude to any military operation he’d ever taken part in during his years with the Rangers, except that the troops were a bit older for their displayed ranks, and the briefing room was state of the art rather than being lowest-bidder Army crap. The tables were circled around a holographic display that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in one of the swankiest hotels in New York City. And at the center of it all was…no one, yet. Mara Soong-Tierney was one of those corporate types who liked to keep everyone else waiting to prove how important they were. Or maybe, he acknowledged, she’d picked up that habit as an academic.

“No offense intended, Sergeant,” Captain Kane told Chase, “but you’re not part of this unit. You and your people may be part of this operation, but this is my platoon, I’m in command and we work as a team. What you do will be up to Dr. Soong-Tierney, but we’ve trained together and fought together.”

Which was fair enough, and Chase would have simply nodded and let it go had it been anyone else, but Kane said everything so earnestly that the retort came without intent.

“You’ve fought together, have you?” he wondered. “Where was that? Does Soong-Tierney LLC have a combat record I haven’t heard of? Because being in the business, I keep my ear to the ground about things like that?”

Kane stiffened, though Chase hadn’t thought it possible for someone already as stiff as she was, and her jaw quivered as if he’d insulted her parentage.

“We have simulated combat competitions with other units in the company security force every month. With modern technology, it’s nearly the same thing.”

He nodded, though he couldn’t tell if the skepticism in his mind made its way onto his face.

“Of course. But you’ve seen combat, right? You were in the war.”

Kane looked at him sharply, as if sensing the doubt he’d tried hard to disguise.

“I have,” she said. “At Mindanao, with the First Infantry Division.”

“The Big Red One,” Chase said, cocking an eyebrow in appreciation. “They had a rough time at Mindanao. Took a lot of casualties.”

“Only half my platoon made it back.” She fell silent, as if she was as reluctant to discuss the action during the war as she was to disclose why she’d left the Army.

Chase was about to press further, not out of puerile curiosity but rather because he was about to go into a very dangerous situation with this Kane as the commanding officer, but he didn’t get the chance. The tall woman braced to attention, and so did Chase by ancient reflex.

“Platoon, attention!” Kane barked and the shuffle of combat boots ended in a stomp, then utter silence fell across the room.

Chase had already been standing beside Kane, but Chilly, Jax, and Zack jumped up, though they looked sheepish about it, as if they were embarrassed they’d given in to old habits. Pri, Aguilar, and Hill hadn’t moved an inch, but then, they’d been Space Force. Victor was looking around, frowning in confusion, while Angel watched in clear amusement.

Mara Soong-Tierney stepped into the center of the room, flanked by uniformed security officers. Chase thought they had to be her personal guard, and he wondered if she was worried about being surrounded by all these trained killers, or if the guards were and had insisted on accompanying her out of devotion to her or to their job. The distinction was important, since the former would make her paranoid of her own judgment while the latter would mean she inspired loyalty. He hadn’t yet decided which he believed. Angel seemed to trust the woman, but Chase couldn’t help wondering how so many years of exposure to the alien AI had affected a human brain.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Mara said, “you’re here because you’re going to be undertaking a very dangerous operation.” She scanned the room, and Chase felt as if she were looking directly at him, although that might have just been a tribute to her public-speaking ability. “Dangerous enough that I didn’t just assign this to the first unit that came across my desk. I asked for volunteers, and everyone here was the best of the willing. You know what this means. There’s a good chance not all of you will return from this mission, and soldiers don’t volunteer for something like this simply for money. They do it for belief, and I am humbled by your belief in my judgment.”

Okay, that’s impressive. And it had the benefit of being accurate. If these people were all volunteers, either Soong-Tierney was indeed the kind of person who inspired such devotion, or she was damned good at pretending to be.

“The target of your assignment is this.” Mara touched her watch and a holographic image snapped into existence, projected onto a plastic sheet across the center of the room’s ceiling. The video could have been taken by a drone, or it might have been CGI simulation, Chase couldn’t tell, but he’d seen the station before in news broadcasts. A traditional rotational wheel for gravity with a thick, tapered cylinder as the hub. It was impossible to determine scale without anything to compare it to, but Chase knew the station was even larger than the Soong-Tierney headquarters. “Hart-Klein Consolidated.”

A low rumble went through the assembled crowd, perhaps excitement, perhaps trepidation, perhaps a little of both.

“Ma’am,” one of the flight crew near the front said, raising his hand. He was a short, wiry man with hair a couple inches longer than regulation and a mustache that was definitely far beyond the uniform standards to which he’d once adhered. “The defenses on that station are pretty close to military-grade. We can…” He grimaced. “We could destroy the damned thing, but short of that, I don’t see any way to force a boarding.”

“Which is why we’re not going in guns blazing, Major Calhoun,” Mara assured him. “We have an insider.” She smiled thinly. “Corporate espionage sounds so nasty, but it’s a fact of life. I’ll be burning a valuable resource to get your ship a clearance to dock, a man who’s been in place for years and provided me with a wealth of information on HKC. That should give you some indication of how important this is. One of your missions will be to get him out of there alive, if possible.”

Another touch on her watch and a man’s face replaced the station. It was round and soft, the sort of face Chase would have expected to see in the HKC corporate headquarters, with a neck so thin it almost seemed as if someone else’s head had been pasted on too small of a body.

“His name is Robert Pincus, and he’s James Hart’s personal assistant. The name and picture will be in the briefing package, along with the possible means of communications you might use to contact him.” Mara paused, her expression firming into something Chase had last seen on a drill sergeant during basic. “This man is not expendable. He’s been a loyal employee of mine for ten years. I don’t ask that you die saving him, but I do demand that you at least try. Am I understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kane barked, echoed by the rest of her platoon. Mara nodded as if the response had satisfied her conscience.

“Now to the main target.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t have a picture of it, but you’ll likely recognize it when you see it. I’m sure everyone here has heard the message Dr. Cortez sent out on the public net about the Sunkillers.”

Soft chuckles broke out here and there among the troops, but they died just as quickly under Mara’s glare.

“I’m sure many of you believe it’s conspiracy-theory bullshit,” she went on, “but I’m telling you that every bit of it was true.” Mara waited until the ramifications of the statement had made their way through her audience. “The aliens, the hive mind, the relativistic weapons coming our way and, most importantly, the Archive and the keys to acquiring it. James Hart has laid his grubby, blood-stained hands on one of them, and it’s going to be your job to get it back.”

Mara switched the image in the projection to a ship. There was nothing distinctive about it, just the conventional, cylindrical lines of a typical S-T drive starship.

“Mr. Pincus is going to get our ship cleared as a regularly scheduled resupply freighter from their Lunar mines, and your personal transponders will be reconfigured to match a new security detail brought in to relieve one of the current platoons on duty at HKC station. That should get you here.” Here was a spot on the diagram that had taken the place of the ship in the holographic projection. Chase couldn’t make heads or tails of the cluttered floor plan, but he didn’t stress over it. Things like this were bound to be attached to the op order, and he’d check it on his phone during the spin-up. “This is the R&D lab, and your clearance will extend this far, but according to Robert, the artifact itself will be in a secure chamber at the center of the lab, and not even your security credentials will get you access to it.”

“Then how are we supposed to get to it?” Zack asked, not raising his hand or showing the slightest bit of deference. Mara looked annoyed, but she’d gotten off easy. It could have been Chilly.

“We’ll have explosives,” Kane told him, disapproval in her tone, as if she wasn’t used to her boss being questioned. Zack offered her a pained glare.

“Seriously? A secure lab inside HKC headquarters, and you think their firewalls won’t stand up to a few kilos of C4?”

“It’s not C4,” Kane said, her frown mulish. “It hasn’t been C4 for ten years. It’s EPX.”

“Whatever,” Zack drawled. “My point is, they’re probably going to have the place hardened against everything up to and maybe including a nuclear explosion.”

“Sgt. Wilson is correct,” Mara interjected, surprising Chase. “The secure lab is impregnable. By force, that is. Your job will be to attempt to infiltrate using stealth, something I trust Sgt. Weston is more than capable of.” She eyed Chase. “Or am I mistaken?”

Chase forced a smile. It wasn’t exactly a challenge he could step back from.

“Of course, Dr. Soong-Tierney. We’ll figure something out. We always do.”

“One more question,” Zack said. “Say we get the thing. That’s gonna set off shitloads of alarms and the whole damned station is going to be looking for us.”

“We’ll fight our way out,” Kane piped up, her upper lip suitably stiff. “It’s what we do.”

“Sure,” Zack said, not attempting to conceal his eye roll. “But my point is, we have to get off the station, and that ironclad, marvelous fake clearance your boy Mr. Pincus is getting for us ain’t gonna be worth shit at that juncture.”

“Are you sure you aren’t the real brains of your outfit, Sergeant?” Mara asked, offering the big man a lopsided grin. “Yes, you’re correct. Which is why I’ve reached out to some less-than-legitimate connections I’ve developed over the years.” She waved the questionable morality of the whole thing away. “Mostly to keep them away from my interests. But when offered as much money as I have to spend, they’re as amenable as anyone else.”

“You’re talking pirates,” Priyanka said, chuckling. “You made a deal with pirates.”

“I did. And they’re going to run an attack on the HKC station at the exact time we estimate you’ll be trying to get out of it.”

“That’s not bad.” The pilot tipped her imaginary hat at the physicist. “It might just work.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought of everything, Dr. Soong-Tierney,” Chase told her. “I’m impressed. It’s almost like you’ve done this sort of thing before.”

“I was a scientist, Sgt. Weston,” she said. “And then I was an innovator. And then a businesswoman, and finally a corporate warlord. I’ve led many lives and done many things, some of which I’m not proud of. But I’ve never done anything half-assed.”

“Ma’am, I believe that.”

“One last thing,” Mara said, raising a hand palm out as if she were an old-time preacher offering them a blessing. “James Stanfield Hart. He’s going to be there. He’s going to be well-protected and he’s not the mission, but anyone who puts a bullet through his goddamned head gets a hundred-thousand-dollar bonus added to their pay.”

“Wait,” Chilly said, raising a hand, his eyes lighting up. “We’re getting paid?”

OceanofPDF.com

14

“Goddammit, this isn’t right, Chase, and you know it!” Pri yelled, jabbing a finger at his face. “You can’t keep us out of this!”

“Hey, it’s all the same to me,” Hill commented, leaning against the wall of the break room, sipping at a bottle of beer. “I’d be just as happy if I never got shot at again.”

“Shut up, Adrian!” she snapped, rounding on him.

“Pri,” Chase said, keeping his voice soft and low so she’d have to stop shouting in order to hear him. It was a trick he’d learned from his mother, though he supposed if someone had asked her, she would have been convinced he hadn’t learned a damned thing from his parents. “How did you think this was gonna work? The Tamar is too recognizable to be part of this, not to mention too small to carry a full platoon of troops and us. And let’s get real. Dr. Soong-Tierney and her hired mercs aren’t going to trust the mission to a pilot they don’t know.” He rushed through to keep her from protesting. “Not that they don’t trust your skill, but let me ask you, if it came down to getting that artifact out and back to her or coming back and saving our asses, which would you do?”

Pri clenched her teeth, biting down on whatever response she’d been about to give.

“All right,” she rasped, eyes still filled with fury. “But what about after? You’re going to need cover and they aren’t even talking about letting me be part of that!”

“After we’re out,” he told her, “you do whatever you think is right.”

She nodded, if not placated, at least having lost her head of steam.

“I’m not too happy about this plan either,” Angel said.

She wasn’t ranting and raving, but Chase knew her well enough now to know she was just as angry. Angel sat at one of the tables close to the microwave ovens, picking at a package dinner of Thai noodles. It wasn’t quite to the standards of the meals they’d been given when they first arrived, but it was available, along with an assortment of others. Soong-Tierney LLC knew how to treat their employees right.

“You think you should be coming along,” he assumed.

“And us, too,” Gina added. The break room meeting had been something of an ambush, an invitation by Angel to have an early dinner before turning in. Everyone not included in the operation had been lying in wait, though Hill and Aguilar didn’t much seem to care.

“We could help,” Victor insisted. “With the Emissary and the Navigator, we could get you into that secure area.” He caressed the duffle bag with the artifact with almost as much affection as he showed for Gina. “He’s told me it’d be easy.”

“And it probably would be,” Chase agreed. He suddenly felt tired and pulled a seat out opposite Angel. “But there’s no way Soong-Tierney is going to let you take those artifacts on board the HKC station. And if she would, I wouldn’t. It’s too dangerous. Anything goes wrong—and something always goes wrong—we’re handing the biggest, most powerful asshole in a world full of assholes the keys to more power than any human has ever had at their fingertips.”

“What if we didn’t bring the artifacts?” Angel suggested, eyes fixed on him, as if daring him to be honest.

And he was.

“Then you’d be a liability. You’re brave, you’re resourceful, and you can fight. But you’re not a soldier. You don’t know how to conduct a small-unit operation and you don’t know what to do in a running retreat. Neither you nor Vic nor Gina. And if Soong-Tierney and Captain Kane would let you come along, I still wouldn’t take you, because you’d get killed.”

Chase rubbed his hands over his face. He hadn’t slept in nearly fifty hours and it was wearing on him.

“God knows, we’re all likely to get killed, but I will be well and truly damned if I am going to let you throw your lives away for nothing.” He met her gaze, seeing the anger there, the hurt. “Because beyond all the bullshit about saving all humanity and how we need the artifacts, the truth is, I love you. And if you’re not around at the end of this, then what the hell was the point?”

Chase braced himself for the reply, expecting an eruption that would make Pri’s rant pale by comparison, but he saw something else in Angel Cortez’s eyes. She reached across the table and took his hand.

“Come on,” she said, tugging at him as she stood. “You need some sleep.”

* * *

The air conditioning in the guest room was set too high. It always seemed to be set too high on every space station and starship Angel Cortez had been on since all this began. She always felt cold. Except now, with Chase’s arms wrapped around her, warmth still spreading out from her core, seeping inward from where their bare skin touched beneath the sheets.

“You awake?” he asked, a soft grogginess in his voice. Men always got tired after.

“You should get some rest,” she told him, running her fingers down his forearm where it rested across her chest.

“I can feel you thinking.”

“I can’t help it,” she confessed. “I’m thinking about what she said.”

“Soong-Tierney?” Chase guessed, shifting to put his face closer to hers. She could barely see his eyes in the dim light of the digital readout on the wall clock. “What she said about what?”

“About the artifacts. About what they do to people.”

He chuckled softly.

“What? You don’t want to live forever?”

“No,” she said fiercely, turning in his arms to face him, his breath warm against her cheek. “No, I don’t. I don’t want to outlive all my friends, to watch them die while I stay the same age with no end in sight. I don’t want to watch you die.”

Chase kissed her forehead, her cheek, then rested his head against hers.

“Angel, I think you’re looking at things a little too long-term here. Have you considered that even if I don’t die trying to get the last key, even if we somehow get the Archive, that we still have to find a way to stop the Sunkillers? That the odds of all of us being alive this time tomorrow aren’t that good, much less the odds we’ll survive long enough to worry about you watching me die of natural causes?”

She sighed, the tension going out of her neck, laying her head on the pillow.

“It does sound stupid when you say it that way. But that’s not the only thing I’ve been thinking about. Mara Soong-Tierney…do you think she’s the same woman she was when the Messenger found her? Do you think she’d even recognize herself?”

“That’s what’s really worrying you, isn’t it?” His words were soft brushes of air on her cheek. “That the artifact is changing you?”

“You don’t know, Chase.” She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “Every time I bond with the Navigator, it gets harder to let go. He doesn’t try to talk me into staying with him longer. He doesn’t have to. All he has to do is show me. Show me all the knowledge of all those civilizations, everything I’ve been searching for all these years as an archaeologist. Like Satan taking Jesus up on a hill and showing him all the kingdoms of the world.”

“That’s an uncomfortable metaphor on so many levels,” he murmured. Gently, he turned her around in bed to face him and leaned down to kiss her. “You never told me, but how did you wind up getting interested in archaeology to begin with? After what happened, well…I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d wound up a cop yourself, like your father.”

“I almost did.” She teased at his chest hairs almost unconsciously, something to distract her from the memories of her mother and father. But nothing could. “For years after, I wanted revenge for what had happened to my parents, and the fact that the people who’d actually killed them were dead was no comfort at all. I fantasized about it, about going back with a badge and a gun and killing every cartel asshole I came across.”

“What changed your mind?”

“My adopted father took me to a lecture at UC Berkeley by Dr. Vivian Charleston, head of the archaeology department. It was about Mesoamerican civilizations, and Peter, my adopted father, thought it would be interesting to me because I was from Mexico.” She shrugged. “Honestly, I didn’t care that much…but she did. Dr. Charleston. When she spoke, it was as if those people who lived thousands of years ago were alive to her. As if they were telling her their story from beyond the grave, and she was honoring their existence by remembering them.”

“But why xenoarchaeology? How did you wind up studying alien ruins?”

Angel chuckled.

“My area of study was classical Greece, which was a rich field with lots of material to draw from, but the plain truth was, there wasn’t much left new to discover, and I wound up begging for space in other people’s digs or studying shit that was brought up decades ago. And that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I was frustrated…and then someone found the first Arborist ruin. I bulled my way into that expedition through sheer force of will and the rest is history. Or archaeology, I suppose.”

“You? Getting your way by being stubborn?” Chase raised an eyebrow. “I can’t even imagine.”

She thumped a fist against his shoulder playfully.

“It was the best decision I ever made. Also the most frustrating, given how inscrutable the Arborist ruins are…well, frustrating until we found the remains at Vishnu. Now, I know everything important about them, but I don’t have any evidence, and it’s all incredibly unimportant.”

“But the knowing is the important thing, isn’t it?”

“You’re smarter than you look,” she told him. “But I think I knew that from the beginning.”

“Not the beginning,” he corrected her. “In the beginning, you thought I was a big, dumb brute who was getting you wrapped up in criminal activity, if I recall correctly.”

“And you thought I was a stuck-up, head-in-the-clouds academic who was going to get you killed.”

“Something like that,” he admitted, “though I knew from the start that you were brilliant and totally gorgeous.”

“Lucky you,” she muttered, turning away from him and staring at the wall. “Thanks to the Navigator, I get to be gorgeous and even more brilliant while you grow old. As long as it’s still me.”

“If we make it through this and get the Archive,” Chase said, almost a whisper, his fingers stroking her arm, “we won’t need the keys anymore, right? We can dump them somewhere, or give them to the Colonial Authority or the US government and never worry about them again. You and I can go wherever we want, get away from all this and let someone else be the hero for a while.” She felt him shrug. “And maybe if you’re far enough away from the thing, it won’t be able to affect you anymore.”

She didn’t bother correcting him. She’d asked the question already, or rather, she’d known the answer before she’d had to ask it. The Navigator had assured her that the two of them would always have a connection, no matter what the distance. He’d seemed to believe she’d find the idea comforting, though given that he could read her thoughts and memories as well as she could his, maybe he’d been disabused of the notion by now.

“And if that doesn’t work,” she said carefully, “if nothing we can do will undo what’s been done, you’ll still love me?”

“There’s a lot of things I’m not sure about, Angel,” he admitted, and her gut clenched at the thought of what he was about to say. “I’m not sure we’re going to live through this, not sure if we’ll all wind up in someone’s jail cell or covert blacksite, not sure if none of that even matters because this is the beginning of the end of everything. But there’s one thing I know for certain. I love you, and I can’t ever see that changing.”

“There’s something I know for certain, too,” she told him, smiling fondly, running a hand across his cheek.

“And what’s that, Dr. Cortez?” There was a playful note to his voice.

“That I am so far out of your league, soldier boy.”

Chase laughed and let his head slump back to the bed.

“Well, that’s something I think we can both agree on.”

OceanofPDF.com

15

Robert Pincus was a soft-faced, soft-eyed, soft-voiced herd animal, and just being around the man made Sean Haricot’s skin crawl. For some reason, though, James Hart considered Pincus irreplaceable, which meant that every time Haricot met with the CEO of Hart-Klein in his office, Pincus was sitting in a corner, tapping away with his stylus on his tablet. The scrape of the electronic pen on the screen built to a crescendo of distraction, and it wasn’t until Hart glared at him that Haricot realized he’d missed the last ten seconds of what had been said.

Haricot winced and sat up straighter in his chair.

“Sorry, sir. Fighting a headache. Could you repeat that?”

“Take a fucking aspirin, Sean,” Hart snapped. “I said, have you had any more reports from our intelligence sources about possible locations for the Tamar? I recall it was you who insisted that they wouldn’t give up, that they’d come to us.” He spun his office chair toward Pincus. “Is that correct, Robert? Did Mr. Haricot say that?”

“Yes, sir,” the round-faced man replied immediately, even though there was no way he could have looked it up even if he’d recorded it. Kiss-ass. “Back on the second of the month at 1340 hours here in your office while you were examining the artifact.”

He was right, which made it even worse.

“I’ve reached out to all of our paid assets,” Haricot told him, “as well as some of my old sources from my time in the CIA, but they’ve gone off the grid. No repairs, no resupply, nothing. They can’t last long that way. The ship’s going to need repair after the beating it took over Adelaar and they can’t eat stored emergency rations for long. We just have to be patient.”

“And in the process of all this intelligence-gathering,” Hart growled, leaning over his desk, teeth bared, “did you happen to read the latest classified reports from the Colonial Authority?” He slashed a hand through the air, cutting off a reply. “No, I’ll save you the trouble. You didn’t, because that information is compartmentalized, and you would have had to get my okay to read them.”

Haricot stumbled over his words, but he hadn’t been a spy this long without being able to think on his feet.

“I just did keyword searches for the Tamar, Cortez, and Weston,” he admitted. “I was trying to stay focused.”

“Well, focus on this, Sean. The CA has found two Sunkillers already.” Hart waved a hand over a section of his desk, and an image sprang up of something that seemed to be composed of light. Haricot couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but he assumed it was huge and devastating by Hart’s reaction to it. “The first one they merely observed…as it consumed a star. A damned star, Sean. They watched it slam right into the thing at nearly the speed of light. Now, my scientists insist that not even that should have been able to make the star go supernova, that it didn’t have enough mass for that, but guess what? It did it anyway, and I don’t give a shit how, or whether it shouldn’t be possible. It happened.”

“You said two of them, sir,” Haricot reminded him. Fear clawed at his nerves, but he kept it under control. Problems didn’t get solved by being afraid of them, they got solved by staying on top of them.

“Yes, I did. The next one they tried to stop. Expensive operation, funded by the US government through the Union.” He shrugged. “Funded by us, on the down-low. They used tugs to launch four asteroids at the thing. Big ones.” Hart slapped at the control on his desktop and Haricot watched the video of the Sunkiller demolishing and eating the asteroids with some sort of energy beam.

“Holy shit,” he murmured as the video ended.

“They’re going to try again, of course,” Hart told him. “But no one holds out great hope for anything we have to work on them, given that the People chose to flee the damned galaxy instead of trying to fight them.”

“And we believe that?” Haricot regretted the words even as he spoke them, but it was a question he needed to ask. Acting on incorrect assumptions around Hart could get him dead.

“Everything else Cortez told us in that message has been proven accurate. You said it yourself. They think they’re heroes, and like most people in history who’ve shared that delusion, they could potentially do more harm than if they were ruthless, mercenary businessmen.” The corner of Hart’s mouth turned up. “Like me.” The smile faded. “The point is, we don’t have time to sit around and wait for these losers to turn up. We’re at a key juncture here. The CA, the US, the Union and even China and Russia know that the Sunkillers are a credible threat, and they’re assuming the artifacts are the key to protecting Earth from that threat.”

Hart stood abruptly, as if the nervous energy trapped inside him was too great for him to remain sedentary. When he spoke again, his hands spoke with him, and he leaned toward Haricot like he was about to pounce.

“This is the point where we step forward and tell them that yes, the threat is real, but HKC is the source of their salvation. This is the point where they realize that Soong-Tierney LLC is useless and has offered no solutions and HKC is prepared to lead them into a new age of expansion. And you know what, Sean?” He was yelling now and Haricot resisted the reflexive urge to punch Hart in the throat. “We don’t have jack-shit to show them! This one artifact is fucking useless without the others! We don’t even know how to use it!”

Pincus was dutifully scratching away on his tablet, taking down every word for posterity, unfazed by the shouting.

“Have the researchers found anything?” Haricot asked calmly.

“Not a Goddamned thing!” Hart punctuated the answer with a palm slammed against his desk. “X-rays, lasers, MRI’s, electron microscopes, everything they could think of, and it doesn’t even show up on any of them! It’s as if it doesn’t exist! And if we can’t figure out how to make use of it, then even if we manage to find the Tamar, we can’t just grab their artifacts and dance around like we just scored a touchdown. We have to get Cortez and the others alive and find out how they’ve managed to use them against us.”

“You’re sure they’ve been able to use them?” Another question he didn’t want to ask, but had to.

“You’ve watched the gun camera footage, haven’t you?” Hart demanded. “Did you think the Tamar was able to outrun our gunships after taking major hits without using some sort of alien enhancement?”

Haricot frowned, staring through the wall and into memory, trying to recall every second of his interaction with Cortez and the others.

“Has anyone tried, like, just touching the thing?”

Hart’s eyes went wide.

“That would be particularly stupid. It’s an alien artifact, for God’s sake. Sure, maybe that’s exactly how they did it, but we’re sitting in a station with thousands of employees, not to mention my precious ass. What if it can activate a drive? What if the idiot who makes contact with it accidentally sends an S-T drive pulse right through the damned station hull?”

“Maybe send it out to the asteroid belt in a ship?” Haricot suggested. “Then, if it blows up or something, no harm, no foul.”

Hart snorted a laugh, sitting down on the edge of his desk.

“That’s the last resort, and God knows, we’re almost there.” He shook his head. “I’ve told the R&D crew they have a week, then I’m taking it out of their hands and we’ll try a remote experiment.”

A smile spread across Haricot’s face even as the idea diffused through his thoughts.

“And maybe we shouldn’t be too careful who we tell about it,” he suggested. Haricot frowned, clearly not understanding. “If we can get the word to Weston and the Tamar that the artifact is going to be vulnerable, they’ll come after it. And we can be waiting.”

Hart nodded slowly.

“Not a bad idea. And if they do have some way of homing in on the artifacts, we might not even have to be sloppy enough that they’d be suspicious. But tell me something, Sean. You’ve met these people. What’s their play? What do they do if they decide they can’t get our artifact? You said they can’t give up, but they’ll eventually hear the same reports we have about the Sunkillers. They’ll have to know time is running out. Where will they go?”

Sean had given a lot of thought to the problem…in those spare moments when he wasn’t worrying about Hart having him killed and trying to figure some way out of here. He answered without hesitation.

“The Colonial Authority.”

Hart laughed scornfully, regarding his employee as if he’d lost his mind.

“You can’t be serious. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to think the CA is anything but a puppet.”

“It’s not how stupid they are, sir,” Haricot insisted, “it’s how desperate they are. We already discussed it. They can’t go any further without help. Who else are they going to turn to?”

Hart shook his head.

“Maybe you’re right. If that happens, you need to make sure our contacts in the CA call us first before they start selling out to the Union or the Alliance. Our offer has to be the highest.”

“Will do, sir.”

“Mr. Hart,” Pincus interrupted. Haricot glanced at the soft man with curiosity. Pincus never interrupted. “I’m sorry, sir, but I have to go record the monthly stockholder message.” He tilted his head to the side. “Will you be recording a personal address to them this time, or should we just let the computer simulation take care of things again?”

Hart offered his favored assistant a genial smile.

“We’ve been using the AI simulation so long, they’d probably think something was off if I did it for real.” He made a shooing motion. “Just get it done. Send me a copy, of course, so I can see how brilliant I was.”

“Yes, sir.”

Pincus gathered together his tablet and stylus and shuffled out of the room. Haricot watched the soft, useless little man go, and his lips skinned away from his teeth in a grimace.

Good riddance.

* * *

Robert Pincus shuffled down the hallway, panic twisting his nerves as he passed his office, abandoning the task he’d used as an excuse to get out of the meeting. The stockholder message did need to be transmitted, but he’d recorded it yesterday. It would go out on schedule, and even James Hart would get his copy. It was a damned good thing Hart had declined to record a personal speech, but it hadn’t been a huge risk, since he hadn’t done one in person for over a year.

The walk stretched forever, the faces of the passersby offering silent accusation, and he tried not to meet their eyes, afraid of what they’d see in his. Pincus’s gaze flickered to the security cameras, knowing they’d capture his lie on digital video, that it was etched in ones and zeros if anyone thought to check it. They would, eventually. His only hope was to be somewhere else.

“Mr. Pincus,” the security officer on duty said, nodding politely as he entered the central clearance office. “What can I do for you?”

This would have been so much easier if he could have made the changes from his desk or, even better, the tablet folded in his jacket pocket. But James Hart wasn’t a trusting man and it wouldn’t have been an unfair accusation to call him clinically paranoid. All security clearances for the station had to run through a central system, air-gapped and guarded.

“Good afternoon, Officer Sullivan,” Pincus said, shaking the uniformed man’s thick, beefy hand as warmly as if the man were his brother. “How are you doing? Your wife feeling better?”

Sullivan was a dullard and Pincus couldn’t have cared less about the man or his family troubles, but he’d cultivated this friendship for weeks, learning everything he could about the man and feeding him bullshit stories about his own troubles to be more relatable. Sullivan’s wife had come down with something. Pincus couldn’t remember what, but it had involved a low-grade fever and a cough, and he hoped to God that Sullivan hadn’t passed it on to him.

“Oh, yes, sir!” Sullivan replied, smiling broadly. “It was just a chest cold. Best part was, I didn’t even get it!”

Of course you got it, you moron. You just didn’t show any symptoms. Which means I’m probably sick now, too.

Pincus didn’t say that, just kept his inane smile intact.

“Wonderful, wonderful. Hey, Marc, I was wondering if you could do me a favor?”

“Why of course, Mr. Pincus…”

“Marc, how many times do I have to tell you?” Pincus adjured him. “My name is Robert when it’s just the two of us.” He stuck his head into the Central Clearance office and looked around. “It is just the two of us, right?”

“Oh, uh, yes, sir,” Sullivan said, nodding. “Augusto is on his lunch break.”

Pincus knew that, which was why he’d chosen this time. Policy was for the office to be double-crewed at all times, but in practice, everyone needed to eat and take a dump at some point.

“Okay, Marc, here’s my problem. I have a new employee coming in on the next shuttle. Great kid, fresh out of Harvard Business School, gonna be a great addition to the company. But their records didn’t come through.” Pincus shrugged apologetically. “There’s been some kind of ransomware attack on the Harvard student personnel center, and it might be weeks before we get the official transfer. But I need Reese working here tomorrow. I have all of his data.” Pincus held up his tablet. “It’s just not the official personnel file. I was wondering if I could set up a temporary clearance for the young man until the official file comes in.”

Sullivan grimaced and Pincus thought for sure he was screwed, that he’d misread the man’s devotion to duty and policy, and he was going to have to go with the backup plan of the stun gun in his pocket.

“Well, it’s against policy, sir…I mean, Robert.” Then the man grinned conspiratorially, and Pincus’s shoulders sagged in relief. “But I know you wouldn’t do anything to hurt the company, so go on ahead.” He waved at the corridor. “I’ll keep a watch out to make sure no one gets the wrong idea.”

“Thanks so much, Marc,” Pincus said, and this time his smile was genuine. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t I take you and your wife to dinner at the Executive Lounge as my guests. How does that sound?”

Sullivan’s face brightened, and he grabbed Pincus’s hand and shook it so hard it felt as if he was going to break it off and carry it away with him.

“Thanks so much, sir! I mean, Robert.”

“My pleasure, Marc.” Pincus tapped the side of his tablet with a finger. “I’d better get to it, then.”

Sullivan nodded and went out to watch the corridor, and the smile left Pincus’s face, replaced by desperate determination. It probably didn’t make a difference at this point, but he refrained from using his personal, biometric ID to log into the system, skipping the retinal scan and inputting an executive override code he’d stolen from James Hart’s desk. The flatscreen monitor was old-fashioned but that was intentional. It was a reminder of the fact that this was high-security, no incoming internet connection, and the whole office had a claustrophobic, nuclear-missile-silo feel to it.

Pincus tried to ignore the oppressive confines and concentrate on the task at hand. This was one of the few terminals he’d seen in the last twenty years that used physical data input, but he’d come prepared for that. The digital flash card was larger than it needed to be for its four-gigabyte capacity, but if it had been any smaller, it would have been difficult to manipulate. Pincus slipped it into the reader, then the files he’d stored in it popped up on the screen and awaited confirmation.

He sucked in a breath. This was his last chance to back out. It wasn’t too late. The Soong-Tierney mercs would come along in their shuttle and wouldn’t have clearance. Their request to dock would be denied, and they’d be forced to turn back. It would all be over and Pincus could go back to his normal life.

No, I won’t.

Even in his fantasy, he couldn’t swallow that big of a lie. Mara Soong-Tierney was less of a tyrant than James Hart, but she wasn’t someone to overlook a betrayal. Her next step would be to send Hart definitive proof that Pincus had been working for her sub rosa the last ten years, and Hart would be even less gentle than that. A long trip out of a short airlock would be his final destination.

Pincus touched the files, dragging them into the clearance folder and watched the progress bar heading from left to right. His stomach dropped in an inverse proportion to the progress of the bar, but he couldn’t look away, not just because it was a traffic accident drawing his gaze in but also because he had to make sure the clearances went through.

The indicator flashed green, then Pincus snatched the card out and headed for the door. He pasted the inane smile back on his face before he reached Sullivan.

“Okay, Marc, that’ll do it.” Pincus clapped the security officer on the shoulder. “Thanks for your help!”

“Anytime, Robert!” the man called at his back as he retreated down the corridor. “See you at dinner!”

Taking the doofus and his cow of a wife to dinner at the Executive Lounge would have been mortifying. Thankfully, he’d never have to go through with the promise. Pincus dug into his pocket for an alprazolam and popped it into his mouth. One more thing to do before he went and took shelter in his private office. He had to write a message to his wife.

If he was going to leave her here, he should at least say goodbye.

OceanofPDF.com

INTERLUDE

INTERSTELLAR SPACE

THIRTY LIGHT-YEARS FROM EARTH

“This freaks me out,” Dr. Emil Cartwright confessed, staring at the darkness on the main screen. The man shrugged. “I mean, I know it shouldn’t, that it’s just psychological and we could die just as easily in low orbit around Earth as we can here out in the middle of nowhere, between star systems, but I gotta admit…it still freaks me out.”

Captain Monica Feragni eyed the American balefully, resenting his incessant jabbering almost as much as she resented his presence. But the United States government was funding the bulk of this mission, through the auspices of the Union, and orders were to keep their chief research scientists apprised.

He wasn’t wrong about how weird this was, though.

“It’s my first time,” she admitted, trying to be civil. “There’s not much reason for us to be out here. Navigation is difficult coming out of the Rift between systems.”

“I’ve read articles claiming someday we’ll have outposts in the black,” the tall, horse-faced physicist told her, seemingly genetically incapable of shutting up. “Full-blown colonies even, living off comets in the halo outside systems. You believe that?” Cartwright stroked his bushy, white beard. It was thick and lush, and maybe he wore it to conceal how long his face was, but if so, it wasn’t working. “Not me. Maybe there’ll be automated observation stations, but I just don’t think you’re going to be able to convince people to live out here with no light, no planets, no communication, totally dependent on other people to fly in and bring you messages and supplies. Even a military base would suck. My granddad once told me that Ft. Drum in New York had the highest suicide rate of any Army base back in the 1980s when he was there, and he said he thought one reason was that the place was so lonely and desolate. I bet if you tried to keep Space Force troopers stationed out here at a military outpost, you’d get a couple walking out the airlock every year.”

Kahlenberg offered her a pained expression behind Cartwright’s back and she smothered a chuckle. At least she wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

“Not my problem at this point,” she said, trying to steer the subject back to something relevant. “At the moment, my problem is those missiles. Are we sure they’re going to work?” He began to object but Feragni raised a hand to forestall it. “I don’t mean if they’ll stop the Sunkiller, I mean, will they work at all? I just mentioned how difficult it is to navigate the Rift out here. This plan…” She shook her head. “I saw those damned asteroids going at relativistic speeds get chewed up and sucked in by that thing. You’ll pardon me if I have my doubts about a couple of dozen S-T drive missiles making a dent.”

“The only surprise about the asteroids was the scale,” Cartwright said, waving a hand dismissively. “We’re talking about a starship advanced enough to siphon up interstellar hydrogen and fuse it on the run. Only a fool would think a ship like that wouldn’t have an active defense against asteroids. Now, I wouldn’t have guessed that it had a laser that could take out something forty miles across, of course, but as I said, that’s just a question of degree. As for their speed, well…the ship is going just a hair under the speed of light, so it didn’t really matter that the asteroids were up near the same velocity. The key point here is the angle of approach. An interstellar ramjet is dealing with shit coming at it from the front.” Cartwright illustrated the scenario with his hands, tapping an open palm into his fingertips. “But not the side. Between the electromagnetic scoops and the electromagnetic drive bottle, there’s got to be a vulnerable point where we can strike at it.”

“If you say so, Dr. Cartwright.”

Why couldn’t he have watched from one of the cargo ships? How did I get so lucky?

Feragni leaned against the safety railing at the perimeter of the bridge, staring closer at the main screen as if it were a window and she could see farther by pressing her nose against it. She saw nothing except the distant stars. Not even the other task force ships were visible in the forward view, though a glance to the side would have shown the computer-animated icons representing the other vessels on the tactical screen. No sign of the Sunkiller, but she knew it was out there.

“You don’t sound confident, Captain,” Cartwright told her. “You should be.”

“And why’s that, sir?” she asked, disinterest dripping off her words.

“Because this particular weapon is aimed for a star within thirty light-years of Earth.” His palms rested on the railing beside her and she sensed his stare in her peripheral vision. “Are you aware of the significance of that?”

“I suppose I’m not, sir,” she admitted, although the number tickled at the back of her brain, as if it was something she’d read in the endless files she’d reviewed.

“Supernovas, Captain, emit just gouts and gouts of deadly gamma rays, and those things just keep on going, frying anything in their path.” All the chatty bonhomie was gone from his voice now. Cartwright could have been giving the eulogy at a funeral. “Fifty light-years. That’s the limit. Any supernova within fifty light-years of Earth will damage the ecosystem so badly, most multicellular life won’t exist anymore.” He shrugged. “Before, that wasn’t a concern, since there weren’t any stars capable of going supernova within 100 light-years of Earth. That was before the Sunkillers. However the hell they do it, they’re able to produce supernovae from stars much smaller than we thought possible.”

Feragni turned and met his gaze. His eyes were dark, and there was no humor in them.

“Now, there’s a bright side to that,” he went on. “Since the stars are smaller, so are the gamma ray bursts. Theoretically. But if the theory is correct, we can be much closer without a lethal dose of radiation. Thirty-two light-years. If that Sunkiller hits, if we can’t stop it, everyone still on Earth at the time has thirty years to live.” He grinned, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “But no pressure.”

“One minute till launch, ma’am,” Reinhardt announced.

“Proceed with countdown,” she told him. “Notify the rest of the task force.”

“Strange, isn’t it?” Cartwright mused, gesturing at the expanse of stars outside the main screen. “Launching missiles at something we won’t even see until after they’ve hit.”

“Not the first time,” she said, barely paying attention to the man. Her focus was on the other ships, their virtual representations on the tactical display spreading out into a V-formation, as if they were migrating geese. Just a few seconds now, but it seemed to drag into eternity.

“Launching,” Reinhardt announced.

Feragni didn’t feel a thing, but she hadn’t expected to. The Charles Martel was too small to launch one of these weapons. They weren’t the typical S-T drive missiles used for ship-to-ship combat. If they had been, the Colonial Authority wouldn’t have needed the Union’s money to fund their production.

They were visible on the main screen for just a half a second before their drives took them to near light speed. Nothing aerodynamic about them since they’d never seen an atmosphere and never would. Drive pods stuck out like cancerous growths, all of them arrayed around nuclear reactors the size of her ship, and at the tip of each of those spears was a thermonuclear warhead.

“You ever hear of Tsar Bomba?” Cartwright asked, his smile as feral as a hunting wolf’s.

“No,” she murmured absently.

“Largest hydrogen bomb ever tested in the atmosphere. Nearly sixty megatons, and they could have gone bigger, up to one hundred megatons, but the scientists were concerned about setting the damned atmosphere on fire. We’re not.” He nodded toward the missile streaking past them, the twelfth she’d counted. They’d been clustered around freighters like remoras on a whale. “Each of those damned things has a tank of liquid deuterium, 212 tonnes, and the device in the center should be able to produce a self-sustaining thermonuclear combustion wave capable of yielding 5,200 megatons.”

“Mother of God,” Feragni breathed, looking at him sharply. “I wasn’t told…”

“There was no reason you should be.” Cartwright shrugged. “It wouldn’t affect your mission one way or another. And we certainly won’t be duplicating them.”

Her scowl was skeptical and he chuckled when he saw it.

“Be real, Captain. 5,200 megatons would render a planet uninhabitable, and it’s sure as hell overkill for an anti-ship weapon. It’s useless…against human enemies.” Another laugh. “But it’s gonna be so much damn fun to watch it go off.”

“We’re getting telemetry from the missiles,” Reinhardt told her.

“Seydoux,” Feragni ordered, “instruct all task force ships to move to follow us to a safe distance for observation.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lt. Kahlenberg, take us out of the path of the Sunkiller. Five light-seconds relative northwest.”

“Aye, ma’am, five light-seconds relative northwest.”

It was hard to describe directions in space, a factor of ten harder to do when they weren’t in a solar system and had no ecliptic to work from. All that was left was to synchronize the orientation of each ship in the task force and work off their current position, even though she’d always felt like a complete idiot using compass directions on a starship.

“I’ve got video and tactical,” Reinhardt said. “The Tactical computer is stitching it into a 180-degree pano. Main screen?”

“Put it up, Commander.”

More blackness, and Feragni wondered if they’d ever see the thing, but then the twinkling light of the drive separated itself from the other stars and began to grow. The missiles shifted their course, heading off at a ninety-degree angle to the Sunkiller. The view distorted along with the stars, and then faded.

“They’ve hit the Rift,” Reinhardt declared. “Should only be a few seconds before they’re back out.”

Feragni had just been thinking how frustrating it was that every battle she’d had with the Sunkillers had been a remote one, watching autonomous weapons do her fighting from a distance. Now, she was frustrated at the inability to watch and sweated the seconds until the missiles emerged from the Rift.

“It’d be better for us if the missiles could hit the Sunkiller in FTL,” Cartwright mused. “We tried that, you know, back when the drive was first discovered, back before we knew about the Rift. Tried to figure out the effect an FTL ship could have on, say, an asteroid. Didn’t work out, of course. Even though the drive thumbs its nose at classical physics, there’s still something about this universe that can’t abide anything traveling faster than light.”

“I’ll make sure to pass your complaint on to God,” she murmured.

“You really think if God cared about us, this thing would be trying to end all human life in the galaxy?”

“They’re back!” Reinhardt interrupted the theological debate.

They wouldn’t have much time. Once the missiles hit relativistic speeds again, their signal would be distorted by the time dilation. But for the moment, she had a wonderful view of the full length of the Sunkiller. Feragni had pictured it as squat and trollish, but seen from the side, the thing was long and graceful, a thin cylinder that stretched from the massive ball of fusion fire at the tail to the coruscating electromagnetic scoop at the front.

A nice, big target.

She finally felt some of the optimism that Cartwright had exuded. If any part of the thing was vulnerable, it was that cylinder. The image faded as the missiles streaked closer to the speed of light, but the optimism remained, an afterimage.

“It’s all over by now,” Cartwright said, as if she didn’t already know. “Just waiting for the light to reach us.”

The Sunkiller was visible now, on extreme magnification, though it was just a bright smear on the screen, disappointing after the crystal-clear image the missiles had shown, but at least they’d be able to see what happened when the weapons impacted. Still, it would have been more satisfying to give an order to fire, to feel the ship rock as the slugs were slung downrange by the ship’s rail gun.

Not that it would have even tickled the Sunkiller, but it would have made her feel better.

“We should be seeing the detonation,” Reinhardt said, checking his readout, “about now.”

The Tactical officer knew his stuff, right down to the second. The Sunkiller’s fusion drive was bright enough to outshine the nearest stars, but it was completely washed out by the chain of massive explosions one on top of another. The spherical flares were a firework show in the biggest sky in the universe, swallowing up the Sunkiller, obliterating it in the pure white light of creation.

A cheer went up on the bridge and Feragni’s reflex was to quash it and tell the crew to get back to business, but she let it go. After Wakan Tonka, they needed a win.

“Now, that’s pretty,” Cartwright said and she couldn’t help agreeing with him. It might have been the prettiest sight she’d ever laid eyes on, not least because it represented power, agency, the idea that humans still held their fate in their own hands.

Like fireworks, the light of the miniature suns faded…and when it did, the Sunkiller was still there. The cheers faded as the realization hit them each one at a time. Feragni held it off, not wanting to believe until she had no choice. The thing wasn’t just drifting, disabled like she’d told herself at first. The fusion drive was still lit, the crackling arc of the ramscoop still alive with electrostatic fire and even though she couldn’t see the long cylinder between them, she knew it was still intact.

“Oh, hell,” Cartwright said. “Neutronium. I was afraid of that.”

“What?” Feragni blurted, staring at the tall man, who seemed to be taking this all in stride.

“The hull,” he clarified. “The actual physical construction of the Sunkiller. It has to be neutronium. Material mined from a neutron star. Incredibly dense, almost impossible to penetrate.”

“How can you be sure?” she demanded, angry and willing to take it out on him. “Just because the missiles didn’t stop it?”

“Jesus Christ, Captain!” he exclaimed, finally showing some frustration. “We just hit that thing with close to seventy thousand megatons! Unless it’s got some kind of force field, the only thing that could take that kind of damage and not just evaporate into nothing is neutronium.” His eyebrows went up and he snapped his fingers. “And I’ll be damned! That’s how they’re causing the supernovae! The stars don’t have the mass so the fucking Sunkillers give it to them! That’s…” He shook his head. “That’s a lot of trouble to make sure a system is sterilized. It’d be easier to just crash the ramjet into the habitable planets, but this…this makes sure that if the People come back, they can’t even terraform worlds because there’ll be no star around.”

“I’m grateful,” Feragni ground out between clenched teeth, “that your curiosity has been sated. But just like you said, this was our only hope. What in the hell are we going to do now?”

Cartwright sighed.

“You know that message Evangeline Cortez sent?” At her nod, he motioned expansively as if that answered her question. “I’m afraid that crazy alien shit is the last option we have.”

Feragni stared at him, finally closing her mouth before something flew inside.

“God help us all.”

OceanofPDF.com

16

“There it goes,” Angel said, watching the utilitarian gray shuttle separating from the Soong-Tierney station docks. She banged a fist into the wall beside the viewscreen, the pain a welcome respite from the fear. “Goddammit, I should be with him.”

“And what would you do?” Pri snapped. She’d been on edge ever since her confrontation with Chase and it didn’t take much to set her off, which was a change from the cool control she usually showed in the cockpit. Maybe, Angel reflected, it had something to do with the fact that Hill and Aguilar weren’t in the room, and Pri didn’t feel the need to maintain her cool pilot attitude without them here to impress. “Hell, me and the crew actually have military training, and they wouldn’t take us along.”

“You’ve had training in ship-to-ship combat,” Angel said, still pissed off despite the fact she understood the other woman’s frustration. “If they get into ship-to-ship combat, they’re dead no matter how good you are. Or, at best, you’d have to jump to the Rift and the whole mission would be blown. What they need are people who can keep their cool under stress, and I think I’ve demonstrated I’m capable of that.”

“Well, that ship has sailed, sister.” Pri motioned at the screen on the wall of their assigned guest quarters. “Literally.”

“I just want to know they make it okay,” Angel admitted so softly she wasn’t sure if anyone could hear it. She was hesitant to reveal such a weakness to anyone, even someone she considered a friend. Angel glanced down at the bench seat beside her, at the duffle bag sitting there, slightly open, the glow of the Navigator enticing through the gap.

It was so tempting, the knowledge he represented, the certainty. Just one touch and she could be sure that things would go well, would have all the odds and variables figured out for her. The news might be bad, but at least she’d know.

“Don’t,” Pri said. Angel’s head snapped up at the word and she found the pilot watching her with eagle eyes. “Don’t do it.”

“I need to know,” Angel insisted.

“Yeah, you need to.” Pri sat down beside her, put a hand over hers, and gently moved it away from the bag. “It’s like drugs or alcohol. If you use it when you need it, then you’ll always need it.”

“You’re right,” Angel said, her shoulders sagging as the breath went out of her. “But I haven’t bonded with him in so long, and I feel like if I don’t that…when it matters, I won’t be able to.”

“That’s not how it works,” Victor told her. There was a bitter note to his voice as he stared at the screen, at the retreating shuttle. “The Emissary and the Navigator waited quietly for millennia for us to show up. They’re not going to abandon us.”

Angel nodded, though she wasn’t sure if it was from relief or disappointment.

“This has to work,” Gina said. Angel frowned at her, wondering what she was talking about. It was as if the younger woman hadn’t been paying attention to their conversation. Gina’s hand was on Victor’s arm but her eyes were unfocused. “I told her not to go. She’s still not healed up completely from the leg wound.”

“Alex is going to be fine,” Victor assured her, covering her hand with his.

Alex. She’s talking about her sister.

“How can you be sure?” Gina asked, pulling away from him and hugging her arms to herself. “They’re walking into the damned HKC corporate headquarters. It’s suicide.”

Victor scowled and Angel thought at first that he might be angry at her for panicking, but he ripped open his own duffle bag and stuck his hand inside, touching the Emissary. The tension went out of his features, and his eyes lost focus for a moment before he smiled at Gina. It wasn’t Victor’s smile, it was the Emissary’s, though Angel wasn’t sure how she knew that.

“I have calculated their odds of success,” he told Gina, “and they’re quite good. Sixty-six point seven percent. Having an inside source greatly improves their chances. Without this Robert Pincus, it would be down in the twenties.”

Gina bared her teeth and grabbed Victor’s arm, pulling his hand away from the artifact. He blinked as if a switch had been turned off, incomprehension and youth returning to his face.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. “You know that?”

“I was just trying to help,” he protested, hands held up in surrender. “I thought you’d want to know!”

“All I want,” Gina told him, slowly and patiently, as if she was speaking to a child, “is for you to hold me and tell me everything is going to be all right.”

The confusion in Victor’s expression was clear as if he’d just blurted out “that’s what I was trying to do!” Angel wanted to yell at him what to do, but she was hardly an expert on relationships, and anyway, she wasn’t his mother. But Victor wasn’t stupid, for all that he was socially backward. He pulled Gina into a hug and patted at her shoulder awkwardly. She was stiff at first, but eventually, she hugged him back. And she began to sob.

Angel looked away, uncomfortable.

“I think I’m going to get something to eat,” she said. “I’m sure Dr. Soong-Tierney will let us know if there’s any news.”

“Yeah,” Pri agreed, eyeing the couple. “I think I’ll come with you.”

The corridor was chilly compared to their quarters, and Angel wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. Soong-Tierney employees walked by outside, traveling to guest rooms or leaving them to report to their jobs. It was almost like a military base except these people wore suits rather than uniforms.

“Have you thought about what you’ll do if this doesn’t work?” Angel asked, pitching her voice low so it wouldn’t go past Pri’s ears. “I mean, Vic and I are kind of stuck. We can’t abandon the artifacts, and I’m honestly not sure the artifacts would let us abandon the cause. But you and Adrian and the Chief…if things go bad, you won’t have anything holding you.”

Pri speared her with a glare.

“You sound like a cold fish sometimes, Dr. Cortez.”

Angel winced, realizing she was just as socially awkward as Victor. Pri still cared about Chase, as a friend if nothing more, and Angel was talking about him getting killed.

Shouldn’t it bother me more to talk about it? I love him, I’m sure of it.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she’d seen him almost die so many times already, almost died herself. Seen her parents die…

“I’m sorry,” Angel said, stopping in mid-stride to face the other woman. “I guess it’s been quite a while since I had to think about other people’s feelings.” She sniffed a humorless laugh. “It’s a long story, but I’ve kind of built a wall around myself. I have colleagues, acquaintances, connections, but I can’t honestly say I’ve had a real friend since college.”

“I’m glad you think of me as your friend, Angel,” Pri said with the hint of a smile. “To answer your question, though…I guess I’d go find a place far enough away that those things couldn’t find it. Maybe Soong-Tierney’ll take me along with her little escape club here.”

“Do you trust her?”

“I don’t trust anyone except you guys and God,” Pri said with a snort. “And sometimes I’m not that sure about God.”

* * *

“Hey Weston, what do you call a fake noodle?” Chilly asked, leaning over against Chase’s shoulder as if he wouldn’t have been heard otherwise. Chase pushed up the visor of his helmet and eyed the former Navy SEAL balefully. “An impasta.”

“Oh, Christ,” Jax moaned, leaning his head back against the rest behind his seat.

Chilly cackled at his own joke, then aimed the next one at Alex, over on the other side.

“Quesada, what’s the stupidest animal in the jungle?” Alex shook her head, and Chase thought she was refusing to take part, but apparently, Chilly thought she was answering the question. “A polar bear.”

“What the hell, Chill?” Zack said. “What did we ever do to you?”

“You guys have no sense of humor. What’s brown, hairy and wears sunglasses? A coconut on vacation!”

“I swear to God, Vazquez,” Alex growled, “you keep this shit up, you won’t have to worry about getting killed on the op because I’ll take care of it myself.”

Chase glanced around, wondering what Kane and her platoon thought of all this, but they may as well have been statues, motionless in their seats, most of them with their visors down like there were no faces beneath. It was unnatural. Troops on their way to combat bullshitted and told bad jokes—though not generally this bad—and needled each other. Not these guys. Not Kane, either. She was cut from ice, emotionless, although that might have been as much of an act as Chilly’s bad jokes.

People dealt with fear in their own way, of course. Chase had always sublimated it into preparation, going over the plan in his head over and over, considering every option, every possibility. That wasn’t happening. Instead, all he could think of was what would happen after. It was a dangerous mindset to fall into before an op and he was trying to kick it, but it was harder surrounded by a few dozen people he didn’t know and wasn’t sure he could trust.

Chase couldn’t predict what they’d do when the bullets started flying, and all the possibilities he could think of involved his friends bugging out and abandoning the mission. That was barely worth consideration so he stopped trying to think.

“Go ahead, Chill,” he said, grinning. “Tell us another one.”

“Are you stoned, Weston?” Zack demanded, but Chilly was already smiling broadly.

“I got one,” Chilly said. “I heard this one from Gray, back when.”

Alex’s expression softened, and she nodded.

“Let’s hear it.”

“What’s the difference,” he asked, “between a G-spot and a golf ball?”

“I don’t know,” Chase said, a laugh burbling up already. “What’s the difference between a G-spot and a golf ball?”

“Guys will actually search for a golf ball.”

Chase couldn’t help it, and he didn’t try to stop the guffaw coming up from his belly. Zack’s shoulders shook, and a deep chuckle welled up almost as if it was against his will. Even Alex barked a sharp laugh, though Jax just rolled his eyes.

“You guys are just encouraging him.”

“Weston.” The voice was harsh and flat, all business, not even sharing a little of the humor they were feeling. It was Kane, of course. She had her visor up and her eyes were fixed on him in a glare. “We just got clearance. We dock in five mikes.”

“Copy that,” he said, swiping his helmet visor down. A few taps on the control panel affixed to the armor plate over his left forearm activated the Heads-Up Display.

The video stream in the display was crystal clear, better than he’d seen in his years as a mercenary and much better than when he’d been in the Army.

Guess that’s what happens when your gear isn’t made by the lowest bidder.

He’d seen the HKC station before. They had offices at Gateway, like every other major corporation, but those were for business. The station was a fortress, hardened and armed, though it wasn’t as obvious with the HKC headquarters as it was with Soong-Tierney and her starship. It was the standard rotational gravity wheel much like Gateway’s, but smaller and set in a thickly armored hub that was sturdy enough to survive a nuke if Chase was any judge. He was sure that was their shelter. In case of attack, they’d no doubt retreat to the hub with that shitheel James Hart in the lead and count on their security fleet to hold off whatever was coming. The HKC gunships were pinpoints of light orbiting the station, the promise of overwhelming violence against any threat.

Despite what the pilot had opined in the briefing, he was pretty sure it would have taken a Space Force attack wing to put a dent in the thing. Once upon a time, not so long ago that Chase couldn’t remember, the idea of a corporate bigwig building their own orbital city would have been ridiculous, but that had been before the drive. When all it took was a power source and an airtight vessel to get workers into space or materials from the Moon or the asteroids, the question hadn’t been what was possible but what was too dangerous to allow. A lot of the stuff that was too dangerous had slipped by before the Colonial Authority had come along to enforce the treaties and prevent any maniac with a ship from launching rocks at the Earth.

HKC and Soong-Tierney were what happened when the limits got pushed without anyone to push back.

The station swelled to fill the screen, what had seemed like bare, gray metal acquiring detail as the shuttle grew closer. Another thirty seconds and point-defense turrets came into focus, the yawning muzzles of the cannons covering their approach.

“Those are what?” he asked Kane, sure she was watching the feed as well. “Eighty-eight millimeter?”

“Yes. Based on designs over a hundred years old, but they work quite efficiently for putting holes in spaceships.”

“No rail guns?” he asked.

“They have them,” she replied. “But rail guns can’t be aimed without basically moving the whole station and they work off capacitors that are pretty slow to charge. Cannons fire just as fast as the loading mechanism works. It’s efficient.”

“You sound as if you admire the sentiment.”

“Don’t you?” She turned and eyed him sidelong.

“I suppose I do,” he admitted. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The kid in me who used to watch sci-fi movies wishes they had lasers.”

Kane frowned at him.

“The inverse-square law means to destroy something at long range, a laser would require a mirror hundreds of meters across. It would be horribly vulnerable to even the most rudimentary kinetic weapons and consume massive amounts of power. Rail gun rounds and regular cannons can travel forever barring gravitational influences.”

“Jesus, Captain, you sound like one of the more boring science classes I flunked in high school.” He grinned. “Besides, an S-T drive ship can outrun cannons and even rail gun rounds. They’d have to jump to FTL to outrun a laser.”

She looked thoughtful, as if she hadn’t considered that before, but her consideration was interrupted by an alarm and an announcement from the cockpit.

“We’re docking at the antipodal bays. Get ready. They shouldn’t run any checks or inspections, not with the clearance we have.”

A jolt ran through the shuttle’s fuselage, accompanied by a metallic grinding, and then they were still…and in free-fall. Chase bit down on the bile rising in his throat and cut loose his harness. He tapped the control to activate the magnets in his boots, anchoring him to the deck. Kane stood beside him, but he beat her to the punch, talking to his people but with orders that would apply to all of them.

“Visors down guys,” Chase told the others. “Maybe they don’t know what we look like, but maybe they do. From here on out, no talking, no taking off your helmets, and no freelancing. We’re professional HKC security, and we need to act the part.”

“Copy that,” Chilly said and stood, then pulled open the cargo pouches on his armored vest and transferred a pair of long, curved, plastic and metal objects from the musette bag over his shoulder to the pouches.

“Are those Claymore mines?” Zack demanded, staring at the SEAL with eyes wide.

“Hell, yeah, they are,” Chilly agreed, smoothing down the pouch covers. “Biggest force multiplier I can carry.”

“In an enclosed station?” Jax asked his friend. “Are you insane?”

“Long as you’ve known me, Jackson Walker, do you have to ask?”

Kane was staring at them, shaking her head.

“I’m beginning to think bringing you along was a mistake.”

“Oh, lady,” Chase told her, slapping down his visor, “you have no idea.”

OceanofPDF.com

17

“Carlo, this is Sean. I don’t know when this is going to reach you, but I need to call in a favor.”

Sean Haricot hit the pause button on his phone and sat back at his desk, rubbing a hand over his face as he thought how to phrase this. Carlo Manfrotto was an old acquaintance, possibly a friend if he stretched the term a little, but more importantly, he’d been guilty of some youthful indiscretions as a teenager in Milan, and he came to Haricot for help covering it up when he was up for promotion to captain in the Colonial Authority Navy.

He hit the record button and resumed the message.

“That ship, the Tamar, the one Chase Weston and Dr. Cortez are on, I need to know if you get any intel on them, if they turn up anywhere. I think there’s a chance they’re going to come to you if they run out of options—you as in the Colonial Authority. If that happens, I need you to call me first.” He smiled thinly. “I know this is asking a lot, maybe more than you think you owe me for what I did for you, and I’m prepared to sweeten the pot a little. Like half a million in DigCoin and if necessary, a job commensurate with your skills and experience working for Hart-Klein. Don’t leave me hanging.”

Haricot stopped the recording and transferred the message into the station communications system through the wireless connection to his desk. All it took from there was finding Manfrotto’s name on his address book file and then hitting send. The message would go out with the hourly burst from the main dish and head to satellites, where it would be stored and retransmitted to ships heading outsystem. Manfrotto would get it sooner or later…hopefully sooner.

It was all very convenient, just like everything else here. Everything at his fingertips, convenient shopping, dining, and entertainment. And he hated it. He hated having a desk, hated having an office, hated being tied down to this station. It was sterile and boring, and he would have rather have been squatting in a hotel room with no air conditioning on Vishnu than stuck here, but Hart had been very clear that Haricot wasn’t to leave until and unless he had a definitive lead on the Tamar.

He hoped to God Manfrotto could come up with something for him, because he’d lose his mind if he stayed here much longer.

“Mr. Haricot?” The voice was whiny and nasal and he recognized it immediately. Rafael Tedeschi was the senior security officer of the Alpha shift, what would have been called a morning shift if there were any such thing as morning or night on an orbital station. Among the many other things Haricot hated about having an office was the fact that it made him available for stupid questions round the clock.

“Yeah, Rafe,” he replied, speaking into the air and counting on the mics built into his desk to pick it up. “What’s the problem now?”

“Sir, we just had a shuttle arrive with a whole platoon worth of new security troops.”

“What?” Haricot sat up, as if sitting straight would help him hear the surround-sound speakers in the office better. “I don’t remember seeing anything about any new security showing up.” And God knows, Hart insisted that Haricot read every single memo that came across the system, telling him that if he was going to stay on the HKC payroll, he’d better earn his keep.

“Neither do I,” Tedeschi agreed. “But their clearances are all in order. Their commanding officer is a Lt. Koenig, and she told me they were brought on board specially to guard some valuable asset? Do you know what she means?”

Haricot did, but he couldn’t admit it to Tedeschi. But he still wasn’t happy.

“Send me a copy of their clearances,” he told the man.

The file arrived five seconds later, as if the man had been anticipating the order. The man was prompt, even if he was also a giant kiss-ass. Haricot scanned the readout and grunted softly, dissatisfied because he had to admit that yes, it was all in order and came straight from the desk of James Hart.

“Did you already let them through?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.” He could almost hear Tedeschi’s shrug. “I didn’t have any good reason not to. But I thought I should tell you.”

Haricot cut the man off, ending the call and scrolling through the menu on his phone to dial up James Hart’s personal number. He could have used the touch-screen controls on the desktop, but the phone came naturally to him and the desktop was too big of a reminder how anchored to this place he was.

“Yes, Mr. Haricot?”

He frowned. The voice wasn’t Hart’s, it was that toady Pincus.

“I was calling for Mr. Hart,” he snapped. “This is important.”

“Yes, well, Mr. Hart is otherwise engaged and has left instructions not to be disturbed. Is there anything I can help you with?”

Haricot bit back a heartfelt curse. Pincus was the worst sort of yes-man, one who let it go to his head when he was given an ounce of power. Still, arguing with him wouldn’t do any good and might just make him more entrenched. Haricot had worked as a spy, manipulating people for either the government or the highest bidder for most of his life, and he hadn’t accomplished that without the capacity for self-control.

“Right. I just got word from the security officer that a platoon of security troops just boarded. They had clearance from the boss’ desk, but I haven’t received any notice about their arrival.”

“Yes, we’ve been expecting them. After speaking to you and hearing your conviction that Chase Weston wouldn’t give up on retrieving the artifact, Mr. Hart felt it would be prudent to beef up security around it. He ordered some of our best people flown up from Earth.”

“Why didn’t someone notify me about it?” Haricot demanded.

“I’m sure I don’t know, but if I was forced to guess, I’d say that Mr. Hart wished to keep his possession of the artifact off all electronic communications and simply hasn’t had time to meet with you personally.” A pause. “Alternatively, it could be that with your record of failure at carrying out his orders, he’s lost trust in your ability to protect it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.”

Haricot was in the middle of forming a fiery rebuttal when he noticed that Pincus had cut off the call. It was exactly what Haricot had done to Tedeschi, but this was different. Haricot wasn’t a glorified night watchman. He made things happen and he wasn’t about to get jerked around by that little brown-nose Pincus.

Lip curling in a snarl, he snatched up his jacket and stomped out the door. He’d see about these reinforcements himself.

* * *

The stairwell seemed to go on forever.

Chase was surprised it even existed in a place like this. Sure, on Gateway, it was necessary to have an unpowered backup to the lift banks to allow for evacuation, but this place was a cutting-edge showroom for all the latest technology James Hart could afford. He’d been dreading the long ride in the elevator since he heard about this mission, envisioning nightmare scenarios of a whole platoon crammed into one lift car, cut off and trapped when the bad guys realized who they were and shut down the lift.

Apparently, Alana Kane had similar nightmares, because her plan had involved using the central concourse through the axis of the station’s rotational hub that was floating free in the wide corridor there until they reached the stairwells outward—and thus, upward. It was better than crowding into elevators, but it had its own drawbacks, the primary one being that it was slow as shit.

Chase had to admit the woman knew what she was doing. When they’d been confronted in the docking bay by the security detail, Kane had proven as cool as the other side of the pillow, presenting her forged documentation with a casual nonchalance. She’d maintained a combination of dedication to her job with a total indifference as to the opinions of a shift manager who she considered beneath her until Chase had believed it himself.

The tense moments had come when some of the junior security troops had tried to make small-talk with the Soong-Tierney imposters, the sort of bullshitting that was expected from mercenaries. Kane had insisted that they were on the clock and not here for chit-chat, but Chase had seen the doubts in the eyes of the HKC people. He’d been happy as hell to get out of there.

He would have been even happier to get off these damned stairs. The platoon was stretched out a good three floors, the stomp of their boot soles on the metal grating of the steps a jangling, rattling chorus scraping at Chase’s nerves. At least he was near the front, though he wasn’t sure if that was a sign of Kane’s confidence in their ability or her mistrust of his judgment and a desire to keep him close and under her thumb.

Twenty-four. The stenciled label above the next doorway out of the stairwell told him they still had ten floors to go. Spin gravity dragged at his shoulders and legs, the lower perceived pull of the levels near the core giving way to something approaching Earth normal the closer they came to the rim.

There were levels beyond the one-gravity section. Chase had seen them on the diagram they’d studied, provided by this Pincus guy no doubt. But they weren’t crewed, visited only by maintenance. The water tanks and the piping system to lead them down through the other levels and then recycle them back upward took up most of the space between the crewed sections and the thick, lunar rock of the outer skin, using the water as shielding and cooling beyond its nominal purpose of keeping them all hydrated and washed, and probably keeping James Hart’s personal swimming pool filled.

Kane had been a few steps ahead of Chase, but now she slowed, walking beside him, tipping back her visor.

“We’re going to be at our floor in five minutes,” she said softly. “Any ideas?”

Chase hesitated a moment before he responded, surprised she’d asked.

“They’ll probably have their most competent people guarding the Special Projects section,” he told her, “so we won’t be able to just bluff our way through. I think our best bet is to play to our strengths. You be the strait-laced, stick-up-your-ass officer type who insists on doing things by the book, and I’ll be the good-natured NCO who just wants to get the job done and is trying to keep you from screwing up.”

Kane raised an eyebrow.

“And in your opinion, those are our strengths?”

“Let’s put it this way,” he told her, grinning, “of the two of us, which is more likely to be able to come across as a stiff-backed officer?”

“Point taken.” She actually smiled before she pulled down her visor. “Let’s see what we find.”

The door was marked in big, red letters Authorized Personnel Only, but it wasn’t locked. Or if it was, the clearance they’d been gifted by Pincus opened it for them automatically when Chase pulled down the handle. There could be a full squad of corporate mercs on the other side, waiting with crew-served weapons to mow them down, but he’d never find out standing there. He pushed the door inward.

The corridors were broad and sterile white, and the workers walking through them seemed just as sterile, dressed in uniform gray coveralls and white lab coats. They weren’t quite similar enough to be clones off the same genetic line, but they were all of a type. Lean but also soft, the kind of soft people got from spending their lives indoors, their only exercise done in a gym and only to maintain their health, on the brink of pale, the lights in their workplace given just enough UV juice to provide the needed vitamin D. They looked up at him as he entered, began to look away because security troops down here were probably the norm, then did double-takes as the rest of the platoon filed through behind him.

Chase didn’t attempt to suppress his smile at their wide eyes and startled retreat. They were sheep jumping out of the way of a wolf pack, hoping that they wouldn’t be noticed. He tried to feel bad for them, but he couldn’t. Everyone knew Hart-Klein’s reputation. They parted before the long file of armed troopers, hugging the walls until the platoon was past.

Offices, breakrooms, and labs lined the corridor, all looking much the same, differentiated only by the labels on the doors. Chase ignored them, knowing they weren’t what he was looking for. The diagrams Pincus had given them were programmed into the mapping software in his helmet’s HUD, and his course was a solid red line down the corridor, technically around the curve of the corridor since it was all built on the outside layer of a rotating wheel.

Once he passed the elevator banks, he knew the Special Projects section was close, but he needn’t have worried about missing it. A transparent wall stretched across the hallway, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, and his first guess was that it was plexiglass, but as he got closer, he could see a metallic sheen to it. There was only one thing it could be: transparent aluminum. Which would make it obscenely expensive but also nearly impregnable even with the explosives they were carrying.

There was a single airlock leading through the metallic shield, with an armored guard on either side of it, and both of them stiffened as Chase and Kane approached. The door between them was stenciled in menacing black letters as sharp as daggers. Special Projects Area: No Admittance. It was a little stronger than Authorized Personnel Only.

“Can we help you?” The guard on the right pushed back his visor to reveal a face too young to be a veteran of the war.

Maybe we vets are getting a little long in the tooth to be the rank and file.

“I’m Lt. Koenig,” Kane announced, pushing up her own helmet’s faceplate. “We’ve been assigned as the new protective detail for the asset.” Another thing they had Pincus to thank for. The official language they used for the artifact was the asset.

The kid seemed nonplussed and exchanged a look with his fellow guard.

“Let me get my CO.”

Getting the CO involved going through the security airlock, and Chase paid close attention to the process. The kid pulled a key card out from his belt on a spring-loaded lanyard and pressed it to a reader on the door, then nodded to the other guard, who tapped a code into a console off to the side. The outer door opened and the younger one entered, hitting a control just inside to close it behind him. Getting through the interior door required a similar ritual, and Chase groaned softly. It was going to be tough to shortcut that system.

The CO wasn’t in armor, just a gray HKC security uniform with a matching baseball cap pulled low over her short, curly black hair. Her expression was stern and businesslike as she strode purposefully toward them.

“I’m Lt. Briggs,” she said. “What’s this about a new protective detail?”

“Koenig.” Kane offered a hand and Briggs shook it after a moment’s hesitation. Kane motioned toward Chase. “This is Sgt. Oster. We were brought up from planetside to supplement security for the asset. Mr. Hart’s orders.”

“Can I see your authorization?” Briggs asked sharply, eyes narrowing with suspicion.

Kane held out her phone and the HKC officer touched her own to it, then squinted at the screen, examining the documents she’d sent over.

“These are approved by Mr. Hart’s office,” Briggs acknowledged, “but you don’t have personal clearance for the Special Projects area.”

Kane sighed, and either she was a good actress, or she was honestly frustrated.

“Well, damn it,” she said, jaw clenching. “We just spent eighteen hours between activation, packing, arming up, and shuttling into orbit, and now I find out we can’t even carry out our assignment? What do we have to do to get the clearance?”

“Those are only available via a personal interview with Mr. Hart,” Briggs explained, her expression softening with empathy at the other woman’s frustration over the bureaucracy. “Until I receive those, I can’t let your platoon into the restricted area.”

“What do they expect us to do until then?” Kane demanded. “I have thirty-eight people here and we’re supposed to set up a three-shift duty schedule immediately!”

“Take it easy, El-Tee,” Chase said, recognizing his cue. He raised a hand palm-out in a placating gesture. “Ma’am,” he said to Briggs, “we’re all dead-dog tired and not in the best of moods. Is there anything you could do to help? Maybe just something that would give us an idea of how to write the shift schedule? We don’t even know how many people to put where.”

Briggs sighed, eyes closing, and Chase could almost see her debating the issue with herself.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, finally, “I can take you and your sergeant in to inspect the facilities if I escort you. Would that help?”

“That would be great, ma’am,” Chase said, smiling with the geniality of an NCO trying to pull the wool over an officer’s eyes. “We really appreciate it.”

“All right. Follow me.”

OceanofPDF.com

18

If the entire level had been white and sterile, the Special Projects area was a surgical theater. Labs behind more transparent aluminum were full of researchers in white clean room suits wearing respirators and bustling around equipment Chase couldn’t recognize like worker bees. Something teased at the corner of his vision, shapes of what might have been weapons, but he pushed aside thoughts of how much they might be worth and concentrated on the lab at the center, the one Briggs was leading them toward.

The other labs were connected, sharing walls on either side, sharing the rear wall with all the others. Not this one. It was a curving oval at the very center of the level, with another airlock leading into it, though there were no guards surrounding this entrance.

“Here it is,” Briggs told them, gesturing at the enclosure as if they couldn’t already guess.

If the level seemed to be built around the central lab, the lab could have been built around the platform at the middle of the room. X-ray machines, MRI’s, electron microscopes and a dozen other things Chase couldn’t name surrounded it like sentries waiting to open fire if the thing moved. He was still thirty yards away, and yet he could still see the artifact as clearly as if he was standing right beside it. It was small, no larger than a volleyball, and faceted even as it was rounded, as if the glow emanating from the thing obscured its shape. It drew his gaze to it, mesmerizing, and he didn’t realize they’d stopped until Kane spoke and broke the spell.

“We’ve been instructed to post troops at the lock,” she said, approaching closer, resting a hand on the clear, metal wall. “And put a full squad inside and outside the main entrance back there.”

“It seems like overkill to me.” Briggs sniffed with more disdain than seemed healthy for a loyal HKC employee. “I mean, if Mr. Hart orders it, we’ll do it, of course.”

“It probably is overkill,” Chase agreed. “But I can’t blame the boss. This thing is probably the most valuable piece of gear in the galaxy. If I had it, I’d probably be a little paranoid, too.” He gestured at the four white-suited figures inside the metallic vault. “How many people have clearance to enter?”

“Six altogether,” Briggs told him. “They’ve all been personally cleared by Mr. Hart and have to be biometrically scanned before they can enter.” She glanced behind them and nodded to a man covered neck-to-toe in a white clean room suit. “Good morning, Dr. Sanchez.”

The man was tall and classically handsome, his neatly trimmed black beard framing the features of a movie star of the previous century.

“Good morning, Lt. Briggs,” Sanchez returned, voice deep and sonorous. “Sorry I’m running late, I had a physical.”

“Hope they didn’t find anything wrong,” Briggs teased.

“Healthy as a horse,” Sanchez assured her, stepping past to access the lock.

Chase shared a look with Kane. This was their only chance. She nodded, her hand straying toward her sidearm.

“You’re quite good-looking for a scientist, Dr. Sanchez,” she commented, and the man looked up from the control panel, smiling. Chase suppressed a scowl, wondering what this was all in aid of.

“Thanks, Ms…” Sanchez shook his head helplessly.

“This is Lt. Koenig,” Briggs introduced, the corner of her mouth twisting in an amused grin. “And yes, Lieutenant, Dr. Sanchez is quite the heart-breaker, but you may as well save your breath.” She nodded to the interior of the chamber, at one of the shorter figures, vaguely female beneath the suit. “That’s his wife in there, and if they’re dedicated to anything more than each other, it’s science.”

“Don’t be bitter, Adalyn,” Sanchez adjured her, laughing as he stripped off a glove and laid his bare palm on an ID plate. “I told you, if I was unattached, I would definitely have accepted your invitation to dinner.”

Chase’s heart was pounding, a drumbeat inside his chest that he was shocked no one else could hear, even through the armor. This was going to be fast and ugly and brutal if it was going to work, and he didn’t want to think about what they’d have to do. Despite his assurance to himself earlier that good people didn’t take this sort of job with HKC without their eyes wide open, these people didn’t seem evil.

And yet…

Kane’s eyes flickered toward Sanchez, then back to Chase, and he hoped he understood her correctly that he was supposed to take the scientist. The airlock door hissed open, and Sanchez took a single step inside before Chase moved. He was only five yards away, two steps, yet they dragged on into infinity, and it seemed sure the door would close again before he reached the tall, handsome man.

It didn’t. Chase’s left arm wrapped around the scientist’s throat before the man could pull on his filtered helmet. Chase’s gun leapt into his hand as if of its own accord, and he pressed the muzzle to Sanchez’s temple as the outer airlock door slid shut.

“What the hell?” Sanchez blurted, but Chase pressed his hand over the man’s mouth and checked on Kane with a sideways glance.

The Soong-Tierney mercenary officer was entangled in a similar dance macabre with Lt. Briggs, with one key difference. Kane hadn’t pulled her gun. Instead, she’d retrieved a dagger from a sheath at the rear of her armored vest and buried it up to the hilt in Lt. Brigg’s throat. Blood gushed from the wound, and Briggs gasped soundlessly, dying in Kane’s ruthless grasp.

Chase’s guts churned and he wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, to block out the image. He’d seen more deaths than he could count, but this just felt wrong somehow. Instead, he blocked out his conscience and hissed a command in Sanchez’s ear.

“Open the inner lock now.”

* * *

Anger smoldered in Sean Haricot’s chest like a spark growing under a pile of leaves in a dry woodland, the embers of some forgotten campfire ready to engulf the entire forest.

No one could tell him what was going on.

“What the hell do you mean they didn’t board the elevators?” he yelled at the younger man seated behind the bank of security monitors.

The screens filled the compartment from one end to the other, stretching a good ten yards across and three yards high, displaying every section of the station for the three uniformed security officers usually on duty. One of them was on break and the other had called in sick, leaving just Officer Winfield for Haricot to question.

Winfield was sweating like a Russian racehorse in heat and stuttering the same answer that Haricot didn’t want to hear again.

“I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t notified I should be watching for them, but I reviewed the recordings of the lifts from the docking bays for the last hour, just like you said when you called up here, and there’s no platoon of troops boarding any of the lifts.”

“Goddammit, then find out if they used the central hub! It’s not that hard, Winfield! Do I have to spell it out for you?” It was taking every ounce of self-control Haricot had not to smack the kid in the back of the head, and if he was being honest, he would have to admit that he didn’t have that much self-control left.

Winfield nodded and began scrolling through menus on the control panel, bringing up the recordings from the hub. The center screens had been filled with shots of the elevators on every level, but those feeds flickered out and were replaced by the wide central hub, running up the core of the station like the aftermath of a worm eating its way out of an apple.

“There!” Haricot exclaimed and jabbed his finger at one of the screens. “When was that?”

“Less than half an hour ago, sir.”

It was impossible to miss the parade of troops, all dressed in the gray body armor of HKC security, carbines hanging from slings attached to their tactical vests. They reminded Haricot of a swarm of bees leaving the hive, floating down the core in a tactical formation, shooing aside all other travelers taking the long way through the station.

“Follow them,” Haricot ordered, gesturing. “Show me where they went.”

Winfield mumbled an acknowledgement, buried in the task. The view shifted until the chain of faceless soldiers made it to the center of the rotational wheel and headed outward and downward. Haricot’s mind wanted to call it upward, but the rotational gravity was pushing everything outward, toward the rim, so following its pull was going downward.

Accessing the emergency stairwell from the hub while the wheel was spinning was tricky, which was why most people avoided it. The wheel was turning around the hub, which meant that the entrance spun as well. Getting one person through was easy enough—it wasn’t spinning that fast—but there were thirty-eight of them as near as he could count, and managing to get all of them through took coordination.

Which means they wanted to avoid being noticed.

“Up the stairs,” he urged Winfield. “Or down the stairs, or whatever. Just follow them.” He motioned impatiently. “And fast forward, for God’s sake. I don’t need to watch in real time.”

The man complied, at least not bothering to squeak “yes, sir” every time Haricot spoke. It was almost comic watching the armored figures negotiating the stairs at four- or eight-times speed, and the bug analogies in his head went from bees to ants. Army ants.

“Can you zoom into those two in the front?” They were obviously the leaders. He wanted to see if he could recognize either of them, but their visors were down, their faces hidden behind polarized, high-impact plastic.

Until they reached one of the outer levels. The restricted level with the R&D labs. Just before they hit the entrance, the two in front pulled up their visors.

“There!” he yelled, tapping Winfield on the shoulder. “Freeze and zoom in!”

The cameras were on either side of the stairwell and from the front as well, so there was no lack of views to choose from. The front view was the best. The shorter of the two armored figures was a woman, one he didn’t recognize. Skin the color of old, weathered teak, eyes sharp and watchful. Young but not too young. No older than thirty.

The other…

“Fuck me.”

The other was Chase Weston.

He could have been wrong. The helmet still hid much of the man’s face, and all he could see on the screen was from the eyes down to the chin. It could have just been another man who looked a lot like Weston. But it wasn’t. He knew it in his gut.

“How long ago was this?” he demanded.

“Umm…twenty minutes I think?”

“Sound a general alarm,” Haricot instructed, punctuating the command with a stab of his finger only inches from the kid’s nose. “Assemble all available troops, on duty or off, and tell them to meet me at the Special Projects level ASAP.” A gun. He needed a gun. “No, hold off. Tell them to meet me at the armory. Do it now and call me to confirm when it’s done.”

Haricot didn’t wait for acknowledgement, just left Winfield and the office, sprinting for the armory. He wasn’t going to let the asshole get away this time.

OceanofPDF.com

19

“I can’t,” Sanchez said again, panting so hard he seemed on the verge of hyperventilating. “I can’t, they’ll kill me.”

A little bit of the guilt Chase had been feeling slipped away with the knowledge that Sanchez was aware just what kind of people he was working for. He turned the man just enough to see Briggs lying on the floor outside, blood spreading from her throat.

“What the hell do you think I’ll do?” Chase jerked him back around to the front. The workers inside hadn’t noticed anything yet while concentrating on the artifact and their study of it. “You want your wife to see what the inside of your head looks like?”

The big man whimpered. It was interesting how people behaved when they thought they might die. He’d seen it over and over, from the Army to the colonies. The biggest, strongest men and women, people who always seemed sure of themselves and in control sometimes just came apart when they stared death in the face.

“All right.”

Sanchez touched a hand to the ID plate and tapped in a code. The inner door popped open with a pneumatic hiss, and Chase pushed the scientist through before it was all the way ajar, using the man’s chest as a battering ram. Now the crew inside looked up, and although Chase couldn’t see their faces, their eyes were wide through the clear lenses in their filter masks.

“Nobody move,” Chase said, maintaining his hold around Sanchez’s neck. “Nobody say a word unless you want this guy killed.”

“Julio!” It was a woman’s voice, the short one. She ripped off her helmet, revealing someone surprisingly normal looking for the wife of a man as handsome as Sanchez.

“All you have to do to survive this,” Chase told them, “is nothing. Stand there, do nothing, and I’ll be gone in ten seconds.”

He didn’t give them a chance to argue, just assumed the sale, as his old first sergeant used to say, and shoved Sanchez ahead of him to the platform. Keeping the gun against the scientist’s head, Chase pulled the strap of a duffle bag from around his neck and put it in the man’s hands.

“Put it in the bag,” he said.

“I can’t touch it!” Sanchez yelped.

“You’re wearing gloves. You’ll be fine.”

Sanchez didn’t seem convinced, but he did as he was told and grabbed the faceted sphere quickly, as if he expected the sensation to be agonizing and didn’t want to prolong it. Probably a guy who liked to rip off Band-Aids. He dumped it into the duffle bag and handed it back to Chase, nearly throwing it, like it was radioactive. Chase shouldered it and was forced to take the barrel of his SIG away from Sanchez’s head long enough to zip up the bag.

It was a risk, but Chase figured Sanchez was too scared to try anything. He was wrong. The second the muzzle of the 9mm moved from the scientist’s temple, Dr. Sanchez pushed away, making a break for the door.

Chase grabbed for him but missed, and the man smacked his palm into a big red button that could only mean one thing. An alarm sounded, lights began flashing, and Chase had a gone feeling deep in his gut as Sanchez spun on him, hands raised.

“Put the gun away,” the man said, sounding much more confident than he had a moment ago. “I hit the emergency alert…there’s no way to open this lab from the inside. You’re stuck, and the guards’ll be coming any second. Just give up.”

Chase had misjudged the man. He wasn’t a coward, that much was sure. He’d just locked himself in a big metal box with an armed, pissed-off man, and Chase’s first instinct was to put a round through his head and show him exactly how big a mistake he’d made. Instead, he settled for backhanding Sanchez in the side of the head and knocking him to the floor. It wasn’t as satisfying as punching him, but there was less danger of breaking his own knuckles.

Panic gnawed at his insides, trying to make its way out and take over, but he’d faced it before, and he pushed it down with a deep breath, examining the door. Sanchez could have been lying, but the ID pad was flashing red along with every other control. It was a good bet the whole panel was locked out, and he didn’t have time to try to force the others into helping. The guards would be there in seconds.

Chase was so wrapped up in examining the control panel, he hadn’t bothered to focus beyond the door at the outside, and he nearly jumped back when Lt. Briggs slammed up against the outside lock. For just a moment, he was convinced she hadn’t actually been dead, that she’d somehow overpowered Kane and was coming for him…until he noticed her head lolling to the side, stretching at the gaping wound there.

Kane’s face popped up behind the dead woman’s shoulder and Chase abruptly understood that she’d carried the body up to the door and pressed her palm against it. The alarm ceased abruptly and the red lights ceased flashing as the outer door opened. Briggs’ body nearly collapsed inward with the door, but Kane caught her around the waist and heaved her at the inner door. Blood spattered against it and the corpse’s face distorted as the flesh pressed against the transparent aluminum. Kane grimaced as she grabbed the body’s left wrist and slapped the hand on the inner lock.

It hissed open and Briggs collapsed into the doorway, blocking it.

“You have the artifact?” Kane asked. Blood stained her face and arm, casting her in the light of some ancient goddess of war.

Chase patted the duffle bag, stepped over the body, and got out of the lab before the door tried to close again.

“We have to go,” he told her, breaking into a run for the entrance to the Special Projects area.

All around them, lab doors were opening, curious workers rubbernecking halfway through doorways, some calling out questions he didn’t bother to try to answer. The alarm had stopped with the touch of Briggs’ hand on the lock, but it had drawn attention, and not just from the scientists. The inner airlock door into the Special Projects section slid aside, and an armored HKC security trooper burst through, raising his carbine. Chase still had his pistol in his hand and knew it would be useless against the man’s body armor, but didn’t have time to transition to his slung rifle with the duffle slung over his back. Kane was behind him but he knew he’d be blocking her shot and prepared to throw himself out of the way.

Gunfire erupted before he could move, and Chase jerked with anticipation of the bullets punching into his chest, but the guard hadn’t fired. The man stumbled forward, collapsing to the floor, and Zack Wilson stepped through the lock door behind him, his visor up. Both doors were open and the other security guard was on his knees, hands clasped behind his neck while Chilly held a rifle to his head.

“I assume you got what we came for?” Zack asked, but before he had a chance to answer, Captain Kane rushed through the lock behind him.

“Get to the stairwell!” she yelled, her rifle tucked against her chest and waving at the rest of the platoon.

Her platoon sergeant was posted by the door to the stairs, a bulky, thick-chested man who Chase vaguely recalled was named Greg something-or-other. The Soong-Tierney NCO barked a terse order at the platoon that Chase could hear even through his closed visor. The platoon was as tense as a coiled spring, and Chase had the sense they were frustrated that they hadn’t been part of the artifact’s retrieval. They sublimated their anger into speed, the squad on point moving out in a wedge formation as tight and precise as any he’d seen in the Rangers, an arrowhead seeking a target.

Chase kept up with them but just barely, falling in with the rest of his team in a tight V, Chilly bringing up the rear on the right side of the wedge.

“I hate running,” the former SEAL panted into the team’s private band, the gasped words rimmed with static in Chase’s helmet headphones. “Did I ever tell you how much I hate running?”

“Stop wasting your breath bitching,” Jax advised him. “You’d probably run faster.”

“Both of you shut up,” Alex chimed in, saving Chase the trouble. “I’d like to be able to hear the enemy before they shoot me.”

He agreed, but his own breath was a steady chuffing inside the helmet, deafening, drowning out anything but the stomp of his boots on the deck. The walls rushed past, but Chase tried to scan for any threats the merc squad on point might have missed. The corridors weren’t as crowded on the way out as they had been on the way in, and the few people they did see were already ducking into doorways or crouching behind cover. That wasn’t a good sign. The alarm had spread, so everyone seemed to know there was trouble coming, and if they were curious about what was happening, none of them was daring enough to step out and try to stop a platoon of infantry running headlong down the halls.

No guards. Plenty of looky-loo civilians, but not a single uniform, not an armored HKC trooper to be seen. That should have been a good thing, should have meant they’d caught the station security by surprise, but Chase didn’t trust good luck. It never held. All it did was make a soldier let their guard down.

The paranoia transitioned to claustrophobia, the walls closing in on his perceptions, and the only escape was the stairwell door. It beckoned, salvation at the end of their run, just past the elevator banks. All the doors were closed, the indicator lights gone dark, and Chase wasn’t surprised. The alarm would have shut down the lifts to this level. The Soong-Tierney squad running point had just passed the lift station, just reached the stairwell doorway when the double doors to the center bank of elevators slid aside.

“Look out!” Chase yelled, but he wasn’t the first. Voices were piling one on top of the other, matching the bodies veering away, out of their V formation to swing off to the side.

He didn’t know who fired first, his people or the troops piling out of the elevator, but within half a second, it didn’t matter. The gunfire was general and he was adding his own contribution, the FN bullpup carbine pushing gently against his shoulder, pouring short bursts into the open elevator doors. He couldn’t hear his own shots over the general din, couldn’t tell if it was his bullets that cut down the trooper coming out of the lift but the man fell, tumbling over the bodies of the first two HKC mercs who’d preceded him.

Chase rushed forward despite the hail of gunfire crisscrossing the broad corridor. He sensed they were catching the enemy in a mistake. Bottlenecking their troops inside the one elevator was a tactical error, a move of desperation by an enemy fighting half-blind, but it wouldn’t last forever. The HKC force tried to push out, and Chase knew they felt the flux just as he did, that they realized the next few seconds were going to decide who lived and died.

Zack was beside him, then Chilly, Jax and Alex, crouching low and adding their firepower to his. Plastic shell casings pelted the side of Chase’s helmet, annoying but painless, easier to ignore than the brass versions that had left faint scars on his neck and shoulder when he was a young soldier. He could ignore the distraction, but the HKC troops in the elevator had a harder time ignoring the 6.8mm armor-piercing rounds. A few had taken cover at the edges of the doors, but the unlucky majority were trapped in the open, sitting ducks, another falling as the rest of the platoon caught up to the first group.

Confidence surged in his chest. Kill these guys and get to the stairs and they’d be home free. He thought that right up until the other two elevator doors opened and a full platoon of HKC troopers spilled out.

“Move!” Chase yelled, hoping the shout would penetrate the jackhammer of full auto gunfire. If it didn’t, his example would have to be enough.

Chase made a break for the stairwell door, sensing the rifle bullets slicing through the air around him. Something cracked against his helmet and spun it and him sideways, darkness obstructing his vision. He barely caught himself against the wall before the stumble turned into a fall, images of a gruesome head wound flashing across his blinded eyes. There was no time to fix the helmet so he ripped it off, and light returned, along with the muffled clamor of rifle shots that lost the filter between them and his ears. Raw sound pounded at his head as if it spurred him forward to the door and he followed its urging, counting on the others to do the smart thing.

The leading squad from the Soong-Tierney platoon was still at their assigned position at the door, laying down suppressive fire but not abandoning their post, showing more of the admirable discipline Kane and her first sergeant had instilled. Greg was there, the big NCO waving them at the door and as they reached it, Chase finally took the time to look behind him.

The Soong-Tierney platoon was cut off, falling back to the other side of the lift banks, trying to get behind cover under the withering fire of the HKC force. Several of Kane’s people were down, some writhing helplessly, others trying to crawl clear of the killing zone and far too many lying motionless, likely dead.

“Weston,” Kane said, her voice calm and steady despite the dire circumstances. With his helmet gone, the transmission came in over Chase’s earbud and he could barely hear it above the hollow whining in his ears. “We can’t get to you. Get the artifact out of here. That’s the mission. Take my First Squad and get to the shuttle.”

Greg Toretto, that was the first sergeant’s name. It came to Chase as the stocky soldier moved past him, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Sgt. Monroe,” Toretto said, turning to the squad leader, “take them down to the docking bay.” He swapped out the magazine in his gun for a fresh one.

“Top…” Monroe said doubtfully.

“Just go.”

The big man ran off across the corridor, braving the deadly crossfire to get back to Kane. Chase threw up his rifle and laid down covering fire for the man, joined by the rest of his team and first squad. God alone knew how, but the first sergeant made it to the rest of the platoon.

“Come on!” Monroe told him, pulling at his shoulder. “Get to the stairs!”

Chase didn’t argue, as much as it galled him to leave people behind. The Gatekeeper was why they were there, and going out in a blaze of glory with Captain Kane would accomplish nothing. Monroe went first, along with two of his soldiers, then waved for him to come ahead. The stairwell was deserted, empty, ringing with the whoop of alarm klaxons that he hadn’t noticed until now. Someone had been smart, not bothering with them until after their troops were on the way, trying to lull Chase and the others into thinking they’d gotten away with it.

If the stairs had seemed endless on the way down, they were nearly infinite going up, a stairway to a heaven they’d never reach. The adrenaline was wearing off, and his body didn’t care that there were fifty floors to climb, his aching quads determined that sitting and resting would be a better course of action even if it got him killed. He’d been there before, of course, and kept going. The body was stupid. It didn’t know how much it could take and always wanted to give up early.

“What the hell happened to your helmet?” Zack asked from behind and below him, his voice as breathy and strained as Chase felt.

“Someone shot it off.”

“You’re lucky you still have a head.”

“The night’s young.”

* * *

“I don’t like these…outsiders being here, ma’am,” Nicholas Salvatore said, staring daggers at Angel. She returned the glare. She didn’t like the officious, overstuffed man. His clothes were too neat, his hair too precisely ordered, not one strand out of place. He had the look of a man who was supremely interested in his image and she’d met people like him before in academia. “This operation is sensitive.”

Angel wasn’t clear on Salvatore’s exact title, but the man seemed to consider the operations center his personal fiefdom, pacing at the center of the large oval room while his staff did all the real work. They pretended not to notice him, buried in their tasks tracing the transponders of the troops and the shuttle, monitoring the feed from spy drones watching the HKC station and spying on communications going into and coming out of the orbital city. They were dressed for the job, wearing company polo shirts and dress slacks, while Salvatore looked like he was heading to the Met for a performance of La Traviata.

“Yes, it is sensitive, Nicholas,” Mara Soong-Tierney agreed, the curl of her lip showing that she was just as annoyed with the man as Angel was. “Which is why they’re here, since they have an intimate knowledge of the situation. Now, stop complaining and give me a situation report.”

The woman was dressed in the same T-shirt and blue jeans as when she’d met them and Angel wondered if she ever wore anything else. She supposed there was no one to tell the multibillionaire that she should dress differently.

“Yes, ma’am,” Salvatore said, though he still didn’t seem happy about it. “The latest we’ve managed to find out from their communications is that the platoon has penetrated the Special Projects section and they’ve been discovered. Whether they’ve succeeded in seizing the artifact or not isn’t apparent from internal comms, and, of course, we can’t receive any transmissions while the penetration team is inside the station. But HKC security has been alerted. I recommend we send in the distraction now, before it’s too late to give the shuttle a chance at launching.”

“Very well, you have my approval.”

“This isn’t going to work,” Pri whispered from close beside her.

They’d been offered chairs, but Angel was too nervous to sit and had been standing beside the others. Pri sat with her legs splayed, elbows resting on her thighs, watching Salvatore with hooded eyes and a general look of disapproval. Hill was lounging, feet stretched out where they were sure to trip up anyone who walked past, while Aguilar sat straight as if he were at attention, his eyes fixed forward. Gina was nowhere near as stoic, her eyes flickering back and forth like a hunted animal. She looked as if she wanted to pace but was simultaneously afraid of getting in the way. The younger woman had looked up sharply at Pri’s declaration, fear in her wide eyes and Victor put a hand on her arm, trying to comfort her.

“What?” Angel demanded, trying to keep her voice low to not attract attention. “The distraction?”

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong, but if pirates and bandits were trustworthy, they wouldn’t be pirates and bandits.”

“The signal has been sent, sir,” one of the techs announced from their station. “Waiting for a reply.”

Angel scanned the dozens of displays, trying to find anything related to the announcement and settled on what she thought was a radar or lidar screen. It was like watching a beehive on infrared, with glowing dots swarming around a larger, glowing dot at the center that was probably the HKC station. Some of them had to be commercial shuttles, some corporate transports, but she had no idea how many, or whether they’d already warned off all civilian traffic.

“What’s the turnaround time for the reply?” Mara finally asked, at least three minutes after Angel would have.

“Captain Thibodeaux told us his ships would be waiting in the closer Apollo asteroids,” Salvatore told her after checking a note on his phone. “That should mean no more than five minutes.”

“It’s already been more than five minutes,” Angel said, earning a dirty look from Salvatore. The well-dressed man looked as if he were about to launch into a tirade at the interruption, but Mara cut him off.

“She’s right. And assuming they were jumping in via the Rift, they’d have been there already.” She moved with surprising grace for someone her age, laying a hand on the shoulder of the woman at the station next to the sensor screen. “Bella, are we picking up any ships coming out of the Rift near the HKC station?”

“Negative, ma’am,” the woman said without hesitation. “Nothing scheduled, nothing cleared by the Colonial Authority Orbital Traffic Control and nothing on the drone cams or the radar and lidar.”

Mara sighed, leaning a palm against Bella’s console.

“They’ve fucked us, then.”

Pri came to her feet with a scraping of metal chair legs against the floor.

“Get the Tamar cleared for launch, Dr. Soong-Tierney,” she said, making the words sound like an order. She motioned to the others, and they stood, only Hill looking reluctant, and that might have been because he’d been comfortable. “We’ll be the distraction.”

“That’s suicide!” Salvatore scoffed. “Their defenses will obliterate you in minutes!”

“Then you’d better figure out some way to stop it,” Angel snapped. “Because if the Tamar is destroyed, the artifacts go with it.”

Salvatore was yelling something at her, but Angel ignored it, following Pri and the others out of the room. She wasn’t sure at first if Victor would go along with them, but a glance aside revealed Gina at her heels and Victor hurrying behind her, the Emissary in the bag around his shoulder.

“You think they’ll try to stop us?” Angel asked Priyanka, hurrying to catch up to the woman, squeezing between her and Aguilar.

“Maybe.” Pri shot her a taut grin. “But honest to God, I’m more worried that I don’t even remember the way back to the docking bay.”

OceanofPDF.com

20

“Goddammit!” Sean Haricot yelled, ducking back inside the elevator as a burst of armor-piercing rounds drilled into the metal beside his head, sending a shower of red-hot metal shards spraying the side of his neck. He grabbed at the shoulder of the security team leader, who should have been out front, setting an example for his people, but was instead cowering back behind cover. “They’re down by at least a third of their numbers! Why isn’t your team taking them out, Gruenwald?”

“They have a good position on the other side of the lift banks, sir,” Gruenwald yelled, pushing back his visor. The man’s face was pale, and sweat poured off his brows, beading on his nose. “We can rush them, but we’ll lose half our force.”

“That’s what we pay you for!” Haricot growled. He was about to order Gruenwald to lead the charge when a transmission over his earbud interrupted.

“Mr. Haricot, this is Winfield.” The kid was breathless, like he’d just run a mile. “There’s a squad-level element that split off from the invading force. They went up the stairwell, and I think they’re heading for the docking bay. What do you want me to do?”

Weston. If anyone had the artifact, it would be Weston, and a bastard like him would be the first to try to get away and let the rest of his people stay here and get killed.

“Get whatever we have left to the docking bay and cut them off. I’ll take care of the rest.” Haricot tapped his earbud to end the call, then grabbed Gruenwald again, yanking the man close to his face so he could hear over the gunfire. “Give me a squad. I’m taking them to the docking bay. The rest of you stay here and keep these assholes pinned down. I don’t care if you can’t overrun them, just keep them pinned down!”

“But sir, if you take one of my squads…” Gruenwald looked like a child who’d just been told Santa Claus wasn’t real, and Haricot barely restrained himself from slapping the man in the face.

“Shut up and do as you’re told. Detail me that squad or I’ll just take the people you have in here guarding your worthless ass!”

Gruenwald nodded, yelling orders into his helmet mic. Haricot couldn’t make them out and didn’t care, except that eight of the HKC mercenaries separated from the rest and ran over to the side of the lift bank to wait for him. Not patiently, though, not with the odd burst of rifle fire ricocheting off the walls. Haricot sucked in a deep breath to steel himself, ducked out of the car, and waved at the squad to follow.

Haricot slammed his shoulder into the door, and it opened under the pressure, as well as the clearance of his RFID. Hugging the wall, he shouldered his rifle and scanned back and forth, not expecting anyone to be waiting for him but preparing for it nonetheless. It would be awfully silly to get himself killed because he’d blundered into a trap.

Nothing. Not a sound, not a hint of motion.

The squad leader of the group Gruenwald had sent with him paused inside the stairwell door and pulled back his faceplate, staring at Haricot curiously. He was a young man, so much younger than Haricot ever remembered being.

“Take point,” he told the squad leader. “The stairwell has been cleared, so anyone you see ahead of us, shoot to kill.”

Haricot wanted to be first, wanted to make sure he was the one who put a bullet in Weston’s head, but he hadn’t survived this long in a job where people died young by taking stupid chances. Taking point and soaking up bullets was for the young and stupid, and he was happy to let them do it.

* * *

The climb was getting easier. That wasn’t how climbs usually worked, but it was on a rotating wheel in space, since the higher they reached, the lower the apparent gravity was and the easier it got to keep going.

Chase appreciated the break. The stairs twisted round and round in a forever spiral, a DNA helix leading to the stars, and he blew breaths out with each step. Despite the lack of protection, he was grateful he’d lost his helmet, because breathing with the heavy thing on would have been even harder. If there was any consolation, it was that Chilly had it worse. The paunchy former SEAL hadn’t exactly been in fighting shape when they’d recruited him and he had more weight to carry around. As long as Chilly kept going, Chase would too, out of sheer pride.

“How much longer?” Chilly gasped from behind him. “Jesus Christ, I don’t remember it being this long on the way in.”

“You need to lose some damn weight,” Jax grunted. “I been telling you that for three years now. But you won’t run even though we had treadmills all over the place on Gateway.”

“I’m a SEAL,” Chilly insisted. “I like to swim. And they wouldn’t let us security grunts play in the tourist pools.”

“Get a room, you two,” Alex said. For someone who’d been shot in the leg just a few weeks ago, she was doing pretty well.

If the Soong-Tierney squad had any comment on their lack of noise discipline, they kept it inside their helmets. Or maybe they were as out of breath as he was.

“The hub is two levels up,” one of them announced. It was the squad leader, and he looked back at Chase. “Then straight from there to the docking bay. Are we expecting opposition?”

“They know we’re here,” Chase told him. “They have to know we’re trying to get out.”

“Then we hit them hard and go in shooting,” Zack put in. “Don’t give them a chance to think. That shuttle is our only way out.”

“We got any grenades?” Chilly wondered.

“What?” Jax asked. “Those damned Claymores not enough?”

“You’re gonna wish you brought grenades,” Chilly assured him, “by the time we reach that damned shuttle.”

* * *

“They have to see us by now,” Adrian Hill said, shaking his head.

The HKC station was growing in the front screen, so close Priyanka felt she could reach out and touch it.

“They see something,” she corrected him. “A ship heading into orbit. But we’re running a clean registration thanks to the good doctor.”

“Yeah, that was pretty nice of her,” Aguilar murmured, “considering we basically told her to get stuffed when she tried to keep Angel and Vic from coming along.”

“I think she might have been worried,” Angel said, patting the shoulder bag with the Navigator inside, “about what we could do with these things if they tried to stop us.”

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Victor said. Gina stared daggers at him, but he held up his hands. “Not that Pri and the crew shouldn’t go help,” he went on hastily, “but Dr. Cortez and I shouldn’t have come along! If anything happens, we’re done. Not just us, everyone. I know they’re our friends, but Dr. Cortez, we’re taking a risk with the future of the whole human race by coming along.”

“We are,” Angel agreed. “But I’m not ready to trust Mara Soong-Tierney with the fate of humanity.”

“Why not?” Pri asked, glancing back at her, curiosity overpowering her hesitance to look away from the controls when she was flying into combat. “I mean, I know why I don’t trust her—the woman gives me the creeps. But why don’t you trust her?”

“She had to share the drive with us,” Angel said, a hard edge to her voice. “She didn’t have any choice about that. I understand the way the artifacts of the People can compel you. But there were ways it could have been done. She licensed it and sold it to everyone, including the Russians, the Chinese, organized crime, terrorists…it didn’t matter to her.” The woman shook her head. “She either panicked and didn’t even think about the effects that could have or she just didn’t care. Either way, I don’t trust her.”

“You know, Angel,” Pri said, laughing softly, “even past all the degrees and the books, you’re a pretty smart woman.”

“Something happening, Cap,” Hill warned her. Pri cursed under her breath. Every time she looked away from the controls, something always happened.

She searched the tactical screen and saw the HKC security cutters swarming out of their patrol orbits, heading for the docking bay.

“Oh, shit,” Aguilar said. “They’re already heading to intercept.”

“They can’t be on board yet,” Pri insisted. She tapped a key on the communications board, hitting the preset they’d been given for Soong-Tierney. “This is the Tamar. I need to know if you’ve received word that the team is back on board the shuttle.”

“Negative, Tamar.” She didn’t recognize the voice, which meant it was neither Soong-Tierney nor Salvatore. Probably one of the people staffing the operations room. “From what we’ve intercepted via their internal comms, the fighting is still going on inside the station.”

“That’s bad,” Gina said, leaning out of her seat to get a better look at the screen. “If they aren’t back at the docking bay, and the HKC ships are already on the move, that must mean they know about the shuttle.”

“Something’s moving inside there,” Hill told them.

Pri searched for what he was seeing and didn’t have to wait long. It was the shuttle. The IFF transponder would have told her even if her eyes didn’t. It screamed out of the docking bay of the station, a pinprick of light against the mountain that was the corporate headquarters, going dangerously fast, but not fast enough.

It had to have been cannon rounds, and they had to have come from the security ships. The shuttle was going too fast for the point-defense turrets to catch it from behind, and the Tamar’s radar and lidar could have detected a missile. One second, the shuttle was there, lunging away from the giant wheel like an animal fleeing a trap, and the next, it was a tumbling mass of hot metal, venting gouts of hot gas. With the drive field gone, so was its momentum, and it scattered with the velocity imparted by the explosions.

“Oh, my God,” Gina whispered.

“Soong-Tierney base,” Pri transmitted, her voice so much calmer than the fluttering panic in her gut, “the shuttle is down. Repeat, the extraction shuttle has been destroyed.”

“They’ve got no way out,” Victor added, though she didn’t think the words carried back to Soong-Tierney.

“Yeah,” Pri agreed, conviction firming inside her, replacing the panic. “No way but us.”

OceanofPDF.com

21

Robert Pincus sagged as he watched the video footage of the exploding shuttle on his office viewscreen. He might as well have been on it for all the hope he had now for survival.

They hadn’t come for him. He supposed he’d half-expected they wouldn’t once he heard the reports of gunfire, of security teams being called up to intercept the intruders. Their only hope—his only hope—had been that they get out of the Special Projects area without alerting anyone. Then, he could have rendezvoused with them on the way to the docking bay. Trying to get there now would only mean he’d be turned back by security, even if he used his bypasses and backdoor clearances to get past the lockdowns.

Not that there was any reason to even try now that their only means of escape had been destroyed. Pincus sighed and scanned the docking bay, more out of curiosity than anything else. There was the usual assortment of corporate birds, cargo and passenger, but none of them would serve as a means of escape. Their internal systems would be locked down from the alarm, and only the personal okay of James Hart could release them.

All except one. He leaned forward in his seat, as if being closer to the holographic projection above his desk would make the image clearer. It was a passenger shuttle, but it was registering as non-flyable since the navigation computer had been stripped out for a systems upgrade and the aerodynamic control surfaces were hanging loose on the fuselage, waiting for the wiring to be reconnected. But it still had its batteries, still had a drive, still had manual controls and, most importantly, hadn’t been affected by the lockdown. He could release the controls from his office, remotely.

Or, he could do his job, call James Hart, and let the man know what was going on. Hart wouldn’t know yet because that was the plan. He’d scheduled this whole thing for Hart’s usual sleep period, then cut the man’s room and personal devices off from the comm systems. Pincus was probably the only one on the station who had the capability to do that, and if anyone looked, they’d know it. But if he contacted Hart now, it might not be too late. Pincus could just claim that he’d forgotten about the communications block for a few minutes, distracted by fear and excitement. Hart would buy that. Maybe.

Someone knocked on his office door, and Pincus nearly jumped out of his seat. He stared at the polished wood for a long second, wondering if he should pretend he wasn’t there before his rational mind took over and reminded him he had a door camera. Pincus cursed under his breath and touched the control to switch the screen from the docking bay to his door.

The image was distorted by the wide-angle lens, stretching Veronica’s already long face into something otherworldly.

“Robert, are you in there?”

Shit.

What was she doing here? She was supposed to be in her Pilates class, and even if she’d skipped it, the lockdown should have kept her trapped in the living quarters. He thought about ignoring her, but if she kept knocking, she’d attract attention. Sighing, he opened the door with the touch of a button, and the woman stalked inside, an enraged Shetland pony, not a bit taller than five feet. Her clothes were outrageously expensive and totally inappropriate for everyday wear for someone half her age, but that had never stopped her in the past.

“Robert, what’s going on?” she demanded without any attempt at pleasantries. “I was on my way to see you when there were all these alarms and a lockdown and I couldn’t even get to the Medical Center for my appointment.”

“Are you sick?” he asked, acutely aware of how inane the question was under the circumstances. Veronica sighed, glaring at him from beneath her jet-black bangs.

“Of course not. I had an appointment with Dr. Giguère about getting my nose redone.”

Pincus sighed, rubbing at his temples.

“Your nose looks fine.” He was lying, it didn’t. It looked like a sharpened eagle’s beak after three rounds of cosmetic surgery, but it had looked fine before she’d started trying to perfect it. “Why were you coming to see me?”

Hopefully, it was something simple and he could get her out of here in a minute or so. He had a call to make, though he hadn’t decided to whom he was going to make it. The look on Veronica’s face told him it wasn’t going to be that easy.

“I want out of here, Robert,” she said, face twisting in a frown. “Off this station. I can’t take it here anymore. Two years ago, you promised me we wouldn’t be here long, that this was a temporary assignment. Either you request a transfer out of here and back to Earth or I’m leaving you.”

Anger swelled in his chest and he nearly launched into a tirade about her ingratitude, her lack of understanding of reality, the fact that she hadn’t worked at all since they’d gotten married despite her assurances that they could count on her career as a systems analyst.

He said none of that. It would start an argument that would last hours, if the past was any gauge to go by, and he had minutes.

“Okay,” he told her instead. She blinked as if she hadn’t expected the answer.

“Okay?” Veronica repeated.

“Yes, I’ll do it.” He spread his hands wide. “I’ll contact Mr. Hart right now and request a transfer. He won’t like it, but with my record, I’m sure he’ll find a place for me back on Earth.” Pincus forced a smile. “After all, it’s not like I’m his damned butler. I can do my job remotely if it comes to it.”

Another lie. Hart counted on him to be a go-between, insulation between the executive and all the clingers-on who wanted face-time with the man. Pincus had told his wife that all the time, but it never seemed to stick.

“Oh, thank you, Robert!” she said, smiling broadly, a horrific sight with her beaklike nose. “I knew you’d see reason! You’ll see, this will be the best thing for us.”

She didn’t throw her arms around him and kiss him in lavish gratitude, because she was incapable of gratitude, lavish or otherwise.

“I should make that call now,” he told her. “Can you give me a few minutes alone?”

“Of course,” she said, yanking open the door like she couldn’t wait to leave.

Pincus stared after her, the smile he’d painted on his face for her turning into a rictus. The decision made itself. He’d memorized the frequency and he tapped it into the system manually.

“This is Pincus,” he said. “Your transport has been destroyed. There’s a shuttle being repaired in docking bay 291C. It’s not airworthy, and its navigation systems are down, but the control systems are unlocked. That’s your best bet.”

There was no response. The air went out of him. Maybe they were dead already. Maybe this had all been for nothing. When the reply finally came, it was a voice he didn’t recognize, and it was a question he didn’t expect.

“What about you?”

He smiled wanly. Whoever this was, he was more concerned with Pincus’ well-being than Veronica had ever been.

“Don’t worry about me,” he assured them. “I’ve made this bed. Perhaps it’s time to lie in it.”

* * *

“So much for Pincus,” Chase sighed.

If he was being completely honest with himself, it was half from relief. Not that he didn’t have sympathy for the Soong-Tierney mole, not that he wasn’t grateful for the man’s help locating them a ride out of the station, but they were down to a reinforced squad of effectives. The central hub loomed large and empty and the only reason for that would be that the security was busy elsewhere. Like the docking bay.

Every yank on the guide rail running down the center of the hub sent him soaring faster, only friction with the air slowing any of them down in free-fall. Less than three hundred yards ahead, they’d hit the north polar docking bay and whatever was waiting for them. Too far away to see in detail past the soda-straw hub.

“Oh, hell,” Zack said, bellowing to be heard since they were spread out along the railing to avoid slamming into each other, “he’s probably got a better chance of living through this without us.”

“When we hit the bay,” the squad leader said, “my people are going to fan out wide. Weston, you stay in the center, brake hard and wait for us to clear the initial assault before you move forward.”

“Copy that,” Chase told him. He didn’t know the man’s name. It felt odd, hearing some stranger tell him that they were about to risk their life for him.

Two hundred yards.

“Start slowing down,” the squad leader ordered. “Not too much.”

Teach your grandma to suck eggs, boy. He didn’t say that, though it echoed through his head in his grandfather’s voice, not the least because this kid probably wouldn’t have any idea what the hell it meant.

Microgravity combat tactics classes flashed through his memory. Taught by some Space Force officer, of course, which all the Rangers in his platoon had thought endlessly amusing, but she knew her shit.

Do not just grab at the nearest handhold to slow yourself down when you’ve built up serious momentum in free-fall. She’d had a severe expression, as if she expected them to ignore her and was already pissed off about it. You do that, you’ll break your fingers, break your wrist, dislocate your elbow and maybe your shoulder, too. To slow down gradually, rub your—gloved—palm on the nearest surface. Brief touches at first, or else friction will burn through even a Kevlar-armored combat glove. Then, as you slow down, lay your entire palm and the edges of your fingers along the length of the object—at ease with that giggling, Rangers, you know what I mean! Once you’ve slowed down enough that you’re ready to stop, you can use your fingers in a light grip—I said light!—to bring you to a complete halt. We got that, you Army boneheads?

They’d all had to do pushups for an hour for laughing at the fingers comment, but it had been a valuable lesson, and he followed her training now. Even with an armored glove on, his palm heated up the first time he rubbed it against the railing, but the method worked, and the Soong-Tierney squad moved ahead of them. Ten meters. Twenty. Forty.

The mercs hit the opening out of the hub and sprayed into the docking bay like birdshot on the opening day of dove season, traveling at close to thirty miles an hour. Jackhammer echoes rolled back over them, and Chase couldn’t be sure who was firing. That was the bad part about carrying the other guy’s guns into combat. He’d been trained to tell the difference between an M27 and a Chinese-made assault rifle, but everyone here was carrying FN bullpups without suppressors.

He stopped himself on the railing just twenty meters from where the hub opening widened out into the docking bay, twenty yards abruptly transforming to nearly one hundred, and that was just on the inside. On the outside, it was probably three hundred yards wide, big enough for shuttles and freighters to match up with airlocks on either side of the pressurized cylinder. The pressurized area gave ample room for cargo to unload through freight locks and for magnetized pallet jacks to take it to the freight elevators for delivery to elsewhere in the station. It also provided ample cover to emplace an ambush.

And I still can’t see shit.

“We’ve waited long enough,” he decided. “Let’s get inside. Clockwork formation, and go on my signal.” Chase gave the hand signals he’d learned long ago in that microgravity combat class, sending each of the other four to the twelve, three, six and nine o’clock positions of the rounded entranceway.

Zack was at six, and Chase joined him there, holding onto the rim of the door with one hand, rifle in the other. The fight was still going on, which was encouraging, since he’d half accepted that the whole S-T squad was dead already, cut down in the first exchange. Two of them were. Their bodies tumbled at the center of the chamber, spinning on momentum, blood flowing away from them in tiny, red globules, heading for the air vents.

They weren’t the only ones. Other bodies were drifting in the air currents about a hundred yards farther in, HKC troops this time. He could only tell the difference by their position since his visor was gone and with it the HUD that would have given him access to the IFF transponders, but Chase had been doing this a long time and certain things just fell into place.

The six soldiers left in the S-T squad had taken cover behind a stack of empty pallets on one side of the bay and a row of cargo jacks on the other, putting short, aimed bursts downrange at the HKC troops. The opposing force was maybe half a platoon in strength, and they were positioned behind maintenance tractors built to haul repair parts for the docked ships, and maybe a couple of them had originally been behind those cargo jacks.

Chase spotted the trouble with both groups immediately, one born of lack of real combat experience in free-fall. They were fighting a two-dimensional war, treating the battlespace as if there was still gravity holding them to the ground instead of magnetic boots. If the HKC mercs had set up in a 360-degree arc around the interior of the bay, they could have taken out the entire squad in seconds. And if the squad really wanted to get past them, they would have done the same.

At least that made his strategy clear.

“On three!” he barked at the others, projecting his voice to carry just the way they’d taught him in the Army. “We go high, hug the overhead and fire down at them. Copy that?”

“Hoo-ah, Sarge,” Zack said with ironic enthusiasm.

“Don’t call me Sarge, Wilson. One…two…”

“Contact, rear!”

Alex had said it, though that fact didn’t penetrate to Chase’s conscious mind until a moment after the warning had sent him into motion. There was nowhere to hide on this side of the entranceway, nothing but open hub, and he went with his instinct, despite the dangers that route held.

“Other side!” was all he had time to yell, hoping the others would follow his example as he swung his legs over the rim of the entranceway only a second ahead of a hail of bullets.

The world was spinning around Chase, and raw sound hammered at his ears, his sinuses, his chest, gunfire from either side, the ricochet of slugs off the rim of the entrance to the docking bay. The universe seemed to be conspiring to confuse him, the fog of war adding the disorientation of free-fall to its arsenal, in its own, separate firefight with his years of training and experience. The good guys won, if just barely, and Chase was able to piece the jagged fragments of reality together.

There was a squad of HKC troopers behind them. They’d been smart, hugging the walls, staying quiet, sacrificing speed for stealth, and they’d done what the mercs in the docking bay had not, organizing themselves in a circular formation, cover 360 degrees of fire, which meant whoever was leading them wasn’t an idiot. They’d waited until they were only fifty yards away to open fire, trying to wipe Chase and his team out in one sustained burst.

It had nearly worked, because Chase had broken a cardinal rule of combat and hadn’t designated anyone to watch their six. Luckily, with a crew this experienced, he hadn’t had to, and Alex must have taken it on herself to be their eyes to the rear. Chase swung his rifle’s muzzle upward, forced to use the electronic sights to aim without his helmet and the link between it and the targeting reticle. His finger was caressing the trigger when a long incoming burst forced him to duck beneath the cover of the edge of the entrance, the 6.8mm bullets passing so close, he felt their hot wind tugging at his hair.

I really need a haircut.

Chase edged a couple feet to the side and popped out again, this time finding a target and firing. One of the lead mercenaries jerked and spasmed as the three slugs cut through his helmet visor, the plastic cracking and splintering under the impact. He didn’t fall of course, didn’t even falter, just kept floating without anything to stop him until he impacted the side of the wall and ricocheted off to the side.

Data was flowing in through Chase’s senses faster than his mind could process it, but the brief glimpse he’d received of the other side of the wall when he’d fired had revealed two things. They screamed at him for attention, but didn’t cohere into anything concrete until he’d ducked back again. The first was that the entire HKC squad was wearing identical armor except one, the man at the rear of the formation, whose face was bare for the world to see, one that Chase recognized all too well. Sean Haricot.

The second was a body, drifting upward, arms splayed, globules of red pouring out of the wreckage of the helmet faceplate. Chase didn’t know who it was at first, with nothing for perspective, until he heard the name screamed, roared into the ever-night of space by Carlos “Chilly” Vazquez.

“Jax!”

Chilly was moving. Chase opened his mouth to yell at the former SEAL to stop, to get back behind cover, to keep his head, but Chilly had already dropped his rifle and reached into the pouches on either side of his tactical vest, a remote clacker in each hand. The detonators for those Claymores he was carrying on his chest, Front Toward Enemy.

Oh, shit.

“Down!” he yelled, grabbing at Zack and pulling him low behind the edge of the entranceway.

Adrenaline did this thing in combat, auditory exclusion it was called. It was what made a soldier not really hear the gunshots at full volume. It did nothing to protect from hearing loss, but it made the sounds seem distant. Auditory exclusion didn’t do a damned thing to muffle the twin blasts of the Claymores. Chase had been to war, been a mercenary, been a bodyguard, and he wore noise-canceling earbuds to protect his hearing even without a helmet, and the explosion was the loudest noise he’d ever heard. He felt it in his chest, his gut, his head, heard the tinny echo for seconds afterward, then the wild, random ricochets of metal fragments off the walls, slowly declining in volume as they lost momentum.

When he risked a look back over the edge of the wall, there was nothing left of Chilly Vazquez except blood spatter on the surrounding walls and bits of flesh already making their way to the vents. There wasn’t much more left of the HKC squad. They hadn’t been disintegrated, but the tightly packed 3.2mm steel balls from the mines’ innards had ripped through them, leaving them twisting in the air currents amid a veil of red specks, the blood shifting this way and that, like hanging beads in a doorway.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Zack said, and Chase was surprised he could hear it.

“Chilly…” Alex said, moving to the hub side of the entrance, her visor pushed upward, a stricken expression turning her features slack. “Jax.”

She was going to break down. It was in her voice. She’d lost her husband not that long ago, and now she’d lost two of her best friends. It wasn’t a matter of if, it was only when. But the when couldn’t be now. Chase pushed off the bottom rim of the doorway and grabbed at Alex’s shoulder.

“They’re gone. We have to get out of here or this is all going to have been for nothing.”

Alex was staring through him rather than at him, a vacant look behind her eyes. Chase turned her away from the floating abattoir and pointed at the docking bay, at the battle still going on. Both sides had taken casualties in just the last few seconds, and the Soong-Tierney squad was down to three people, huddled together behind a pair of cargo jacks. A fire team of HKC soldiers crept up on the three, trying to flank them while the remnants of the defenders provided covering fire, keeping their heads down.

“What would Chilly want, Alex?” he asked softly. The woman’s back stiffened and she pulled her rifle to her shoulder, her eyes coming back into focus.

“He’d want us to kick their asses.”

OceanofPDF.com

22

Alana Kane had spent most of her adult life thinking about death.

It came with the job. She’d enlisted at seventeen with her parents’ permission, knowing the war was coming and wanting to get in on it, not just sit at home and hope it didn’t touch them. Young Alana had been so damned excited about actually being part of the action, she hadn’t thought about dying at all. Even when her friends had begun dying around her, when it had seemed as if the whole world might die in flames, she’d still believed herself immortal.

Until her mom died. Not from the war, just cancer. Banal, unavoidable, genetic. A pathetic way to die in the midst of a world war, in a day when humanity was cruising to the stars, but death didn’t care how it got you. Somehow, amidst the suitcase nukes and the terrorism and the mass casualties, that quiet, singular passing had made Alana Kane acutely aware of her own mortality, and it was a lesson she never forgot.

It was at that point she’d decided to go to OCS, not so much from a desire to be in charge as from the time it gave her away from the front. She loved the military life, but being a grunt on the front lines had lost its appeal. Despite every precaution, despite training and planning, she knew that Alana Kane would someday meet the same fate as her mother. This job with Soong-Tierney security had seemed perfect. She could make a living doing what she did best without the danger of anyone trying to kill her.

So, why the hell did I volunteer for this mission?

The question echoed through her mind like the hoarse stutter of automatic weapons fire, like the ricochet of bullets off the walls. A whirring, out-of-control slug, nearly spent, smacked into the armor over her left thigh like a reminder from God that her being here was entirely her own fault. Kane spat out a curse and emptied the last six rounds in her magazine at the HKC troops entrenched behind the cover of the elevators.

This could have gone on forever, with neither side able to press the advantage, except for one thing. Kane pulled out her last full magazine and smacked it home, an exclamation point on what that one thing was.

“How are we on ammo, Sgt. Toretto?” she asked, not wanting to hear the answer.

“Wait one.” That was the job of a chief NCO, to do the scut work that a platoon leader or company commander didn’t have the time for, like getting a round count from each squad leader.

Toretto didn’t radio back, instead sliding in just beside her, his FN aimed downrange. He fired off two rounds, and an HKC trooper who’d stuck their arm out just a little too far to try to get a shot spun off to the side, clutching at their bicep.

“Everyone’s down to their last mag,” he told her. “We got a couple totally Winchester.” The big man sighed. “I think we got maybe another five minutes, tops.”

“Then we only have two options,” she said, her training and experience performing the analysis on autopilot while her conscious mind gibbered and screamed inside her head. “We can either surrender…or we can rush them.”

Toretto pushed his faceplate up and eyed her doubtfully.

“Either way is probably suicide,” Kane admitted. “At least if we rush them, we’ll take a few with us.”

“I didn’t think it was going to go down this way, Alana,” Toretto admitted. She looked at him sharply, then relaxed and offered a smile.

“Neither did I, Greg.” She laughed softly. “This is the last time I volunteer for a mission.”

“You’re damned right it is.” He pushed down his visor. “Let’s do it.”

“Platoon,” Kane barked, transmitting to all that was left of her unit, “at my command, we’re going to rush the enemy. Save your ammo until you can hit something. If you don’t have any rounds left, take them off the enemy.” The troops stayed silent, and their faces were concealed, but Kane hadn’t made it to captain without being able to read a little body language. They were scared, disbelieving, thinking she was crazy. “I know it’s nuts,” she admitted, “but our alternative is letting them take us captive and ‘disappear’ us. If anyone wants to stay and surrender, give your ammo to the others.”

No one did. She wasn’t surprised. Mara Soong-Tierney was no sort of businesswoman, but what she did know was people. She recruited people who didn’t give up.

“All right then.” Kane stood, rifle at her shoulder. To hell with doctrine. She was going to lead from the front. “Follow me.”

Death came to everyone. She was going to meet it on her own terms.

* * *

Chase Weston had dreamed of flying as a kid. Not in a plane, not in a spaceship, but flying through the air like a superhero. Those dreams had been his favorite, the ones that kept him in bed when he should have been up getting ready for school. His arms spread wide, he’d soared over the Montana forests past eagles and redtails.

In none of those dreams had he been carrying an automatic rifle, nor had anyone been trying to kill him. This wasn’t a dream, though it possessed many of the qualities of a nightmare. In his flying dream, the air currents from the overhead vents wouldn’t have been trying to push him downward into the squad of HKC mercenaries, and if he’d slowed down because of those air currents stealing some of the momentum from his push-off on the entrance doorway, all it would have taken to speed up again would have been positive thoughts.

Chase was fresh out of positive thoughts, and close to being out of ammo as well. The Hart-Klein mercs seemed to sense that and were generously offering him a lot of their own ammo, bullets first. His initial plan had involved soaring over their heads, using speed to get past them while they were still engaged with the three remaining Soong-Tierney shooters, but that idea had died right alongside the S-T mercs. The HKC troops had overrun them, and though it had cost them four people, that left the remaining six with nothing to do with their time except shoot at Chase, Alex and Zack.

Chase didn’t think because thinking took too long. His arms swung as if of their own accord and swam through the air, turning his body until his feet slapped against the overhead, heels banging into a protruding air vent with a hollow, aluminum clunk. Strain went through his legs and up his lower back, adding to wear and tear done over a career that might have broken him, but he ignored the pain with the same resolute determination that had kept him unbroken. Knees bent, though that hurt too, then he pushed off, pushed down, if down had any meaning in free-fall.

Chase wasn’t a physicist. All he cared about was speed. Movement was life.

The buttstock of the FN pressed against his shoulder like the reassuring hand of a friend, and a green reticle floated in front of his vision, both his eyes open and fixed on the two mercenaries anchored to the deck below him by their magnetic soles. He didn’t remember pulling the trigger, but that was always the way it felt when he took a good shot. The man on the right took the three-round burst in the chest and swayed backward, his rifle pinwheeling out of his suddenly slack grip. The woman on the left didn’t seem to notice, her attention set on trying to get a bead on Chase. He was coming too fast for that, coming in just a heartbeat behind the 6.8mm slugs from the barrel of his rifle.

Chase was sure he’d hit her and couldn’t take the time to determine if he was right. He was coming straight at the ground with too much velocity to land feet-first if he preferred his lower leg bones in one piece. He barely had enough time to swing his arms, trading feet for left shoulder, adjusting his course so that the shoulder hit the wavering corpse of the male HKC trooper instead of the floor.

It still hurt. He rammed into the dead man going at least twenty miles an hour and would have likely separated or broken his shoulder except for those magnetic soles. They gave way at the impact, pushing the corpse free of its hold on the floor, spreading the impact out. That had been the theory, but the blinding, twisting pain in his upper back drove out all the optimistic predictions he’d made and reminded him of what he already knew, that he was a Ranger, not a scientist.

He tumbled, about to go into an uncontrolled spin, and thrashed blindly through a haze of agony, catching something with his left hand, arresting the momentum and bringing him back to the floor long enough to attach his own magnetic boots. What he’d caught, he found out as his vision cleared, was the arm of the dead woman and he let it go with a reflexive disgust and searched for another target.

There were none. It took him a second to figure that out, and in the process, he very nearly put a bullet into Zack Wilson’s back, only a familiarity with the man’s movements making him pause when he saw the tall figure in HKC-pattern body armor. Alex was off to the side, easy to spot now that he had Zack’s height to put hers in perspective, and there was a certain gratification in the fact that they’d both followed his lead and headed down into the teeth of the threat.

There was also gratification in that they’d each managed to kill two of the remaining HKC mercs. Armored corpses wound lazy patterns in the air, red streams crossing, splashing larger globes into smaller beads and then reforming again. Zack turned back and gave him a thumbs-up.

“What the hell was that berth number Pincus gave us?” Chase asked, scanning the markings above the airlocks.

They’d all be useless, the ships on the other side of them locked down by the alert, secured with biometric passcodes even if they hadn’t been.

“291C,” Alex reminded him. She pointed down the bay. “It’s over there.”

Chase didn’t try to find it himself, trusting the zoom function in her helmet visor since he didn’t have one. The outer walls of the bay were thick plexiglass, which didn’t seem like much to Chase when pitted against micrometeors coming in at hypersonic speeds, but then again, they didn’t have to be the sole protection against such things. A couple feet of steel fashioned from asteroid material was wrapped around the outer bay, while sheltering arms wrapped around the docked ships. Polished silver metal packed every available berth, the airlocks mated either with the passenger compartments or cargo bays, each of them sealed tight, security panels flashing red in a warning not to tamper with them.

All except one. The lock was open and Chase was sure it hadn’t been left that way. Even without the security alert, leaving an inner airlock door open was a huge risk. One malfunction, one power surge and the ship docked at the berth could pull away, ripping open the outer airlock and sucking out a good portion of the bay’s air before emergency seals could come down. Pincus must have opened it remotely, for which Chase offered silent thanks.

The shuttle on the other side of the lock was just as torn apart and broken down as Pincus had related to him, with the entire portside wing removed and the vertical stabilizer hanging loose by metal cables. The hull was intact, though, and presumably airtight.

Chase motioned for Zack and Alex to keep watch on either side of the lock while he went inside. Not that there was anything to watch. Even the maintenance crews had evacuated the docking bay, and if there was anyone there, they had to be stuck in some emergency shelter or possibly even sealed inside the ships berthed along the line of airlocks. He wondered what they were thinking.

Probably think it’s a drill.

Chase was sure Hart had drills for this kind of thing periodically, given how quickly security had been able to clear the hub and the bay. Did James Hart expect corporate espionage, or was he more worried about a raid by the Union or the Colonial Authority. Chase wanted to call the man paranoid, but that would have been a tad hypocritical, not to mention ironic.

There probably wasn’t anyone aboard the shuttle, but that wasn’t a chance Chase was willing to take. He let his rifle retract against his side on the sling attached to his tactical vest and pulled his sidearm. Training made him want to fall into an isosceles stance, but this was microgravity, and he needed a hand free. He kept the 9mm close to his chest and grabbed at the handholds affixed to the interior fuselage, then pulled himself through the passenger lock.

The interior of the shuttle was as trashed as the exterior, panels pulled off and attached to the walls by Velcro, wires hanging free. The entire port side of the cockpit was a morass of PVC wire junctions laid bare and even the seats had been removed. Doubt nagged at Chase’s mind that Pincus knew what he was doing, that this thing could fly at all, but he kept it in check long enough to clear every nook and crevice in the passenger shuttle large enough to conceal a human. It didn’t take long—the thing was fifty yards long from nose to tail and most of that was the batteries, S-T drive and life support. There were equipment lockers in the aft end, but most of those had been ripped out for maintenance as well.

“Clear!” he yelled out to Zack and Alex, holstering his SIG and kicking off the fuselage back up into the cockpit.

Chase realized he was grinding his teeth and made a conscious effort to stop, though it was difficult given the state of the control panel. The steering yoke was still attached…by the wiring. The plastic harness had been removed, and a touch on the upright arms of the controls sent it bobbing back and forth against the constraints of the red, black, and yellow strands. The touch screens floated listlessly as well, and he cringed as he grabbed at one of them, praying to a God he hadn’t bothered recently that they were still powered up.

“What the hell?” Zack blurted, coming up behind him, staring at the mess that was the cockpit over Chase’s shoulder. “Can this thing even fly? Should I get out and push?”

“Alex,” Chase barked, ignoring Zack, “close the external airlock and see if you can get us separated from the dock.”

The woman said nothing, apparently not up for Zack’s style of banter, but she disappeared back into the shuttle’s passenger compartment. Chase realized he hadn’t yet tapped the screen to check if it was active. He blew out the breath he’d been holding when the display flickered to life. Not that it was all smooth sailing from there. The flickering continued, the screen flashing light and dark before settling on the familiar control menu he knew so well from the Tamar. Chase sighed and tried to scroll through to the power management screen but the display flashed again and reset itself before it finally let him manipulate the settings.

“Damn,” he muttered, repeating the word like a mantra as he tried over and over to get the controls to work.

“Hatch is closed,” Alex reported, coming back from the passenger compartment and locking her boot magnets to the deck. Her tone was dull, lifeless, as if the prospect of escaping didn’t excite her. “We’re free of the docking umbilical…at least I think so.”

“You think?” Zack repeated, pushing off back the way she’d come. “Jesus, we don’t have any space suits on this thing so I hope you fucking know!”

There. The power feed status bar lit up green and there was a faint hum, something Chase might have thought he imagined, like the soft tone from an Army hearing test that he often thought he’d imagined.

Good. Power’s up. Just need the drive.

Another foray into the menu and another four resets, another three excruciating minutes that seemed to drag into hours, interrupted only by Zack coming back from the hold.

“Can confirm,” he said curtly, which Chase assumed meant he’d gone to a lot of trouble just to find out that Alex had been right the whole time.

“Yes!” Chase exulted when the throttle graphic showed up on the screen. “If you’re not on the deck, get there, because we’re about to be under the drive field.”

He took his own advice, pulling himself to the deck with the toe of a boot tucked under what was left of the base for the absent pilot’s chair.

Wish Pri were here. The woman would have already had the damned thing halfway to Mars by now. Chase slid a finger across the throttle and the shuttle lurched forward, moving slowly and jerkily at first but moving nonetheless.

“Take this!” he told Alex, handing the display screen over to her, then grabbing the control yoke as the shuttle began to boost directly into the cargo carrier only thirty yards ahead of her.

The steering yoke was a nightmare, more like the controls of one of the ancient video games he’d played as a child. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been very good at gaming, and he wasn’t very good at steering a spaceship either. The portside wing of the shuttle was already in pieces and scraping it against the side of the cargo hauler assured it would never be put back together again. The sound wasn’t what it would have been in an atmosphere, lacking a certain screeching vibrato he’d expected, more of a shuddering moan through the fuselage, but the impact was enough to send him—and the steering yoke—pitching sideways into the open maintenance hatches, and the sound of his back slamming into the bulkhead was exactly as he’d imagined it.

Chase had latched onto the steering control like it was the last life preserver on the Titanic and miraculously, the wires did not pull out of the control panel. Unfortunately, that also meant that when he jerked the wheel to the side, the ship went with it. The shuttle spun to starboard and was inches from slamming its nose into the exterior wall of the docking bay when he wrestled the controls straight again, panting as hard as if he’d just run five miles.

“Judas Priest on a pogo stick,” Zack said, eyes wide. “Could you get us out of this damned bay in one piece? I mean, I know we’re probably going to get our asses blasted by the HKC point-defense turrets, but at least I won’t see that coming!”

“You feel free to take the wheel any time you want, Wilson,” Chase growled.

The shuttle’s gravitational field had, at least, returned, which pulled him to the deck and gave him some sort of stable base to use as he tried to put some body English into the controls. He was keeping the shuttle straight, which was a win, the outer opening of the docking bay looming ahead, not a light at the end of a tunnel but a vast darkness.

There’s gotta be some symbolism there, but I don’t want to try to figure out what it is.

“Give us some gas, Alex,” he said, then risked a glance back at Zack. The big man was leaning against the wall, his helmet off, sweat pouring down from his curly, black hair and dripping off his nose. “Zack, make yourself useful and see if the radio works on this bucket.”

“Why?” Zack asked, moving to the mostly disassembled control station. “You want to radio for a real pilot?”

“I’d very much like to be able to tell Soong-Tierney what we’re flying,” Chase shot back, clenching his teeth as the starry opening grew wider, the shuttle speeding up. “It’s going to be bad enough to get killed by the bad guys. I’d rather our own people didn’t do it by accident.”

Freedom. The shuttle was out of the metal tunnel, out of the shadow of the valley of death and back among the stars. Chase would have allowed himself a moment of elation if the squadron of HKC interceptors wasn’t clearly visible even without a working radar system.

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that,” Zack said softly. “These guys can handle it all on their own.”

OceanofPDF.com

23

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Priyanka said, grip tightening on her control yoke. “Tell me that’s not them.”

The spacecraft rocketing out of the HKC station’s docking bay wasn’t so much a shuttle as it was a tin can some ill-tempered god had kicked down the road. If it wasn’t bad enough that the thing was a genuine toy, it was also moving at probably a quarter the standard speed for a ship that size, putting it right in the center of the swarm of enemy gunships.

“I’m afraid it is.” Hill’s tone was dolorous, lacking even the irreverent insubordination she’d come to expect. “What the hell are we gonna do?” It was a good question, though Pri had no idea what the answer might be.

HKC traffic control space was a glowing red line on the tactical display, coming closer every second to the blue arrowhead that represented the Tamar. She knew exactly how long they had and the countdown ticked off in her head without having to watch the computer readout. Another ten seconds at their current velocity and they’d be across that line. On a regular day, that would mean a warning and a demand for them to transmit their clearance. Today, it would mean the point-defense turrets would open fire immediately, which could mean Chase and the others getting blown up in the crossfire.

“They won’t shoot at Chase,” Angel declared as if reading her thoughts. “Not if they know he has the Gatekeeper. They won’t risk it.”

“Hold on,” she warned. “We’re going in. Weapons free.”

“Oh, shit, we’re gonna die,” Hill muttered. “I was really hoping we wouldn’t die.”

“Shut up, Adrian.”

Speed was their only hope and Priyanka poured it on, giving the S-T drive the benefit of a kick in the ass from the ship’s reactor. There wasn’t room to go relativistic, but they went from just this side of the red line to the center of the HKC formation in seconds, and she very nearly took them right out the other side before she could cut the power.

Pri didn’t try to think. She didn’t need to. She’d been in this kind of fight before, trained for it, lived through it when the crews in those other ships were the best the Chinese and Russians had to offer. It was as natural as breathing and just as easy. Her fingers caressed the steering yoke, nudging the bow to the right along with the red reticle in the tactical screen until it was aimed directly at one of the gunships. They should have maneuvered out of the way, but she guessed they hadn’t even realized she was there, too focused on the emergence of the shuttle. Pri fired a long burst, the first and last clean shot she was going to get in this fight, the one sure kill.

Were the men and women in that gunship bad people? Had they done anything to deserve this? Or were they just like her, trying to make a living doing the only thing they’d ever been good at? The questions were useless, counterproductive, but they whispered into the dark corners of her mind just the same.

It didn’t matter. A lot of the Chinese and Russian crews she’d killed during the war had probably been patriots, serving their countries, opposing the United States and other western nations because they’d spent their whole life being told those were the bad guys. The crew of the gunship didn’t have that excuse, couldn’t claim ignorance of HKC’s misdeeds.

The questions were between them and God now, because no one else would answer. Just flares of momentary heat on thermal, that was all that told the story. Burning atmosphere leaking out in a microsecond before it was gone, a nuclear reactor venting heat and shutting down before it could go critical. It wasn’t, she decided, a dramatic enough way to die. They deserved a spectacular end, with fire and explosions.

They weren’t going to get it and neither was she. The HKC gunship drifted, and Pri moved. A burst of power that took her out of the firing arc of the interceptors around her and Aguilar swore softly. She’d cost him a shot, but that wasn’t important. There were two dozen of the HKC ships—minus one, now—more than she had any hope to take on. She just needed to distract them, to give Chase at least a fighting chance to get clear.

“Oh, they see us now,” Hill murmured. “They’re breaking formation.”

And they were, but not forming into a new one. Their pilots were experienced, no doubt. HKC didn’t hire idiots and was famous for offering a high price for combat veterans. But there was a difference between having seen combat and having fought together with the men and women beside you. Each of those pilots was having the same thought, that they had to destroy the Tamar, but none of them was having the natural follow-up that came through training—how they could help the rest of their squadron accomplish that mission.

It wouldn’t last. They’d have a squadron leader, someone in overall command, and whoever that was would get them organized, but it would take precious seconds. Pri knew how to use those seconds.

They’d have fired at her by now, the rounds coming in from at least two different angles, if they were smart and didn’t want to risk blue-on-blue casualties. She goosed power to the drive, putting on a burst of acceleration that would outrun any cannon round, then curved around, coming back again. Ships that had raced off after her had to turn back into their own formation, and she could almost hear the shouts over the radio as the pilots yelled at each other to stay clear of their firing lines. That was the hard part about space combat. Any idiot could fire a cannon, and a talented idiot might even be able to fly rings around other pilots, but keeping from shooting at your own people took math, took computing power, took time and forethought.

There were some advantages to being surrounded by enemies. Some Marine had said that, though she couldn’t remember who. A feral snarl passed over her face as she triggered the main guns again, short, bracketing bursts. She wasn’t close enough and hadn’t fired enough rounds to be sure of a kill, but she’d put some holes in them. They’d be screaming even louder then, particularly if they weren’t wearing space suits. Pilots would abandon the stick to run for the equipment lockers, trying to get into their suit before the air evacuated. It took a few seconds for that if the hole was small enough.

“Where’s the shuttle?” Pri asked, unwilling to take her attention away from the threat icons long enough to search for it.

“Two thousand klicks and still drawing away,” Hill told her. “Not going fast enough, though. She’s got power issues, I think. Something’s not hooked up right.”

Leave it to Chase to pick the one shuttle with a broken power system. That wasn’t quite fair, of course. She doubted he’d had much choice.

Running again, racing against cannon shots she couldn’t see, too small for radar or lidar to pick up, but she knew they were there. Time wasn’t on her side anymore. The interceptors were forming up, getting into tactical array, a globular cluster to maximize their firepower, so there was no direction from which she could approach without eating a depleted-uranium slug. Their commander had finally pulled his head out of his ass. If there was any consolation, it was that the HKC squadron seemed to have forgotten all about Chase and his shuttle for the time being. Maybe he could get far enough clear for Soong-Tierney to send a ship to pick him up.

“We got another problem, Cap,” Hill told her. His fingers swept across his touch screen and a mass of radar signatures blinked to life, closing in from outsystem at relativistic speeds.

“And who the hell is this?” Aguilar wondered.

As if someone had heard his question, the comm system lit up, a stern and authoritarian female voice coming over the cockpit speakers, overriding Pri’s standard settings that would have taken it to her earbud first.

“Attention civilian spacecraft, this is Captain DuBoff of the Colonial Authority. Cease hostilities immediately, and cut power to your drives. Anyone who fires will be fired upon…we’ll shoot to disable, but we’re not going to cry bitter tears if you wind up with a hole in you.”

Pri definitely shouldn’t have heard the reply from the HKC squadron leader, but she guessed the Colonial Authority captain was retransmitting it.

“This is Captain Jeffries, Hart-Klein Security Force.” He was brash, petulant. Pri had the sense she wouldn’t like him if they met socially. “We are responding to a direct threat to our station, and you have no right to interfere. This station is more than capable of defending itself from any threat.”

“Captain Jeffries,” DuBoff said, mocking the man’s rank, “I think you need to contact your superiors and ask them if they really want to be threatening open hostilities against the Colonial Authority. Stand down or be fired upon. Last warning.”

There was a long gap, and during the tense wait, Pri slowed the power feed to a trickle, bringing the Tamar down to a slow patrol pattern around the HKC formation. Angel, Victor, and Gina stared at her as if waiting for her to make a decision, but Pri shook her head and put a finger up to her lips.

“Very well,” Jeffries finally said, sullen and resentful, sounding very much like he’d been shouted down by a superior officer. “But we want the fugitives caught and prosecuted for industrial espionage, and I will personally hold you responsible, Captain DuBoff, if they are allowed to escape.”

“Trust me, Jeffries,” she told the HKC pilot, “I have no intention of letting them get away.” When DuBoff spoke again, her demeanor changed, and Pri would have known the woman was talking to her and not the corporate mercenaries. “Captain Ambedkar of the privateer Tamar, by the authority of the Colonial Authority, I order you to cut power, heave to, and prepare to be boarded. You and your crew and all passengers are under arrest. Failure to comply will result in your ship being destroyed.”

Pri froze, for once not able to make a decision. The shuttle was still boosting, ever-so-slowly, carrying Chase and the others away from the station. If she gave up, the Colonial Authority was sure to get him and then they’d have all of them, all three artifacts. But she couldn’t leave him behind, either, not if she ever wanted to look at herself in a mirror again. Not that she could boost away fast enough to get away from three squadrons of CA interceptors.

Her fingers hovered over the controls, as if time was frozen, and dozens of guns pointed her way.

* * *

“What’s going on out there?” Zack demanded, standing close to the screen, as if the staticky, flickering view would be clearer that way.

“Maybe we’d know,” Alex said tautly, “if you’d been able to make the damned radio work.”

“There is no radio!” The big man waved at the disassembled control panel. “This bird doesn’t have shit!”

“It’s got a forward camera,” Chase said, tapping at the menu with increasing force and frustration until it took him to the zoom controls.

The image on the screens seemed to race after the approaching cluster of glittering stars until they enlarged into angular, bat-winged interceptors with a familiar logo on the side, crossed swords behind a shield, and embossed on the shield a spiral galaxy.

“It’s the Colonial Authority,” Alex murmured. A redundancy—they all knew what the flag meant—but she was still shell-shocked by the deaths of Chilly and Jax.

“This is kind of like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Zack said. He stopped and pointed at something just off to the side of the CA ships. “Wait a second. That shape right there, coming in on the HKC ships. Is that…”

“The Tamar,” Chase finished for him. “Shit.”

Pri had been good to her word, coming for them. Without the CA showing up, it would have been suicide. With the CA, it meant that the Colonial Authority would soon have their hands on all the artifact keys to the Archive…and who they would give them to was up in the air. Maybe the Union, maybe the Alliance, maybe even right back to James Hart if the man waved money under the right noses. And that would mean every one of them would wind up in a jail cell for the rest of their lives.

“They’ve gotta get out of here,” he said, half to himself.

If the shuttle hadn’t been hamstrung, one arm tied behind its back by the balky power junctions, they might have been able to rendezvous with the Tamar and get out, but at the rate they were going, they’d have no choice but to surrender. Chase looked around desperately for any way to communicate with the Tamar. Zack was right. There was no communications console, and if the shuttle still had an antenna, there was nothing to connect to it. Maybe one of their helmet radios would have done the trick, but none of them were qualified to try to jury-rig a hook-up between them.

Then his gaze fell on the shoulder bag. He’d doffed it, leaving it on the deck beside him so he’d be free to manipulate the controls. It was zipped shut, yet somehow Chase felt as if he could see the glow coming through the fabric. The artifacts. They were all connected.

Chase scowled, every part of his being screaming at him not to do it, that he was nuts.

Of course I am. I’m here.

He knelt beside the duffle bag and ripped the top open, revealing the faceted orb that was the Gatekeeper. Like the other two, the light the thing emitted seemed to come from somewhere beneath the surface, and when he peered into the depths of the artifact, something beckoned to him, shapes, objects buried inside. Chase stripped off his right glove and reached out.

“What the hell are you doing?” Zack yelled, lunging toward him.

It was too late.

Chase was somewhere else. It wasn’t real, he knew that much because he wasn’t touching the artifact, couldn’t even see it. He was on a raw, red plateau overlooking what might have been a city. He wasn’t completely certain because nothing about the structures below reminded him of anything built by the hand of man. Their twists and spirals and curves defied logic, defied any rules of architecture he’d ever learned and they could just as easily have been part of a temple, some ancient, alien Stonehenge.

And yet he knew it wasn’t. Somehow. He knew all kinds of things he shouldn’t have, couldn’t have. Like that this planet was 220 light-years from Earth, one of two habitable worlds in this system, the capital of the civilization that called itself the People.

“Isn’t there a better freaking word for them?” he complained aloud.

“Why would there be?” The voice wasn’t real, not just because it was only in his head. The alien that had spoken lacked the vocal cords to produce human speech even if it had actually been physically present.

Chase wasn’t surprised to see it, since among the many impossible things he knew was the fact that this was all a play of biological circuits, the artifact’s and his own. He’d seen its like before, or its skeleton. Hooped ribs created an impossibly deep chest, and the weight above the thing's center of gravity meant that it needed broad, squat hips and knees that bent digitigrade. Its shoulders defied description, unlike any creature Chase had seen on Earth or off it, but the end result of the design looked powerful, the arms big and muscular enough that he was sure the thing could break his neck without straining. It was a weird look for an ancient, ultra-advanced alien species that was able to engineer whole planets.

The face was the worst, angular, narrowing to an oval mouth with omnivore’s teeth, though they didn’t look as if they grew there from roots but were extrusions of the jaw. And the eyes. The eyes reminded him of the Emissary, the first artifact they’d discovered. They were golden, with subtle shapes formed deep inside, floating yet also part of the structure.

“There are almost innumerable human societies,” the spectral alien argued, “who referred to themselves as ‘the people’ or the ‘real people’ or some such variation. Why should we be any different?”

“Yeah,” Chase admitted, shrugging. It felt real even though he knew his physical body hadn’t moved. “But those words still sound cool…Anishinaabe, Dine'e, Inuit. Isn’t there some version of the actual word you used that we could call you?”

The race of beings that had created this thing had never laughed. Chase knew this as he knew all the rest. But the being they’d sought for, the one called the Gatekeeper, laughed in a very human manner.

“Look at this mouth,” the Gatekeeper said, motioning toward the angular jaw. “Do you honestly believe a human could ever make even a pale imitation of the sound of our language?”

“Probably not.” Chase looked upward. It was a bright, moonlit night, though the moon here had a different face than the one back home. “So, why am I here?”

“You tell me, Chase Weston. You touched the Gatekeeper, you chose to bond with me. Why are you here?”

“Because I need to warn my friends. There was no other way.”

“Is that the only reason?” If one of the People couldn’t laugh, they most certainly couldn’t raise their eyebrows, not least because they didn’t have any, but Chase would have been willing to swear in court that the thing had done just that. “Are you certain it had nothing to do with the knowledge that the woman you love has been gifted with extended life and you couldn’t stand the idea of dying before her and leaving her alone?”

Chase’s face went warm, and he was more embarrassed that he was embarrassed than by what the Gatekeeper was saying.

“Any other reasons can wait. Right now, I need to warn Angel and Pri, and we’re wasting time.”

“Are we?” That laugh again. “Do you think time is real here?”

Chase sighed, glaring at the thing.

“Fine. Let me talk to her.”

“As you wish.”

* * *

Angel should have been watching Priyanka. What the pilot decided would determine whether they wound up free or dead, or in prison. But she couldn’t look away from the duffle bag, from the glow growing brighter every moment.

Or was it? Was the light output increasing or was that just a trick of perception? Something was happening and there was only one way to find out what. She pressed her hand against the Navigator, and suddenly she was on a moonlit plain, table-land looking out over a gleaming city, and Chase was standing beside her.

“How?” she asked, shaking her head.

“Later,” he told her, taking her hand in his. It was rough and warm and him, she knew it in her heart despite the unreality of this place. “I love you, but later.” His eyes were shadowed, his voice urgent. “Tell Pri to use the Navigator to get out of there, to jump to the Rift. Don’t try to come get us, but hang out within radio range and wait to hear from me.”

“If we leave,” Angel told him, shaking her head, “the CA is going to capture you. They’ll get the Gatekeeper.”

He took her gently by the arms, and his gray eyes pierced deeply into hers.

“You have to trust me.” He leaned in and kissed her, and then he was gone, and so was the world, and she was back in the cockpit of the Tamar.

“Pri!” she said, and the pilot’s gaze snapped around as if she’d been woken from a dream. “I’m going to use the Navigator and we’re jumping to the Rift. Get us out quick, somewhere in radio range and do it now.”

There was doubt in Pri’s eyes, but there was also trust. She nodded and her fingers slid the throttle to the right. The view outside the screen shifted, the HKC station fading off to the left side of the display, the moon replacing it at the center.

“Privateer Tamar,” Captain DuBoff said, her voice booming through the cockpit, “if you don’t surrender, you will be fired upon!”

“Do it,” Pri snapped and for a second, Angel thought she was daring the Colonial Authority pilot to shoot her down, but then she realized Pri was telling her to take over.

She was still touching the Navigator and the action was an effort of will. The moon rushed up to meet them as the ship went relativistic, passing by so close Angel could see the shadows of the mountains. Beyond it waited the Rift, ready to swallow them up.

OceanofPDF.com

24

Chase Weston stared at the blank wall, allowing the featureless gray to hypnotize him, his thoughts as barren as the decoration. It helped him to ignore the edges of the plastic flex-cuffs digging into his wrists and the uncomfortable hard plastic of the bench and the chill in the air. Jail cells were always cold. It didn’t help that the Colonial Authority troops had taken his body armor and his fatigue top…and his boots. His left big toe was sticking out of a hole in his olive drab sock, and it was just so damned embarrassing.

Staring at the wall also meant he didn’t have to look at Zack’s frequent accusatory glares or the catatonic haze behind Alex’s eyes.

“I have to pee,” Zack announced loudly to no one. The cell was empty, the guards outside behind the windowless door, but Chase was sure they were being monitored. There was no response, which Zack took as encouragement to yell it louder. “I said I have to take a piss!” He jumped up, and the plastic bench bolted to the floor wobbled under his weight. “If you guys don’t have any problem with this whole fucking cell smelling like piss, I’ll just do it in my damn pants!”

“I told you to go before we left the house,” Chase mumbled. Zack turned and stared at him as if the big man didn’t believe Chase had said it. Zack was still trying to look angry, but the corner of his mouth quirked.

“And I told you,” Alex said, still not quite looking at anything in particular, “that you shouldn’t have drunk that whole soda by yourself.”

Chase smiled, though he wasn’t quite sure why. At least if he’d made a mistake and this was their future, they weren’t going down like whiney little children.

The door unlocked with a magnetic clunk and slid open silently. Everything in the Colonial Authority space station was new, no personality to any of it. Chase expected a guard to enter and escort Zack to the little Ranger’s room, but instead an officer came through. A captain by the rank on her shoulder boards, tall and straight-backed, her eyes glacial blue and her blond hair tied into a braid down her back. Chase’s shoulder bag hung at her side, the top unzipped, the glow of the Gatekeeper shining through.

“Do you think you can hold it in for a few more minutes, Sgt. Wilson?” she asked Zack, her voice mildly accented with what might have been Italian. “I’d hate for you to miss the conversation.”

Zack shrugged expressively.

“If I can’t,” he assured the woman, “you’ll be the first to know.”

The captain wasn’t armed, but she wasn’t alone, either. Behind her, four armored guards filed in and took up positions on either side of her. Not carrying conventional rifles, though. Chase didn’t recognize the weapons, but he figured them for some sort of advanced taser.

“I’m Captain Monica Feragni,” the woman said, “Colonial Authority Navy.”

“Navy!” Zack scoffed. “I guess that makes Alex here a fucking space marine, huh?”

“And you’d be a space ranger, you overgrown toddler,” Alex shot back.

“To infinity!” Zack quoted. “And beyond!”

Feragni rolled her eyes.

“Sgt. Chase Weston,” she said, apparently through with the pleasantries. “United States Army Rangers. You mustered out when the US military was folded into the Union. Do you have a problem with people from other nations?”

“I have a problem violating my oath,” he told her, “which included swearing to protect and defend the constitution of the United States of America, not fighting under another flag for the benefit of the EU or Australia or Great Britain. I joined the US Army, not the French fucking Foreign Legion.”

She laughed softly and ran a finger across the CA logo on her chest.

“I hope you understand I am the wrong audience for such sentiments.”

Chase shrugged.

“You’re here,” he said, “and you brought that.” Chase nodded toward the duffle bag. “I guess you want to talk.”

“I have the Union Prime Minister on one line,” she informed him, pacing in front of him, a caged lion, “the President of your United States on another, and the Alliance Secretary General on a third.” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “And the only reason I don’t have the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party on a fourth is that he and the President of the Russian Federation are locked in an argument about who has seniority.” She stopped pacing within a step of her, close enough that he could have lunged at her and taken her down before the guards could get to him, if he was of a mind to. “There’s no more running from this. They know who you are, Sgt. Weston.” She patted the duffle bag. “And they have a pretty good idea what this is, and what it does.”

“It won’t do anything without me,” Chase told her. “I’ve already bonded with the AI inside the artifact and that’s for life. Its life as well as mine in case you get any ideas. I die, I go to prison, that thing is a shiny, very expensive paperweight.”

I sound pretty confident for a guy with a big-ass hole in his sock.

“If you know what this is,” he went on, wishing his hands were free so he could gesture toward the bag, “then you know there are two more, and it only works with all three.”

“So you say,” Feragni interrupted. “Every bit of information we have is from you people. You could be lying your asses off.”

“Then try,” he suggested. “Stick your hand inside that bag and try to make a connection with the thing. Or hand it back to the Hart-Klein researchers who’ve been probing and testing it for days. If you think you have the time.” He enunciated the last sentence clearly, emphasizing each word, and he could see it hit home by the look in Feragni’s eyes. She tried to hide it but not well enough.

“If you want to be alive in ten years,” he went on, speaking softly, forcing her to listen, “or a year, you’ll give me back the Gatekeeper and let us go with the rest of our friends on the Tamar to find the Archive. It’s the only hope any of us have, unless you’re ready to abandon Earth and the colonies and just try to get far enough away that the Sunkillers won’t notice you.” He cocked an eyebrow. “I know you and the Union and the Alliance all have to have sent scouts back down the direction of the chain of supernovas. You’ve seen them. You know they’re real.”

Feragni didn’t answer at once. Chase didn’t know her, but if he’d been forced to guess, he would have said she was angry, frustrated, right on the verge of punching him in the face.

“And what if we don’t?” she demanded, pushing the shoulder bag back further, behind her hip, away from his grasp. “What if we don’t let you go? Will your friends just give up? Abandon you, abandon everyone? Leave humanity to its fate?”

“If you don’t let me go,” Chase countered, “then humanity will be the ones who’ve given up.”

Feragni didn’t quite growl at him, but her jaw muscles quivered as if she was just barely controlling herself. She turned on her heel and headed for the door.

“Hey!” Zack protested, hopping from one foot to the other. “I still have to go pee!”

* * *

“What the hell do you mean you’re not going to give the artifact back to me?” James Hart bellowed and gesticulated at the video display as if he wanted to jump through it and throttle the Colonial Authority admiral with his bare hands. “It’s Hart-Klein property! Discovered on my property, stolen from my station!”

Sean Haricot slumped in his chair and cradled his head in his hands, wishing the man would shut the hell up…or that the docs had given him more powerful painkillers. He’d been far enough back that the shrapnel from the suicide rig hadn’t hit anything vital, but the shockwave had given him a concussion that the docs had assured him was minor. It didn’t feel minor, and he would have been happy enough to stay in the medical center, curled up in a dark room, but Hart had insisted he be in the executive’s office for this…fiasco.

“Sir,” Admiral Peterson said, his tone deferential for someone so highly ranked, “according to the Treaty of Farragut, any alien artifacts discovered in the colonies technically belong to the collective nations of Earth as represented by the Colonial Authority. Therefore, by that legal recourse, we have taken possession of the artifact.”

“And why aren’t you holding this Weston as the terrorist and criminal he is?” Hart had jumped quickly away from the ownership of the artifact, perhaps because he was wary of detailing just how exactly he’d come across the information about the existence of the artifacts in the first place. “He’s wanted by the United States and the Union government for the murder of the Undersecretary Colonial Affairs on Farragut! Why haven’t you handed him over?”

“We’ve received security camera footage,” Peterson explained, “that shows Undersecretary Radcliffe was murdered by her own assistant, not by Chase Weston or the crew of the Tamar. Mr. Valente has a warrant for his arrest and will be in custody as soon as the ship carrying it reaches Farragut.”

“That footage has to be doctored!” Hart insisted, gesticulating like a revival preacher. “I can’t believe you’re falling for this con game, Admiral! What the hell do I pay you for?”

That had been pushing it a touch too far, and even a concussed Sean Haricot knew it. Peterson stiffened, chin tucking against his chest like a boxer about to wade into a flurry of blows.

“Mr. Hart, I’ll ignore that since I see that you are very upset. But rest assured there is no evidence whatsoever that I have any sort of inappropriate relationship with you or your corporation.” Peterson’s tight snarl was challenging, as if the man had thought of this possibility long ago and prepared for it. “You’re going to have to accept the facts. You’ve seen the reports from Captain Feragni and the scouting missions we’ve sent to intercept the…devices. You know what's at stake and you have to know we’ve exhausted all other possibilities. We’re going to deal with Weston and Cortez and the others because we have no other choice.” Peterson shrugged. “It may be that once we have access to this Archive that the technology we obtain will require industrial capacity to produce. No one knows yet what the thing will be or what it will give us. But if it’s possible and practical, I will try to involve you and your resources in any way I can. That’s the best I can do.”

The admiral’s image faded into the Colonial Authority logo, then the blank gray of the screen, and before the logo had disappeared entirely, Hart was already screaming incoherently, grasping at the trophies and mementos on his desk top for something suitable to throw. His hands clenched into fists, his shoulders hunched up, control pulled back from utter rage by the barest of margins. He turned on Haricot like a family dog suddenly gone feral, about to lunge for someone’s neck.

For the fourth time in just the last few months, Haricot was sure that Hart was going to call security into the office and have him thrown out an airlock. As badly as his head hurt, he might have welcomed it. He couldn’t even tense up in anticipation.

“Do you have your weapon with you, Sean?” Hart growled, eyes burning into him.

“Umm…yeah.” Haricot’s hand went automatically to the holster at his side and the Heckler and Koch 9mm secured there. “Why?”

The door opened, and Robert Pincus stepped tentatively inside, looking between Haricot and James Hart. There was something different about the man. Maybe it was the way he was dressed, or maybe that perfectly coifed hair had a few strands out of place. It was hard to tell.

“You called for me, sir?” Pincus asked, letting the door go. It shut behind him and the uptight, overdressed man started, then glanced behind him.

“Yes, I did, Robert,” Hart said, his usual fond tone transformed into a low growl, the last thing an elk heard before the wolves attacked. He sat on the edge of his desk, hooded eyes watching his assistant. “We’ve had quite the security breach, as I’m sure you’ve heard.” Hart laughed, a sound with no humor in it. “I’m sure everyone in the whole damned station heard. In fact, I’d be surprised if it isn’t on the Goddamned twenty-four-hour newsnet by now.”

“Yes, sir,” Pincus said, nodding. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his tablet. “Did you want me to schedule a press release? I’m sure there’s some way we can spin this to reduce the damage.”

Hart smiled, and a less pleasant expression Haricot couldn’t remember seeing.

“You know, you’re right, Robert. I think we can spin this.” He rose from his desk and paced the office, hands stuffed in his pockets. “Follow me on this. Maybe we can say that this wasn’t a huge fuck-up by the nominal chief of security, Sean Haricot.” The instant’s glare Hart shot at Haricot was almost gentle by comparison with the expression the man had worn since the conversation with Peterson. “Let’s say instead that this was a result of corporate espionage.” Hart raised a finger as if he’d just thought of a brilliant idea. “In fact, let’s say it was that talentless bitch Mara Soong-Tierney! She’d be the one to plan something like this if anyone was.”

Pincus was tapping away at his tablet, though his eyes were fixed on Hart as if he were afraid to look away.

“Let’s say,” Hart went on, “that good old Mara put a mole among us. Someone we wouldn’t expect, someone who had access to all the security codes, or at least enough of them.” Pincus was white as the Alps in winter, and Haricot forgot all about his aching head, watching the speech with mouth agape as Hart just kept going. “And that this mole arranged clearance for a shuttle that wasn’t on the schedule until just a few hours ago. Let’s say that happened. And let’s go even further and say that this treacherous piece of shit found out that the transport Weston and the Soong-Tierney mercenaries came in on had been destroyed by the station’s defenses, so he actually led them to a half-disassembled passenger shuttle so they could get away.” Hart’s faux smile disappeared, even the pretense of it vanishing behind a hard sneer as he stood nose to nose with Pincus. “It was genius, right up until the moron forgot the part where he was supposed to get away.”

Something shifted behind Pincus’s eyes, and the man sighed deeply, straightening. He carefully replaced his stylus in its holder and tucked his tablet back into his pocket, arms going to his side.

“Did I not pay you enough, Robert?” Hart wondered, shaking his head in disbelief. “Why the hell would you do this to me?”

“Because sir,” Pincus told him, as honest and forthright as Haricot had ever witnessed, “you hired me when I was a young, naïve kid, stupid enough to believe that all those things they said about you were the product of jealousy, greed, envy. That you were a good man, a fair man who just wanted to run a competitive business. But I’ve written too many press releases, seen too many reports that no one else was cleared to read. You’ve sat back here in your comfortable chair, with your personal trainers and virtual reality and ordered people killed for no other reason than they got in the way. You’ve had whole towns destroyed by pirates because they wouldn’t sell out to you. You’re a monster and you deserve to get what’s coming to you.”

Hart stared at the man for several seconds, and Haricot waited for the next explosion, but the executive just shook his head, then turned away from Pincus.

“Get rid of this problem for me, Sean.”

Haricot should have considered the order longer, but he was working on a light concussion and very little sleep. He stood, drew his HK from its holster in one, smooth motion, and shot Robert Pincus between the eyes.

The gun was loud in the little room, without the auditory exclusion of an adrenaline dump to shove it into the background, and Haricot winced as he re-holstered the weapon. His head hurt.

James Hart was staring at him in sheer horror.

“You moron!” he blurted. “I meant take him out an airlock!” Hart gestured in disbelief at the body slumped on the floor. “Do you have any idea how much this fucking carpet costs?”

Haricot eyed him balefully, past being afraid of the man.

“Peterson still owes you one,” he said. “Call him back.”

“What the hell for?” Hart seemed confused by the suggestion. “He already said he won’t hand over the artifacts.”

“We don’t need him to. We just need a small favor.” Haricot didn’t attempt to smile, knowing the pain it would cause. “I’ll do the rest.”

OceanofPDF.com

25

Angel wanted to run across the room and throw herself into Chase’s arms but held the urge in check. This place held too many enemies, too many eyes staring daggers at her and the rest of the crew.

Not Feragni. The woman wasn’t happy about the arrangement, Angel was sure of that, but she seemed to have accepted it. The others were having a more difficult time with that, particularly the Alliance representative, a short, slight little man with glasses so thick they could have been used to start a fire in a survival situation.

“This is Dr. Li Huanteng,” Feragni told them. “Physicist from the Hong Kong Institute and our technical representative from the People’s Republic of China. He’ll be briefing you on the Sunkiller situation.”

“Nice to meet you, Doc,” Priyanka said, grinning crookedly as she fell into a seat beside Alex and Gina. The younger Quesada still had one arm wrapped around her sister and likely wouldn’t let go until forced to. She was even ignoring Victor, which she’d previously shown an inability to do, and he might have been relieved, lost in his communion with the Emissary. For her part, Alex seemed drained, leaning into the younger woman, jaw quivering as if she might cry if she let loose of her emotions for an instant.

Angel couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t known Chilly and Jax that well, but Alex had, and the cumulative effect of their deaths so soon after Gray Haskell’s looked as if it was frighteningly close to breaking her. Zack looked to be handling things with his usual equanimity, though she wasn’t sure why he was wearing a pair of Colonial Authority Navy fatigue pants instead of the ones he’d left in.

And Chase…

Chase was different. Not that there was any external change she could have described if pressed. He had the same cool yet engaged bearing, the air of a professional soldier that had both attracted and repelled her when they’d first met. He still looked at her with the same fondness in his eyes, with the same relief she felt that the other was all right. But there was still a difference, something below the skin, the same difference she felt in herself. Its explanation was no mystery. It was sitting on the floor beside him, glowing softly from inside the shoulder bag. He’d bonded with the Gatekeeper.

She hadn’t realized it at first, although she should have. It was obvious. There’d been no other way he could contact them, which was probably why he’d done it. He’d been so afraid of what it might do to her, that it might change her.

Angel’s chest was tight, and she realized with a start that she was close to panic. She worked on controlling her breath and pretended to be calm as she sat beside Chase. He smiled warmly, grabbed her hand, and squeezed it tight.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said softly, then kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“I still think this is a mistake,” the severe, pinch-faced woman in the drab business suit declared, standing squared off at the side of the room as if ready to fight all comers. “We only have their word that someone else couldn’t…operate those artifacts.”

Chase sighed and grabbed his duffle, then stood and held it out to her.

“Here. Try. Take as long as you like. Or as long as you think we can afford to.”

“Ms. Brenda Davis,” Captain Feragni told them, the corner of her mouth twitching in what could have been a grin. Angel sensed Feragni didn’t like the woman. “Liaison from the U.S. Department of State.” Feragni eyed the older woman sidelong. “Ms. Davis, we know these people can work with the artifacts. We saw it ourselves when their ship escaped our squadron despite being surrounded, despite every computer simulation we ran telling us there was no way they could slip out of that trap. They jumped into the Rift in ten seconds. Do you know any ship in the Union or Alliance fleet that could do that?”

“We don’t have a fleet, Captain,” the barrel-chested troll of a man standing next to Davis corrected her. His accent was Canadian, though Angel couldn’t place the particular province. Not Quebec. Maybe British Columbia. His Union military dress uniform was spotless, though it seemed to barely constrain his chest and shoulders, and his face might have been carved out of an ancient, lightning-felled tree for use as a totem. “The Union has a Space Force. And no, we have nothing that could match that performance.” He shrugged. “Still, there’s no saying we couldn’t figure out how to do it.”

“Agreed.” The word was spoken in English, but the man’s Russian accent was so thick, he nearly twisted it beyond recognition. He was Alliance military, a general if she read the rank correctly, and young for his station, not much older than Chase. Just the right age to have been a young officer during the war, so Angel imagined he must have been a war hero who turned out to be good enough at politics to parlay his record into a quick rise up the ladder. Which could mean he was intelligent or maybe just a great schmoozer.

“These people are criminals,” the Russian went on. He was, Angel had to admit, quite handsome for a general, which probably hadn’t hurt his career either. “You say they are innocent of killing this CIA field officer, Radcliffe…”

“She was an Undersecretary for Colonial Affairs,” Davis corrected him sharply. “No one ever said she was with the CIA.”

“Of course,” the Russian sneered. “My mistake. But you say they didn’t kill her and that’s fine. However, they still invaded the sovereign territory of our allies, the People’s Republic of China, when they stole the artifact from the colony at Dragon’s Egg.” He jabbed a finger at Captain Feragni. “Perhaps the Colonial Authority is prepared to ignore this, but the Alliance has not forgotten. It is inconceivable to me that we are prepared to trust them with the fate of the entire human race.”

“You don’t trust us, General…” Angel trailed off in an unasked question.

“Yashin,” the Russian replied, and the tilt of his eyebrow as he appraised her was evidence that he knew just how good-looking he was and didn’t hesitate to use it to his advantage. “Alexei Yashin, Dr. Cortez.”

“You don’t trust us, General Yashin,” Angel continued. “But why should we trust you? Why should we have trusted the Alliance to use the artifact wisely when you’d already sent a team of Chinese special forces to violently steal the one my archeological team had discovered on Vishnu? We were prepared to share that find with the entire world via academic channels, which could have led to immediate cooperation, but not only did the Alliance military unit try to illegally seize the artifact, in the process, they murdered my friend and colleague, Dr. Daniel Stephenson.” Her voice quavered, emotion she hadn’t allowed herself to feel at the time finally surfacing. “He was a good man, General, and he didn’t deserve to die for your greed.”

“I had nothing to do with any operation on Vishnu,” Yashin insisted, his tone abruptly transforming from righteous indignation to defensive retreat in half a second.

“Trust,” Chase said, still standing, arms crossed over his chest like he was a university lecturer. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? We can’t trust the Alliance, the Union didn’t trust us, and none of us should trust Hart-Klein. But let’s look at the choices we have, not the ones we’d like to have. You can either trust us, or you can try to do this yourselves. My invitation stands.” He lifted the bag. “Try it. Touch it. See if it reacts at all. You know it works for us. If you really believe it’ll work for you, give it a shot.”

Yashin was still young and defiant enough to take that bet, apparently. The general crossed the room in three long strides, thrust his hand into the bag, and touched the Gatekeeper with his bare skin. His teeth clenched, eyes slitted as if he was waiting for a painful death, but nothing happened, and when his features relaxed, there was disappointment in his expression.

Yashin sighed and pulled his hand away and wiped it off against his pant leg.

“Fine. I acknowledge that even if there’s some trick to this, there’s no way we’d figure it out without your help. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

Feragni watched the byplay with a thin smile, and Angel wondered if Yashin had ever tried to hit on her.

“If I may,” the CA captain interrupted, “Dr. Li?”

“Yes,” the physicist said, nodding. He fumbled with his phone and a projection sprang to life on the wall screen. “As you can see, we’ve confirmed both the existence, the intentions and the capabilities of the Sunkillers.”

Angel’s breath went out of her as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. The Sunkiller was exactly how the Navigator had described it, yet somehow seeing the raw video of the thing was so much worse. Dr. Li was still speaking, but the words were a meaningless drone passing just beyond the grasp of her attention, which was focused on the sight of the energy weapon ripping apart entire asteroids. Cold talons clutched at her chest and she shivered despite her jacket.

“These devices,” Dr. Li went on, “are probably constructed from pure neutronium.” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes tiredly. “How this was accomplished, I can’t be sure. It’s something that would have taken thousands of years to extract.”

“The Sunkillers,” Victor told him, the cadence of the voice indicating that the Emissary was speaking through him, “are a hive mind, effectively immortal and with little sense of time. A thousand years is no different than a day to them.”

“Yes, well, it’s quite inconvenient for us, since it effectively makes the things indestructible. The only thing I can think of that would penetrate that hull would be a missile also made from the same material.” Li glared at Victor. “It appears that you people are our only remaining option.”

“How’s this going to work?” Davis asked. The woman had calmed down since the beginning of the meeting, perhaps because she’d seen Yashin demonstrate that just touching the artifact had accomplished nothing. “We’re not just going to sit back and let these civilians try to figure out this Archive thing on their own. I think we saw how well that worked with Dr. Soong-Tierney and the space-drive she tried to pass off as her invention.”

Apparently, the US government at least accepted that part of their message from the artifacts as true.

“Here’s what we’re willing to do,” Chase told her. “We take the artifacts and go search out the Archive. Just us. Once we get it, we’ll bring it back to the Colonial Authority station here and share it with everyone through the CA. And everyone means everyone. If you don’t like that, tough shit. I’m not handing this over to any one government, not when everyone on Earth has a stake in this.”

Davis, Yashin, Li, and the Canadian officer whose name Angel still hadn’t caught shared a look.

“Agreed,” Davis said, though it was obviously a grudging assent. “I doubt any other way would work.”

“It would not,” Yashin assured her. “Though I am not sanguine about you and your crew going alone. Not that I expect you to run off with the secrets of the aliens, but you have no idea what you’re going to be facing. I’d think you’d want some help.”

“You were Russian Marines, weren’t you?” Chase asked him.

“We call it the Naval Infantry, but yes.”

“I thought so. Battle of Kharkiv?” At Yashin’s nod, Chase went on. “Then you know how important it is to be able to trust the guys on either side of you.”

Yashin sighed, as if in surrender.

“Do you even know where you’re going?” Davis wanted to know.

Now that was a good question. Angel decided she needed to know the answer. The top of her shoulder bag was unzipped, and it took just the slightest motion to slip her hand inside and brush her fingertips against the Navigator. It was an electric shock, but one she’d grown used to. Victor was in contact with the Emissary, but Chase still had the duffle bag tucked into the crook of his arm from offering it to Yashin. He needed to be bonded in order for them to discern the location of the Archive, and she debated whether she should ask him to touch the artifact.

She didn’t have to. Angel didn’t know if Chase somehow sensed that the other two were in contact with their AIs or if it had merely been deduction on his part, but his hand slid inside the half-open top of the bag. When Chase touched the Gatekeeper, a jolt went through her, and she was one point of a triangle, a third of a complete entity in a manner she hadn’t experienced when it had just been Victor and her connected to the artifacts.

And she knew. The coordinates meant nothing to her, and yet she knew exactly where the world was, knew its entire geologic history and the exact date that the People had abandoned it.

“We do,” Chase said, and Angel thought the gap would seem odd until she realized that the actual elapsed time had been less than a second. “It’s a three-week flight, right at the edge of explored space.”

“Is there anything you need?” Feragni wanted to know. “Any supplies? Weapons?”

“We could use some fresh fuel rods,” Pri said. “And reloads for the 30mm. And maybe some replacement armor plating.”

“And some real food,” Aguilar put in. “If I never eat another emergency ration again, I will die a happy man.”

“Amen, Chief,” Hill agreed.

“Captain Feragni,” Chase said, his expression turning grim, “would you happen to know if any of the Soong-Tierney Security Force troops who were with us on the HKC station survived? I know HKC probably isn’t inclined to cooperate, but if you can get any survivors out of there, I would be in your debt.”

Angel expected Feragni to scoff at the idea, but instead, her businesslike demeanor softened—just a hair, enough that if Angel had blinked, she would have missed it.

“I’ll make some calls,” she promised. “If they’re alive, I’ll get them back.”

“What about money?” Davis asked, arching an eyebrow. “You’re all mercenaries. Don’t you want to get paid eventually?”

Chase exchanged a look with Zack, then looked back at Alex, Pri, Hill, and Aguilar. Hill started chuckling first, but it spread to the others and in a few seconds, they were all laughing heartily.

“At one point, maybe,” Alex admitted once she’d stopped chortling. “I think we all got into this with the idea of getting paid at the end. But it’s beyond that now. We’ve lost friends, and the only thing that matters now is completing the mission.”

“And maybe getting out the other side alive,” Zack added. “If that’s not too much to ask.”

* * *

“How’s your head?” the doctor asked, shining a light into Sean Haricot’s eyes. “Follow the light please.”

Haricot sighed and tried not to blink.

“My head hurts. Just like it did the last time you asked twelve hours ago.”

“How about the shrapnel wound in your arm?” the man pressed, ignoring the sarcasm. “Any inflammation? Any numbness?”

“Not enough damned numbness,” Haricot said, eyes flickering back and forth with the light. “It can’t even be time to change the dressing you put on it. I don’t know why the hell I’m back here already. Shouldn’t I be getting some sleep?”

“It’s best to keep on top of a concussion,” the white-haired man explained. “Can’t take a chance you might have a brain bleed.”

The door to the clinic opened and James Hart entered. He seemed in a better mood than when Haricot had left the brains of Robert Pincus splattered over his office rug. He’d definitely changed clothes, which was good since there’d been blood stains on his old shirt.

“You done in here, Sean?” he asked, eyeing the doctor.

“Definitely,” Haricot told him, pushing off the examination table.

“You need to rest a few more days, Mr. Haricot,” the doctor objected. “You still have a slight concussion, and the stitches in your arm might open up if you strain them. Not to mention the psychological strain of nearly being killed…”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll take two aspirin and call you in the morning.”

The doctor was still talking, but Haricot was out the door before he could put together another coherent thought. The hall outside the medical center was suitably sterile, and Haricot loathed it and everything about it.

“Yes, sir?”

“We have intelligence,” Hart told him, glaring at an employee heading into the clinic until the woman turned and walked back the other way. “Weston and the others told the Colonial Authority where they’re going.”

For the first time in fourteen hours, Haricot’s head didn’t hurt.

“Get me a ship and a team, sir,” he said, lips peeling away from his teeth in a wolflike grin, “and we won’t need the artifacts. We’ll have that damned Archive and the Alliance, the Union and the Colonial Authority will all have to come to us if they want a way out of this shit.”

“You’d better, Sean,” Hart warned him, looming over the corporate mercenary. It was easy to forget the executive was such a tall, powerful man when Haricot usually saw him behind a desk. “I’ve been extremely patient thus far because I recognize your talent and I understand how hard it would be to replace you.” He shook his head. “But if the Colonial Authority gets their hands on the Archive, the game’s over, and then I won’t be worrying about replacing you.” Hart’s dark eyes narrowed. “I’ll be thinking about suitable punishments.”

Haricot fought not to sigh. The threats had been intimidating once upon a time.

“There’s one other thing,” Hart told him, mood turning from threatening to annoyed. “The Colonial Authority contacted me personally asking for the return of any prisoners we took during the Soong-Tierney raid. Did any of those assholes survive?”

“A couple,” Haricot told him, shrugging indifferently. “Three, actually. That platoon leader, the bitch captain. She was okay, just took a bunch of rounds to the body armor, knocked the wind out of her, another to the helmet that stunned her. If I were there, I would have told the troops to put a round in her face to finish her off. Another couple who were wounded.” He frowned, trying to think past the slight haze over his memories. “I think one of them was her chief NCO. You know…” He held up a finger, shaking his head. “You know, sir, I think we should show the Colonial Authority that we’re honoring the spirit of cooperation. This might work out well for us after all.”

OceanofPDF.com

26

“She looks better than she has since we left Gateway for Vishnu,” Pri said, crouched on the maintenance catwalk, running a hand over the nose of the Tamar. “These Colonial Authority engineers do good work.”

“Maybe this time no one will be shooting at us,” Chase said, watching her from the deck of the drydock. He burst out laughing. “Yeah, sorry, I’m not taking that idea seriously either.”

“Where’re the others?” Pri clambered down the ladder. “We leave in like two hours. Everyone ready?”

“Getting there.” He shrugged. “Chief is personally supervising the fresh food being loaded, Hill is grabbing as much alcohol as he can get his hands on, Zack and Alex are being fitted for new body armor, Angel is grabbing a couple of hours of sleep in a real bed for the last time in a couple months, and Gina and Vic…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. They’ll be here.”

Pri rapped her knuckles against the hull with a hollow bonk.

“I can’t believe you did it, you moron,” she said, staring at the floor.

“Did what?” he asked.

“The artifact, dummy,” she snapped. “I can’t believe you…bonded with it, or whatever it’s called.” Pri rounded on him, eyes flaring. “You don’t know what it’s going to do to you! Did you do it for her? Because she’s a great girl, Weston, but I’m not sure anyone’s worth handing your fucking soul over to an alien machine!”

Chase swallowed hard, forcing himself not to take a step back beneath the onslaught. Pri had yelled at him before, particularly around the time they’d ended their relationship, but this was different, not least because she had a point.

“I did it because I thought it was the only way to keep the Union and the Alliance and everyone else from splitting us up,” he admitted, figuring the truth was the best defense, “and forcing Angel and Vic to work for them.”

Pri’s shoulders shook, though Chase couldn’t decide if it was from rage or if she was restraining sobs.

“I hope it was worth it,” she told him.

Chase didn’t know how to reply, and he was saved from having to by the notification chime on his phone. He tapped his earbud, still staring doubtfully at Pri.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Zack. You need to get down to the medical center. We got a visitor.”

* * *

Chase tried not to stare, but it was hard. He’d never expected to see Alana Kane again, and particularly not here on the Colonial Authority station.

“She’s fine,” the CA medical officer announced as Kane slipped back into her utility fatigue top and boots. “Maybe a couple cracked ribs but nothing even worth wrapping up. Mostly bruising, a light concussion, and a few scratches.”

She didn’t look fine. Mostly bruising the doc had said, but the bruise on the left side of her face was pretty damn nasty, about what Chase would have expected from a bullet ricocheting off the side of her helmet and banging against her cheek. And before she’d fastened her blouse, there had seemed to be more black, yellow, and green visible around her tank top than pink flesh.

“Nothing else?” Captain Feragni asked the man. “No trackers, no implanted bombs, no mind-control chips?”

The doctor eyed Feragni sidelong, then made a shooing motion.

“Nothing beside what’s in my report, so if you’ll excuse me, I have other patients and better things to do.”

Feragni scowled at the man, but motioned for Kane and Chase to follow her. The medical center was surprisingly busy, though none of the file of CA personnel coming through the main entrance seemed sick or injured, so Chase guessed they’d interrupted some kind of periodic checkup. The CA officer waited until they were past the last of them and out into one of the main corridors before she rounded on Kane.

“Okay, Captain,” she said, “you’ve had your examination, and I know you’re healthy. So, why don’t you tell us what happened?”

Kane’s eyes were fixed on the deck, her expression dull and disinterested, and Chase thought she might not even bother to answer.

“I was hurt.” Kane’s voice was barely audible, a dry rasp. “Not quite unconscious, but I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t lift my arms. I was helpless, and the HKC soldiers were advancing on us, and even though I could barely think, the one thing I knew was that I was going to die.” Nothing but labored breathing, as if she was reliving the moment in her memories, until finally she closed her eyes and clenched her fists and brought herself under control. “Greg…First Sergeant Toretto. He was wounded pretty bad, bad enough he couldn’t even stand, but he threw himself over me to keep them from shooting me.”

She broke into sobs and Chase put a hand on her shoulder to steady her, but Feragni surprised him, folding Alana Kane into a hug, holding her tight as the mercenary officer’s whole body shook.

“It’s okay,” Feragni soothed, rubbing a hand over the other woman’s back. “You made it. That’s what he wanted.”

Kane nodded, pushing away from the naval officer, wiping at the tears.

“Thank you.” Her voice was steadier now, a little stiff as if she was embarrassed with her breakdown. “They didn’t bother treating my injuries, just handcuffed me and threw me in a cell. I expected them to toss me out an airlock, but this man, their chief of security, Sean Haricot, came and told me that they’d made an agreement with the CA to turn me over.”

“Haricot?” Chase repeated sharply. “He’s still alive?”

She nodded, not seeming to understand the man’s significance.

“He didn’t seem too happy about giving me up. He said I was one lucky bitch.”

“Asshole,” Feragni murmured.

“Weston,” Kane said, then grabbed his arm and held it tight, her eyes flaring with purpose, even the one that was swollen half-closed, “this has to have been worth it, right? What we did? It has to have meant something.”

“Captain, it means everything.” Chase put his hand on top of hers. Her skin was cold and clammy, and he had an urge to rub his palm over hers to warm it up. “It’s not over yet, but if we hadn’t pulled this off, there’d be no chance at all.” He nodded toward Feragni. “Ask her. She’s seen the Sunkillers. If this doesn’t do it, we’re gone, all of us.”

“He’s telling you the truth,” Feragni assured the other woman. “We’re out of options.”

“And you’re going now, aren’t you?” Kane asked Chase. “You’re going to finish this, to find that Archive?”

“We leave in a couple hours.”

“Take me with you.” Kane glanced between Chase and Feragni. “Unless I’m under arrest or something, I want to go. You’ll have to need people for this.” She shook her head. “I can’t just sit around writing letters to the next of kin, waiting to hear back whether we’re all going to die or not.”

Chase froze in mid-step, caught off guard. Of all the reactions he’d expected from Captain Kane, this hadn’t been one of them. He had a dozen reasons why she shouldn’t go and was tongue-tied mostly because he couldn’t figure out which one to pick first.

“I’ll follow your orders,” Kane insisted, anticipating one of his many objections. “You’re in charge. I just want to be part of it.” She was pleading now and the note of desperation in her voice tugged at Chase’s conscience. “I just want to finish what they started. For Top…First Sergeant Toretto.”

“Okay.” Chase hadn’t meant to say it. He’d fully intended to tell her no as gently as possible, to assure her that staying and taking care of her duties was the right thing to do, but that wasn’t what came out of his mouth. Maybe if he’d been an officer, he might have been able to do the smart thing instead of what his gut told him was right, but NCO’s brains worked a different way. “Go find Zack Miller and Alex Quesada in the armory. They’ll make sure you get outfitted with some new body armor.”

Kane sighed as if she’d taken a painkiller and it had just kicked in.

“Thank you, Sgt. Weston.”

“My name’s Chase,” he corrected her, “particularly when you technically outrank me. And don’t thank me. You’d be a lot safer staying here.”

Captain Feragni waited until the other woman had gone around the corner, following the signs to the elevators, before she turned back to Chase.

“You’re an old softy, Sergeant,” she told him. “I would have told her no and not thought twice about it.”

“It’s like I told General Yashin,” Chase said, trying to justify it to himself as he explained it to her. “When you’re going into combat, you need someone next to you that you can trust.” He nodded in the direction Kane had gone. “She put the mission above her own life. That tells me everything I need to know about her.”

I hope.

* * *

“This’ll be your room,” Zack Wilson said, grunting the words out as if they were teeth being extracted. He waved at the compartment. “It was Chilly and Jax’s before.” His face split in a scowl as if he was angry at Captain Kane, though Chase thought it was more likely he was trying to keep his emotions under control. “I already cleaned their stuff out.”

There hadn’t been much. All either of the men had brought from Gateway had fit in a pair of duffle bags.

“Did they have families?” Angel asked him softly, leaning over the galley table to get close enough that Kane wouldn’t hear him. The Soong-Tierney security officer had stepped into the compartment, switched on the light, and tossed aside her small bag.

“Not really.” Chase didn’t want to talk about it, not after the discussion he’d had with Alex on the subject, but it was something he had to face. “Chilly’s family was in Colombia. Most of them died when the nuke went off on that freighter in the port at Barranquilla. Jax…” He shook his head. “His mom died when he was a kid. No brothers or sisters and he hadn’t spoken to his father since he enlisted in the Navy.” Chase rubbed at his eyes. He badly needed sleep, but that would have to wait until they jumped. “I guess if any of them had families, they wouldn’t have been working dead-end jobs on Gateway.”

Kane emerged from the room, arms crossed, still looking shell-shocked.

“It’s time,” Victor said, stepping into the galley, the Emissary naked and glowing in his hands.

“The kid’s right,” Pri confirmed, calling back from the cockpit. “We’re clear of cislunar space. We need coordinates before we head hyperlight.”

Chase sighed and exchanged a look with Angel. He knew where the planet was, but that wasn’t the same as knowing the navigational coordinates for Pri and Hill to input. She needed numbers, and for that, they’d have to access all three artifacts again.

Angel held the Navigator in her lap, but Chase wasn’t that comfortable having the Gatekeeper in such intimate contact. He set the thing on the galley table and kept a hand over the surface of it, expecting it to wobble a little, given its shape. It didn’t. It sat in one spot as if magnetized, beckoning him to it.

I am not part of this thing. I don’t care what it says, I am Chase Weston and I’m no different today than I was yesterday.

Except for the whole part about being Methuselah. That was different.

Chase touched the artifact and sucked in a breath that never seemed to end.

He was back on the planet, not as it was currently but as it had been ten thousand years ago, when the People had left it. More of the twisted spires, the mind-bending architecture he’d seen before, though this was in the midst of a vast, boreal forest, surrounded by jagged mountains.

“It’s a city.” Chase wasn’t startled by the appearance of the alien because he’d known it was there. The thing towered over him by a foot, but Chase didn’t feel intimidated.

“An impossible city,” Chase told him. “Either those spires are way too thin to have any way to get up and down them, or they’re so big there’s no way they should be able to support their own weight.”

“Many things we accomplished, your kind would call impossible. Yet you will accomplish them yourself, given time. We’ve left you the knowledge and the tools.”

Chase looked around them. The hillside was between a steep escarpment and a steeper drop, surrounded by brush. There didn’t seem to be any way to reach it on foot, though that was meaningless in this mental landscape.

“Where are the others? Don’t they have to be here for this?”

“You mean Victor Lee and Evangeline Cortez?” The alien didn’t actually shake his head, but it felt as if he had. “No, their personalities are not necessary for this, just the connection between us, the pieces of the key.”

“So where are the rest of you?” Chase motioned around them. “Your buddies the Emissary and the Navigator? Shouldn’t they be hanging on my shoulder like the ghosts of Christmas past and present?”

“Would it make you feel better if they were?” The alien avatar split into three identical figures, one directly in front of Chase and the others on the other side of him. Then, just as quickly, they were gone. “Would that be a more comfortable idea than that we are all the same being?”

“Oh, I don’t know if anything would make me more comfortable right now, GK.” Chase cocked an eyebrow. “You mind if I can call you GK? Just when we’re in private?”

“As if I cared,” the AI replied snidely. “Or could stop you if I did.”

“Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it, GK?” Chase reached out and put a hand on the alien’s shoulder—what passed for a shoulder, anyway. It was arranged more like a knee socket and felt like one. “How much control do you have over us? How much have you changed us? Because I got a hunch that despite what the others told me, you can only change us as far as we’re willing to be changed.”

“Is that the question, though?” the Gatekeeper wondered, perverse gratification in his mocking. “Or is the question, would you know if you’d been changed?”

Chase sighed and made a “move-along” motion.

“The coordinates. Give me the damned coordinates.”

“You have them. When you write them down for Captain Ambedkar, it will be as if you knew them all along.”

“Oh, good, then we can cut this visit short.”

“Can you?” the Gatekeeper teased.

Chase smiled at him and pulled his hand away from the artifact. He was back in the galley, staring across the table at Angel, who still appeared lost in a trance.

First things first.

“Gimme a pen,” he said, jogging up to the cockpit and motioning at Aguilar. “Something to write on.”

Aguilar pulled a tablet out of a pocket fastened to the cockpit bulkhead and handed it to him. Chase cursed as he pulled the stylus out, sure that he’d forget the string of numbers any second, but when the note program lit up the screen, they flowed off his hand as if there’d never been any danger. He sighed and handed the tablet over to Pri.

“You sure?” she asked, squinting at the numbers. Out of habit, she repeated them back to him aloud.

“Yeah, that sounds like it,” he said with a shrug. “As if any of it means anything to me. I’m a damned grunt.”

“Okay. Give me five minutes, and me and Adrian’ll work a course up.”

Chase nodded and headed back to the galley. Angel was still in a trance and he murmured a curse, grabbing her hand and pushing it off the surface of the Navigator. Her eyelids fluttered as if she was just waking up from REM sleep, then her gaze sharpened on him and he thought for sure she would be furious at him for breaking the connection. But when she spoke, there was wonder in her tone.

“I didn’t think anyone could do that.”

“They don’t want you to think it.” The fierce conviction behind the words surprised even himself. “Don’t accept everything they say.”

“Sgt. Weston?”

He hadn’t noticed Kane’s approach but she was standing right behind him. Her face was shaped with pain, lines beside her eyes that he didn’t remember from when he’d met her on the Soong-Tierney station.

“Chase,” he corrected her.

“Chase,” she agreed, then seemed to falter, as if she’d been about to tell him something but had changed her mind. “If it’s okay, I’m going to go lie down. My head is killing me. I know you wanted to brief me on the mission but…”

“But we have almost three weeks to do that,” he finished for her. “Go ahead.” He chuckled. “I’ve slept through my share of Rift transits.”

Zack was leaning against the bulkhead, watching Kane as she disappeared back into the compartment.

“I don’t like bringing someone new in this late in the day,” he said, a mulish look on his face that Chase knew all too well.

“She’s a good troop,” Chase insisted. “And she’s hurting. Just like we are. Maybe you could talk to her.” At Zack’s skeptical glare, Chase sighed and raised a placating hand. “Make sure she’s put together enough in the head to be useful in the field. If we have to, we can just leave her in the ship while we go on the mission.”

Zack nodded, though with obvious reluctance.

“Right. Like you said, there’s plenty of time.” He stared at the closed door of Kane’s compartment. “I just hope we don’t regret it.”

OceanofPDF.com

27

There was something calming about cleaning a rifle. Back in the day, the rest of Zack’s platoon had always complained about weapons maintenance, but not him. There was certainty in the motion of the cleaning rod, the smell of Break-Free CLP cleaner, in the careful order of the bolt-carrier group parts laid out on a cleaning rag. And if the Tamar’s utility bay wasn’t exactly the squad area of his barracks, at least it provided some solitude at this time of night.

He snorted, the thought taking him out of the fugue of cleaning the M27. “Night” was a fiction on a spaceship, but one they mutually agreed on, keeping the lights dim and trying to synch their sleep cycles. Not this night, though. Not when the image of Chilly flying toward the HKC mercenaries kept playing over and over inside his head.

One second, the man was there, the next he was gone in a flash of light, a deafening roar. Zack had to admit it wasn’t a bad way to go. Maybe it was how the man had wanted to go out, and maybe he didn’t want to admit a little envy. Either way, sleep wasn’t in the cards. Just cleaning these damned rifles.

“You want some help?”

Zack Wilson very deliberately did not leap to his feet and reach for the handgun he wasn’t wearing, but only just. Instead, he eyed Alana Kane balefully as she came down the ramp from the galley. She was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts and he had to admit she looked pretty good for an officer.

And no, he did not want any help, but Chase had asked him to talk to her. He sighed and nodded at an identical stool to the one he was sitting on.

“Sure. Plenty of weapons to clean.”

“You didn’t have a chance to clean them after the last time you used them?” she asked, pulling an M27 from a rack inside the cabinet.

“I honestly don’t remember,” he admitted. “Which probably means no.”

Her hands broke the weapon down with rote precision. He nodded. At least she hadn’t been one of those officers who made some poor E5 clean her weapon for her. Chase had said something about her being with the First Infantry Division at Mindanao.

“You get to go to Ranger School?” he wondered, not looking up from the barrel he was swabbing out.

“Yes.” She laughed softly. “I hated it.”

“If you liked it, I’d wonder about you.”

“You think we’ll need these?” Kane asked suddenly, hefting the weight of the carbine. At Zack’s questioning glance, she clarified. “I mean, this place we’re going to get the Archive…it was abandoned thousands of years ago, right? There shouldn’t be anything there, should there?”

Zack chuckled.

“The Big Red One must have a different way of thinking than the Ranger Battalions. We were trained to always expect a firefight. That way, if we didn’t get into one, we’d be pleasantly surprised.”

“You were at Subic Bay,” she said, almost an accusation. “You and Sergeant…” She shook her head. “Chase.”

“We were. And yes, it was as bad as you’ve heard. And no, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t blame you.” She grabbed a cleaning rod and dunked the brush in the Break-Free. “I don’t feel much like talking about Mindanao either. That’s one reason I got out. Part of the transition to the Union armed force was mandatory psych evaluation. And anyone who’d fought in the war got to go to counseling once a month, like it or not.”

“Oh, to hell with that.” Zack set down the bolt, grabbed a small cooler out of a floor locker, pulled out a bottle of beer, and offered it to Kane. The woman shrugged and took it, then twisted off the cap while Zack retrieved one for himself. “This is the only counseling I’m interested in.”

“It worked okay for a while,” Kane admitted, taking a sip then making a face. “What is this shit?”

“Local-made on Gateway. The bottles—and the labels—are recycled.” He grinned and chugged half the beer, trying not to taste it too much.

“I mean, it worked when it was…closer to what had happened,” Kane went on, taking another drink of the beer despite her earlier reaction. “But eventually, they were just asking the same questions again and again and it just made me angry.”

“The shrinks can do that,” he admitted. “Though, you know, I kinda needed it after Subic Bay.” He leaned back against the bulkhead, tilting the stool until only two legs were against the deck. “I gotta say, I thought it was the end of the fucking world, Captain.”

“Alana,” she said, the corner of her mouth quirking up.

“I dunno if I can call an officer by her first name,” Zack said doubtfully. “Maybe Kane. Can I just call you Kane?”

She answered with a toast, and they both took another drink.

“Okay, Kane, it was like the end of everything. I mean, I’d accepted I was gonna die. That was a given. Just about the whole company had already been wiped out so I was sure we were goners. But it was more than that. When that nuke went off, I was sure the whole world was gonna be blown up. I don’t know if I was more surprised afterward that me and Chase had survived or that there wasn’t a full-scale nuclear war going on.”

“Is that why you never go back to Earth? You afraid it’s going to happen again?”

“Well, that and the fact I’m probably wanted by a couple different governments,” he allowed. He threw his head back and laughed, something loosening in his chest, maybe from the horrible beer. “I said I didn’t want to talk about Subic Bay, and damned if I didn’t wind up talking about Subic Bay.”

“That happens to me sometimes, too,” Kane admitted. Her gaze dropped away from his. “I think that’s why I don’t go back, even when I have time off.”

“It makes relationships with civilians hard. They always want to talk about the war, and what you did in the war, and how many people you saw die, and how many people you killed.” Zack grunted. “I promised my mom when I went in the Army that I’d never…you know, pay for it, but it’s really tempting because at least working girls don’t want to talk.”

Kane laughed, but it was less amused than it was bitter.

“Yeah. The last relationship I had with a civilian ended…badly.”

Zack didn’t consider himself a particularly insightful individual, least of all when it came to the interactions of men and women, but there was something about the way Kane had phrased the sentence that caught his attention.

“You tried to date someone in your platoon, didn’t you?”

She rolled her eyes, but wound up nodding.

“It’s not exactly like the military,” she said a little defensively. “It’s not as if there’s a UCMJ. I mean, my rank is captain because that’s what I was in the Army, but I run a platoon. I have…” A spasm of pain passed across her face. “I have a first sergeant as a platoon sergeant.”

“You were involved with him, weren’t you?”

She nodded, squeezing her eyes shut.

“It was a stupid idea. Greg kept telling me it was a stupid idea. But he couldn’t end it and neither could I.” Tears welled out and she wiped at them in a short, angry motion.

“That’s why you came along, isn’t it?” Zack tried not to stare at her, focusing on the mouth of his beer bottle instead.

“I can’t let him die…” She faltered. “I can’t let him have died for nothing.” Kane forced a smile and shook her head, setting down the beer and picking up the M27. “Let’s get back to cleaning.”

“Nothing to take your mind off your troubles,” he agreed, “like cleaning a weapon.”

* * *

“I don’t want to lose you,” Victor Lee said quietly into Gina’s hair.

“Why would you?” she asked, turning over, her warmth against his skin. The compartment was dark, even the glow from the Emissary muted by the blanket he’d thrown over the duffle bag, but somehow, the glint in her eyes showed through the black. “Did I give you some reason to think I wasn’t having fun?”

“That’s not what I mean.” Even with the blanket covering the thing, Victor felt the light of the artifact seeping through, toxic waste poisoning everything it touched. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’m going to change…even more than I already have. I’m afraid you won’t be able to love what I change into.” He buried his face against her shoulder and squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m afraid I’m not strong enough to resist it.”

“This is because of Chase, isn’t it?” Gina asked, putting her finger under his chin and tilting his face up so their eyes could meet.

“You saw him. He bonded with the Gatekeeper, but he didn’t let it control him.” Victor shrugged. “I should have tried harder.”

“You didn’t know,” she admonished, smacking him on the shoulder. “It’s not like anyone had put up a how-to video on resisting the influence of psychic alien AIs. Chase was only able to do what he did because he’d been watching you and Angel. Now that you know it’s possible, you can do the same thing.”

“I don’t know if I can.” She started to protest again and he cut her off. “I mean, I don’t know if I want to. I didn’t like who I was before. I was a whiny little kid with no direction in life, mooning over my doctoral advisor. You didn’t know me then.” He laughed quietly. “You wouldn’t have even liked that worthless little shit.”

“Victor, you wouldn’t be that worthless little shit anymore with or without the artifact. You didn’t have the artifact when you tackled that mercenary on Barataria Bay. You did it because you wanted to make sure I didn’t get hurt. You don’t need to change. I love you the way you are.”

“And you’re not worried about what happens after? After we find the Archive? The Emissary said…”

Gina put a finger over his lips.

“Stop worrying about what the Emissary says. It’s a computer programmed by aliens thousands of years ago. It has its own agenda, and I think maybe part of that agenda is to keep hold of you. Without you, it’s nothing. It can’t interact with the world. I think it’ll tell you anything it can to keep you tied to it.”

Victor was sweating, his mouth dry, and he was terrified of nothing he could identify.

“This doesn’t feel right,” he murmured, drawing away from Gina. She stopped him with a firm grip on his shoulder, her other hand holding his face so he couldn’t look away.

“Stop,” she said sharply. “That’s not you. That’s the Emissary trying to scare you away from me. Look at me.” He did, her tone scaring him even more than the sudden panic. “You don’t need the Emissary. You’re enough for me. You could toss that thing out of the airlock and you’d still be enough for me. Do you believe that?”

“I believe you,” he told her, his breath slowly coming back under control. “As long as I have you, I don’t need the Emissary. “

As long as he had Gina, he didn’t need anything else.

OceanofPDF.com

28

“Why are we coming out here?” Alex demanded, scowling deeply as she stared over Angel’s shoulder, eschewing the emergency fold-down seats. “We know where this place is, so why don’t we just get there and get this over with?”

Chase glared at her sidelong but didn’t snap back despite the fact that this had all been explained at least twice during the briefings. This was the most talkative she’d been in the last two and a half weeks, and he didn’t want to discourage it. He didn’t need a soldier—or Marine in this case—with their head out of the game this close to the launch of a mission.

“We don’t want to go in totally blind,” he said patiently, speaking up before Zack, who looked as if he wasn’t going to be so gentle about it. “We don’t think there’s any kind of threat, but all our intel is ten thousand years out of date.” He shrugged, then loosened the restraints on his seat when it took too much effort. “Coming out a few light-minutes from the planet is just playing it safe. Hell, we don’t even know if the Sunkillers already hit this star.”

“Shut up before you jinx us,” Pri told him. “Get ready, guys. Cutting power.”

A lead weight sank low in Chase’s gut, a trepidation he couldn’t have explained if he’d bothered to try. It grew heavier and colder as they exited the Rift, and the stars reappeared, stretching out from a mass of white into a rainbow tunnel before settling back into their places in the heavens.

It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and it usually inspired a childlike sense of wonder at the times he lived in. Now, it only inspired fear, as if he could feel death on the other side of that rainbow ring. Yet when the Tamar emerged into regular space, there was nothing but the eternal stillness of deep space.

“Okay,” Hill said, tapping on his touch screen, putting a blue delta shape on the main display, “you are here.”

“Here” was, according to the scale at the side of the display, approximately three Astronomical Units—279 million miles—from the planet.

“What are we calling this place?” Aguilar wondered. “Or does it matter?”

“The People didn’t name planets the way we do,” Vincent informed him. He didn’t have the Emissary with him, which surprised Chase. Sometimes, he thought the kid didn’t believe he was worth anything without the artifact. The lack of it didn’t seem to affect Victor’s memories of the details he’d learned during his interactions. “They designate them in some kind of scientific notation I couldn’t understand even if I were a physics or math major. So, we can pretty much name it whatever we want.”

“Barsoom?” Gina suggested, digging a finger into Victor’s side. He rewarded her with a giggle, though from the joke or the finger, Chase wasn’t sure.

“I hope there’re no eight-foot-tall, four-armed freaks waving swords down there,” Zack said. Gina goggled at him and he cocked an eyebrow sidelong. “Yeah, I’ve read a book. Don’t faint dead away.”

“I watched the movie,” Chase told them. “It’s a classic. But I was thinking we could name it Alexandria.”

“Aw,” Alex said, grinning at him lopsided. “I’m touched.”

“As in the library at Alexandria,” he corrected her. “After all, isn’t an archive just another word for a library?”

“You must be rubbing off on him, Doc,” Hill told Angel. “He knows about history and shit now.”

“Not that a classical education is the only benefit of your presence,” Aguilar assured her. “I mean, we’ve all noticed that Chase hasn’t been quite the humorless hardass he once was and I’m sure we have you to thank for that.”

Angel was chuckling, but Chase’s ears were getting hot and he cleared his throat.

“What are we seeing?” he asked Hill.

“Typical shit,” the copilot replied with a shrug. “Star is G-class, more or less. Whole system is pretty unremarkable, unless you count there being a habitable planet, which once upon a time would have felt pretty spectacular, though not so much anymore.”

“Spare us the blindingly obvious, Adrian,” Pri told him. “The merely obvious will do.”

“Sorry. You got a burnt-to-a-crisp rocky little world close in, then a small asteroid belt where maybe another planet used to be, then you got Alexandria.” He sneered at the name. “Past that is another smaller, colder terrestrial planet about the size of the moon, another asteroid belt, and a couple gas giants. We’re between the orbits of the two gas giants, by the way, which means we can’t stay here long because when one of those big-ass things swings around this way, it’ll bring a shitload of radiation with it.”

“I wasn’t planning on taking up residence here, Adrian. Any energy readings from the planet? Thermal? Spectrographic?”

“Nothing I can see. We’re a little far away, but everything looks like your typical uninhabited world to me.”

“Uninhabited now,” Chase corrected him. “Ten thousand years back, there were a bunch of funky-looking aliens here.” He looked around. “Anyone see any reason we shouldn’t go ahead in?” No reply but shaking heads. “You heard ’em, Pri,” he said. “Take us to Alexandria.”

* * *

“It’s really freaking cold out here,” Gina declared, zipping up her jacket and pulling the hood up over her ears.

Snow flurries curved inward and melted on the end of the ramp before they reached her boots, coming from nowhere in the darkness above.

“Complaining already?” Chase asked her, coming down the ramp behind her and Victor. “You’re the one who insisted on coming along.”

“I’m tired of spending every landing sitting on the ship, waiting to see whether you guys come back,” she told him, the hesitation leaving her voice, her shoulders squaring. “Besides, it’s not like we’re walking into a gunfight. You might need my scientific skills.” She frowned at Victor, who was carrying the Emissary with him. “Besides, if that thing is going with him, so am I.”

Chase shrugged, exchanging a look with Angel. They both had brought their bonded AI’s along with them, since they’d need the guidance to find the Archive, but he was just as troubled by their presence as Gina was. He’d only connected with the Gatekeeper once since they’d left the Solar System, and that had been to find their landing area. The AI had been…sullen, he supposed was the word. Resentful. He was fairly sure that if it hadn’t been part of the thing’s programming, the Gatekeeper would have refused to talk to him at all.

“Hey, you pedestrians!” Zack called from behind them. “Clear the damned ramp before you get run over!”

Chase hopped down, chivvying the others in front of him. The chill stung his nose and ears, though his down jacket kept his core warm. It reminded him of home, of a brisk, early spring morning. The grass—or the local grass analogue—was damp, dripping with dew where it wasn’t stiff with frost, though he imagined that would melt off when the local sun came over the mountains.

Stiff, plastic tires scraped against the metal ramp, and two four-wheel rovers rumbled out of the depths of the cargo bay. The Colonial Authority logo was splashed across the front of each, a reminder of their benefactors. It was Zack who’d thought of the vehicles just before they’d left, and Chase would have given him an attaboy if it wouldn’t have gone to his head.

Zack drove the lead vehicle, while Alex was at the controls of the second, with Alana Kane beside her in the front seat. The Soong-Tierney security officer sat stiffly, her rifle balanced between her knees, eyes fixed straight ahead. If Chase was any judge of troops, she was nervous, scared even, which wasn’t surprising. He just hoped she could hold it together, that she wouldn’t prove him wrong.

Both vehicles pulled to the edge of the clearing, waiting for them, and Gina and Victor went off immediately. Angel started to follow but paused when she saw Chase still waiting beside the ramp.

“Go ahead,” he told her. “I’ll be right there.”

Priyanka had her arms wrapped around herself as she stepped to the edge of the ramp, her light, shipboard jacket unequal to the task of the weather in the mountain pass.

“You should be able to reach us with the antennas on the rovers,” she said. “This is as close as we could land the ship with the terrain down the trail, but if it’s an emergency, we can hover and lower a boarding ladder.”

“Hopefully, it won’t come to that.” He looked back, making sure no one was in hearing range. “Hey, it’s probably nothing, but I’ve got an itch between my shoulder blades.”

“Maybe you should get your girlfriend to scratch it,” she suggested drily and he glared at her.

“You know what I mean.”

“You think the aliens left something behind?” she wondered, eyebrows shooting upward. “Or maybe the Sunkillers did?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “All I’m saying is, don’t be sitting back here drinking coffee and clipping your toenails.”

She made a face and shot him a bird.

“You always hated when I clipped my toenails in bed. But I never once complained about your snoring.” Pri stood on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “Be careful. You sucked as a boyfriend, but you’ve been a damned good friend.”

“You, too.” He swallowed hard at the words. They sounded too much like goodbye.

* * *

The headlights of the rover were high-power LEDs, yet they barely penetrated the shadowed darkness of the mountain trail, casting the encroaching trees in a sinister, looming aspect. Night-vision goggles hung from a strap around Chase’s neck, but he resisted an urge to pull them up, knowing the headlight glare would make them unusable. If the CA had provided infrared illuminators for the vehicles, they would have been more useful, but what else could he expect from a space navy?

Yet through the depths of the darkness, there was motion and life. Things dark and furry flittering through the leaves and detritus of the forest floor, startling but harmless, and other things much larger and less harmless lumbered away from the approaching rovers with a crash of breaking branches. Their exact shape wasn’t clear, but they teased at the edge of Chase’s mind, filling the vague forms with the labels of the animals he’d grown up with—moose, elk, bear, wolf. And that might not be too far from the truth, given what the AI’s had told them about the People using Earth life as a basis for the planets they’d re-engineered.

His fingers squeezed the pistol grip of his carbine, and he imagined the Alexandrian equivalent of a grizzly bear.

“You sure we’re going the right way?” Zack asked, raising his voice to be heard over the rattle and jostle of the oversized tires on the rocky trail. “This ain’t much of a road and it’s getting narrower every mile.”

A low-hanging branch smacked Chase in the arm as if in support of Zack’s statement, reminding him of his duties to guide them. He peeled off the fingertips of his right-hand glove and touched the isolated bits of bare skin against the Gatekeeper, bracing himself as if he was about to anchor a tug-of-war. He could almost feel the burn of the imaginary rope against his palms as the Gatekeeper yanked at his consciousness, fighting for control. An involuntary grunt escaped clenched teeth but he’d set his metaphorical feet and held fast.

He didn’t see the alien, wasn’t transported to some ancient planet, but he heard the still, small voice and its undisguised threat.

You can’t fight me forever.

Watch me, asshole. Now if you don’t want to fail your programmers, tell me how to get to this Archive.

It wasn’t as if the AI had provided a GPS screen with a big red arrow for Chase to follow. Instead, it reminded him of driving his pickup truck home from school, following a route he’d traveled thousands of times. He pulled his fingertips away and zipped up the top of the bag.

“Yeah, we’re going the right way,” he assured Zack. “It’s another couple miles. Might get a little thick.”

It did. Twice, they had to stop the vehicles to drag fallen trees off the trail, one of them heavy enough that it took all seven of them to move it. Two miles took them nearly fifteen minutes to drive and halfway through, the dull gray light of dawn began to penetrate the cloud cover and the forest canopy. The barren light wasn’t bright enough to reveal the details of the boreal woods, but the headlights no longer seemed as impotent and the rocks and fallen branches became more visible and easier to avoid.

The trees began to thin out after another mile, the trail less cramped and claustrophobic, and gradually, as the light sharpened, Chase began to realize that the dark shapes rising into the gray sky weren’t pines or aspens a hundred yards away. They were twisted, broken alien spires a mile distant.

“I guess you aren’t full of shit after all,” Zack said, slowing the rover to a crawl, staring upward in awe. “This is the right way.”

“I’ve seen those before,” Angel said, leaning forward from the back seat, her hand resting on Chase’s shoulder. “In the visions when I connect with the Navigator.”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. It was the same city but not the same. Time had taken its toll even on the miraculous construction of the People. They hadn’t collapsed, but bits had peeled off, broken away, the neglected remains of a forgotten people, towering tombstones conquered and overgrown by nature.

Sort of. The forest had definitely encroached on the city, but it hadn’t quite taken it over. There was a clear line of demarcation, though it wasn’t obvious until they were nearly on top of the structures. It was as if the ground itself was poisoned, not so much as a blade of grass penetrating through the hard-packed dirt. He toyed with the idea that the place was protected by some sort of force field, but the snow gathered in the concave niches of the spires put the lie to the notion.

“That’s not just dirt,” Angel said when he mentioned it to her. “I think it’s something like pavement. But not. Like they somehow baked the dirt into pavement.”

The base of the city was more like the foundation of a single building, an unbroken wall, yet not a straight one. Nothing about the city was straight and Chase’s head hurt just looking at the twists and turns of the place. Even with the burgeoning dawn, the edges of the wall seemed cloaked in the shadows, his eyes sliding off the lines of it as if it was just too far outside his experience for a human brain to process.

“Okay,” Zack said, bringing the rover to a halt. “Now what?”

“There.” Victor was right beside them, which meant he had to have jumped out of the vehicle behind them before it had even come to a complete stop. He was connected to the Emissary with one hand, the other pointing off to their right. Following his gesture, Chase found the entrance he’d missed on his first scan.

It was easy to see why he’d missed it, more a matter of his perception than the opening being hidden. He’d been searching for a regular shape—a rectangle, an ovoid, even a triangle. This was more reminiscent of a lightning bolt carved out of solid darkness, jagged and looking more like a shadow cast by a ridge built into the wall. Nothing was visible through that ragged blackness, an impenetrable mystery.

One thing wasn’t a mystery, though—the entrance was far too narrow to get a rover through it.

“I guess we walk from here,” Alana Kane said, slipping her carbine sling over her shoulder, settling the weapon into a low-ready position. She pulled her night-vision goggles into place and looked back at Chase, a bug-eyed monster. “Want me to walk point in front of the kid?”

He really didn’t, but he also preferred gung-ho Kane to nerve-wracked Kane.

“Go ahead. Alex, you and Zack bring up the rear.”

“What are we expecting to find in here, Sarge?” Zack asked, casually checking the load of his magazine.

Chase grinned, though there was no humor behind it.

“The end, Zack. We’re expecting to find the end.” He racked a round into the chamber of his rifle. “And don’t call me Sarge.”

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29

“There aren’t any spiders in here, are there?” Gina said, her voice hushed as if they were in a cathedral. “I hate spiders.”

“As long as the spiders aren’t six feet tall,” Victor told her, “I think we can handle it.”

Victor seemed pretty cavalier about the possibility of six-foot-tall spiders. Looking around the labyrinthine depths of the city’s interior, Chase was convinced that this was a place where human-sized insects were a distinct possibility. There was no rhyme or reason to the architecture here, no obvious way to get anywhere but the ground floor, and he had an idea that the People might have used some variation of the S-T drive as a kind of anti-gravity elevator, but he couldn’t be sure if it was a memory from the Gatekeeper or something he’d imagined.

If there had been any anti-gravity transportation, it was gone now…along with any furniture the place might once have had. But then, if they’d been able to defy gravity, maybe they hadn’t needed furniture. All that was left was layers of dirt, dust and rotting leaves and a stench that might have been even worse if the chill seeping in from outside hadn’t damped it down. Above them, something fluttered flashing white as it ascended, a bird or a bat or the local equivalent seeking an opening farther up in the structure.

This place had once been a home for the gods themselves and now it was the home of birds and beasts. Chase glanced at Angel, then looked quickly away. With her enhanced optics goggles, she looked as alien and otherworldly as this building.

“Just another tomb, huh?” he said softly and she chuckled.

“This is exactly what I imagined when I decided to become a xenoarchaeologist. Then I spent ten years digging up useless Arborist computer equipment.”

“This place goes on forever,” Alex complained from behind them. “Do we have any idea where this thing is?”

Chase suppressed a sigh, not wanting to interface with the Gatekeeper again but knowing he might have to. Victor came to his rescue.

“Not much further.” He waved in a follow-me gesture. “This way.”

Chase wasn’t sure what he’d expected. A library, that’s what he’d called it, and maybe he’d had visions of endless shelves of golden tablets, some old-timey Christian version of Heaven like the stories his mother had told him as a kid. If he’d thought about it harder, maybe he would have imagined a chair with some sort of helmet on it to read their thoughts and bring up images of every secret of the universe that the People had once known.

He’d certainly thought they’d find it buried under feet of wreckage, another mess to be sorted through like back on Dragon’s Egg or Vishnu. He should have figured that wasn’t going to be the case when he saw how well the city had held up to ten thousand years of neglect. There was no wreckage, no rubble, no loose stones and debris.

Instead, there was a pedestal. Two pedestals, if you counted the one hanging down from the ceiling hundreds of feet overhead, ending abruptly in a smooth capstone just a few feet above the surface of the one coming up from the floor. The thing had been suspended between them once. He didn’t remember how he knew, but he assumed it was a residue of the Gatekeeper. There’d been one of those anti-gravity S-T fields holding it in place, an icon to be visited, revered, worshipped by the People as they passed.

“We should have known,” Gina said, the words filled with awe.

It was another artifact. About the size of the others, but this one was a pyramid, solid white and gleaming from its internal light, like the polished marble on the capstones of the ones at Giza. There was no connection of course. There couldn’t be. The People had evacuated the galaxy millennia before the Egyptian kingdoms had arisen.

Chase stared at the thing, just a little disappointed. He pulled up his night-vision goggles, looked at it with his naked eyes, and was still disappointed. Not that it wasn’t beautiful, as mysterious and compelling as the rest of the artifacts, but he’d been hoping for something more.

Gina though, she seemed fascinated by it, taking a step closer, stretching out her hand.

“No!” Victor snapped, grabbing her by the shoulder. She looked back at him, her own goggles pulled down, her eyes wide and white. Victor took his own set off and shook his head. “Don’t touch it.”

“Is it like the others, then?” Angel asked, fingers straying near the artifact in her bag but then drawing away quickly. “The first person who touches it will bond with it?”

Victor still had his hand on the Emissary, and when he spoke, it was both of them saying the words.

“It will bond with the first to touch it,” he agreed, “but no, it’s not like the others. This one…there’s too much. Too much knowledge, too much power. The being who exists within is equally complex and powerful—they have to be in order to guide us through to anything useful. When it takes over, there will be no room left for the mind of the human host. Whoever bonds with the Archive will be completely subsumed, their memories buried beneath the weight of hundreds of thousands of years of data. They’ll be gone forever.”

“Got it,” Zack said, scowling at the pyramid shape. “Don’t touch the Archive.”

“What the hell good is it, then?” Alex demanded, waving at the thing. “Who’s gonna volunteer to have their brain wiped to interface with this damned thing?”

“That’s not our problem,” Chase told her, circling around the pedestal, trying to get a look at the Archive from every angle. Nothing seemed to be holding it in place. “Our job is to get it to the Colonial Authority and let them handle it.”

“Someone will volunteer,” Angel assured Alex. “It’s the fate of every man, woman and child, everyone they ever loved.”

“Yeah,” Zack agreed, the cynicism of an old soldier thick in his tone. “There’s always some sucker who’ll throw themselves on a grenade.” He smirked at Alex. “You were a Marine, you must have known people like that.”

Alex glared at the big man, and Chase winced. That was a bit too close to home, since her husband had sacrificed his life to save her.

“I’d do it,” Gina said, an odd note to her words. Her eyes were still locked on the Archive, its pure, white glow reflected in them. “I mean,” she clarified, shaking her head as if the spell had been broken, “if I didn’t have any family or anything and they asked me. I’d do it.”

“Well, you do have family, little sister,” Alex reminded her pointedly.

“Right. I was just saying if.”

“Is it safe to touch it with gloves?” Chase asked Victor.

“Maybe.” The kid didn’t seem convinced. Or maybe it was the Emissary who was doubtful. “To be safe, I’d just push a bag or something down around it and carry it out.”

“Copy that.” Chase motioned to Zack, and the man nodded, then shrugged out of the backpack he’d brought with him from the ship. Zack grimaced as he opened it and emptied out half a dozen ration packs onto the floor.

“Jesus Christ,” Alex muttered. “How long did you think we’d be in here?”

“They’re for all of us,” the big man said with a trace of defensiveness. He ripped open the side pouches on the pack and pulled out three loaded rifle magazines, then shoved them into his cargo pockets. “I didn’t know if anyone might want lunch.” He handed the pack off to Chase and bent down to collect one of the meals, then ripped it open, grabbed a candy bar, and stuffed it in his pocket. “Besides, I get hungry.”

Chase pushed back the top flap of the pack, then loosened the ties and opened it wide. He let his rifle dangle on its sling, approaching the pyramid-shaped artifact as if it was a rabid animal he needed to trap in a sack.

“Be careful,” Angel told him.

“I wish I’d thought of that,” he rasped, mouth dryer than could be explained by dehydration.

Chase kept his gloved hands on the fabric of the backpack, being careful to let nothing but the nylon touch the artifact.

Yeah. A tenth of an inch of nylon is gonna keep me safe from the brain-eating alien machine.

But he felt nothing as the material slipped around the thing. It was less than two feet tall at the tip and maybe the same breadth at the base and it barely fit inside the pack, but when he pulled the cover down and tipped the artifact on its side, sliding it in, he was able to close it. He set the backpack on the pedestal and backed away a step, expecting the device to start glowing brighter and shoot out mind-control rays.

Nothing. He let out the breath he’d been holding and heard more than one other long exhalation that proved he hadn’t been the only one nervous. Chase fastened the buckles and tightened them down, then picked the thing up by one shoulder strap. It was lighter than he’d thought, no heavier than the Emissary had been, which seemed wrong, somehow, given the weight of the fate it carried.

“I’ll carry it,” Kane offered quickly, stepping forward, but Gina had already moved ahead of her, holding out a hand.

“You’ve already got that tactical pack thing,” Gina told her, nodding at the day pack on Kane’s back, loaded with water and spare magazines. “I don’t even have a gun. I’ll take it.”

Chase shrugged and helped her slip into the pack. She had to adjust the shoulder straps since it had been arranged for Zack, who had a hundred pounds and a foot of height on her, but she grinned at him, pulling on the straps to show it was steady.

“I can’t believe it,” Angel said, her hand on Chase’s shoulder as if she needed to support herself. She smiled up at him, relief stripping strain and stress from her features. “We got it. After everything, we got it.”

Motion, jerky and sudden, just out the corner of Chase’s vision, and a collective gasp. When he turned away from Angel, he blinked, sure he was lost in some fever dream induced by the Gatekeeper. Kane had a pistol in her hand and was holding it to Gina’s head, an arm wrapped around the girl’s neck.

“If anyone moves,” Kane said, the words enunciated clearly and precisely, “I will shoot her in the head.”

“What the fuck, Kane?” Zack said, his face darkening with anger, his right hand creeping to the grip of his M27.

“Keep your hand away from the rifle,” she warned him. “All of you, put them on the ground. Now.” She spun on Angel, Victor and Chase. “And you three, drop the duffle bags. I’ve heard stories about what those things can do and I’m not going to let you melt my brain.”

Chase tried not to give into the rage filling his gut, just put on a mask of calm as he unslung his rifle and set it on the floor, followed by the shoulder bag.

“What’s your play here, Kane?” he asked her. “You think Pri and the others are just going to give up the Tamar, give you a ride back to Earth?”

Her look wasn’t desperate, it was pitying. And maybe a little guilty.

“I’m sorry,” she told them. “I really am. But Greg—First Sergeant Toretto—he’s not dead. Hart-Klein is holding him prisoner, and if I don’t deliver this thing to them, they’ll kill him. Slowly. And they’ll put it on video and make sure I see it. They told me they would and if you’ve ever met James Hart, you’d believe it.” She pulled Gina back away from them a few steps, then wrapped her right arm around the girl, shoving the gun under her chin, while she reached into her chest pouch with the left, pulling out a phone. She pushed a button and Chase’s gut roiled as he realized what that meant. “Mr. Haricot,” she said, “I have it. Come get me.”

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30

“When the hell are they gonna call?” Adrian Hill complained, scrolling idly through the menu system of the ship’s radar and lidar display screen, running yet another functions check. Pri thought it was the third he’d run in the last hour, though she supposed it was better than the copilot playing solitaire. “You think their comms won’t work through the…whatever? I mean, the ruins or whatever that was we saw from orbit?”

“I’m sure I have no idea, Adrian,” Pri told him, tapping her fingers rhythmically against the arm of her chair, a foot propped up on the console. “I’ve never been to an alien city before so I’m not up on their cellular plans.”

Pri squinted at the dull gray sky above them, wondering if it was getting lighter or if that was just wishful thinking. She hoped the snow didn’t pick up. Chase and the others getting lost in a blizzard wasn’t even worth considering.

“You don’t have to be such a grouch,” he said, scowling. “I got feelings too, you know. I’m worried about Chase and Zack.”

Pri eyed him doubtfully.

“I knew you had feelings,” she confessed, “but I thought they mostly involved alcohol and prostitutes.”

Hill shot her a bird, but Aguilar was laughing, a rumbling sound like an avalanche in the mountains.

“Aw, come on, Cap,” Aguilar said, “don’t be so hard on Hill. He’s had it rough since this whole business started and we stopped being able to hit the finer establishments. There’s gotta be at least two dozen working girls from here to Gateway that are noticing a steep drop in income these last few months.”

“We’re on an alien planet,” Hill said, shaking his head, “with like, ancient ruins and shit, and our friends are off trying to save the galaxy, and all you two can do is ride my ass. Don’t you have any, you know, gravitas?”

“Gravitas?” Aguilar hooted. “Holy shit, where’d you read that one?”

Pri tried to keep a straight face, but she couldn’t restrain the laugh burbling up inside her. There’d been way too much death and near-death lately.

“Oh, shit!” Hill blurted, straightening in his seat, eyes going wide. “We got fucking incoming!” He jabbed a finger at the screen. “Vampire! Vampire! Vampire!”

Pri didn’t speak, didn’t think, just acted. Vampire was incoming missiles, and there was only one certain defense against that—speed. She slid the throttle open, feeding a sudden burst of energy to the S-T drive, and jerked the steering yoke upward.

Leaving the drive powered up while the others were gone had been a risk. The coils could overheat and even fracture under the strain of a constant charge without feeding that power into an activated drive, but Chase had told her to stay ready, and however much shit she gave him for being a groundpounder, she’d still listened to him.

For once, he’d been right. The Tamar exploded off the mountainside in a spray of snow, shaking and tumbling as the landing gear slowly rose back into the fuselage, but the aerodynamic instability was lost in the shockwave of their landing zone exploding.

“Jesus!” Aguilar swore, grabbing at the side of his chair as the ship tumbled sideways, rocked by a surge of turbulence as a wave of hot gas rose from the missile impacts.

Hill squawked and grabbed at his seat restraints, but Pri didn’t have that luxury. She’d locked her boots around her chair’s center column when she’d blasted off, and the muscles in her calves spasmed with effort as she fought to stay upright.

“Sitrep!” she barked at Hill, the word exploding from her gut like a kiai in martial arts class, focusing her energy on keeping the ship level.

“We got two ships!” Hill gasped, buckling his restraint harness. “Gunship on our six, coming up fast, and a transport behind her, heading for the LZ!”

“How the hell did they find us here?” Aguilar growled, pulling himself up into his chair. “How could they?”

Pri ignored the questions, partially because she had no idea but mostly because they were irrelevant. Only two things mattered right now, and the ship on their six was one of them. The other…

“Chief, get on the horn, try to raise Chase.” She’d wriggled one arm into her harness and now she worked on the other. This was going to be a bumpy ride. “Tell them they got enemy inbound, and they need to get to cover.” She shook her head as she buckled her harness in place. “And tell them they’re on their own.”

* * *

“Kane,” Chase said, trying not to let the panic seep upward from his stomach into his words, “you’re making a mistake. I know this Sean Haricot. He’s not going to let your friend go. You’re both loose ends and neither Haricot nor his boss like loose ends.”

If Kane had heard him, she gave no indication, the barrel of her pistol still digging into Gina’s temple. Gina winced, trying to pull away but coming up against the older woman’s left arm. Her bicep might have been corded steel, unyielding and strong.

“Get on your stomachs,” Kane barked. “All of you. Get on your stomachs and put your hands behind your head.”

Chase moved slowly, going down to one knee, and Gina got the sense he was stalling for time, hoping for an opening.

“We can get him back,” Zack said, and Gina felt Kane’s jerky motion as the Soong-Tierney security officer looked over at the big man. He was down on his knees, palm resting against the caked dirt of the floor, but his eyes were locked on Kane’s. “We have the Colonial Authority, the Alliance, the Union, the United States, hell, even the Chinese on our side. They’ll make Hart give him up—he won’t have any choice.”

“It’s my word against his,” Kane said, shaking her head. “There’ll be no proof Greg survived at all. Now get on your stomach and shut up. I’m not going to say it again. You can rush me and sacrifice the girl, but even then, you’re not getting out of here, not past the troops that are landing right now. Your best bet is to just stay here until they have the Archive and they’re gone.”

“You told them where we were going,” Chase said, fixing her with a glare, down almost flat. “Before we jumped, you signaled them somehow.”

“They gave me a burst transmitter,” Kane confirmed. “Now shut up and stay here. I’ll do what I can to make sure they leave you alone.”

Kane walked backward, dragging Gina along with her, the soles of their boots scraping against the dirt as they walked flat-footed. Gina thought about throwing herself to the ground and giving the others a chance to get a shot at Kane, but the woman’s grip was too tight and all she would accomplish would be to choke herself. She glanced around in desperation, breath catching in her chest with the beginnings of panic until her gaze settled on Victor.

He was lying flat on his stomach, but his head was turned toward her and he seemed preternaturally calm, as if he were still interfaced with the Emissary even though it was three feet away from him. The calm spread like warmth radiating outward from a fire and Gina’s breathing steadied, confidence filling her, though she wasn’t sure what reason she had to feel it.

She had to act. Hart-Klein could not be allowed to get their hands on the Archive. It was bad enough resigning the fate of everyone to the bureaucracy of the Colonial Authority, but even that was better than handing it to the whim of a corporate oligarch. Still, Gina waited, went with the pull on her neck, keeping her feet beneath her.

There was a turn she remembered, just a hundred yards from where they’d found the pedestal, where the interior walls curved around, taking them back toward the entrance. They’d be out of sight of the others, which might mean…

It did. Kane turned her to the front, walking forward, the older woman’s left arm coming off Gina’s throat, grabbing at the top handle of the backpack to control her, still glancing back every few steps to make sure they weren’t being followed. Gina felt the other woman relax her grip just slightly, almost as if Kane had forgotten that she was a thinking, scheming human being and fell into the trap of considering her nothing but a hostage.

It was a mistake Gina was going to make her pay for, thanks to Alex and Gray. They’d taught her combinations of self-defense moves to react to any situation, and one of those was a gun to her head. Not that they’d recommended the move. They’d both stressed to her that it was a desperation move, a last-ditch effort, but if there was a better time for desperation, she hadn’t thought of it.

The first priority is to move your head out of the line of fire. Gray’s voice because he was always the calm one. Alex would yell too much.

She stepped to the left, away from the gun and half a step back into Kane’s shoulder.

Control the gun. Lock the arm, push the barrel away from you.

That was easier said than done. Kane was strong, her forearm a bar of iron, but Gina slammed her elbow into the woman’s wrist, knocking the gun aside and deadening her own arm all the way down to the fingertips.

Shit. She’d been about to grab the wrist, but that was out now and Kane was already moving, the surprise of Gina’s assault subsumed by years of training. Time for more desperation.

Gina was lighter, shorter, but leverage was everything. She threw herself into Gina’s gun hand and wrapped the wrist under her arm, taking them both to the ground, her shoulder impacting square into Kane’s chest. The air went out of the older woman and the handgun clattered free on a bare patch of floor before landing in a clump of dirt. Gina let go of Kane’s arm and lunged for the fallen Heckler and Koch 9mm, but the mercenary’s left hand was still wrapped in the handle of the backpack, jerking her up short.

Gina’s left arm slipped out of the strap, the right still caught and spinning her around. She landed hard, her right arm coming most of the way out of the backpack and she barely had the presence-of-mind to grab the strap before Kane snatched the Archive away from her. The gun was only a few feet away, but Gina’s instinct was to protect the Archive, to hold onto the backpack.

Down on one knee, she grabbed at the top of the pack, trying to push herself backward and yank it away from Kane’s grip, grunting like Chilly when he’d tried to max out at deadlifts in the Gateway employee gym. Kane’s eyes were wide, her face flush, and her expression was a wounded animal fighting for its life.

There were so many things Gina could have done, so many self-defense moves she’d been taught, but none of them penetrated the adrenaline fog over her thoughts, the tunnel vision closing in on that wild-eyed face. All she could think to do was hold onto the bag, and if Kane was thinking at all, it went no further than the idea of trying to pull it away.

Something ripped, and Gina fell backward, only dimly aware that what had torn was the backpack. The Archive tumbled out of the remains of the pack and landed with a solid thump in the leaves and dirt, its white balefire a glittering star in the dim shadows of the abandoned city. Gina didn’t think about what she was doing, didn’t consider Victor’s warning, just rolled onto her side and threw herself at the alien artifact, her only consideration keeping it away from the other woman. Her fingertips were inches from the flowing, satin surface of the thing, drawn in as if it had its own gravitational field pulling her inexorably inward.

Alana Kane was a half-second faster.

Kane grabbed the Archive by the base and rolled out of the way with it clasped to her chest, landing in a crouch facing Gina. Kane’s face went blank, her eyes fixed on the Archive, mouth dropping open. The thing had been pressed tightly to her chest, but somehow it kept going, merging with her, disappearing beneath her clothes, her skin, without leaving so much as a scorch mark in evidence of its passing.

She screamed, a lost soul consumed by the fires of Hell.

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31

“We can’t keep this shit up forever,” Hill reminded her, an annoying and useless Jiminy Cricket on Pri’s shoulder, telling her what she already knew. “All they have to do is wait us out until they take out Chase and the others.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Pri ground out, threading the needle of the mountain pass, massive, snow-capped peaks turning into blurs way too close on either side of them.

The enemy gunship was larger, more powerful, the best that Hart-Klein Consolidated had to offer, and the only thing that had prevented it from wiping them out like a boot stomping a bug were the mountains. They stretched halfway across the continent, and she’d followed them like a topographical map, the sonic booms of the Tamar causing serial avalanches as they went. It might almost be beautiful, the falling swathes of snow glistening in the morning sun, but she barely noticed it, acknowledging its existence only to be sure it wasn’t a threat to her ship or on the off-chance it might be a weapon against the enemy.

It wasn’t.

“This guy’s good,” Aguilar said. The Tamar shuddered as the rear Vulcans growled, spitting out 20mm slugs.

He was good. Combat pilots had a set pattern they flew to avoid rear-turret fire, and Aguilar knew it better than anyone, but the Chief hadn’t been able to score as much as a single hit on the HKC gunship. This guy was toying with them, just waiting for the mountains to run out and with them, their cover. And Pri knew exactly how much longer they had, the end of the mountain range coming ever closer on the mapping overlay of the main screen.

“What’s he gonna do, Cap?” Hill asked softly, for once actually sounding worried. “When we get out of the mountains, I mean.”

“He’s close enough to catch us,” she admitted.

The friction of atmospheric drag had saved their asses more than once, preventing enemy ships from gaining ground on them and giving her time to spin the ship and use the 30mm at close range. But not this time. The gunship had dropped almost on top of them at the LZ, and now only a couple klicks separated the two spacecraft.

Wish we had a 30mm mounted on the ass of this thing. It wouldn’t have worked, of course, mostly due to the counter-vibration it would have set up way too close to the drive coil, but it was a nice thought.

“He’s got enough juice under the hood to pass us up,” she concluded. “And when that happens, he can shove a missile right down our throats and there’s no way we’ll be able to avoid it.” She swallowed hard, looking at the map and the readout beside it. “We got about ten seconds.”

“Split-S?” Hill suggested.

She started to answer, then gritted her teeth and banked the Tamar to port, following the curve of the mountains. There was nothing like this on Earth, no mountain range that spanned the length of a continent very nearly from ice cap to sea, and she imagined a very high-end resort being built here one day, a ski getaway for the rich. Probably James Hart would make the first run down the slopes, laughing at the thought of some raggedy-ass group of mercenaries who thought they could stop him.

“No,” she replied after she’d leveled the ship out. “He’s too close. He’d nail us while we were climbing.”

“Death spiral,” Aguilar said. “We could try that.”

She nearly laughed. Death spiral was a maneuver they’d invented between the three of them during the war, involving cutting power to the drive and dropping out of the sky fast enough to get a shot at the enemy’s exposed belly. Pri had nearly been court-martialed the one time they attempted it.

“I’m afraid not, Chief. We’re too low. We’d plow right into the dirt before we got a shot off. And he’s not going to give us the time to climb.”

“Well, there’s gotta be something we can do!” Hill exploded, nearly distracting her enough to draw her attention away from the control yoke. “We can’t just give up!”

Pri wanted to snap back at him, but she didn’t want the last words she said to her friend to be “shut up, Adrian.” Instead, she stared at the map, at the stretch of open ocean only a few klicks past the mountains. It reminded her of the Kahuku range on Oahu. She’d trained there after flight school under one of the pioneers of space combat, Colonel Nathan Wade. The man had known more about the Soong-Tierney drive than any engineer, more than Mara Soong-Tierney as it had turned out. He’d shared the secrets with her and her class in the brief time she’d had under his command, before the war. He’d died during an Alliance raid on Farragut.

One of those secrets had been about the ocean. Something she’d never even had the chance to test in training, much less use in combat. A smile spread slowly across her face.

“You know the turbulence an S-T drive creates in the air behind it, right, Adrian?”

“Yeah?” he grunted, still sounding upset over the prospect of dying.

“What do you think it does to water?”

They broke free of the mountains, streaking out over an abbreviated shoreline and Priyanka shoved the control yoke downward. It felt like suicide, diving this close to the massive waves breaking on the rocky coast, sprays of water covering the nose of the ship when she dipped a hair too low, each one a kick in the gut, rocking the Tamar from side to side. Hill screeched in terror and now she did say it, even if it might be the last words he heard.

“Shut up, Adrian! Keep your eyes on that damned gunship!”

“He’s right fucking behind us!” Hill told her as if the answer was obvious. “Less than a hundred meters!”

Yeah, the pilot was good…and he knew it. He was hot-shotting, showing off. He could have passed right over them at a safe altitude and ended this all right now, but he had to prove to her who was the best. He came in low right on their ass, and Pri whispered a prayer and took them just a few meters lower.

“What the hell are you doing?” Aguilar asked, and she knew if she’d thrown a scare into the Chief, she’d really accomplished something.

Waves crashed and she stroked the controls to guide the Tamar around them, but most of her attention was fixed on the rear viewscreen at the corner of the main display. The gunship was so close, Pri could read the stencil across the nose.

HKCS-9977 Orion.

The Orion wasn’t military surplus, wasn’t any sort of design that should have been in civilian hands. It was the very latest model of Union Space Force gunship, wedge-shaped and angular, the massive, yawning maw of a rail gun peeking out under the portside of the nose, the missile launch bay on the starboard. It was sophisticated enough that it made her ship look obsolete by comparison, but it couldn’t fight physics.

Priyanka had seen waterspouts before, but she’d never seen a horizontal one. The twisting rope of white froth and green ocean rose out of the turbulent water behind the Tamar and smashed into the bow of the Orion like Poseidon himself had ascended from the depths to take up their cause.

It didn’t destroy the Orion—she hadn’t thought it would. That ship was too well put together. But it did throw her out of control, a tumbling, gyroscopic spin that was almost impossible to recover from. He did. He was good. But it gave Pri time, and she used it, spinning the Tamar end for end, lining up the 30mm cannons nearly point-blank.

Pri had never heard a more beautiful sound in her life than the deep-throated roar of the cannons, and she kept the twin triggers depressed long past the prescribed burst, burning through half their ammo, just to be sure. Depleted uranium speared into the beautiful, deadly HKC gunship, ripping her to shreds and Pri almost felt guilty when the smoke began pouring off her. The Orion yawed and toppled, her drive gone, no more alien magic protecting her from the clutching talons of Newton and Einstein.

A fountain of seawater gushed up from her impact, a fitting tombstone for the pilot.

“At least he made a splash,” Pri murmured. Hill goggled at her and Aguilar laughed with just a hint of hysteria behind it. “Come on,” she told them. “Let’s go pull Chase’s ass out of the fire. Again.”

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32

Chase grabbed up his rifle and rushed after Gina before the echoes of the scream died. It was a banshee wail, the cry of the damned, and a part of him knew what it had to mean, though he pushed that knowledge down and responded with the instincts of a Ranger.

Maybe those instincts were why he’d taken up his rifle but left the Gatekeeper behind. He didn’t realize it until he was a good fifty yards away, and by then it was too late to go back for it. Chase didn’t wait to see who had followed him, just scanned back and forth with his rifle, searching for movement.

There. Gina, rolling onto her side, getting up on one knee. Kane was down, her rifle hanging off her shoulder unnoticed, her arms and legs twitching like she’d touched a live, electric wire, the backpack lying beside her, yawning empty. Chase ran up to Gina, about to offer her a hand, but something caught his eyes, human shapes framed in thermal red advancing up from the entrance. It could have been Pri or her crew, but it wasn’t, and he hadn’t required any alien AI to tell him. It was Hart-Klein.

“Down!” he yelled at Gina, pushing her to the dirt and throwing himself into the prone beside her just before the first shots echoed through the confines of the massive chamber.

The report of the weapons was a signature, a regional accent Chase could identify immediately. FN F2000 bullpups, a Belgian-made weapon. No suppressors. Standard-issue on the HKC station, and these troops had to have come straight from there, alerted by Kane. It was Haricot.

Chase wasn’t wearing a helmet, but the enhanced vision goggles were linked to the electronic sights mounted on his M27, and when he touched the trigger, a crimson reticle flashed to life, hanging over the point man of the incoming squad. Chase stroked the trigger, breathing out the mnemonic he’d learned the first time he’d been handed a full-auto assault rifle.

“Trigger control.”

He held the trigger back until the last syllable, then let it go, just long enough to fire a three-round burst. His target was less than a hundred meters away, close enough that Chase would have been pissed at himself if he’d managed to miss. He didn’t. The soldier up front didn’t fall immediately, just stumbled to the side, his rifle coming off his shoulder, hands going to his chest. The wounds would likely be fatal, but some people went down like a sack of manure and some took longer to die.

The next one went down immediately, collapsing onto his side, convulsing.

Lung shot. Bad way to go. Not that there were any good ways.

He’d gotten two of them, but that was as far as surprise took him.

“Rush them! There can’t be that many! We have to take them before they get out another exit!” The voice was familiar, one he’d never forget although he’d only heard it briefly a few times. Haricot. Leading from the rear, as usual.

The human shapes were a jumbled mass of red, yellow, and white on thermal, giving up on any sort of tactical formation in an effort to overwhelm Chase and the others, and it might have worked if Zack and Alex hadn’t slid into position on either side of him, each taking their own third of the battlespace and laying down suppressive fire. There was a platoon assaulting their position, outnumbering them ten to one, and if they’d done what Haricot had ordered, it would have worked.

But they were mercenaries, not robots, and most definitely not patriots or zealots fighting for a cause. You could always find people who would kill for money, but it was damned hard to find ones who’d die for money. Three more were DRT as the saying went, Dead Right There, and at least four were wounded and that, apparently, was enough. No order was needed or asked for, no request made, they just began falling back, searching desperately for cover.

Retreating was more dangerous than advancing and another four of the troops stumbled, though two of them got up and limped out of the line of fire, diving behind the seemingly random bits of architecture and ancient machinery and finally returning aimed fire.

Too damned close.

Dirt sprayed up at his face, and Chase ducked his head down, grabbing Kane and pulling her back with him. Her eyes were open but unseeing, her arms and legs still twitching uncontrollably, but she didn’t resist when he grabbed her collar and yanked her along. Her rifle sling slipped off her shoulder, sending the weapon clattering to the ground, and Gina darted in to grab it. Chase tried to remember if any of them had ever showed her how to use an M27, but it quickly became obvious that somebody had because she racked home a round and fired off a burst at the HKC mercs, forcing their heads down. Angel wasn’t there and Chase felt a brief stab of panic before convincing himself that there’d been no threat that could have befallen her if she’d stayed beside the pedestal.

“Get back!” Chase told the others. “Get back around the curve and we’ll make a stand there!”

Zack rushed up beside him and took Kane’s arm, then helped him drag the convulsing woman the fifty meters to the curve in the interior wall while Alex and Gina kept up the suppressive fire. Victor had followed Gina and was adding the spiteful pop of his 9mm to the hoarse stutter of their suppressed carbines. Chase wasn’t sure how much good Victor was doing, but no one shot him in the back on the way to cover and he considered that a win.

Once they were around the curve, Chase fell back onto his side, breathing heavily. Kane wasn’t a light woman. Angel was walking up to them, all three of the duffle bags hanging off her shoulders. She’d stayed to guard the artifacts, he realized, which had been a remarkably sane thing to do, and something he hadn’t even considered.

“Did anyone see another way out of here?” Alex wondered.

“Not from our flyby,” Chase said, then grabbed at Gina’s arm, getting her attention and motioning to Kane. “What the hell happened to her? Where’s the Archive?”

The girl shook her head, her face pale, horror in her eyes as if she couldn’t accept what she’d seen.

“Inside her. It fell out of the pack and when she touched it, it…went into her chest, somehow. Then she screamed and started shaking.”

Her rifle’s bolt was locked open, but she hadn’t seemed to notice. Chase pulled a fresh mag out of Kane’s tactical vest and passed it to Gina. The girl stared at it for a second without comprehension, then seemed to come back to herself and replaced the spent magazine with the fresh one. Sporadic gunfire panged off the other edge of the wall until Haricot yelled distantly for his troops to stop shooting. The echoes of the last shot took two seconds to spend themselves, replaced by silence.

Chase exchanged a look with Zack, and Chase knew the big man was thinking the same thing he was.

“They’re gonna come at us organized this time,” Zack said grimly, reloading his rifle and tossing the expended mag to the ground. “And we ain’t gonna be able to take down three squads of effectives with just four rifles.”

“This place is huge,” Alex observed. “We can lose them in here, get them strung out.”

“And maybe get lost ourselves,” Chase pointed out. “Plus, we gotta haul her around.” He nodded at Kane. She stopped spasming as they watched, her body going limp, eyes closing. She might have been breathing, but it was shallow enough that he would have had to check to be sure. “But you’re right, we can’t take them with just four rifles.”

“How about three rifles?” Angel suggested. Chase turned back to the woman, about to ask what she meant. She held out the Emissary and the Gatekeeper, one in each hand, to Victor and Chase, their combined glows casting her face in an otherworldly light. “Three rifles and the three of us.”

Victor took the Emissary, but Chase hesitated a beat longer, staring at the Gatekeeper in trepidation. He remembered what Victor had done on Dragon’s Egg and the thought made his skin crawl.

“Last time, it took Vic a while to take out that Chinese archaeologist.” It wasn’t what was really bothering him, but it sounded more logical. “We can’t sit and stare at these guys for two minutes while they’re shooting at us.”

“Trust me,” Angel said, pushing the artifact toward him.

Chase searched deep within her dark eyes for the soul behind them, unsure for a heartbeat whether it was Angel or the Navigator who was asking him to trust them. In the end, he decided he was going to have to go on faith. He set his feet and took the Gatekeeper, and the weight of three alien minds crashed in on him like waves on the rocks.

I told you, you can’t fight me. It’s inevitable that we become one.

Chase clenched his jaw and forced his eyes open, determined to view the reality around him rather than the simulation the AI kept trying to force his consciousness into.

“Only two things are inevitable, asshole,” he ground out, saying the words aloud and not caring what the others thought. “Death and taxes. So, unless you’re here to kill me or do my taxes, shut the fuck up and let’s smash some bad guys.”

* * *

“Move!” Sean Haricot hissed, wanting to scream at the troops he’d brought from HKC station, wishing there’d been time to get someone better. “Get up there before we lose them!”

A few calls, a couple days, that’s all it would have taken. With as much money as Hart was promising for accomplishing this mission, Haricot could have attracted the best talent on Earth. Hell, dangle enough money in front of them and he was pretty sure he could have convinced a few SF types from the Union and the Alliance to come along.

But there hadn’t been a couple days. Haricot had been forced to cobble the mission together in mere hours, to have them shipboard and ready to jump the second they’d received the transmission from that useless idiot Kane. Coming up with the idea to embed her with Chase’s team had won Haricot major points with Hart, along with the promise of an executive position in HKC if he could pull this off. If this collection of screw-ups cost him his payday, he’d make sure not a one of them made it out of this place alive.

Their visors were down, so Haricot couldn’t see their faces, but the hesitation when they passed by the dead and dying was obvious. Nearly a full squad dead or badly wounded enough to be out of the fight, and they hadn’t so much as scratched Weston or the others. Haricot hadn’t worn a helmet. He liked to be able to hear what was coming, liked the freedom of movement, so he’d stuck with the latest, high-dollar enhanced optics, barely bigger than a pair of sunglasses, a gift from James Hart.

They cost more than you make in a month. Don’t break them.

Apart from the glasses, his face was bare, so when he grabbed the platoon sergeant, a wiry little Algerian with skin tanned and weathered by the climates of a dozen different worlds, he knew the man could see the scowl on Haricot’s face.

“Sgt. Betancourt, once this assault starts, there’s no retreat. I don’t care how many casualties you’re taking, we have to get that artifact. Understood?”

“You’ll make sure my family is taken care of?” Betancourt asked.

The question wasn’t one he would have expected from a hardened corporate mercenary, but Haricot didn’t miss a beat.

“Of course. You have my word.”

It was hard to keep a straight face through the promise, but the Algerian nodded and jogged to the front of the formation. When Betancourt spoke again, Haricot only heard it through his earbud over the radio.

“Bounding overwatch by squads. I want the overwatch element laying down suppressive fire—short bursts, but keep their heads down. The bounding squad is to concentrate on moving. Don’t fire unless you have a clear target, and make damned sure you don’t shoot one of us!” He made a hand motion toward the curve in the wall ahead. “First squad, move up!”

The man did know his stuff, Haricot had to admit, and the others seemed to respect him. Haricot found himself hoping the little man would make it. Though he wouldn’t lose any sleep if none of them did.

Haricot couldn’t follow the rhythm of the advance and didn’t try. He’d never been infantry and experience as an assassin didn’t count. He did the smart thing and let them go first, wincing as they opened fire. Not that Sean Haricot was any stranger to gunfire, but the acoustics in this place were unreal, reflecting each jackhammer report back at him from every direction.

More of his soldiers went down in the first assault group. Three, then four. Haricot felt nothing but annoyance at their incompetence and sped up, not eager to be in front but anxious to make sure they accomplished the mission.

There. He could see them now, tucked behind protrusions in this nonsensical place, one of them hiding in the shadow of some kind of column that ran from the floor all the way up into the spires above them. Haricot brought his rifle to his shoulder, not at all interested in getting shot but very much willing to take one of these troublesome amateurs out. A patch of gray body armor got in the way, and Haricot cursed the HKC security trooper who’d interrupted his shot.

Wait. He stopped in his tracks, eyes narrowing. Something was wrong. There should have been more of them. He only saw three firing back, though they were entrenched well enough to make things difficult for the HKC force. Another was sprawled out a few yards behind their position and that was encouraging. At least his people had managed to hit someone…assuming it wasn’t Kane.

But where the hell were the others? And where was that glow coming from?

The three of them stepped out from the shadows, seemingly unworried about the bullets flying, their faces lit from below by the artifacts carried at chest level. Lee, Cortez and Weston. And they wouldn’t be taking this risk unless they were sure it was worth it.

Shit.

Haricot dropped his rifle on its sling, not even trying to shoot them. There was no guarantee he’d even get hit with so many of his own people in the way, no guarantee any of his troops had even seen them, as locked in as they were on the shooters. But there was something else. Maybe he’d never been infantry, but in his years pulling dirty tricks on colony worlds, he had developed a real affection for explosives. Haricot ripped the grenade off his tactical vest, pulled the pin, and whipped it overhand in a high arc.

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33

You have to let me take control.

“No,” Chase murmured. “Fuck you.”

The words were harsh, but it was a losing battle. The energy was building up inside him, around him, connecting him to Victor and Angel despite the distance between them. They’d spread out and waited until the HKC mercenary platoon had all moved out into the open, until they’d become fixated on the firing positions Zack, Alex, and Gina had taken up, before they stepped out of hiding.

The energy was from the artifacts, but the focus had to come from them…from them as one. The only way to let that happen was to open himself to the Gatekeeper and let the thing work through him. He’d told Angel he trusted her, he believed in her, and this what she wanted.

“Fine, you glorified alien calculator. Do your stuff.”

Memories that weren’t his flashed before his eyes.

Angel’s parents beamed proudly down at her as she blew out the candles of her cake on her fourth birthday, surrounded by the kids of their coworkers, cheering, laughing. The smell and taste of her mother’s blood, the look of horror on her father’s face. Her adopted parents in the crowd, watching as she graduated high school…then just her adopted mother there for her bachelor’s after the cancer had claimed him.

Victor at school, second grade, crying on the ground as an older boy kicked him in the leg over and over. Graduating first in his class from high school, but all he could think of was his ex-girlfriend and how she’d broken up with him for one of the baseball players and now that guy was on a scholarship to UCLA and she actually believed he’d stay faithful.

Victor when he’d met Dr. Evangeline Cortez for the first time. The infatuation he’d had with her, the frustration when he realized she’d never reciprocate, the shame when he couldn’t stop following her around like a lost puppy anyway.

Victor when he first touched the Emissary, first felt the power and significance and thought he might actually mean something in the grand purpose of the universe. Victor when he first kissed Gina and realized he was more than just a vessel for the alien AI, that he might be important to someone else for who he was.

Angel when she finally believed she loved Chase. When she let loose the knot around her feelings she’d kept tied so tight for so many years. The fear of losing herself when she’d bonded with the Navigator…the fear of losing him.

The visions could have lasted days, years, but somewhere deep inside, he knew they’d occupied a fraction of a second, the space between the pulling of a trigger and the detonation of a primer. The eyeblink between life and death.

Power erupted from them, through them, through the artifacts. A wave, yet discrete packets of energy as well, and if he couldn’t understand how that was possible, he knew it was okay because Victor told him the best scientists in the world couldn’t understand it either. Waves or particles, it impacted the incoming platoon of HKC soldiers and spread out like the shockwave of an explosion, like birdshot during pheasant season. Where it touched them, they dropped, marionettes with their strings cut. As dead as if they’d each had a bullet through the head.

He stared at them in that time between moments, fascinated and horrified, knowing if he took their helmets off, they’d all look like the Alliance archaeologist Victor had killed, their minds wiped away down to the last neuron. So fascinated, so horrified that he didn’t notice the grenade until it landed ten feet in front of them, spiraling across a patch of bare floor.

“Down!” Zack bellowed, rolling into a ball.

Chase dropped. There was no time for anything else, no time to concentrate on the energy of the artifacts, not even time to think of grabbing Angel and making sure she was safe. Just time to drop straight down, holding the Gatekeeper ahead of him like a shield.

The world exploded.

* * *

Haricot screamed again, rubbing at his eyes, then shook his head, trying to get rid of the water-in-the-ear feeling. The dirt was cold on his face, and he started, realizing he was lying on his side, sprawled on the floor.

What the fuck happened?

The colored floaters obscuring his vision cleared slowly, enough for him to make out the bodies littering the floor twenty yards ahead of him. They were all down, the whole platoon, even Betancourt, unmoving. Maybe some were still alive, but he wouldn’t have put any money on it. Two minutes ago, he’d convinced himself that he wouldn’t care if they died, but now he felt alone and exposed, no buffer between him and his enemies.

I should run.

Wait…hadn’t he thrown a grenade?

Haricot squinted, rubbing again at his eyes, and abruptly realized he’d lost his expensive glasses. Hart wouldn’t be happy about that, but if he got the Archive, he was sure all would be forgiven. His vision cleared and his eyes adjusted to the dark, and finally he could see that his people weren’t the only ones down. Weston’s team was laid out, a couple of them moaning and clutching at their heads, others rolling from side to side, clutching at injuries. But not Weston. He was struggling to his feet, the artifact he’d stolen from James Hart no longer in his hand, having fallen off to the side.

Haricot grinned like a stalking wolf sniffing out a wounded elk. He’d dropped his rifle, but he wouldn’t need it. His sidearm would be plenty.

It had taken far too long, but he was finally going to rid himself of this pain in the ass.

* * *

How am I not dead?

It was the first coherent thought Chase was able to form after the blast and even through the pain and the haze of concussion, he knew what had happened. Someone had thrown a grenade. It had hit closer to him than anyone, and he wondered again how he’d survived.

The answer to that question was off to the side, dug into the dirt like it weighed a hundred pounds, not the five or six it felt like when he carried it. The Gatekeeper. Somehow, it had kept the grenade fragments from hitting him, though it hadn’t been able to do anything about the shockwave. Or the sound. His earbuds worked as noise-canceling plugs, but despite their protection, all he could hear was a hollow whistling.

Chase felt at his eyes and touched bare skin. His goggles were gone, his rifle too, and the glow from the artifacts only illuminated upward, the floor beneath them a dark mystery, along with the whereabouts of his M27 and his night-vision gear.

Angel.

She was alive, moving, scrabbling on the ground, and Chase was hit by what he knew was a premature surge of relief. He’d seen too many soldiers live through explosions, only to die minutes later from unseen internal bleeding. Victor was up on his knees, feeling around for the Emissary as if he couldn’t see the thing sitting in the shadows a few yards away.

He had to check on the others, had to get to his feet, which turned out to be a major undertaking. His balance had taken a beating along with his ears and his head spun when he pushed up on one knee.

Just stay here for a second. No hurry. We got them all.

That confidence betrayed him, keeping his attention on his own team for a second too long. By the time he glanced to the side again, Haricot was on his feet, pistol in his hand, only ten yards away.

“Jesus Christ, you’re a fucking cockroach,” he said.

“Give me the Archive, and I’ll let you live,” Haricot told him. A lie, of course. Chase sneered.

“It’s right there,” he said, motioning at Kane. “Your mole got it, just like you wanted.”

Haricot’s gaze darted toward Kane, and he frowned in confusion. The woman was still lolling, not so much unconscious as in some kind of trance,

“Don’t fuck with me, Weston.”

Chase stood slowly, hands raised. His balance had returned and much of the haze over his thoughts had lifted.

“Wouldn’t dream of it. She has it, Sean. She absorbed it. Probably won’t be as easy to double-cross her and kill her friend you were holding hostage now, since you’ll have to convince her to cooperate with you.”

“That’s a problem,” Haricot admitted. “But it has a silver lining. Now that I’ve got her, I don’t need any of you.”

Chase had been ready for the man and he moved a half-second before Haricot’s finger tightened on the trigger. Shoulder rolls were a game for the young and he knew he’d pay for it later, but getting shot would have hurt a lot worse. This next part was where he’d likely get shot anyway, because he had to pull his Sig, aim and fire at a trained killer who already had a weapon in his hand.

A baseball bat swung by a major league slugger punched him in the right side of his chest. He stumbled back and landed on his ass, his right arm going numb, the half-drawn pistol tumbling out of his hand.

I hate being right.

The round hadn’t penetrated his body armor, but the next one would. Haricot was adjusting his aim upward, snarling in impatience. The snarl turned to an oof of surprise when Angel Cortez tackled him. She was a good seventy pounds lighter than the man, but she had a running start, and he toppled backward like an oak under the saw, his gun flying out of his hand.

Chase ignored the ache in his chest, the dull pain in his head, and scrambled to his feet, knowing what was coming. Angel was fierce and well-trained, but she wasn’t a killer. Haricot was and she had seconds, if that. She put a hand in Haricot’s face and drew back for a punch, but the HKC mercenary threw her off with a bucking motion of his hips, then rolled to his feet and reached back for the knife sheathed at his belt.

Chase grabbed the man’s wrist and wrenched backward, sending Haricot stumbling to the side away from Angel. Chase didn’t go for his K-bar combat knife, knowing that the delay would allow Haricot to draw his own blade. And if there was anything worse than a gunfight, it was definitely a knife fight.

You get into a knife fight, his unarmed combat instructor had informed him during Ranger training, one of you is going to the hospital and one’s going to the morgue. And I won’t say which is luckier.

Chase had violated that rule more than once, but usually with people who had no idea what they were doing. Haricot was not one of those people and Chase ducked in for a single-leg takedown, catching the other man in the right side. Haricot went to the ground but he broke his fall on his shoulder and punched downward, trying to catch Chase across the temple. The Ranger ducked his head against his chest and took the blow on the crown of his skull, the crack of knuckles breaking vibrating through the bone and into his head.

Haricot howled in pain but kept moving, smart enough to realize hesitation would cost him his life. He scrambled, kicking out with his free leg, desperate to get free, but Chase yanked downward on the other man’s pistol belt, pulling him in for the mount. Haricot tried to buck him off the way he had Angel, but Chase was too heavy for that.

Another truism his unarmed combat trainer had imparted was to never hit anyone in the face with a closed fist. It was generally good advice, since it often resulted in the same broken knuckles Haricot had already suffered, but Chase’s gloves were armored, protection against cuts and bites and just perfect for the job at hand.

Haricot twisted his shoulders, trying to block or evade the blows, but Chase pushed him down with one hand, raining blows in with the other. The impact went up his arm and into his shoulder, snapping Haricot’s head back with each hammerblow punch. It wasn’t Chilly’s face or Jax’s that flashed through his mind—they’d died in fair combat, knowing exactly what they were getting into. No, it was Gavin Patel.

He’d been an honest man working for a living, trying to support his ex-wife and their child, a brave man who’d only been trying to help them when he could have easily left them to their own devices back on Vishnu. Sean Haricot had murdered him in cold blood and probably hadn’t thought twice about it. Everything else, Chase might have forgiven. He’d fought for money and even if he hadn’t worked for HKC, Zack had and he didn’t begrudge his friend. But not killing Gavin.

Haricot’s jaw splintered with one last punch, the man’s face swollen and bloodied. He didn’t move, beaten unconscious. Chase could have finished him off with a single blow to the throat, but instead, he rocked back, pushing himself to his feet.

“Is he dead?” Angel rasped, staring at the ruin of Haricot’s face.

“Not yet,” Chase said, noting the man’s chest rising and falling. “He’s out though, and being unconscious that long don’t mean a headache and an ice pack.” He shrugged. “It’s in God’s hands now.”

“Yeah.” He turned to check on the others but spun back around at the report of a gunshot. His mouth dropped open at the sight of the ragged hole in Haricot’s forehead.

Angel lowered the smoking muzzle of Haricot’s HK 9mm, face graven from cold bronze. She glanced up at Chase’s stare and shrugged, then tucked the gun into the holster on her tactical vest.

“God helps those who help themselves.”

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“Is everyone okay?” Chase asked, offering a hand to help Zack up while Victor looked after Gina.

“Got my bell rung by that fucking grenade,” Zack moaned, then wiped at his forehead and looked down at the blood on his hand from a nasty cut there. “Shit. Guess that’s gonna need stitches. Wouldn’t ya know it, the only place I wasn’t wearing armor. You’re a bad influence, Sarge, not wearing a helmet.”

Gina appeared to be uninjured, maybe because she’d been so close to Victor when the Emissary had sheltered him from the fragments. But her sister…

“I think my damned arm is broken,” she said, cradling her right arm as she rolled onto her side and accepted Angel’s help to get to her feet. “Damned slug hit the armor and cracked it. Might just be a bad bone bruise, but either way, I ain’t pulling any triggers for a little while.”

Chase had been putting off calling Pri, worried that he wouldn’t hear anything, that he’d find out the Tamar was gone, but he couldn’t wait any longer. He touched the control on his wrist and his earbud beeped, indicating a connection being made.

“Chase, are you guys all right? We just been running down the whole Goddamned continent and back, sparring with an HKC gunship. It’s toast, but they had a passenger transport along too, and we couldn’t get to it before they landed.”

“We’re okay,” he told her, sagging as the breath he’d been holding went out of him. “I think we can make it back to the LZ…”

“There is no time for that.”

Chase froze at the voice, head snapping up. Alana Kane was awake and on her feet, though there was something different about her stance, the way she carried herself, as if a different person had stepped into her body.

“There’s a Sunkiller in this system, heading for the star. We only have hours before it’s too late to stop it.”

“Wait one, Pri,” Chase said, tapping his earbud to mute the call. “How the hell would you know, Kane?”

“I have Kane’s memories,” the woman said, no change from her placid expression, “but I am the Archive. The one you knew as Alana Kane doesn’t exist.”

“Yeah?” Alex said, glaring at her suspiciously. “Sounds awful convenient given you just betrayed us all to Hart-Klein. Prove it.”

Kane raised her arm straight out, palm extended, and the hair on the back of Chase’s neck stood up with the static electricity in the air. The three artifacts rose from the dirt, their glow so bright Chase had to shield his eyes. Each one levitated across the chamber to float directly in front of the one with whom they’d bonded, the Gatekeeper wobbling slightly only three feet in front of Chase as if taunting him.

“Take them,” Kane said, a hollow, commanding echo to her voice. “You’re going to need them.”

“Okay, so we believe you,” Chase said, staring at the Gatekeeper without touching it. “So what if there’s a Sunkiller in this system? I mean, it sucks that a habitable world is going to get destroyed, but it’s not exactly our priority.”

“Fifty light-years,” Kane responded, and Chase blinked, uncomprehending. “When a star goes supernova, any habitable planet within fifty light-years will be sterilized by the gamma-ray burst. There are three human colony worlds within fifty light-years of this place you’ve named Alexandria. One of them is a planet called Vishnu, which I believe holds some significance to you beyond the fact that it was where the Emissary was discovered.”

She gave Chase a look that pierced through to his soul, to the memory he’d had just minutes before of Gavin Patel and his daughter.

Chase touched the control on his earbud, unmuting Priyanka.

“Pri, we have a…situation. We’re gonna need an emergency extraction at the target site. Like right now.”

“Copy that, we’re on our way. What’s the problem?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” he promised, eyes still locked on the artifact in front of him. “This is something that you have to see to believe.”

* * *

“So, she’s the traitor,” Priyanka said, pointing at Kane, “but she’s not the traitor anymore. Have I got that right?”

“More or less,” Chase assured her. He, Angel, and Victor were strapped into their usual seats in the cockpit while Kane stood, hands clasped behind her as if she had no worries of flying off should the ship power down and go into free-fall without warning. “But the important thing is, she’s the Archive now, and the Archive somehow knows that there’s a Sunkiller heading into this system, and if we don’t stop it, it’s going to wipe out three human colony worlds.”

“In fifty years,” Adrian Hill pointed out, turning in his seat. “Why is this such a rush job? Those gamma-ray bursts you’re talking about move at the speed of light. We can warn them, have the worlds evacuated in plenty of time.”

“Once the supernova happens, it’s too late to do anything to stop it,” Kane said. Well, Pri thought of her as Kane, though she was supposedly some alien computer or something now. “Those worlds are lost. And if you keep allowing the Sunkillers to take your worlds away, you’ll wind up as we did, leaving your homes behind, leaving behind the worlds we made for you and the other intelligent races of this spiral arm, abandoning all you know, all that is warm and living, for a cold and uncaring universe.”

Pri eyed the woman sidelong, making an adjustment to their course, following the coordinates Kane had given her.

“Okay, fine,” she said. “I agree with all that. But your People ran off because they couldn’t stop the Sunkillers. So, how do you propose we do anything about it? I thought the idea was we’d take all that incredible knowledge you have stored in you... somewhere… and try to come up with a weapon to destroy them.”

“I am an archive, a storehouse of knowledge,” Kane agreed, “but that is not all I am. I am also a thinking being, and I’ve had a long time to think. I don’t have a weapon that will destroy them, but I have something that can slow them down.”

“Why do you need us?” Chase asked her. He held up the duffle bag containing the Gatekeeper. Victor and Angel held their artifacts in their bare hands, but Chase wouldn’t do it. “And why do we need these?”

“The keys, what you call the artifacts, hold incalculable power. The ability to extract computing power from other realities. The ability to manipulate spacetime. And the ability to navigate the Rift in ways you can only dream of. All they lack is the awareness of how to use this power.”

“And you have that?” Chase prompted.

“I do.” She closed her eyes as if seeing something they couldn’t. “We are seconds away. Please, Sgt. Weston…I know you fear what the Gatekeeper may do to you, what the other keys may have already done to your friends, but you once swore an oath to protect and defend your home and people. You were willing to sacrifice your life for them. Is that oath no longer true?”

Chase glowered at her, but he opened the bag, pulled out the Gatekeeper, and held it in front of his chest. The combined light of the artifacts nearly drowned out the screen, and Pri was about to complain, but she saw that they were at the coordinates Kane had given them and it was time to leave the Rift.

“We’re coming out,” she announced, leaching power from the drive.

Reality solidified around the Tamar, and Priyanka Ambedkar, hardened starship captain and combat pilot, gasped. They’d come out above the ecliptic, looking down on the system, far enough away that the primary sun was a ball of light smaller than the moon seen from Earth, far enough that Alexandria was just another star. But she could see the Sunkiller.

Her hand shook as she expanded the image, zooming in with the optical telescope. It was the size of a world, everything she’d been told and yet so much more terrifying, a hunger that could only be satiated by destruction.

“Somehow,” Aguilar murmured, “I don’t think even the 30mm is going to do much against that thing.”

“Radiation is getting a little on the high side,” Hill reported, the words casual but awe and terror adding a distinctive vibrato to them. “And we’re still a hell of a long way away. How much closer do we have to get?”

“This is close enough,” Kane said, not bothering to look at the flight crew or even the Sunkiller, focused instead on Chase, Victor and Angel. “Open yourselves to me. Do not try to do this…simply let go.”

“There is no try,” Hill said snidely, earning a dirty look from the corporate mercenary turned alien library.

Not a fan of the classics, I suppose.

Victor seemed to have already done it, had slipped into the sort of fugue state she’d seen before when he interfaced with the Emissary, but then he had more practice at it. Angel was next, her head tilting back, eyes closed, lips slightly parted as if she was waiting for a lover’s kiss. Chase took the longest, his neck muscles bunched, ready for a fight.

“Sgt. Weston,” Kane said, the words sing-song, a chant. “Relax. Trust. In Dr. Cortez if not me.”

Chase sighed, some of the tension going out of him, and the Gatekeeper’s radiance gradually increased until it met the level of the other two.

“You still haven’t told us how you’re going to stop that thing,” Hill pointed out, apparently as unconcerned at the wrath of the Archive as he was at the prospect of pissing off his captain.

Kane didn’t seem to mind, speaking calmly, her eyes fixed on some point on the bulkhead, seeing beyond them to dimensions Pri couldn’t imagine.

“Something so large, so fast, so powerful can’t be stopped. It’s a force of nature, a world set in motion. Is it any surprise that the People were forced to flee in the face of such raw energies? But the People were not as subtle as they were industrious. There are other ways to meet a problem than head-on.”

“And she still hasn’t told us anything about how she’s going to do it,” Hill said, shaking his head.

Kane raised her hands above her head, fingers stretched apart, energy crackling between her fingers and between the four of them. A spark snapped off the control yoke and shocked Pri, and she shook her hand, swearing.

“What you call the Soong-Tierney drive,” Kane went on, still speaking as clearly as before despite her arcane conjuring, “is based on a distortion of spacetime. The People decided when they developed the drive that they’d succeeded, that there was nowhere to go with it since they’d accomplished what hundreds of generations of their society had considered impossible. But there’s other things that can be done with this technology…or, at least, I have calculated that there may be, over the last ten thousand years that I’ve spent buried under the city on Alexandria.”

Pri thought at first that the static electricity was causing the main viewscreen to fritz. There was a distortion at the center, between the Sunkiller and the star, as if a door was opening.

“The Rift is not in our reality. It can’t be…it’s impossible to travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum in our reality. It’s another reality, outside our universe, and it’s one we know can be reached simply by going very close to the speed of light and adding a dimensional twist.”

The distortion was plain now, not a flaw in the screen or the camera but a flaw in the fabric of reality.

“The machine is already traveling as close to the speed of light as is possible. All I had to do was add the twist.”

The Sunkiller hit the distortion, the intense electromagnetic fields of its ramscoop flaring, a sphere of white brighter than a fusion explosion, filaments of plasma tracing a spider-web of pure energy before they winked out of existence. The fusion flare of the drive was the last to go, an afterimage that took seconds to fade.

“It’s gone,” Hill breathed, the words as reverent as a prayer. “Holy shit, it’s gone.”

It was, and the distortion had disappeared with it. Pri was not a woman who was easily impressed, but she jumped up from her seat, and glanced back and forth between the empty screen and Kane, who had relaxed, arms falling to her sides. The static electricity had drained from the air, and with it, the energy seemed to drain from Chase, Angel, and Victor. Victor and Angel collapsed back in their seats, but Chase gritted his teeth and took the time to stash the Gatekeeper back in its duffle bag, his shoulders heaving as if the separation had taken more effort than opening a doorway in space.

“It went into the Rift,” Pri said. “But where’s it gonna come out?”

“There is an energy expenditure required for matter from this universe to stay in the Rift,” Kane replied, “and the infusion we gave it can only keep it there for so long.” She gave a shrug, but there was something stilted about the motion, like it was a machine intelligence imitating a shrug after watching a movie of normal people.

Which is exactly what it is, of course.

“Three light-years, approximately.”

“Shit,” Chase blurted, sitting up in his chair. “We’ve only bought them three years?”

“It’s better than nothing,” Angel said soothingly, but Pri was already chuckling.

“You’re an infantry grunt, Weston,” she said, “so I’ll forgive you for not understanding. The thing doesn’t have an S-T drive. It can’t just turn around and accelerate back up to near light speed in a few minutes. It has to decelerate, turn around, then build up momentum again. It’ll take them years just to get turned around.”

“Then we’re saved!” Gina said. Pri hadn’t noticed her enter the cockpit. The girl’s eyes were alight as if she’d witnessed a miracle. “We just have to do this to the rest of them!”

Pri sighed and Kane echoed the sound, again with the eerie sense of mimicry.

“Unfortunately, no,” Kane explained. “There are thousands of them and only one of me. We may be able to keep the closest ones away from your core systems, but even I can only detect them from fairly close range. This is a stop-gap, nothing more.”

“We didn’t come here for some magic solution,” Pri reminded them. “We came for the knowledge stored in the Archive. We can get out of this mess ourselves.” She nodded toward Kane. “With a little help.”

“Well, thank God it’s someone else’s problem now.” Hill hissed out a sigh. “And we can finally get back to normal.”

Pri tried not to stare, but she couldn’t help looking at Chase, Angel, and Victor.

For some of them, things would never be normal again.

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EPILOGUE

You can’t keep fighting me. We belong together…think of all the good we can do.

Chase ignored the voice, zipped up the duffle, and stuffed it in the storage cabinet, before closing the door and locking it. Angel and Victor were doing the same under the watchful eyes of the Colonial Authority security troops, the closest thing they had to an army or Marine Corps. Angel hesitated only briefly before shutting the door on the Navigator, but Victor stood there, eyes fixed on the Emissary for long seconds, reluctant to shut it away.

“It’s going to be okay,” Gina told him, pressing against his back, rubbing his shoulders. “You’ll see it again.”

“Sooner than you think.”

Chase sighed and put on as fake a smile as he could manage.

“Captain Feragni,” he said, “how nice to see you again. And again. And again.”

“I know you’re probably getting tired of me haunting your every step,” the tall woman acknowledged, stepping up uncomfortably close to Victor. She eyed him sidelong until he closed the locker door, then smiled and patted him on the arm, earning a dirty look from Gina. “But you’ll be on your own again soon enough.”

The Colonial Authority Navy captain pulled out her phone and tapped a control, and Chase’s own device buzzed for attention.

“Check your phones,” Feragni told them. “I just sent over a schedule. Six intercepts in the next twelve weeks, and you leave tomorrow.”

“Where’s Kane?” Angel asked her, and anyone who didn’t know the woman wouldn’t have detected the hint of a chill in her voice. As former military, Chase understood the captain’s brusque nature and the way she’d taken charge of the artifacts, but Angel wasn’t quite as forgiving.

“She’s being debriefed.”

“It’s been three days. And every day we break out the artifacts and run your damned tests, and every day you tell us Kane is being debriefed.”

Feragni’s eyes widened just a hair, and Chase was barely able to suppress a laugh. The Navy officer was used to being in charge, but obviously not at all used to Dr. Evangeline Cortez’s fiery personality.

“She’s not Captain Kane anymore,” Feragni reminded her. “She’s the embodiment of an alien artificial intelligence, and she contains all the collected knowledge of a race that engineered worlds.” The officer pursed her lips as if the next part was something she hadn’t wanted to say aloud. “And since you’ll be confronting Sunkillers for the next three months, there’s always the possibility something might happen to you. If it does, we need as much information as we can get from her.”

“Nice to know we’re still expendable,” Gina murmured. “When can I see my sister?”

“And Zack,” Chase added. He hadn’t expected to see Priyanka and the crew again after they’d arrived back—she had a business to run, with or without him, a ship to pay for. But Zack had only come aboard because Chase was his friend, and Alex obviously wouldn’t leave her sister. “Why haven’t we been able to talk to them?”

“Because this is all classified, compartmentalized,” Feragni explained patiently, as if she was speaking to a kindergarten class. “They know a good deal more than we’re comfortable with already, and there’s no reason I can justify to my superiors to allow them to hang around and watch our classified, compartmentalized tests on you.” She sighed. “They’ve been getting medical treatment, being examined for any side-effects of exposure to the artifacts.”

“Side-effects?” Gina asked, maybe a little too sharply.

“You’ve already been tested, Ms. Quesada.” Feragni smiled thinly. “And if we’re all being brutally honest, the only reason you’re not with your sister and Sgt. Wilson is that Mr. Lee strikes me as an emotionally unstable sort, and you seem to be the only thing that keeps him on an even keel.”

“As long as we’re being brutally honest, Captain,” Chase shot back, a surge of annoyance stiffening his back, “then maybe I should share with you that our cooperation with you is voluntary. And if you don’t start respecting that and treating us like human beings, I think I might find that my communication with that glowing piece of shit might start to suffer.”

“You’ll be able to see them in a few hours,” she assured him. “But if they plan on coming along on the missions, they’ll have to pass a background check and fill out applications for the Colonial Authority armed forces.” Feragni finally grinned with something approaching real humor. “Just like the flight crew for your mission. It’s about time you met them.” She tapped her earbud. “Send them in.”

Chase wasn’t an easy person to surprise, but he had never been more shocked in his life than when Priyanka Ambedkar, Adrian Hill, and Stefano Aguilar walked through the door to the secure storage facility wearing Colonial Authority Navy uniforms.

“What the hell?” he blurted, shaking his head.

“Don’t start with me, Weston,” Pri snapped. “It was the only way we could be part of this.” She scowled, fingering the rank placard on her shoulder board that advertised her as a lieutenant commander. “After all these years of being a captain, I got promoted at least…sort of.”

“And I had to get a fucking haircut,” Hill growled, rubbing at his buzzed scalp. “You guys better appreciate this.”

“But what about the Tamar?” Chase asked, not sure whether to be grateful or horrified. “You sank everything into her.”

“She’s part of the mission,” Captain Feragni told him. “Despite the uniforms and the new ranks, there may be situations where you’ll be required to go incognito.”

Chase glanced at her sharply.

“You’re thinking long-term here, not just the next three months.”

Feragni didn’t bother to deny it.

“The threat is existential and ongoing. As far as I’m concerned, we’re in this together until we come up with an alternative.” She looked between Chase, Angel, and Victor. “Is there anything else, or can we get down to our mission brief?”

“One other thing,” Chase said. “Greg Toretto. He was one of the Soong-Tierney security troops who was on the raid of the HKC station. We know he survived, and they didn’t hand him over with Captain Kane.”

“Sgt. Wilson told me about him two days ago. Hart-Klein surrendered him immediately.” She smirked. “James Hart is not a happy man, but he is a realistic one. I wouldn’t look for him to be overly helpful, but if he wants to stay in business, he’ll keep his nose clean.”

“You know, Captain Feragni, you Colonial Authority types may not be so bad after all.” Chase grabbed Angel’s hand and nodded toward the door. “Come on, people. Let’s get to work.”

* * *

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

J. N. Chaney is a USA Today Bestselling author and has a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He fancies himself quite the Super Mario Bros. fan. When he isn’t writing or gaming, you can find him online at jnchaney.com.

He migrates often, but was last seen in Las Vegas, NV. Any sightings should be reported, as they are rare.

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Rick Partlow is that rarest of species, a native Floridian. Born in Tampa, he attended Florida Southern College and graduated with a degree in History and a commission in the US Army as an Infantry officer.

He has written over 40 books in a dozen different series, and his short stories have been included in twelve different anthologies. Visit his website at rickpartlow.com for more.

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