AVENGING

©2025 RICK PARTLOW

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ALSO IN SERIES

Archangel

The Fallen

Avenging

Ascending

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CHAPTER ONE

What the hell am I doing here?

It wasn’t the question I should have been asking walking through the arched entrance of the plushest resort on the planet Aurora with a beautiful woman on my arm, and yet it was, and the thought was enough to throw me off stride, send me into a stumble. Riva caught me, smiling broadly as if it was all totally natural and not something from a bad romance story.

“Easy, honey,” she said. “I know this place is overwhelming, but we have all week to enjoy it. No need to try to take everything in yet.”

Which was a very subtle way of telling me I was about to blow our cover and I nodded, returning her smile with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, given that I was neither an actor nor a spy. True, I’d been a commando, an assassin, but fighting against the Southwind hadn’t required any sort of subterfuge or undercover work. The Archangels would sneak in, kill the enemy and wreck their shit, then sneak out. It had required expert timing, intricately planned violence, and all the technology the Coalition researchers had been able to cram into our bodies through irreversible surgery, but it hadn’t involved much subtlety, and certainly no acting.

I didn’t know where Riva Powell had learned that talent. It probably wasn’t during her time with the Coalition military, since she’d served as a line Marine wearing a suit of combat armor. It certainly wasn’t in her post-war career as the foreman of an interstellar shipping firm, where she’d been working when Cas and I had recruited her, along with whatever other veterans we could find who’d listen to our crazy story and sign up.

Maybe it just came naturally for her. Looking into her piercing blue eyes, I could believe it. She was far too beautiful to be a stereotypical Marine, far too interesting to be a stereotypical shipping foreman, and it must have taken some acting ability to convince those who doubted her that she could do the job even before she proved her competence in action.

She sure as hell looked like neither of those now, her red-blonde hair falling over her bare shoulders, far too much skin showing through her casual beachwear for my comfort. Maybe that was the real problem. Not that I, a wanted criminal across multiple systems being hunted by the Security and Intelligence Directorate and the corporate monopolies who controlled them, had just blithely walked into the Vistula Tableau Resort, poshest of the upscale getaways on Aurora, the most expensive resort planet the Consortium had to offer. No, not that even the slightest slip, the most minute flaw in my cover story could result in our arrest, interrogation, and execution by the Coalition military… or worse, by the SID.

No, the thing that made me so uncomfortable was the reality that I was in the company of another woman so soon after Miriam. Not that this was a date, of course, but I hadn’t even been in the company of another woman for the last six years and it felt… unnatural.

“Relax,” Riva hissed so softly I doubt anyone else could have heard it, the admonition accompanied by a not-so-gentle squeeze on my arm.

I nodded and smiled as we approached the front desk, our bags accompanying us on a wheeled valet cart keyed to follow my commlink. My black-market commlink spoofed to identify me as Edward Fell, a middle manager in Interstellar Futures Trading, LLC. There was a real Edward Fell, or at least Raphael had assured me there was, but he was currently incommunicado on a long jaunt through the Tachyon Interface to a work assignment on the far side of the Coalition.

“Mr. Fell,” the concierge behind the polished, real-wood desk said with a dazzling smile and the sort of obsequious subservience I would have expected from someone used to dealing with corporate bigwigs. “It is a genuine pleasure to have you as a guest at the Vistula Tableau. My name is Eric, and if there’s anything you need during your stay here, you can contact me personally any time, day or night, through the icon I just sent to your commlink.”

“Thanks very much, Eric,” I told him, keeping to myself the conviction that we’d almost certainly get his virtual subroutine if we called him outside of his shift, just intelligent enough to answer simple questions and promise to get back with us. Nothing about the too-handsome, too-starched young man screamed devotion to his job. “We’re supposed to have room 3404B, correct?”

“That’s the one, sir,” he assured me, and I thought for a moment he wasn’t even going to acknowledge Riva’s presence. It would have fit his toadying personality, given that her cover was as Fell’s mistress, one known to but not acknowledged by his wife. But I’d underestimated his capability for schmoozing and he turned that artificial smile on her, offering a hand. “It’s so nice to welcome you to our resort as well, Ms. Nansen. I trust that if you have anything you’d like to schedule, you’ll take to heart what I told Mr. Fell and contact me.”

“Of course, Eric,” she said, her own smile nearly as dazzling as the concierge’s and much less full of shit. “But please, call me Angelique. I’m on vacation—I’d like a break from being addressed so formally.”

“Of course, Angelique.” And if there was a touch of lecherous imagination in the glint of the kid’s eyes, I at least couldn’t fault him for his taste. “If you’d follow our porter, he’ll take you straight to your lodging.”

The porter was just as neatly dressed as the concierge, though his solid whites were less gaudy than Eric’s bright red jumpsuit and he was also less talkative.

“This way, sir, ma’am,” was all he said, tapping at a control on his wrist to instruct the luggage ‘bot to follow him. I knew because my neural implant computer read the signal and informed me helpfully that it could take control of the system if need be. That would come in handy just in case we were assaulted by rogue suitcases.

The porter and the robot both led the two of us back out of the main entrance, past the plasticky, forever-young faces of Consortium mid-level managers and their even more plasticky wives and husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends, mistresses and gigolos. And their baggage. Physical baggage, not emotional, because not all the robots in the Coalition could have carried that load. What they’d brought with them was bad enough, at least twice what Riva and I had taken along, and I’d thought we were being unrealistically extravagant. How little I knew.

“Get out of my way!” one of the men snapped imperiously at the porter, glaring at the young man for doing his job.

“Yes, sir,” the porter stammered. “Sorry, sir.” He sounded cowed and intimidated, but I read nothing of that in his body language, which made me think that the whole thing was an act practiced over months or years of dealing with people like the manager talking down their noses at him.

Once through the funnel of the doorway, the porter took us wide around the stream of incoming guests and I took a look back at the main body of the hotel, ten stories tall, at least fifty acres wide and just as deep. It could put up thousands of guests, even in the luxurious suites people of this financial caliber were used to, but it wasn’t where we were going.

“Is it always this crowded?” I asked the porter. He glanced back at me with a look of faint surprise, as if unused to being spoken to by his clients other than to snap orders at him.

“Is this your first time here, sir?” he asked, apparently emboldened by my friendly question.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I usually prefer the mountains, a little skiing. Angelique here though…” I put my arm around Riva’s waist and pulled her a little closer, “… likes things a little hotter.”

Riva giggled, and it was a struggle to keep my eyes from bugging out at how honest the laugh sounded.

“I understand, sir,” the porter said, chuckling. “But this is actually our slow season. The monsoons are due in just a couple weeks, and most people don’t want to risk getting stuck inside for their entire visit. Not,” he hastened to add, “that our inside entertainment isn’t worth the stay all on its own, but that sort of thing can be had on any luxury space station. This,” he continued, waving a hand expansively, “has to be experienced to be believed.”

This was Aurora.

Not all of it, of course. Planets aren’t all beaches or jungle or mountains. But this island, the one known locally as the Big Island, was what Aurora was known for all the way across the Coalition. It was almost a continent, but the central portion was a harsh, arid desert populated by flora and fauna nasty enough to make me wonder if the people who’d genetically engineered it were auditioning for the role of a supervillain in a bad movie. Intellectually, I knew that they’d adapted the plants and animals from Earth species well-suited to life in an arid hell, but they still should have been able to produce something that wouldn’t devour a human with a single snap of its jaws.

None of that here on the coast, of course. Nothing deadlier than a few smaller species of shark, unless you counted the whales, and those were usually friendly to people. Nothing but white-sand beaches and palm trees at the coast, golden and glowing in the mid-morning light of the system’s primary star, and then, just a mile inland, the lush jungles of the river delta. There were trails leading from the beach out to those jungles, to isolated pools where guests could swim in private or do other things not usually encouraged during public bathing.

“Your cottage is closer to the river trails than the beach,” the porter said, wincing as if he expected us to complain about the arrangement we’d specifically requested. “I hope that’s not a problem…”

“It’s exactly what we want,” I assured him. “I spend all my time at work cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of other people. I want some time to myself.” I smiled at Riva. “With Angelique, of course.”

“You’ll have that for certain,” the porter replied, grinning. “There’s only one other guest out at the cottages this time of year—well, one other couple—and they never talk to anyone else, so I doubt they’ll bother you.”

“Good to know,” Riva said, offering me a grin of her own, though hers was more akin to the expression of a hunting wolf.

“You know,” the porter went on, “we’ve even had Vincent Duret himself here once, a few years back. That was before I started, but there’s a holographic reel on display in the main offices. The chief executive officer of the Consortium stayed at our hotel for three nights. Pretty much after that, this place became de rigueur for every executive all the way down. I’m surprised you haven’t visited before, sir.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I explained, hoping he’d drop it.

The walk was longer than I expected. Not that it was any exertion for me, given the kinetex muscle enhancements the Coalition had been so kind as to implant beside my natural muscles, nor was Riva put out by the kilometer or so walkway, but I would have expected a place this high-end to provide its guests with motorized transport for a haul this long. Maybe the exercise was meant to be part of the experience.

Either way, by the time we arrived at the cottage, Riva’s tanned skin was covered with a thin sheen of sweat and I had a little trickling down my back, though it wasn’t from the temperature or the sunshine. Cottage didn’t do the building justice, of course. It was bigger than the house I’d grown up in and came complete with a sun room and its own pool and hot tub. There was nothing else around for hundreds of meters, as promised, and even the view of the distant resort structures was obscured by strategically planted palm trees and shrubbery.

“The doors are keyed to your biometrics, of course,” the porter informed me. “Just in case you go off to the beach and forget your commlink.”

They were certainly keyed to the porter’s commlink, because he opened the front glass double-doors with a grand flourish and held the luggage bot back until we could take the place in.

“It’s incredible,” Riva declared, and I didn’t think any acting was required because I agreed with her.

White tile floors, cool even in the baking heat of this late-summer day, real leather furniture that had to have cost more than the porter made in a lifetime, and a kitchen that could make any meal to order and had the ingredients stored away for all of them. Plus the heart-shaped mattress visible through the open doors to our bedroom, and I started sweating again.

“Let me get the luggage unloaded for you,” the porter offered, ordering the bot into the center of the tile floor before he hauled the bags off, leaving them beside the dining room table. “Just call the main desk when you check out and I’ll be back to pick up your bag,” he promised on the way out. “I’m Craig, if you need anything.”

He closed the front doors behind him and I glanced back at Riva, suddenly intensely uncomfortable with our solitude.

Riva glanced back, and I followed her look to where the porter snuck a peak behind him through the glass doors at us.

“Better act the part,” she said, grabbing the front of my shirt and pulling me into a kiss.

I was not ready for it, despite two weeks of preparation, and the warmth of her lips against mine brought a rush of guilt and shame, the feeling of betrayal of Miriam’s memory. But she was right. The porter was watching, and we had to make it look good. I slipped my arms around her waist and pulled her closer, giving the kiss serious attention… and after a few seconds totally forgetting about the operation, our real identities, our real purpose here, and all that guilt and shame.

My hands ran up the smoothness of her back, still slick with sweat, and went automatically to the fastenings of her sundress…

Riva broke the kiss, looking over her shoulder. The porter was gone. She grinned and pushed me away, her fingers refastening the straps of her dress as if she’d done it a million times.

“Come on,” she said, nodding toward the door out to the pool. “We have work to do.”

What the hell, I wondered again, was I doing here?

CHAPTER TWO

It had all started weeks ago. It had also started with violence, of course, because what in my life didn’t?

“Open the damned door,” Raph demanded, jamming a fist against the call button again. “Can’t you idiots see we’re bringing in a prisoner?”

As if demonstrating his words, he pushed Willwood forward, into the view of the door camera. The big Southwind grunted and groaned, affecting fear and pain, his arms and shoulders limp from the neural restraint wrapped across them. It still felt strange being this close to a Southwind, for all that we’d known each other for months now. They weren’t genetically human, but they were too damned close, their ridged brows and thick, fur-covered skin unable to hide the similarities, the reality that the Southwind had been reengineered from our DNA.

The result was what Raphael referred to as the uncanny valley affect, though he must have gotten the term from files I hadn’t gotten access to, because neither I nor my neurosynth had ever heard of it before. It was, he’d told me, the innate fear and loathing of something that was almost human but not quite. How, and especially why, early humans would evolve a fear of something not quite human was something he hadn’t known and I didn’t like to think about.

The only thing I knew for sure was that it hadn’t come about because of the Southwind. They hadn’t existed until a few hundred years ago when the Terraforming Authority had ordered their creation to solve the problem of a labor shortage for the worlds they were charged with engineering. The Southwind were intelligent enough to work the atmospheric processing plants and tough enough to live on the worlds before they were quite ready for prime time, when the air was still technically poisonous, the temperatures too low or too high, or the radiation too intense.

We’d turned them into at least indentured servants if not outright slaves, and yet we’d had the gall to be surprised when they rebelled. The war that had sparked had spread across the entire Coalition like wildfire and caught a young Brent Parthet in its net. I’d been stupid enough to enlist and then stupid enough on top of that to volunteer for officer training. The ultimate stupidity had come when I’d been offered the chance to be part of the Archangel program, of course.

It wasn’t the surgeries, the biological and cybernetic enhancements, that had been the stupid part. Those were risky, experimental, but I’d been young enough to think they were badass, and to some extent, that hadn’t changed. I wouldn’t have gone back to being a Norm. No, it was the unit that made the whole thing so damned tragic. The Archangels, the brainchild of one Colonel Conrad Janus. Our job had been to penetrate enemy lines, sabotage the Southwind war effort, and assassinate their leaders. We were according to Raph, who studied such things, a modern-day version of the Phoenix Project, the Jedburghs, Operation Nemesis.

I’d bathed in the blood of so many Southwind, I couldn’t count them all even with the help of my implant neurosynth. I hadn’t regretted it, only regretted the end, when all of the other Archangels had been killed at Tamyang and I’d barely survived, been allowed to retire with Miriam and, eventually, our son, Sam.

If that was what had actually happened. I had reason to believe it wasn’t, but not enough information to know for sure. Cas might be a copy, a genetic duplicate of his original self, with backed-up memories read into its brain. I might be a copy. Or neither of us might be, depending on whether we wanted to believe the last words of Conrad Janus. I was going to go about my life on the assumption that we were both the originals, brought back from near death after the disaster at Tamyang, because it made life easier. He had enough to think about.

Like this operation. Fenris was a wild, untamed world, devoid of civilization, nearly untouched by the hand of man… except for this outpost. It wasn’t much, just a bunker dug into the side of a hill, most of the concrete facing concealed beneath centimeters of snow at the moment.

The cold was our camouflage as well, giving us an excuse to wear thick, hooded jackets and balaclavas, which concealed not only our faces but gave plenty of space for the sensor-spoofing gear beneath to hide our biometric data. There was still the possibility that the SID operatives inside the bunker would notice that and it would arouse their suspicion, but we were gambling that having Willwood restrained between us would be enough to allay their worries.

After all, their function here was as a listening post to keep an eye out on Kali and the Southwind there, to make sure they weren’t in contact with any non-governmental entities in contravention of the cease-fire. Theoretically. In reality, they were here to run black ops against the Southwind to make sure none of them ever became organized enough again to pose a threat. Which made us showing up with a Southwind prisoner eminently believable and likely to get us entry.

Cas’ attitude was an affectation, but one justified by the weather. I wasn’t sure why they’d built the listening post in the far north of the northernmost continent on this world, but if it had been to make sure no one could ever stumble on it by accident, mission accomplished. We’d landed nearly four kilometers away at the last clearing at the edge of the centuries-old woodland, then walked in under the shelter of the towering trees, which at least kept some of the heavy, wet snow from falling on our heads.

I instinctively felt bad for Willwood, but he was built for this and could have survived naked in a lot colder climate than Fenris. And hotter. He did his best to act intimidated and angry, but he wasn’t even trying to pretend to be cold. I didn’t have to pretend. The jacket was heated, but every molecule of air that penetrated through to bare skin sent knives of ice through to my spine, and I yelled at the SID agents inside the outpost to fall for this and open the damned door.

“Who are you?” a plaintive voice asked through the door speaker, the words barely audible over the howl of the wind through the trees. “What’s your authorization code?”

“We’re freezing our asses off is who we are,” I told him. “This is emergency authorization Alpha Three.” Which was the latest one we’d been able to intercept, and I prayed to God that it hadn’t been superseded. “We need to question this prisoner, and your station was the closest one. We don’t have chemical or virtual interrogation gear on our ship.”

Willwood did stiffen at that, and I knew why. He’d spent weeks under deep, invasive interrogation by Colonel Janus and his people, and it had left him a wrung-out dishcloth. He’d spent weeks recovering from the ordeal, and I wasn’t sure if he actually had yet.

“All right, all right,” the agent on the other side of the door conceded. “The code checks out. Hold on, I’m opening up.”

“Thank God,” Raph sighed, and I wanted to tell him to shut up before I realized he’d spoken via our implant commlink directly into my auditory nerve. “Stop calling me a wimp! You don’t feel the cold!”

That last part wasn’t addressed to me or to God. Raph wasn’t exactly a paragon of tactical fortitude, never having actually operated in the field before he’d been kicked out of the Archangel program because of what was technically termed an asynchronization of his brain with his neural computer. In simpler terms, he had a split personality, and the other half of it was an AI who lived in his brain.

“Focus,” I growled at him, just as privately.

The door opened with an electromagnetic thunk and warm air flowed out, bathing us in a fog of condensation as moisture condensed. Through that fog stepped a nondescript man, broad through the shoulders but otherwise unremarkable other than the red flush in his cheeks and an unchecked growth of beard that hadn’t seen a razor in weeks. He wore a light, uniform jacket that was totally inadequate for the weather outside and waved us in with desperate haste.

“Hurry up, for God’s sake! It’s gotta be thirty below out there!”

“No shit!” Cas agreed, pushing Willwood through the door ahead of us. “We’re the ones who’ve been walking for an hour in it!”

We pushed in, letting the man close the door behind us. Off to the side was another SID officer, a Gauss rifle held at his hip pointed in the general direction of Willwood, caution warring with alarm on his broad-boned face.

“You wanna watch it with that thing?” Raph asked, gesturing at the rifle. “You try to shoot, you’re gonna put a round right through the Southwind and into us.”

“You’re the ones who brought the damned monster right in here with us,” he protested, his tone bordering on a whine. “The only Southwind I wanna see are dead ones. Lots of dead ones. We didn’t kill enough of these sons of bitches during the war. Should have wiped them all right outta the galaxy.”

“This particular son of a bitch,” I told him, “is in neural restraints and won’t be any danger to you. So, whaddya say we get your base chief up and have him supervise our interrogation? I don’t want to be up all night for this shit.”

The one who’d complained about the cold laughed sharply.

“You want the station chief, you’re looking at him. You think this Podunk base rates more than two officers? It really sucks during alerts because then we gotta run twelve-hour shifts, and during the winter, that means either sitting around the monitoring center, drinking stale coffee, or sitting around in the break room, drinking that same stale coffee. And winter lasts like five fucking months here! This place sucks.”

“That does sound like it sucks,” I agreed. “When was your last alert?”

“Only a week ago.” He sighed. “That means we ain’t due for another for a good two months. Nothing but automated check-ins and we can sleep in. Or if it warms up, maybe go look for some wolves to shoot. I know it’s technically breaking cover, but after being cooped up in here for a couple weeks, I gotta kill something.” He laughed and motioned at Willwood. “Hell, once you’ve squeezed everything out of this one, maybe you could let me put a slug through his skull for you.”

“Yeah, maybe not. I think we have other plans for him. Isn’t that right, Willwood?”

“Oh, I believe so, Brent.”

The eyes of both SID officers went wide at the rumbling reply of the Southwind, and the armed one tried to swing his rifle back around. Not in time. Willwood backhanded him across the face and the man’s neck broke with a crack nearly as loud as the sound of his jaw shattering. His body hadn’t had time to hit the ground before I had my Medusa out of its holster, pointing the weapon at the remaining SID officer.

“Don’t move,” I told him, but he was far beyond reason or listening, screaming in fright and clawing for the gun at his waist.

I touched the trigger, judging that the jacket he wore was light enough for the stun dart to penetrate, but I never had the chance to find out for sure because his head exploded, spraying the far wall in a shower of red. Raphael’s pistol slowly lowered and he pulled off his goggles and balaclava, regarding the dead man with a disdainful twist to his lip.

“What an asshole.”

“We wanted the asshole alive,” I reminded him, gesturing with the Medusa demonstratively. “That’s the whole point of the stun rounds.”

“You said you’d stun him unless he tried to kill us,” Raph pointed out, reholstering his handgun. “He was most certainly trying to kill us.”

Cas sighed, stripping off his own mask and glasses, revealing a face and a demeanor far different than Raphael’s. Raph had spent most of the last ten years on the wrong side of the law and his full beard, unkempt unibrow, and long, unruly hair were a sign of that, while Cas had been a soldier his entire adult life. Everything about him screamed precision, from his buzz cut to the cut of his jaw and his piercing, disappointed stare.

“Goddammit, Raph,” he sighed, bending down to secure the weapons from the two dead intelligence agents. “Can’t you even try to act like a professional?”

“He asks that,” Raph mumbled aside to Tommy, the name he’d given his AI, “like I ever was a professional. How quickly you forget our history, Cas. My history.”

“Oh, I’m sure you wouldn’t ever let me forget it,” Cas shot back.

“Enough,” I told them, having to put the old command tone into my voice. They both looked over at me, surprise in Cas’ eyes, amusement in Raph’s. “We don’t have time for this. Either we break into the system and shut down the automatic alarms, or we might as well just blow the place up and forget about retrieving any intelligence, because they’ll just scrub the drives remotely.”

“Okay, okay,” Raph said, raising his hands palms-out in surrender. “I’m on it, I’m on it.”

He stepped over the bodies casually, as if the two men meant nothing to him other than as obstacles, and headed up past the living quarters to the control room. Willwood gave the dead more consideration, spitting on the one Raph had shot, probably because of the late SID officer’s comments about killing Southwind. I didn’t much care for the man’s opinion about ethical hunting, but I didn’t waste any breath or spit on him.

“Raph is a loose cannon,” Castiel told me, not for the first time. “He’s used to dealing with criminals, but these guys aren’t criminals.” He gestured at the dead men. “I mean, war criminals maybe, but they don’t act the same, and he can’t go around treating them the same.”

“I’ve talked to him,” I said with a shrug, “but there’s no substitute for experience. He’s going to have to learn the hard way.”

“Yeah, and what if it’s the hard way for all of us?” Cas demanded, keeping his voice low, glancing toward where Willwood stood watching Raph attempt to penetrate the communications control board in the monitoring room. “It’s not just the three of us anymore, you know? Not even the four of us, if you count that big bruiser. We can’t cowboy our way through this.”

I grunted noncommittally, but I knew he was right. We’d spent most of the last few months recruiting, and it had been frighteningly successful. Frightening not just in the number of disaffected military veterans willing to sign up for a revolution, but in the fact that everyone seemed to expect me to lead them. I was a commando… a former commando. Not any sort of a commander, not even of a platoon.

“I get that,” I insisted, then shrugged. “The fact is though, there aren’t that many of us left, and we need every Archangel we can get.”

“No arguing that,” Cas admitted with a grudging scowl. “Come on, let’s see if he’s screwed this part up too.”

“It’s done,” Raph announced when he noticed our approach. He’d made himself at home in the rolling office chair at the workstation, and he spun it 360 degrees with the flourish of a stage magician, gesturing at the wall of code streaming up the holographic projection. “I looped the last automatic update and adjusted the time and date. Just another ordinary week here on Fenris.”

“That’s something, anyway,” Cas admitted, poking his head into the living quarters of the crew, nose wrinkling at the stale stench I could smell even from two rooms away. “These guys weren’t lying about spending all their time in this hole. It smells like they weren’t bothering to shower much.”

“They smell worse now,” I assured him. “Raph, you’re already in the system. Can you find us the database?”

“It’s why we’re here,” Raph mused, turning the chair back to the workstation and waving his fingers through the haptic hologram like an empresario conducting an orchestra. “No remote access, Tommy, so I’m afraid you’re not going to be of much help here.” Raph rolled his eyes. “Of course I know you’re guiding me through every move, but you could at least allow me the illusion of some ability of my own.”

“This machine inside your head,” Willwood asked, his butt-ugly face screwed up even more in a grimace. “It seems argumentative. Have you two not lived in the same space for ten years? How could you not have come to an accommodation?”

“Oh, I can tell you’ve never been married,” Raph said, shaking his head. “Tommy and I get along just fine. We simply have occasional disagreements about who gets to run this meat suit.”

“And how would we know if you lost this battle?”

Good question, though not one I would have asked to Raph’s face because I was afraid of the answer.

“If I were to ever start acting like Castiel here,” Raph cracked, grinning at Cas, “then you’d know the computer had taken over.”

Cas didn’t seem amused but kept his mouth shut, perhaps trying to be a good example of professionalism for Raph. On the projection screen, systems appeared and fell away as Raph peeled away layers of security with the ease of a man who’d done this sort of thing for a living until recently.

“You notice something, by the way?” Raph asked. He shot me a knowing smile. “How easily we all fell back into calling Gino here Cas again? And how I’m still Raphael, despite you both knowing my real name?” He shrugged. “Not that I blame you there, since I never really cared for Kamran Ali, either the name or the man. He died when Tommy came along, and if I was never the Raphael Janus wanted, at least I was something different than I had been.” He paused in his work to regard Cas. “I suppose it makes sense for you too, in a way, since you’ve been Castiel for the last ten years. I bet you even think of yourself that way now. But not you,” Raph told me. “I tried to think of you as Michael at first, but it doesn’t fit. You’re Brent Parthet, and nothing else suits you. I wonder why your real identity shone through what they tried to make you more than for the rest of us. More than even me.”

“Focus, Raph,” I reminded him. “Still got work to do.”

“Work is done,” he announced, flicking the virtual representation of a mountain of data into a corner of the image. “Same as the others, we got a shitload of personnel files, administrative files, all the non-critical crap that every field office is gonna have, along with the daily reports from signal intercept… but all the crucial data is stored in the quantum core.”

Raph tapped another control and the central panel of the workstation popped open, revealing a squat, bulky cylinder, identical to the half-dozen others we’d collected from a half-dozen other SID offices we’d raided.

“And all of the damned things are biometrically sealed to a specific list of agents. We’ve got bupkis.”

“We certainly do,” Cas agreed, “particularly if one of the agents they’re keyed to are any of the ones you’ve killed during our raids.”

“Please,” Raph sneered. “What would be the point of a biometric seal if anyone stationed at the office could open the thing? Hell, we don’t even know whose DNA is needed, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be either of those flunkies rotting away in the other room.”

“Willwood, grab the core,” I told him, mostly because I didn’t feel like carrying it all the way back to the ship. I’d taken that turn last time and the damned things were heavy. “We’re out of here.”

“It’s a waste of time,” Raph said. “Just like the others.”

“We’ll go over the data we have on the flight back,” I insisted. “You never know, there might be something we missed.”

CHAPTER THREE

“I found something we missed,” Raph announced, running into the chow hall breathless, eyes glowing.

It had taken longer than I’d hoped—we’d been back from the Fenris mission for a whole day, and including the return flight, that was nearly a week without finding anything useful in the hundreds of thousands of files we’d discovered in the non-classified section of the database. It had been a long shot, but one I’d counted on, since we had nothing else to go on.

I’d been discussing the matter with Cas at breakfast, keeping our conversation low to avoid attracting attention from the rest of the crew in the mess hall, on the conviction that a group of new recruits didn’t need to hear their commanders talking about how hopeless the situation was and that neither of us knew how to proceed from there.

All heads came up at Raph’s entrance though, their eyes brightening at the idea we might be near a breakthrough. Not young men and women, not exactly. That was the rule for wars, that they were fought by the young, but these were all veterans, the youngest of them in their early thirties, all scarred by a war they’d been deceived into fighting. Maybe it was fair to expect more from them than I had the kids who’d fought against the Southwind, but the truth was, they were broken, as broken as I was, or Raph, battered by a galaxy that didn’t care about them, and they needed hope as much as we did.

“Tell me,” I said, motioning him to the table, pulling my tray aside to make room. I’d finished eating but hadn’t bothered to dispose of it yet.

Raph glanced around at the curious faces and sat with his back to most of them, pulling a folding tablet out of his jacket pocket.

“There’s nothing about planning or operations in the files,” he summarized, “but we knew there wouldn’t be, so I stopped looking. What we needed was to find someone who might have biometric access to the compartmentalized data.”

The corner of Cas’ mouth twitched in a microexpression I doubt Raph would have picked up, but I did. I’d worked with him long enough to know that he found it amusing when Raph immersed himself into something enough that he almost sounded like a professional soldier.

“Not only that,” Raph went on, “but it had to be someone we could locate. I mean, sure, the assistant director of the SID would know, but there’s no way in hell we could ever have a chance at black-bagging Valentine Didio, even if we could find her. Too heavily guarded. We needed someone big enough to be a trusted member of the inner circle, but small enough they won’t have a platoon of security guarding them twenty-four/seven.”

“And I assume from how worked up you are,” I prompted, arching an eyebrow at his torrent of words, “that you’ve found someone who fits that description?”

Raph grinned broadly and held up the tablet. The man displayed in the photograph there had the look of perpetually ageless middle age, the distinct appearance of someone who either had access to advanced healthcare through the government or the military… or because he was rich. Possibly both. Café-au-lait skin, short, dark curls cropped close to his scalp, and eyes dark with intelligence, together with a hard line of a mouth that looked like it had never smiled completed the look of his harshly fashionable suit coat.

“Ethan Rhule. Former military intelligence, former SID until two years ago. Now he runs private security for one of the Consortium firms—Kinetex, LLC.”

“Kinetex as in…” I tapped my chest, signifying the material that made us, that armored our skin, wrapped around our bones, and augmented our muscles.

“One and the same,” Raph agreed. “They produce the stuff, and they’re the only ones who can. And by coincidence, the rumor mill says that Rhule’s security force for Kinetex are all vets, all augmented just like the Archangels.”

“Well, that’s not good news,” Cas sighed. “It’d be hard getting by that kind of security.”

“No, but the good news is that Rhule is mentioned over and over in the records. He’s clearly up to his eyeballs in whatever games the SID is playing, and I’d bet my ass that he has biometric clearance for the memory cores. And since he’s not military and not SID, he’s not going to be as closely watched.”

“Still,” I equivocated, “we can’t go breaking into the Kinetex Offices to snatch him. Even if he didn’t have Archangel-lite security, there’s plenty of the regular kind, not to mention the military patrols that would be all over one of the Core systems.”

“That’s where my external connections helped us out,” Raph said, scrolling away from Rhule’s face to another screen, this one showing a brochure.

“Aurora?” I read off the screen, my brows knitting. “That’s an exclusive resort world, right? How does that figure in?”

“He’s booked a private cottage there in five weeks. Goes at least once a year, takes no one except a female I assume is his girlfriend or mistress, since he isn’t married.”

A smile spread slowly across my face, the possibilities revealing themselves to me like fan dancers on a stage.

“Okay, I like that. We just have to get someone there before him. Any way of getting a couple of our people working at the resort?”

Not in time. The training program is six months, minimum.” At Cas’ raised eyebrow, he went on. “This is a high-end place, like the cream of the crop come here. Hell, even Rhule couldn’t afford it if it wasn’t the shoulder season. This close to the fall storms, they don’t do as much business.”

“Maybe,” Cas suggested, waggling a finger like it was a fly-fishing pole, “that’s our in. We don’t get people working there, we get someone in as a guest.”

“No one goes to Aurora alone,” Raph corrected him. “You’d need a couple.” He raised a hand. “I can get cover identities put together in a few days, a week at most.” He smiled. “And, of course, I volunteer to be the one who gets to go to the plush resort with a hottie at my side.”

“Yeah, no,” Cas said flatly. “You’d start talking to yourself in front of the staff and draw way too much unwanted attention.”

“I never talk to myself!” Raph insisted with righteous indignation. He turned to the side and waved his hands. “Do you hear this shit, Tommy? You hear what I have to put up with? I’m not appreciated here…”

“I’ll do it,” I said, before Cas could. Not that I didn’t trust him—he’d proven his loyalty the hard way, going up against General Janus and helping kill off the other Archangels. But he’d also been working with the SID for years, and I didn’t trust he wouldn’t be recognized by Rhule on sight. “I’ll go. The question is, who’s going with me?” I cast a hopefully subtle glance over my shoulder at the crowd in the mess hall. “We have a pretty limited selection here. At last count, I think there are a hundred men and forty-eight women, and most of the women were in non-combat roles in the war.” I winced at what I was about to say, knowing how it would sound. “And being honest, most of them wouldn’t cut it for a mission like this. Corporate executives are genetically engineered for looks by their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and they mostly pick lovers and spouses who’re at least close to that level.” I waved at my face. “And while I might have been nothing much to look at when I was a rancher’s kid, the techs who gave us our new faces and identities fixed things up enough that I can get by. But it’s gonna be hard to find someone else in this group to even meet that standard.”

“There’s only one possible solution then,” Raph said, his face dead serious as he looked between the two of us. “Cas will have to go with you.” He couldn’t hold it though, and he burst out laughing. “I mean, why not?” he went on through snorts and chuckles, gesturing at the two of us. “You’re both handsome young men, and there’s no reason you couldn’t both be corporate executives who found true love in the strangest of places…”

I rolled my eyes at him.

“Which wouldn’t be a horrible idea,” I admitted, “given that it would be two Archangels on the operation instead of just one, except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Raph wondered. “He’s not a good kisser?”

“I’ll never know,” I snapped back, “and that’s exactly the problem. If we’re at a romantic resort, we’re going to have to get romantic, and not only that, we’ll have to look like we’ve been intimate for a long time. And are actually attracted to each other. One second of awkwardness and people are going to see right through us.”

Maybe that was the reason, or maybe it was just because I was a loyal member of the other team and didn’t want to argue whether my innate unwillingness to pretend to be otherwise was selfish and juvenile, but that was the end of the matter. I noticed Cas hadn’t said a word and didn’t even want to guess why. When he finally did speak, it was with an utter seriousness that belied any idea that he’d been about to give me shit as well.

“There’s one woman I’ve met who might be able to pull this off. She just came in with the last bunch of recruits and she hasn’t gone through our retraining course, but she was a Marine officer. Ran a platoon of suits and saw shitloads of combat, so I wouldn’t worry about her keeping her cool in a fight.”

I nodded.

“Not bad. But could she pass for rich arm candy?”

Cas shrugged and waved a hand toward the door.

“Let’s go meet her,” he offered, “and you can tell me.”

I heard the grunting first, which perhaps set the wrong tone mentally, given the recent conversation we’d been having, but once we came around the corner, the actual scene disabused me of that notion.

It hadn’t been easy to find a base of operations for our covert war, at least not one that wouldn’t be noticed within a few weeks and get us all killed. That had taken up most of the first few weeks once we’d decided to take this personal fight to a broader scale, to bring down the SID, the Consortium, the entire Coalition government. We’d scouted out half a dozen places and every one of them had proven to be too vulnerable, too obvious. Except this one.

Lyonesse had once been a beautiful world, a crown jewel of the early terraforming program, home to well over ten million colonists… before the Devil’s Rift. The geologists had known about the supervolcano, of course. But a lot of habitable worlds had them, and the odds of any one of them erupting within the next few thousands of years was always long. But never zero. There’d been warnings, of course, enough to give the entire population time to evacuate, though it had been one of the largest operations in human history.

When the Rift had blown, it hadn’t just laid waste to the entire continent, it had spread ash over an entire hemisphere, killed half the life on the planet. A sphere once beautiful blue and green had turned into huge swathes of black, gray, and brown, and an entire ocean had become a poisonous death trap. Eventually, in a few thousand years, the dead ocean would make the entire planet uninhabitable, and even now, most of the large animal and even marine species had died off.

That didn’t mean the world would be abandoned forever. Terraforming would be attempted again once things settled down, but that was a job for the next century, or the one after. For the time being, not a single living soul had stayed on the planet, and even the monitoring stations were unmanned… and easy to hack, as it turned out.

What had been left behind was one island town, small and isolated, on the opposite side of the planet from the Devil’s Rift. It smelled bad, nothing would grow outside a few greenhouses, and the rains were acidic enough to wash out the concrete sidewalks, but it had the one advantage that absolutely no one would look for us here. Well, that and all those handy buildings.

This one had been a school, and the gymnasium had doubled as a competition center for various local sports. The mats laid out near the far wall of the gym had once been used by wrestlers, jujitsu practitioners, and whatever other combat sports the kids did for fun here. But right now, they were being used for training, not fun… and one of the two people on the mat was definitely not having fun.

I’d trained with a lot of females, a couple of them on the Archangels, and while some had been crack shots and others had been expert pilots, and yet others had been top-notch intelligence analysts, the only ones who’d been able to take on a trained male in unarmed combat had been Zoe and Ursula, and they’d both been Archangels. Kinetex muscles made up for the difference in body mass, but most people didn’t have that luxury.

The woman on the mat was a meter-seven, just a few centimeters shorter than me, and massed probably sixty, maybe sixty-five kilos, every bit of it muscle. Her strawberry-blonde hair flapped in a ponytail down her back as she stalked one side of the mat to the other, the predator to her opponent’s prey. He wasn’t the biggest guy in the world, maybe ten or fifteen kilos heavier than the woman and only a few centimeters taller, but she had two advantages over him.

The first and most obvious was speed. Not straight-ahead sprinting speed but quickness. He threw a cross at her jaw, but she wasn’t there for the punch, ducking to the side like someone who’d been trained at boxing and countering with a leg kick. I winced in sympathy at the slap of her shin against the man’s thigh, and the fact he managed to stay upright after the blow was a testament to his pain tolerance. He limped to the side, going on the defensive because he couldn’t move fast enough for an attack, and that was, as they say, all she wrote.

She went for a forward foot sweep, which wouldn’t have been that effective normally but was a real threat when his rear plant leg was already unsteady, forcing him to respond, to lift up his front foot. The move immobilized him, and the redhead leapt into a jump roundhouse that I hadn’t seen coming. Her opponent sure didn’t, and hadn’t even tried to duck when her shin impacted his jaw.

If the slap of the leg kick had been painful, the sharp crack of her leg against his face was enough to make me grimace. The man went limp, eyes rolling into his head as he fell sideways onto the mat. The redhead danced carefully for a moment, and in that one second, the second advantage she had over her opponent became just as apparent as her quickness. Killer instinct. It took a long second for the look in her eyes to shift from triumph to concern.

“Tony, are you okay?” she asked, taking a knee beside the man and slapping his face gently with her gloved hand. “You awake?”

Tony shook his head like he’d just woke up from a bender, then moaned loudly, hand going to his jaw.

“Ow, that fuckin’ hurts,” he said. “Dammit, Riva, what did you hit me with? A baseball bat?”

“Just stay down for a second,” she cautioned, patting him on the arm. “When you can stand up without getting dizzy, we’ll walk down to the medic and get you looked at, just in case.”

He waved her off and the woman seemed to notice the two of us watching for the first time. She stood, stripping off her sparring gloves, and I noticed her for the first time. Not just her size and quickness, or how well she fought, but her. Athletic, muscled through the shoulders, she managed to combine the power of a swimmer with the grace of a dancer… or a martial artist. And yes, she was beautiful in a way that either spoke of winning the genetic lottery or, more likely, coming from money.

“You’re Captain Parthet,” she observed, then nodded to Cas. “Captain Olin.”

Cas frowned almost imperceptibly, still not used to sharing his real name with everyone. Raph and I might still call him Cas, but he’d been born Gino Olin, and it hadn’t seemed right not to trust our soldiers with at least that much.

“Brent,” Cas introduced formally, “this is Lt. Riva Powell. Until recently, she worked as the port foreman for Coalition Cargo Services out of Orbital Three.”

“Nice to meet you, sir,” she said, offering me a hand. I shook it and found her grip to be firm and dry. “I’m looking forward to kicking some serious ass once I can get back into a battlesuit.”

“You don’t look like you need a battlesuit to kick ass,” I pointed out. “That was a pretty impressive move.”

“My parents enrolled me in martial arts classes when I was three,” she confided, grinning as she looked me up and down. “Maybe we should spar sometime. If you promise not to use all that Archangel shit on me and keep it fair.”

“If you’re in a fair fight, Lieutenant,” I told her, quoting one of my old trainers, “then you’ve planned poorly. But sure, I wouldn’t mind sparring with you. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.” I looked around the gym, making sure none of the recruits using the nearby weight racks was listening. Tony had hauled himself to his feet and wandered off, presumably in search of a medic to get himself tested for a concussion. “There’s a mission. Undercover at a vacation resort. I need to be a Consortium exec, and to make it sell, I need a female to pose as my companion. Do you think you could handle that?”

She regarded me carefully, her eyes as piercing as a sensor scan.

“You need someone,” she corrected me, “who could pass for a gene-altered rich girl. And my grandparents’ money makes me the perfect candidate.”

“It’s a mission requirement,” I admitted. “Along with unarmed combat skills. You seem to have both in spades.” I cocked my head to the side, questioning. “Is that a problem?”

I thought she might be about to get pissed off, but instead she smiled. Not a cruel smile or a sarcastic one, either of which I would have understood and not blamed her for, but a genuine one.

“I’ve often resented my grandfather,” she admitted, “for being a rich son of a bitch who put the Consortium above the Coalition or even his family, but the old bastard always made sure his extended family got the best medical care. Including prenatal genetic perfection.” She nodded off to where Tony still hobbled off, holding his jaw. “As he found out the hard way… and he’s not the first.”

“Not the last, either, I’ll bet,” I judged. “Listen, we’re going to have to be a couple. We have to make it work, and that’s going to mean acting romantic. I can understand if that’s something that makes you uncomfortable, and if you aren’t interested in this mission, then now’s the time to say no. It won’t be held against you.”

Riva retrieved a towel and wiped the sweat out of her eyes. As it came away from her face, it revealed her eyes fixed on me.

“Is it important?” was all she asked.

I could have just given her a generic spiel about how this was a key mission for our new force to gather intelligence, but I was going to have to trust her, and I might as well start now.

“We’ve seized multiple compartmentalized data cores from SID outposts. The way the Security and Intelligence Directorate works is, they maintain multiple redundant backups of key data, just in case they’re forced to destroy their central database.” I snorted in amusement. “Like for instance, if it gets raided by people who hate their guts and want them dead. But it would be just as dangerous to leave that sort of data out there unprotected, so it’s all biometrically coded to certain individuals. If anyone else tries to access it, it self-deletes.”

“We found that out the hard way,” Cas added, sighing. That had been awful lot of effort for nothing.

“We also found out in the process,” I added, “that if the central comms system at Orbital Prime doesn’t receive a confirmation signal once a month from the duplicate cores that they’re still secure, they’re automatically wiped. So we have three weeks to grab one of the people who can access the data before it was all for nothing. And on that core will be, we hope, evidence of what the SID and the Consortium did before the war, the aid they gave to the Southwind separatists. Once we have that, we can actually have some hope of convincing active military units to switch sides. Maybe even peel off members of Parliament.”

“We’re going to have to practice,” she said, nodding to me. “If we want people to believe we’re together, we’ll have to learn to act like it.”

“And that’s not a problem?”

Her response was a sharp laugh.

“Captain Parthet, if I could pretend I actually liked my ex-husband for the six years we were married, I’m pretty sure I can pretend to like you.”

CHAPTER FOUR

I didn’t like being outside. It smelled like death and ashes, and things were only going to get worse. It felt like a bad omen for this thing of ours. But Yanto was on his way back with another group of fighters, and I needed to talk to him.

The shuttle was old and beat up, but it flew, and that was all we could ask right now, until we started operations and stole some newer ones. The logo of its former owner, Trans-Coalition Shipping, hadn’t quite been scoured away by time and wear, but what had once been clear, precise lettering and bright colors had faded to vague shapes and symbols, reminiscent of some ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. The landing gear extended with a pained groaning I could almost hear over the roar of the jets, and when the bird touched down in the courtyard in front of the old school, the struts sank a meter deep into their hydraulic housings and barely bounced back.

I didn’t wait for the whine of the landing jets to die completely, just strode across the cracked pavement, one hand shielding my eyes from the debris the dying thrusters still kicked up. I made it to the back of the bird just as the belly ramp touched down and Yanto Phillips walked down it.

While Raphael had let his beard grow in, Yanto had shaved, and in my opinion, it had been the wrong decision for both of them. Raph’s beard was a different color from his hair, but the problem with Yanto was, without a beard, you could see his face. Yanto was a hard forty. We were about the same age, but I’d received the nanite medical injections at birth and the anti-aging treatments when I’d enlisted in the military. He hadn’t. Yanto Griffith was a Nativist, one of those people who thought that humans hadn’t evolved to live more than eighty to a hundred years, thus living any longer was probably a bad idea.

I didn’t argue religion with anyone, so I’d never tried to convince him the entire concept was stupid, since evolution was blind and only concerned with the survival of species rather than the individual, but the evidence of that was written all over his face. Time and rough living on the Rogue Worlds since the war had etched deep lines in his features, and there’d been no nanotechnological defenders to fight those ravages off. That, combined with the gray field utilities that had become our semi-official uniform, gave Yanto the look of some ancient drill sergeant, not a bad thing for the man we’d sent off to pitch our little rebellion to dissatisfied veterans.

“Hey, Brent,” he said with a nod. We needed to work on that. Technically, we were running this whole thing like a military operation and I was Captain Parthet to the new recruits, while Yanto had taken his old NCO’s rank from the war. But Yanto had been with us since Tempest, long before my quest for personal revenge had turned into… whatever this was. “Got a good group for you.”

I squinted at the twenty or so men and women filing down behind him, wondering if we had different standards of good and useless. Ragged clothes, tangled hair, scraggly beards, and slouching postures were the rule, and I resisted an urge to point that out, nodding to the group silently as they passed by.

“Go to Castiel!” Yanto reminded them. “He’ll take you to your quarters.”

I waited until they were well beyond earshot and nearly to the front entrance to the school before shooting Yanto a look of annoyance.

“You kidding me?” I asked, jerking a thumb at the new recruits. “Did you grab them all out of a homeless shelter? Or maybe the drunk tank?”

He didn’t flinch from the questions, not showing any sign of feeling guilty, just planted his fists on his hips and scowled.

“Tell me something, Captain Parthet,” he said, and a twinge of embarrassment made me realize he must have noticed my reaction to being called by my first name in front of the troops. “Where the hell do you think down-and-out combat veterans are gonna be? You think I can walk into someone’s farm out on the Periphery and convince them to give up their nice, quiet life to come out to the ass end of nowhere on a planet with a poisonous atmosphere and an ocean full of dead fish to get killed fighting the government?”

“Okay, okay,” I said, raising my hands in a quelling gesture. I shut my mouth against the rest of what I wanted to say, because the flight crew had finally come out behind their passengers. They, at least, looked halfway professional in their flight suits, and the pilot saluted me on the way down.

Not good military procedure, since technically there was no saluting on a flight line, but I’d take what I could get, and I returned it.

“Captain,” the woman said by way of greeting. She’d been a captain herself, a dropship pilot for the Marines during the war, but I was in command so she saluted me, then nodded to Yanto. “Sergeant. Gonna go get my guys some breakfast. Or whatever they’re serving.”

“I think it’s lunch,” I told her, but once they were gone, I turned back to Yanto. “I know it’s not easy signing people up, but we are gonna need people we can trust. Do you think half this last group can go for a month without getting drunk and trying to start a fight?”

“Hell,” he said with a shrug, “I couldn’t during the war. But they’re warm bodies, and if you bothered to look, half of them had these.” He tapped beside his temple to indicate the hardline ports for interfacing with a Marine battlesuit. “We get some more Havok powered armor, we’re gonna be glad we got ourselves people who can operate ‘em.”

I grunted at the thought. We currently had a grand total of three Havok suits, and one of them was on semi-permanent DX because of how badly it had been damaged during the fight on Bastion. It and Yanto, though he had been easier to fix. It had broken his Nativist proscription about nanites, but they hadn’t stayed in his system after the repairs were over, so he’d gotten past it.

“Maybe this operation will help us convince those farmers,” I said, then quickly filled him in on the plan. His eyes went wide and he whistled softly.

“Well, that’s a bold move, boss. And shit, you could sign me up for spending a few days at a resort with a hot officer, but this could all go real bad real fast. You’re going into a rat’s nest of Consortium execs, and maybe they won’t recognize you, but any place that caters to that clientele is going to have the military and the Patrol on speed-dial. All it takes is one busybody getting suspicious and there’ll be nothing we can do to get you out before they grab you.”

“Well, thanks all to hell for trying to make me feel better,” I told him, rolling my eyes. “You’re starting to sound like Raph.” I clapped him on the arm. “Come on, let’s go get you something to eat. Sorry about complaining. I know it can’t be easy doing what you’re doing. Hell, I know I’d suck at it.”

“The worst part,” Yanto told me, keeping his voice low even though the maintenance crew for the shuttle was still a hundred meters away and taking their time getting here, pushing their equipment carts with the desultory certainty that they had all day, “is seeing the hope in their eyes when I start talking about what we’re doing. Not the hope that they can beat the government or get to the truth, not even the hope that they can redeem themselves for what happened in the war.” His expression went bleak. “Just the hope that they can do anything meaningful in their lives again. They’ve spent the last ten years wandering from job to job, from relationship to relationship, trying to recapture the comradery and purpose they had in the war.”

“Something you can relate to?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I suppose it is,” Yanto admitted, his shoulders sagging tiredly, as if the confession exhausted him. “It’s probably why I wound up on Tempest in the first place.” His eyes narrowed, and something of the shrewd judge of character I’d seen on Tempest returned. “Not you, though, I bet.”

No,” I agreed. “Mostly because I had no squad, no platoon, nothing but Cas and me most of the time, and when we had Marines attached to us for an op, we didn’t know any of them and didn’t want to. Hell, we barely knew the other members of the Archangels, and sometimes I think that was on purpose.” My teeth bared in anger against an enemy I couldn’t kill again. “Janus playing mind games, making sure we didn’t know each other well enough to tell the difference when one of us died and he had to replace them with a duplicate. Which is why I’m glad we have you around, Yanto… Sergeant.” I shot him a grin. “We—Cas, Raph, and I—need someone who can relate to the line grunts, tell us what we’re missing.”

“Well, I can fucking tell you right now,” he said, speaking louder now that we discussed matters not quite so sensitive, “that we need something to call ourselves. Our… movement, or resistance, or rebellion. We need a unit name or at least a nickname. I can’t keep giving people some vague goal if you want to get quality troops here. Hell, the only thing that’s brought them in this far is the fact that we have three—” He shrugged. “—two and a half Archangels. For a top-secret unit, it seems like everyone has heard of you.”

“I’ll think about it,” I promised. “Though I might not have much time for it between now and the op. We’ve got a lot of training to do.”

“No, dammit,” Cas sighed, rubbing at his eyes as I looked up in confusion.

I snatched my hand away from Riva Powell’s like we were both on fire and looked between her and Cas.

“What is it this time?” I demanded, throwing up my arms. “I mean, we were just practicing walking.”

As if the concept of having to practice how to walk didn’t sound silly enough. The two of us had paced back and forth like caged lions in this crumbling cage that had once been a schoolroom and was now a makeshift operations center, crammed with monitors and communications gear. There was a narrow corridor for our passage, but the one advantage the chamber had over practicing outside or in the chow hall was that we could be alone. Or at least, Riva and I could be alone with either Cas or Raph, because the two of them had been judging us for the last two days.

“Can you try,” Cas implored, holding up his hands in a pleading gesture, “to hold onto her hand like you enjoy it instead of treating it like a venomous snake you’re afraid is going to bite you?”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at my hand, suddenly embarrassed. I offered Riva an apologetic look. “Sorry. I just haven’t touched any woman besides Miriam… my wife… since we met ten years ago. It’s not easy for me.”

“Look, I get that,” Cas interrupted. “Really, I do.”

But I said nothing, unable to meet Riva’s eyes.

“But you did hold a woman’s hand before meeting her, right?” he went on. “Maybe a girlfriend in high school? You do remember what it was like, don’t you? It’s not hyperdimensional physics, for God’s sake.”

“I have perfect memories of every hyperdimensional physics text ever recorded,” I reminded him, tapping the side of my head. “What’s harder to remember is anything that happened before I got the implants. Which you should know just as well as I do, Gino.”

“Right, right,” he acknowledged. “Sorry.” And I wasn’t sure if he was sorry or just didn’t feel like arguing about it. Cas had spent most of the last ten years running black ops with enhanced commandos, not handholding people who were having emotional breakdowns.

I was a soldier. I’d killed hundreds of enemy directly, thousands if you counted airstrikes and orbital bombardments I’d called in, and I’d be damned if I was going to let this sabotage the mission.

“No, I’m the one who should be sorry,” I insisted. “Let’s do it right.”

I pictured Miriam, remembered our first date after I got out of physical therapy, remembered how I’d taken her hand. Gently, I wrapped my fingers in hers and walked casually, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Look back at me every once in a while,” Riva suggested. I nodded and glanced her way every couple steps, again drawing on the memories of Miriam.

Looking back, I saw her face, the dark hair spilling across her shoulders, the smile I couldn’t forget that had warmed me in the cold winters of Sylvanus. The smile that always brought the mirror image of the expression on my face.

“Okay, now we’re cooking!” Cas said, applauding with mock enthusiasm. “You actually look like a real couple instead of a casualty evacuation.”

The memory of my late wife faded and Riva’s face replaced hers, fuller, stronger-jawed, lighter skinned. I let my hand fall away, though I didn’t jerk it back the way I had before.

“Thanks,” I said. “Let’s take a break for a while, okay?”

“I’m going to go get some coffee,” she said, waving as she headed out the door.

My shoulders sagged as she exited, closing the door behind her, and I let out a breath I didn’t remember holding.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I told Cas. “It hasn’t been that long.”

“It’s been months, bud,” he reminded me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Almost a year. I know it was bad…”

“Do you?” I challenged. “I don’t recall you ever having a relationship that lasted more than a month.” I glared at him. “Has that changed? Did you become a domesticated family man since we both thought the other died?’

His jaw clenched as if he’d been about to snap back at me and instead bit down on the words, and he shook his head.

“No. I haven’t had one even that long since the war.” Cas found a desk and sat on the edge of it, eyes on the floor. “It was… discouraging. It’s been a long string of joy girls and one-night stands at clubs, if I even had the time for those. No friends other than the people on the team, and even they were intentionally distant. It’s been a lonely few years and I think I knew, deep down, that things weren’t right. I’m sorry I was a part of taking away your family.”

“You didn’t know what was going to happen,” I insisted. “I don’t blame you for what Janus did.” Closing my eyes, I tried to remember Miriam’s face again, but all I could picture was her charred, smoking corpse in the wreckage of our house. “But every time I held that woman’s hand, the only way I could do it was to picture my wife. I can’t promise I’ll be able to keep it together for very long during this mission. I think maybe you should go instead of me.”

“If you want me to, I will,” he said. “You’re the boss. I said that and I meant it. But I think it would be a mistake.” I looked a question at him and he spread his hands. “Think about it, man. Like you said, I don’t do relationships. I don’t even think I’d know how to fake one. Sometimes I think maybe Raph was right when he said I was a clone. I think maybe he’s right, because there’s something broken inside me.” Cas tapped his chest. “I’m having a hard time caring about any of these people, the troops we have here, Yanto, even Raph. Certainly not about Willwood. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, and I’m doing this because of what Janus did to you, what he made me a part of. Not because I’m any kind of revolutionary or patriot, not because I give a shit about the Southwind. I don’t. I don’t care if they got fucked by the SID or if I was part of it. They don’t mean anything to me. I’m here to make up for what I did to you.”

“I understand,” I told him. “Honest to God, if you’d taken Willwood off with you and that had been it, I would have stayed on Sylvanus and been happy to do it.” I snorted derisively. “You think I’m stupid enough to believe that any government we wind up with would be better? But they killed my wife and son. I can’t go on as if it didn’t happen, and if I have to wade through blood to make the people responsible for it pay, I will.” I shrugged. “Maybe that makes me the one who’s broken.”

“It makes you human,” Cas said. “I’m not sure if I qualify anymore.”

“I trust you, Gino,” I insisted. “You’re my friend.”

“I’m your friend,” he agreed. “But I’m not sure I’m Gino anymore.” He stared at his hand, flexing the fingers. “I’ve been Castiel too long. You’re going to have to do this one. Because I don’t know if I trust myself.”

CHAPTER FIVE

I hadn’t been lying. I never liked the beach.

Ethan Rhule did though. At least, as far as I could tell, the man looked perfectly content, head resting on his hands on the lounge chair, soaking in the sun next to his girlfriend.

“She’s hot,” Riva murmured beside my ear.

That she was. Her name, according to the guest records for the hotel, was Constance de Betancourt, though that was the limit of the information we had on her. No biographical data, no service record, no criminal record. There was always the possibility that she was involved with someone else, someone high up in the government, or the military or Consortium, and had come here under an assumed identity. She certainly had the looks for it.

Skin the color of polished amber, dark hair cascading down her tanned shoulders, and if her face was a little too skinny and hollow for my tastes, well… I wasn’t a former SID officer turned corporate spy. And I certainly wasn’t as concerned with fashion as Mr. Rhule. Even his bathing suit cost more than I’d made in a month as a wildlife ranger, for all that it was barely existent. Either the man had gone through some serious surgical body mods or he’d been hitting the weight room every day for most of his life. Or both.

This stretch of beach would have been ideal for a snatch-and-grab. Isolated from the main hotel, open to the ocean. Just a signal from my commlink to the Orion and she could pick us up in minutes, no need to even return to our rooms, so long as Cas and Raph had remembered to pack our spare clothes.

Would have been ideal, except for all the other guests splashing through the water, taking advantage of the last few days of perfect weather before the storms came. Dozens of them. Probably nothing compared to the peak season, but enough that someone would call for help, maybe call in ships from the military garrison in the outer system. They wouldn’t get to the surface in time to prevent us getting Rhule, but they’d definitely reach the Tachyon Negative Zone and cut us off from the Interface.

“She sticks to him like glue,” Riva added. “Do you think we’re going to have to take her out when we grab him?”

I glanced aside at her, intending to look askance at the idea, but my eyes got stuck. Ms. De Betancourt might have been hot, but Riva was much closer. We shared a towel on the warm sand rather than renting the chaise lounges, and her breast rubbed against my arm in a way that made it very difficult to affect moral outrage. Or think at all.

“She might be an innocent,” I pointed out. “I’d rather not take the chance of collateral damage. If we have to, we can stun her and put her in a neural restraint, but I don’t want to hurt her if we can help it.”

Riva grunted noncommittally.

“You really think any of the Consortium stuffed shirts are innocents? I know these people. They’re more of a different species than the Southwind ever were.”

It went against my innate op-sec mindset to talk about shit like this in the open, but we were about as secure as we could get without jamming hardware. There was nowhere within three kilometers where anyone could have planted spy gear, and any ambient noise detectors would be drowned out by the crash of the surf, as long as we didn’t speak loudly.

“How did you wind up in the Marines?” I wondered.

It was probably unprofessional to be asking personal questions while on the job, but we were going to be here for hours and while we’d spent a good bit of time together in our mission prep, most of that had been having other people watch while we dined in public, danced, and walked, just to make sure we looked like a real couple. And getting our covers down. That had taken a while, long enough that we hadn’t wanted to confuse things with our real-life stories.

“You mean how did someone with a grandfather in the Consortium wind up in the Marines,” Riva corrected me. She scooted down, resting her back against the towel and resting her head against my chest. It was already warm outside, and where her hair fell over my skin, my chest became a furnace. “That had more to do with Mom than it did me. She and Grandpa had a falling out when she decided to marry a Fleet officer, and he told her that if she went through with it, he’d cut her off completely from the family fortune. Mom told him to shove the family fortune up his ass, and the only thing any of us got from him after that was a complementary medical suite at birth.”

My breath started to come shorter and I had my implant computer steady out my respiration and heartbeat the easy way instead of letting Riva know that her proximity had affected me.

“If your dad was in the Fleet, why didn’t you stay in after the war?” I shrugged. “And how did you end up with us? I’d think you’d be more likely to wind up on the other side.”

She cast a dubious look back at me.

“I told all this to your friend Yanto when I in-processed. Don’t you guys share this information?”

“There’s so much going on right now,” I admitted, “that we pretty much have to trust each other’s judgement when it comes to recruiting. We each take a quarter of the names, and we still are barely able to keep up with it. Of course, Yanto has been off on another headhunting mission, trying to bring in some more specific talents, some higher-ranking officers, so recently we’ve been splitting things three ways.”

“You’re gonna have to fix that, you know?” She cocked an eyebrow at me, though I could barely see it through the tangle of hair over her face from this angle. “I mean, if you hope this is going to become big enough to affect real change, you’re going to have to set up some sort of formal process for bringing masses of people in. Background checks, psychological tests, everything the regular military does. You’re gonna need clerks and automation, and I don’t know where the hell you’re going to get it.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” I said, impressed. “I figure we’ll just put you in charge of it.”

“Oh, you bastard!” she said too loud, laughing. But it sounded like something a lover might say in a moment of levity, so I supposed it wasn’t a big deal. “That’s what I get for opening my big mouth!”

“You never did answer my question though,” I pointed out, still watching Rhule and his girlfriend out of my peripheral vision. “Why did you leave the Corps? And why did you join us?”

Riva fell silent for a moment, and I thought she might choose not to answer, but finally, a heavy sigh signaled her surrender to telling the tale.

“I got out for the stupidest reason I can think of,” she admitted. “I fell in love.”

“I can think of stupider reasons,” I said softly, thinking of Miriam and suddenly not so welcoming of Riva’s closeness.

“Well, in my case, it was the dumbest thing I ever did. Ted was—is, I suppose—a priest of the Temple of Gaia.”

I goggled at her, unable to keep my attention on the target.

“Seriously?” I’d heard of the Temple of Gaia, of course, but I’d never met one of their priests or even seen one of their temples in person. “Do they really worship Old Earth?”

“Close enough. Though at the time, Ted convinced me that it made perfect sense, that they didn’t actually worship the planet itself but rather the spiritual side of humanity that we’d left behind when we’d abandoned her. And of course, the Gaians are all pacifists, so if I wanted a life with Ted, I would have to get out of the killing business. He worked in the temple, I worked at the shipping firm. I got pretty damned good at that job.” She rolled her eyes. “So good that Ted felt threatened by it and demanded I quit and work for the church. I told him I didn’t want to work for the church, and after that it was only a matter of time before we split up, because it became very clear that the church—and his position in it—was a lot more important to Ted than I was.”

“That’s half the answer,” I prompted.

Riva shifted uncomfortably, like the subject troubled her.

“I’m hesitant to say that I found anything those loons taught useful or close to the truth, but they did advocate for equal rights for the Southwind. I didn’t know much about Earth history back then, because really, who does? Well, the Temple of Gaia does. It’s their purpose.” She hugged her arms to herself as if a chill had gone through her. “I learned about slavery, about what we used to do to each other. Do you know about that part of Earth history, Brent?”

“I do,” I told her. “I know everything recorded.” I tapped the side of my head. “I’m not sure if they knew what they were giving us Archangels access to when they implanted these computers.”

“Well, I didn’t have any computer databank in my head. But when I saw what we’d done before, what we’d done now to the Southwind… I suppose I couldn’t entirely blame them for striking back at us. Even then, though, I didn’t regret fighting them, going to the Academy, accepting a commission. I mean, maybe they had a legitimate beef with the Coalition, but that doesn’t mean we could just sit there and let them kill us. But then I heard what you guys were saying, that the whole thing had been a setup from the start, and it made way too much sense. I wasn’t just a Marine who’d fought for a morally questionable government, I was a pawn… a patsy. I don’t like being used.”

“I bet you don’t.”

Riva sniffed at that, smiling in obvious agreement. After another few minutes, the smile had turned to a frown.

“You notice anything about those two?” she wondered.

“They like sitting still and doing nothing a lot more than I do,” I guessed.

“That too. But I haven’t seen them touch.”

It was my turn to frown. Rhule and his girlfriend were both lying out, catching rays and maybe sleeping, so there was nothing to see at the moment, but I ran the memories back of when they’d come down to the beach.

“They were holding hands before they left the boardwalk,” I said, though it wasn’t much.

“Maybe he’s just too strait-laced for public displays of affection,” Riva mused. “I mean, he is a corporate security specialist who used to be a spook. He could be one of those stiff-backed types who think showing affection makes him look weak.”

I squinted up at the sky. The sun was lower, past mid-afternoon.

“Well, for our sake, I hope he’s the type who likes an early dinner.”

He was not.

I’d waited out targets before, during the war. For days sometimes, and it hadn’t been that difficult. My implant neurosynth had the capability to play back any memory I called up, an endless array of movies, books, music, and a scrapbook of my life, at least since the thing had come online. It had been easy to set the computer as an automatic sentry while I slipped into a semi-trance, lost in the perfect recall.

I couldn’t do that now, not because I didn’t trust the computer’s abilities, but because I wasn’t alone. That shouldn’t have mattered. Riva would have taken the hint if I’d fallen silent, would have pretended to sleep or check the news on her commlink. But I didn’t want her to. And more than that, I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t interested in what she had to say. I wasn’t sure if it was because it was specifically her or simply because I hadn’t had the chance to talk to anyone other than Cas, Raph and Yanto for months.

Oh sure, there was Willwood, but Southwind, whatever their other positive qualities, weren’t much for casual conversation. So we sat there until nearly sunset and just talked. I told Riva what I could remember about growing up on Aphrodite and she shared the joys and tribulations of a childhood spent as a military brat at various Orbitals and other permanent stations all around the Coalition.

“Where are your parents now?” I finally asked after she still hadn’t gotten around to telling me after another hour. She still leaned up against me, and I’d grown used to the feel of her skin on mine, but at the question she stiffened slightly, drawing away a few millimeters.

“Dad…” she closed her mouth, staring into space for a second before trying again. “Dad was killed in the Battle of Gamora when his destroyer hit a mine.” Another long pause, and I sensed I should hold off on expressing my condolences just yet. “Mother couldn’t face life without him, not after what had happened with her family. I was gone, fighting the same war, just as likely to die, leaving her alone. It ate at her.” Riva took a deep, shuddering breath and I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to say it. But again, I had the feeling I should keep my mouth shut, that this was something she had to get out. “She left. Left the Orbital, left the sector, left her name behind and took off. I searched for her for a couple years before I gave up, but she might as well have dropped out of reality altogether. I came back from the war with no one. Which was, I suppose, another reason why I fell so easily for Ted’s line… and the Temple’s.”

“I’m sorry.” I slipped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed, and she patted my hand gratefully.

“I shouldn’t be talking about it. You lost a lot more than I did.”

Maybe, but I didn’t want to think about that. I’d spent way too much time the last few months thinking about nothing else.

“My parents are gone,” I confessed. “My dad and sister died in a flood and Mom…” I shook my head. “Mom couldn’t handle living without them. So she didn’t. And I sort of died right along with them, in a way.”

“And you were reborn as Michael,” she pointed out. “Then died again and became something else. Now what are you?”

“Tired of sitting here,” I chuckled, though it sounded forced to my own ears. But I didn’t want to go down that road. “Don’t these two get hungry?”

As if they’d been listening, Rhule finally roused himself, stretching before he rolled into a sitting position and spoke softly to Constance for a few seconds. She stood, unfolding like a praying mantis with agility and strength I wouldn’t have expected from someone as skinny as her, and offered Rhule her hand. He took it without hesitation and led her back up the path toward the resort.

I grabbed the towel and crouched in place, waiting until the two of them were far enough up the gentle slope to the paved road at the top that they wouldn’t see us, then walking after them at a brisk but not conspicuous pace. Until Riva slowed me with a hand on my arm.

“Couple,” she reminded me softly. “Supposed to act like a couple.”

“Sorry.”

I took her hand in mine and reduced my gait to match hers, still keeping an eye on Rhule and the mystery woman. They walked briskly and I chafed at our slow pace, but I knew Riva was right. It wasn’t as if they’d be running off to some hiding place. Our cottage wasn’t that far from theirs, and if they headed out before we got back, we could still keep them in sight. Not that I thought they’d go straight to dinner without cleaning up first. Rhule didn’t seem the type to go out showing anything other than his best.

“And there they go,” Riva confirmed, able to see the two walk into their cottage even without the benefit of my enhanced vision. We slowed to a halt, arm in arm, watching for a long moment. They didn’t come out, and she looked a question at me.

“They’re not coming out before dinner,” I decided. “And we can’t follow them everywhere. Let’s see if the bread we cast upon the water has returned tenfold.”

Riva frowned in confusion and I laughed softly.

“Sorry, I’m too used to working with people who can look up any quotation instantly. It’s kind of a game Cas and I used to play.” I didn’t bother explaining where this particular quote had come from, just used my implant comms to hook up to the resort network. “Craig, you there?”

He’d given us this number after I’d tracked him down via the Vistula’s personnel listings when we’d been heading for the beach. All it had taken was a small transfer of funds to his private account and he’d been very happy to become our confidential informant.

“Yeah, this is me,” he replied, his breath coming quick as if he’d suddenly had to walk away from a group to take the call. “What you need, Mr. Fell?”

“I wondered if you had anything for me on my coworker?” I told him. “The one who I asked you about?”

The story had been lame, and I think both of us realized that. I’d told Craig that Ethan Rhule and I had worked together until recently and we’d parted on bad terms, and I wanted to catch him somewhere alone to try to patch things up. Preferably without his girlfriend around because I’d used to date her.

“Uh, yeah.” Craig’s breathing had settled down but he still sounded uncomfortable, and I knew this was a good time to sweeten the pot. All it took to transfer another fifty credits was a light touch of my implant computer. I heard a faint chime on the other end as his commlink notified him. “Oh, wow, thanks, sir!” Now he sounded more relaxed. “Yeah, Mr. Rhule is booked for a few trips, a massage, renting a boat… but it’s all with his companion, Ms. De Betancourt. I think the only time I’ve ever seen him without her is when he takes his morning run on the Sylvan path. That’s usually like an hour before sunrise.”

“Thanks, Craig,” I told him, grinning. “That sounds perfect.”

“What is it?” Riva asked when I turned back to her.

“We have time to get showers. And maybe even dinner out.”

“I’d kill for a steak,” she said, licking her lips.

“Good news.” I took her hand and led her back toward our rooms. “You’ll only have to kidnap.”

I hoped.

CHAPTER SIX

I probably should have taken a cold shower. It would have been faster, would have woken me up after an entire afternoon spent lying in the hot sun, and most importantly, it would have done a better job of washing away the lingering feeling of Riva pressed against me for the better part of four hours.

Instead, I luxuriated under the high-pressure warmth of a virtual rainstorm, the water hitting me from every direction, a standing hot tub. It was something I’d only experienced once before, when Cas and I had stopped at one of the Orbitals and used a month’s salary to get each of us a private room in a luxury hotel. It had been worth it and this was even better, since someone else was paying for it. A hacked corporate account, specifically. Raph had an entire library of the things from his time working on the shadier side of the street, and they’d come in very handy funding our little organization.

We needed to give it a name. Yanto had been right about that. Raph had suggested the Jacobins, but I doubted he was serious and anyway, that was some bad optics.

Maybe something with a historical connection? Like… the Aurelian League. I kind of liked that. Or the Restorationist Movement. That gave the idea we were trying to bring back legitimacy to the government, although I had my doubts if the Coalition had ever really been all that legitimate. I’d run it past Cas and Yanto when I got back. And maybe Riva. If she was going to be in charge of filtering recruits, she might have some ideas.

I liked her. It felt shocking to think it, not because there’d been any reason that I shouldn’t, but because I wasn’t much for making new friends. I’d spent the war on my own and sometimes, I thought the only reason Miriam had been able to penetrate that shell was because I thought, with some justification, that everything from my old life was gone. I’d clung to her as the one good thing I had on the other side of nearly dying, of losing my only friend, and then I’d proceeded to take a job that isolated her and me and our son from everyone else in the galaxy.

There was Yanto, of course, but he’d sort of inserted himself in my life against my will. The same for Willwood. I hadn’t been given the choice of accepting them as friends because circumstances had thrown us together… and I owed them. Owed Yanto my life and owed Willwood for calling the Patrol and nearly costing him his.

But not Riva. She was just a random Marine. An attractive one, but if I’d just found her attractive, that wouldn’t have meant anything. She was bold and aggressive, yet at the same time smart and analytical. She would have made a good Archangel.

Damn. Now I really needed a cold shower. I sighed in resignation and reached for the temperature control, but the shower door swung open. I didn’t alert at the intrusion because I knew exactly who it was and had from the moment she’d approached on the other side of the smoky glass. If her bathing suit hadn’t left much to the imagination, somehow the lack of it still made a difference.

“I was beginning to wonder if you were going to hog the shower all damn night,” she said, the husky tone of her voice putting the lie to the playful lightness of her word.

I had some smartass reply in mind, something smooth that would have shown how in control I was, but all of that fled my mind when I kissed her. She was warm and smooth, slick with water, and yet there was no danger I’d lose my grip on her. Solid and athletic and not hesitant at all when I lifted her off the tile floor, my kinetex muscle implants barely feeling her weight. Her legs wrapped around my hips and when steam began to cloud the glass walls, I couldn’t tell if it was the shower producing it or the heat from the two of us.

“There are all sorts of reasons we shouldn’t be doing this,” I whispered into her ear.

“I know there are,” she gasped in reply. “But I can’t think of a one.”

And in the end, neither could I.

“I don’t think,” Riva mused, sorting through the contents of her suitcase, “that I brought any running clothes.”

I stared at her without saying a word, and not just because she wasn’t wearing a stitch. Neither of us had said a word about last night. Not when my internal alarm had woken me at two hours before local dawn, not when we’d shared another shower, this one shorter by necessity. She finally noticed me looking at her, and her smile beamed bright in the darkness of the cottage’s living room.

“We don’t have time for that,” she insisted, laughing. “And we should really save our energy.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” I said, slipping on a long-sleeved, dark-colored t-shirt. Together with dark sweat pants and a watch cap, it wasn’t exactly tactical gear, but it was as close as I could come without overly exciting the luggage scanners. “Well, not the only thing,” I corrected, trying to be honest.

“Oh, really?” she asked, unconvinced, pulling on her own set of dark clothing. More fashionable than mine, but that was to be expected. “And what were you thinking about?”

“I was just…” I stopped, started again as I pulled on my boots. They weren’t exactly running gear either, but they were more practical in a fight than sneakers. “Last night—and this morning—was…” I fumbled over the words, shook my head.

“You’re worried,” she told me, interrupting my gabbling as she straightened and began pulling her hair into a ponytail, “that what happened is going to make it hard to work together.”

“Yes,” I admitted, sighing gratefully at not having to say it myself, because I really hadn’t wanted to put it that bluntly.

“Do you think I’m that unprofessional?” she accused with a harsh glare, and I winced, thinking that this had been exactly the sort of reaction I’d been trying to avoid.

“No, not at all,” I said.

“Are you?” Her expression had gone from the accusatory glare to something softer, as if she’d made her point. The question caught me by surprise, and I took a moment to think about it before I answered.

“I don’t know. The situation never came up before.”

Weapons. We hadn’t been able to bring much, and not just because they weren’t allowed on a posh resort like this. Spreading enough money around could get by almost any regulation. But having deadly weapons along would have attracted attention that we didn’t want. The stunner was standard equipment for most corporate types though. Short-range, not much beyond contact distance, but within that range it could direct a static charge powerful enough to knock a grown man on his ass for a few seconds. I handed it to Riva and took the other one myself. A metal cylinder about twenty centimeters long, it could have been anything, but a flick of the wrist would extend it into a baton three times that length.

“You’re an…” Riva paused, eyes darting around. There was always the chance that the security system might be listening in. “You are what you are,” she corrected herself. “You know that when you do what you do, you don’t exactly have to think about it.”

Yeah, I got what she was talking about. The Machine. The cognitive combat response system, as Janus liked to call it. It was part and parcel of the neurosynth, and it would take over my reflexes and reactions in combat, running me through a series of tactical movements and responses that it considered most likely to triumph. It had no time for personal feelings or romance, and if it considered allies at all, it was only in relation to what they could contribute to victory. Theoretically, I could override it, but it worked a hell of a lot faster than my conscious mind and by the time I tried, whatever it did would be done.

I frowned at the thought, imagining the Machine letting Riva die in order to better accomplish the mission. Great, something new to worry about.

“You ready for a run?” I asked her, trying to change the subject… both between us and the one in my head.

“Almost,” she told me, tucking the stunner into a pocket of her light sweatshirt. She grabbed me by the back of the neck and pulled me into a kiss. “Now I am.” She pointed a finger at me and arched an eyebrow. “Don’t overthink things.”

“I’ve never been accused of that before.”

I’d spent the last several years nestled in a boreal forest in the foothills of some pretty harsh mountains, a place where it had been below freezing more days than it wasn’t, but stepping out into the pre-dawn damp of Aurora sent a shiver down my spine. It had gone from almost thirty-five degrees Celsius in the afternoon down to not even twenty, and the temperature drop caught me by surprise.

There was very little light pollution out here among the cottages and the stretch of stars spread across the early morning sky was nearly as breathtaking as it had been back on Sylvanus, drawing my attention away from the palm trees gently swaying in the wind.

“Nice morning for a run,” Riva said, pulling up her hood. “You know the way?”

I didn’t, but my neurosynth had the map of the trails and helpfully overlaid it in my vision, a faint blue glow leading me to the left at the fork of the paved sidewalk like a will-o’-the-whisp. Running for exercise wasn’t something I’d done since leaving the military, not when hiking up and down mountains kept my natural musculature in plenty good shape. Running was something I did when I was hunting something down… or trying to get away from something hunting me.

Finding a comfortable pace that wasn’t a full-out sprint took conscious effort, and even then I wound up having to slow down when I noticed Riva breathing hard. Not that she would have complained, but I needed her ready to fight when we caught up to Rhule, not wrung out and gasping for air. At least I didn’t have to worry about her not being able to see in the pre-dawn darkness. Not everyone could afford the enhanced optics contact lenses, but the Consortium could, and Raph had made sure the account numbers he’d stolen had gifted us a couple dozen sets. They weren’t nearly as advanced as the multi-spectrum implant filters the Coalition R&D department had left me as a permanent addition, but they were a damned sight better than stumbling around in the blackness. And it was a sure thing Rhule had his own set.

We might have been able to get by without them for the first couple kilometers. The walkway was broad and paved, lined with the faint glow of chemical ghostlights half-buried along the sides, barely visible until your sight had adjusted to the darkness. And if Rhule had stayed on that paved trail, maybe this would all have been easier, but according to the map Craig had given me, the security consultant had a nasty habit of heading out into the barely existent trails through the jungle.

Slowing as I came to the first of the social trails, I saw the fresh footprints, preserved by a thin layer of mud from the brief rain we’d had last night, and turned to follow them. I’d been hoping we’d get out before him, but Rhule’s schedule wasn’t exact, and from the heat coming off the tracks on thermal, we were only a minute or so behind. Possibly close enough that I didn’t feel comfortable speaking aloud, instead alerting Riva with a hand signal I hoped she remembered from Boot Camp, since she wouldn’t have been using it in a Havok battlesuit. She followed me off the pavement, so she at least understood that much.

The palm trees vanished, replaced by scrub oak, willow, and hardwoods, the space between them filled in with palmetto bushes and tanglefoot, except where the trail cut through them. Darker in here, the glow of false dawn filtered out through the overhanging trees, and everything went plasticky as the software had to fill in the gaps with data from my ears and nose, from extrapolation of thermal and infrared.

I adjusted my gait, going from a normal jog to a toe-heel cat foot to minimize the noise. Not just so Rhule couldn’t hear us, but so I could hear him. There. A distant, steady drumbeat even my enhanced hearing could barely pick out over the wind through the palms. The footsteps of a running man less than a hundred meters away. I couldn’t see him through the trees yet, but the neurosynth analyzed the sound of his footsteps and gave me the result.

Picking up my pace, I matched his stride, stepping when he stepped to disguise my own passage, and after a couple initial missteps, Riva followed suit. She was fast and had kept up with me for nearly five klicks, though I wouldn’t have expected anything less from someone with the perfect genes of a Consortium legacy child. Kind of ironic that so few of them had joined the military to fight the war they’d started, but that wasn’t Riva’s fault.

Two more minutes and I caught my first sight of Ethan Rhule, a dark shape passing through the shadow of the trees, only his thermal signature standing out from the surroundings. Close now. Thirty meters. I had to speed up, but he was going to hear it. Which meant we could either nod politely and pass by, or cross the Rubicon.

Alea iacta est. The die is cast.

I broke into a sprint, fast enough that Riva wouldn’t be able to keep up, and the world went into fast motion, the tall, well-built form of Ethan Rhule rushing at me like I’d grabbed the ground under his feet and pulled it back toward me. He wore a tank top and running shorts, seemingly unbothered by the morning chill, and just as obviously unarmed, which surprised me. A man who used to work for the SID and now ran off-the-book wetwork for them should have been more paranoid.

Oh well. His loss. He didn’t turn until I was less than ten feet from him, and by then it was far too late. I slammed my shoulder into his, spinning him out of control into the dirt in a tangle of arms and legs.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he blurted, jumping up to his feet quicker than I would have imagined he could.

I had no intention of engaging him in conversation, and if he expected an answer to the reflexive question, it didn’t show in the defensive stance he’d fallen into. Normally in a fight like this the neurosynth would have taken over, the Machine Riva had talked about, launching into the combinations it thought would work best to disable Rhule. But I needed the man alive and more or less intact, which meant I had to measure my assault. Disable without killing.

He didn’t need his joints to activate biometric idea, so I decided to start with the knees. The round kick snapped from the ground to where his knee had been in a fraction of a second, far too quickly for a normal to avoid it, far too powerful for anyone to block it. His leg wasn’t there anymore. He’d danced back into a front stance with that leg behind him, and when I hit nothing I could have sworn I saw a thin smile on his too-handsome face.

He ran private security for Kinetex LLC, the same people who’d manufactured my artificial muscles. Ethan Rhule was enhanced.

That revelation hit me like a metaphorical truck… and then something else hit me like a literal one. I had a half a second’s warning from the Machine, enough time to move just slightly, not get completely steamrolled, but I couldn’t get out of the way completely because the figure had come up fast, running at least fifty klicks an hour. Something, a knee or maybe an elbow, flashed at my head and hit my upper arm instead, still hard enough to knock me off my feet.

The blur cohered into a woman, dressed in black as I was, standing in a fighting stance beside Rhule. I almost didn’t recognize her with her hair pulled back and tucked under a hood, but the eyes gave it away. Constance de Betancourt. Rhule’s girlfriend.

Rhule’s bodyguard, and just as enhanced as he was.

We were so fucked.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was clear now, of course, hindsight being 20/20.

What Riva had noted about the two of them not showing much physical affection, not talking, him not going anywhere without her, it all made sense now. Ethan Rhule was paranoid, paranoid enough to not just get himself augmented with the same gear his foot soldiers used, but to also bring one of them along for backup even when he went on vacation.

And I’d waltzed on in here without even considering the possibility. I’d lost my touch since the war. Wallowing in self-pity wouldn’t help though. I had a decision to make and a fraction of a second to make it. I could either abort, run back the other way and grab Riva, head back to our cottage and call for evac, or double down and take both of them on.

I don’t recall actually making the decision. It might have been at exactly that moment that Constance attacked and the Machine took over, or it might be that the Machine took over in the microsecond before that, but either way, the fight was on. Deliberations went on inside my head in the space between moments, and I was never sure whether the internal debates were real or whether I just convinced myself they’d occurred in the wake of the Machine guiding my actions and explaining it to me the best way it knew how.

Both of them had muscle implants, likely jacked reflexes as well, which meant superconductive nerve fibers running from the kinetex augments to some sort of control systems, but what they didn’t have, I was almost certain, was a neurosynth. The neurosynth wasn’t just expensive as shit, it was dangerous. Raph was the mildest example of what could happen if the synchronization between the Machine and the mind went wrong. The most egregious examples hadn’t survived, followed by the ones who’d been euthanized after they became hopelessly violent. A man like Rhule wouldn’t take that chance, and even the Consortium couldn’t throw around that kind of money for a bodyguard.

All that was a long-way-round argument to let the Machine control me, which I suppose should have worried me, but I was just too damned busy to be worried. Time slowed down, an illusion brought on by my conscious mind running a beat behind reality, allowing me to watch the fight from the outside, as if it was a performance in a tournament or an action scene in a movie and I was just a spectator.

I was on my way to the ground already, and when the ball of my foot interrupted the fall I followed the momentum, knee bending just a little farther than it would have been able to without all the kinetex. The forward and downward momentum turned into the angular kind, the world spinning around me as I whipped my leg in a round, sweeping motion. It caught the woman first because she’d been closest, the impact surprisingly solid for someone of her slight build, and if it didn’t put her all the way down, I hadn’t expected it to.

Constance fell into a crouch and the Machine guessed what she’d do next, a lunge straight for my throat. My right hand still held the collapsible baton, almost forgotten in the confusion of the first three seconds of combat, and if there’d been no time to extend it, it was still plenty useful as a club… and for striking where she wouldn’t expect it. The blunt end of the heavy metal cylinder took her right between the eyes.

If she’d had the same level of augmentation that the Archangels had given me, the blow wouldn’t have taken her out of the fight. Even with a concussion or a bad brain bleed, my neurosynth could go on fighting without my help. Constance de Betancourt couldn’t, and she slumped backward, eyes rolling into her head. I was in motion before her back touched the ground, and watching from the confines of a little cell locked inside my own head, I whispered a prayer of thanks to the cyber-gods that my own interests aligned with the Machine’s.

Riva arrived in that exact second, having trailed far behind me after my last burst of speed, and Rhule would have gone after her… if I hadn’t gone after him first. That wasn’t the way the Machine worked, of course. As Riva had said obliquely back in the cottage, the AI didn’t think about my emotional attachments or how I wanted to keep her safe, but it knew that de Betancourt was down for at least a few seconds, which left Ethan Rhule a bigger threat.

The security expert might have been dangerous, but he was also in this for himself and rather than attacking Riva, as I’d feared, or attacking me, as the Machine worried about, he tried to run. It wasn’t a bad plan, actually. He was jacked with kinetex muscle augments, just like me, and knew these trails better than I did even with the aid of satellite mapping and my neurosynth. He could have lost me if I’d let him get a couple steps.

But I still had that baton and as good of a club as it made, it also did pretty good as a throwing stick. Ironically, I’d always sucked at baseball as a kid and would have killed to have this kind of accuracy in a fastball. The still-collapsed baton bounced off the base of Rhule’s skull and he toppled forward, head over heels, grabbing at the back of his head.

I lunged toward him but stopped short with an iron grip on my ankle. De Betancourt held on like a zombie coming out of the grave, blood trickling from the cut in her forehead, her teeth gritting with determination, trying to pull herself up my body. Unfortunately, she had the muscle to do just that, and her fingernails sliced into the skin of my calf like push-daggers. They weren’t natural, weren’t cosmetic, they were polymer blades anchored in the bones of her fingers, and I didn’t want to think about what she could do with them if she reached any higher up my leg.

Yanking my right leg free of her grip, I twisted in midair and slammed the sole of my boot into her face, tossing her backward. I landed in a crouch, not yet feeling the deep cuts in my leg, though I probably would later, once the Machine decided it wouldn’t compromise my fighting ability. De Betancourt sprang back up, her perfect features not quite as perfect now, looking more pissed off than injured and intent on revenge. She swiped broadly with those implant talons, a backhand blow I barely pulled away from in time, a faint sting on my triceps from shallow scores across the back of my arm better than having her fingers buried in my chest.

Riva. She was only a few meters away, running straight for Ethan Rhule, who’d managed to recover from the blow to his head and decided it was better to stand and fight than get blindsided again. But she had that stunner in her hand and I had an idea.

“Riva!” I barked, then did something stupid.

Well, my old unarmed combat trainers would have called it stupid because rule number one as far as they were concerned was to never, ever leave your feet. I violated the hell out of that idea, leaping as hard and as high as I could manage with the added boost of the kinetex, a good three meters off the ground, flipping around in midair to land behind de Betancourt. She didn’t wait around for me to hit her, of course, closing in to jump me the second I touched the ground. Which was just what I wanted. I used her momentum against her, getting a nasty set of cuts across my deltoid in the process, and grabbed her by the upper arm, throwing her directly in the path of Riva Powell.

I was trusting her a lot, risking not only my life but hers, since all it would have taken was a single slash with those claws and de Betancourt could have torn out Riva’s throat. But she’d heard me and, more important, knew exactly what I wanted.

The stunner crackled and popped, a blinding flash of static electricity pulsing into de Betancourt’s chest at nearly point-blank range. The woman went stiff, every muscle clenching, her eyes open wide and smoke curling out of her hair, and Riva didn’t let off the trigger until the gun’s charge was spent. I wanted to stay and wait, to see if that was enough to take out the bodyguard, but the Machine had made the decision and, dragging me along, we went after Rhule.

The man wasn’t a commando, but he’d been an SID agent, had probably heard shots fired in anger or they wouldn’t have hired him to do their dirty tricks, and had likely received extensive unarmed combat training, which would all likely have been enough to kill the shit out of the average attacker. And he wasn’t going down without a fight.

No wild swings from him, no desperation, even though he had to be desperate by now. Sharp jabs, short and powerful kicks, nothing fancy, just trying to keep me back and wait for an opening. And call for help. That was his play.

“Raph, I need pickup,” I said silently, hoping like hell the call would go through to the resort’s relay antenna and satellites. “Immediately. I think we’re about to have company. Home in on my signal.”

I could have given more details, but making a call for pickup while fighting hand-to-hand with an intelligence agent wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The worst part was that I had no idea if it went through and wouldn’t, because Raph and Cas couldn’t answer without revealing their location and even if that hadn’t been a problem, the relay system wouldn’t just pass along messages from anyone out there in the aether without authorization. If the call hadn’t gone through, we’d never know until whatever backup Rhule had signaled arrived.

Which meant I had to take the sonofabitch down now. His entire defense was keep-away, forcing me to take damage to get to him. Fortunately, I was an expert at taking damage. I waded into a flurry of straight punches, barely feeling impacts hard enough to crack bones—if my bones could crack—and grabbed Rhule by the throat, lifting him off his feet and slamming him into the dirt.

The breath left the man in a harsh wheeze, and if I’d wanted to kill him that would have the perfect opportunity, but we had other plans for Ethan Rhule. The man had muscle augments and it was a safe bet he had skeletal reinforcement as well, but there were two things that wouldn’t help with. One was cutting off his oxygen.

He’d already had the air knocked out of him, but when my knee landed in his solar plexus, he rattled like a pinata and folded in the middle, gasping silently, helplessly until I wrapped an arm around his carotid and squeezed. The Machine knew exactly the length I could cut off the oxygenated blood to his brain before it killed him, and I let off at a half-second before that.

Rhule went limp, but it wouldn’t last forever. Just long enough to restrain him. That had been the other trick, figuring out a way to bring restraints with us that wouldn’t be detected by the scanners, and the answer had been to smuggle the stiff strips of polymer inside one of my dress belts. I’d shoved them into a pocket before the run, and I had just enough time to secure Rhule’s wrists and ankles before he began to stir.

I left him groaning in pain and gasping for air and went back to Riva. She had de Betancourt trussed up the same way, although the bodyguard hadn’t woken up yet and still smelled like burned hair and flesh.

“I think I might have overdone it with the stunner,” Riva confessed, her voice jarring in the stillness of the last few minutes. Even the fights had been wordless, as if all of us had been afraid to break the silence even as we tried to kill each other. “I don’t know if she’s breathing.”

“Yeah, well, you know that shit I said about collateral damage and innocent bystanders?” I asked, then pointed to my shredded clothing and the blood staining my boots. “She’s not that fucking innocent. She’s probably one of his covert ops team who he drags along as his make-believe girlfriend to keep an eye on him while he does the whole corporate vacation bit.”

“Are you okay?” she asked, wincing as she looked at my leg. “Those are some pretty nasty wounds.”

“Just skin deep,” I assured her. “It’ll hurt, trust me, but I heal fast.”

“You people…” I turned at the moaned words and was surprised to find Ethan Rhule turned over on his side, glaring at us. “You people don’t know who you’re fucking with.” He spat out blood. “You don’t know who’s going to come after you.”

“You’re Ethan Rhule,” I informed him, keeping my tone clinical. “Formerly of the SID, lately head of security for Kinetex LLC.” I allowed myself the luxury of a sneer. “And since you actually never stopped working for the SID, your biometrics are still on file with a whole shitload of quantum memory cores at SID listening posts. Which means you probably know all about the conspiracy between members of the SID and the Consortium to sponsor Southwind terrorist groups to foment a war they could use to take control of the government. Is that close?”

Maybe it was poor interrogation technique, giving away this early how much we knew, but it was worth it to see Rhule’s eyes go as wide as saucers and his face turn pale. And at least it shut him up. I stared up into the lightening sky, so close to dawn now, the black turning to gray, the stars fading out at the burgeoning sunrise.

“We’re exposed as hell out here,” I told Riva. “If Rhule got a call out to reinforcements, we’re going to need to tuck in somewhere and hide until we’re sure that…”

“We have incoming,” Riva said, pointing to a glint of light high in the pre-dawn sky.

“That’s my security team,” Rhule said, seemingly over his shock at my revelations enough to gloat. “You should let me go and surrender now. Maybe then they’ll take you alive for questioning. That’s the only way you’re getting off this planet alive.”

“Gag him,” I told Riva. She nodded and ripped a strip of cloth off Constance de Betancourt’s shirt and used it to tie around Rhule’s mouth, stuffing an extra wad of the thin material between his teeth first for good measure.

I hefted the body of Constance de Betancourt up like a sack of grain, deciding that Riva was right and the woman was dead. It was the risk with a stunner under the best of circumstances, and Riva hadn’t been particularly cautious in her application of the supposedly nonlethal weapon. A pang of sympathy hit me, and rather than flinging her corpse into the woods, I hefted her in my arms like a baby and carried her off to the side, laying her gently beneath a copse of trees. She was on the wrong side, but Cas had been too. It was all he knew, and maybe this was all Constance had known.

“What do we do with him?” Riva asked, jerking a thumb toward Rhule. Him I felt no pang of sympathy for. “If that is his ship coming in with his people…”

If it was, the smart thing to do would be to kill him, but the part of me that had spent most of the last ten years nourishing life and shepherding its spread on Sylvanus rebelled at the idea of killing a helpless man, even a scumbag like Rhule. As much as I didn’t like it, maybe we’d just have to abandon him and make a run for it.

“Hey, Brent, that you down there?”

I sighed in relief at Castiel’s voice, looked up. The Orion was still a thousand meters up, but the delta shape gleamed in the light of the rising sun.

“It’s us. Hurry up, we’re expecting company.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to move your asses about a klick northwest.” Raph this time, sounding annoyed. “This bird needs some room to touch down, y’ know? I don’t want a damned oak tree through the belly of the ship!”

“Give us five minutes.”

Grabbing Rhule by the throat and one arm, I lifted him off the dirt, looking him in the eye.

“Bad news, buddy. That’s not your ship, it’s ours. And if you like the guys coming to rescue you even a little bit, you might want to tell them not to engage.”

I threw him over my shoulder and waved at Riva to follow.

“Come on,” I told her. “We have to get to a clearing.”

“Damn,” she murmured, falling into a brisk jog behind me. “I hate leaving all those nice clothes behind.”

“Where we’re going,” I pointed out, “I don’t think you’re going to have much need for bathing suits.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Why couldn’t we just take the fucker back to Lyonesse?” Raph wondered, grimacing as we clomped down the ramp of the Orion into the damp, dripping shadows. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“As opposed to a dying world with poisonous oceans?” Cas shot back, laughing sharply. He’d been tagged to carry Rhule off the ship since I’d personally had enough of the man and his never-ending supply of invective. Cas had solved that particular problem by injecting Rhule with a sedative just after we’d emerged from the Tachyon Interface, and it was amusing listening to the SID agent snoring softly as he was carried head-down over Cas’s shoulder. “You know why we’re here as well as I do, so stop playing stupid. We only have twenty-four hours before the data cores erases itself, and this is the closest base we have to Aurora.”

I ignored their chatter, though I gave a prayer of thanks that we’d only had to spend twelve hours in the Interface listening to it and to Ethan Rhule ranting how we’d regret this and how the Parliament, the SID, and the military would make us all pay.

“He does have a point,” Riva admitted, speaking softly from beside me. “Hephaestus is a real dump. I spent five days here during the war and went straight from here to the Battle of Dunbar. Dunbar felt like a vacation.”

I grunted a soft laugh but said nothing else. Riva was another reason I was glad we’d only spent twelve hours hyperlight. It had helped me avoid the awkwardness of trying to explain to Cas and Raph why we were sharing a compartment.

They were both right though. If there was a step down from Lyonesse that could still technically be called habitable, it was Hephaestus. The terraforming job here had been left half-done by the Southwind rebellion, the Venus-like planet seeded with genetically engineered bacteria that broke down its thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere into oxygen… and rain. Rain that would have only lasted a few months had the process been completed, but without the next step, it was rain that would go on for years.

The terraforming control stations had been abandoned during the war and not yet reoccupied, which made the entire place ideal for an outpost for us. For whatever we wound up being, and dammit, I couldn’t stop thinking about that now. The main problem with Hephaestus was that there was just no place at all to get warm and dry. The constant rain soaked everything, turning every surface of the planet that wasn’t already underwater into a bog, and every body of water covered in the sickening blue-green of the engineered algae.

Willwood showed no antipathy to the eternal damp chill here in the shadow of the battered old hangar, no reaction to the unending patter of the rainfall on the sheet-metal roof. This was just the sort of environment his people had been built for and indeed, it would have been home to thousands of them if the war hadn’t interrupted.

At least we weren’t alone here, as the two other star transports sheltering against the elements in the hangar beside us showed. No maintenance crews rushed to meet our landing, but Yanto and a short, broad-faced woman named Bloedorn who’d once been a Fleet engineer stood near the entrance to the main facility, waiting for us somewhere dry. Dryer.

“You got the cores here?” I called as we walked up to them. I winced at an ice-cold drop of condensation from the hangar ceiling hitting me in the forehead, bit back a curse as another went down the back of my jacket.

“Naw,” Yanto drawled, rolling his eyes. “I decided at the last minute to leave them behind and just come to this beautiful vacation spot for the sunshine and beaches.”

I glared back at Raph.

“Have you been giving him asshole lessons?”

“I resent that,” Yanto said. “I come by my cynical humor honestly, by being a Marine NCO. How did it go? You guys have fun at the resort while the rest of us were stuck on this shithole?”

“Oh, yeah,” I assured him. “We spent like five hours sitting on the beach, needing very badly to go to the bathroom while we watched this bastard—” I nodded at the unconscious form of Rhule, “—sleep, when he wasn’t checking his reflection in his sunglasses. We did get one good meal out of the place before I had the pleasure of the enhanced bodyguard pretending to be Rhule’s girlfriend basically ripping my leg open.”

“It still sounds more exciting than this.” Yanto made a come-hither gesture. “Come on, come on. Enough with the suspense, bring the douchebag on in.”

“We have everything set up for you,” Bloedorn said, motioning behind them. “Just bring him straight to the lab. We even have a table we can strap him down to… if he wakes up.”

“He will at some point,” Cas said, slapping Rhule on the butt. “Probably in about ten minutes if I read the dose right. Let’s get him strapped in.”

It was less damp inside the hallways of the terraforming facility, but not by much. Condensation still dripped off every metal surface and the chemical light strips our people had fastened to the ceilings hung limply at some points, the moisture working loose their adhesive. They swung like pendulums under the push of air currents from the ventilation system, their shifting light throwing shadows fitfully across the hallway.

Not quite abandoned anymore, but still haunted and lonely, making our technicians and flight crews seem like intruders in this remnant of a civilization less than two decades past and yet still as lost to us as old Earth. An innocence we’d never get back. Details of my youth eluded me, but the feeling of being young remained in my memory, the idea that humanity was fulfilling its destiny, spreading life to lifelessness remained. If I’d thought about the Southwind at all, it was with a sense of awe that we’d created them too, that we’d become like gods and no one could stop us.

No one believed that anymore, not after the war.

Men and women who I knew by sight and at least by their last name nodded to me with respect I didn’t really feel I’d earned and huddled under their jackets. Uniform but not the latest, the best we’d been able to find and afford.

“We fixed up some of the living quarters the facility crew used to use,” Yanto told me. “Don’t know how long this is going to take, but I figure you might need to get some rest.” He shrugged. “It’s still damp inside them, but we put up some plastic sheeting around the doors to try to keep the condensation to a minimum. We put some up in the lab too, although it’s the one place in the entire facility that’s really insulated. I think they were using it for engineering new strains of the cyanobacteria.”

“Cyanobacteria?” I repeated, laughing. “Since when did you become a biochemist?”

“Since I haven’t had anything to do the last couple days except read up on this planet. What? Just because I’m a Marine, I can’t be interested in science?”

Riva snorted, elbowing me in the side.

“He’s got you there.”

“There’s nothing about being a Marine that would keep you from being interested in science,” I agreed with Yanto. “I assumed you couldn’t be that smart because you were an NCO.”

“Ow, that stings, sir,” he said, miming a chest wound.

“In here,” Bloedorn said, guiding us through a set of silvery double doors into the lab.

I could imagine this place as the lair of some mad scientist creating hybrid monsters, especially with the plastic sheeting the tech crew had hung up on the walls and across the ceiling. More sheeting had been draped over the computer gear, and at the heart of it all was a cluster of gleaming metal cylinders, the quantum cores we’d stolen.

“Are we sure this is going to work?” Riva asked, and Cas shot her a dirty look.

“Now you ask?” He shook his head, then laid Rhule out none too gently on the metal gurney set in front of the quantum cores. The man’s head bounced off the cart and I winced, but none of the techs seemed to notice as they got busy strapping him in. “If this doesn’t work, we went to an awful lot of trouble for nothing.”

“There’s no way to isolate the cores from incoming signals just in case?” she suggested.

“It wouldn’t matter,” Bloedorn explained. “They’re on a timer set at the last check-in.” She pointed to one of the techs. “Richy, get the DNA samples and be quick about it.”

The technician retrieved a syringe from a covered tray next to the gurney and inserted it carefully into Rhule’s vein. The prick of the needle was enough to wake him from the anesthetics and he blinked, tried to thrash around, but the straps across his chest and wrists kept the needle in place until the vial was filled with blood.

“It’s not just biometrics then?” Riva asked. “I thought it would just scan his retinal patterns or something.”

“Too easy to fake that,” Bloedorn said, shaking her head emphatically. “Even the DNA would be too easy, which is why you have to have the living person present. Y’see, it’s this process called…”

“Can we just get on with it?” Raph asked. “The fucking suspense is killing me. I just have to know if Brent sacrificed himself by going on a romantic weekend getaway with a beautiful woman all for nothing.”

“God damn you guys,” I sighed. “Next time, Cas goes no matter what.”

“Okay, we have the samples,” Bloedorn confirmed, laying out the vials they’d collected from Rhule. “This should be enough for all the cores. Hutchinson, make sure the data connections are secure. God knows how long we’ll have once the ID goes through.”

Rhule moaned, eyes squeezed shut as if the bright lights in the lab hurt them.

“What th’hell did you do to me?” he mumbled, the metal of his gurney squeaking as he tried to pull free of the restraints. I hoped they were strong, because with the muscle implants he might actually manage it, and I moved slightly away from Riva and the others, ready to grab him if he got loose. “You’re all gonna die, you know that? I’m friends with the fucking deputy director of the SID… she’ll have you ripped apart, piece by piece, then she’ll pop you in the biomodule and let the thing grow back the pieces she cut off, just so she can fucking cut them off again!”

“Oh, I bet this asshole is a hit at parties,” Raph said, snorting in amusement. “Maybe we should have brought along some kittens for him to drown.”

“He reminds me,” Cas said, “of every SID field officer I’ve ever worked with. Sure that their shit doesn’t stink.”

“It’s working!” Bloedorn announced, pointing at the displays.

Computer code streamed across them, undecipherable to most, though I knew—thanks to the neurosynth—that it was the security clearance routines for all the cores running their course, unlocking all the bank vault doors and letting out the secrets within. I sighed, wishing there was something I could lean against that wasn’t covered in plastic.

“Good job, Bloedorn,” I told her. “How long before we get anything useful out of this?”

“It’s going to be a few hours just to transfer the data into our own cores, sir,” the woman said, sounding like every engineer ever. “After that, it depends on how detailed your inquiries are, but I wouldn’t expect anything concrete for a day? Maybe two?”

“You don’t have a day!” Ethan Rhule yelled, yanking at the straps. “You’ll all be dead before then, or wishing you were! Let me go and turn over the data and I’ll let you fly out of here with your lives. It’s your only way out!”

“Oh, Christ on a crutch!” Cas said, throwing up his hands. “Do we have to listen to this guy? I mean, he’s served his purpose, can I just put a round through his head?”

I sighed, sympathetic to the impulse, but shook my head.

“Yanto, is there someplace secure in this base where we can lock him up? And I mean secure, because he’s jacked with augments. Strong door, no windows, and armed guards outside at all times.”

“I got just the place for him, Brent,” Yanto assured me, grabbing the end of the gurney, then pausing to grin at Cas. “I’d feel better if I had one of you Archangel types along to make sure the big bad man doesn’t hurt me.”

Cas glowered at Raph before he followed Yanto and the still-ranting Ethan Rhule out of the lab.

“You really have been a bad influence on the man.”

“Bloedorn,” I said, once they were gone, “I want people on this around the clock. No breaks, just shift changes until the data is cross-loaded. Not one but two copies, and getting one of them back to Lyonesse is our number-one priority. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, stiffening as if she was about to salute but reconsidered it. “We have enough personnel for two shifts. I’ll get right on it.”

“What you got for me, oh fearless leader?” Raph wondered, and I motioned him over to the side, away from the tech crew.

“Don’t look over Bloedorn’s shoulder,” I instructed him, “but keep an eye on the progress and let me know if anything important pops up that can’t wait.” I rubbed a hand across my face. “I’m running on no sleep and not much food, and I’m gonna go try to get both.”

Raph’s sidelong glance at Riva might have been what he thought of as subtle, but didn’t quite make it.

“Sure, boss,” he said, grinning. “I’ll give you all the time you need to… recover.”

“Raph,” I told him, speaking through the implant commlink, “I want you to do me a favor and ask Tommy if he thinks this is a good time to mess with me.”

A pause and Raph’s grin faded.

“Damn. The little cybernetic bastard is a lot more perceptive than I gave him credit for. Sorry, Brent.” When he looked over again, it was less of a leer than before. “Is it serious?”

“If I want to talk about my love life with anyone, Raph,” I told him, “rest assured, you will be the fourth, or maybe even the fifth person I confide in.”

“Ooh,” he said, aloud this time.

“Remember what I said,” I repeated. “Anything you think is important, wake me up.”

It probably didn’t help matters that Riva left the lab with me, but Raph at least had the good sense not to say anything about it.

CHAPTER NINE

“Raph knows,” I sighed.

Riva wiped the thin sheen of sweat off her forehead along with a few stray hairs stuck there and propped her head on her hand, looking at me with amusement. The low light of the terraforming base living quarters glowed on the soft tan of her bare flank, graceful and deadly as a lioness. Her shoulders shuddered in a last, harsh gasp of breath from the recent exertion before she relaxed enough to speak.

“I have to say, that isn’t the most romantic pillow talk I’ve ever heard from a man,” she admitted, brushing her fingers across the hair on my chest. Her fingertips pressed against my chest like embers nestled in snow, a slow-burning warmth spreading through the cold dampness of the room.

“Sorry,” I said, taking her hand in both of mine and turning over in bed to face her. “But Raph knows about us. I think maybe Cas does too, but I trust him to keep his mouth shut. I trust Raph too… with my life. But not with gossip. The man has no filter.”

“He talks to an imaginary friend in his head,” Riva pointed out.

“The friend’s not imaginary,” I corrected. “I just…” I closed my eyes for a second and gathered my thoughts. “I don’t know if we should keep doing this.”

“You’re worried about gossip?” she asked, eyebrow going up in surprise. “You?”

“No, I’m not. That is, I’m not worried about what gossip would do to me.” I pushed the red-gold hair out of her face, cupping her cheek in my hand. She was so damned beautiful.

“What?” Riva laughed. “You think I’m worried about the rumors staining my virtuous reputation?”

“We’re going to be buying—or stealing—hundreds of Havok battlesuits eventually,” I explained. “You’re going to be at least a company commander. Maybe higher than that, since we’re probably going to be light on senior officers who’ve had combat experience. We need you in that position. And the last thing I want to do is undermine your authority by making recruits who don’t know you think that you’re holding that rank because you’re involved with me.”

I thought she was going to get angry with me, that she was going to take what I said the wrong way, but instead her expression went thoughtful.

“I suppose,” she finally said, “that if I were some young girl fresh out of the Academy, that might be an issue. But I’m pretty confident in my ability to lead whether or not there are some assholes who think I got the job by sleeping with the boss.”

“I have no doubt. I’m just wondering if it’s worth it.” I raised a hand to forestall her protest. “For you, not me. You’re definitely worth it. But I… I don’t know how much I have to offer. I’m not ready for anything more than this. And I didn’t know if this would be enough for you.”

“I’m not stupid, Brent,” she told me. “We all know why you’re here. Even if you don’t talk about it, Yanto does. And you’re right, Raph can’t keep his mouth shut to save his life. I know what happened to your wife and son. I wouldn’t presume to think I could step into your life and…” she shook her head, “… take her place. But you need to not be alone, and I’ll be honest with you, even though it might cost me my tough-chick-doesn’t-need-a-man card, I need that too. I like you and that’s enough, for now. Is it enough for you?”

It was a good question, but not one I felt like I could answer.

“I like you too, Riva.” I shrugged. “And I think what scares me about it is that I want more than that, even though I don’t know if I could handle it.”

“Well, I know this is hard for guys, despite the stereotypes that say otherwise,” Riva said, nestling into my side, whispering in my ear, “but what if we just take it slow? Maybe just give it some time, see what happens?”

I laughed softly at the idea, pulling her to me, hands wandering across the smooth skin of her back.

“Yeah, I think it’s because we want to be too much in control,” I admitted. “We want to be moving forward, doing something. And if we’re not moving, then something’s gotta be wrong and we want to end it. Just going with the flow doesn’t come naturally for us.”

“Would you do it for me?” she asked, kissing my ear just behind the words. “Am I worth going with the flow?”

I answered her by covering her mouth with mine, pressing her down beneath me. It was easier than telling the truth.

“Brent, you busy?” Raph asked inside my head.

I didn’t stop what I was doing, because thanks to the implant commlink, I didn’t have to.

“Very. What’s up?”

And unless it was a matter of life or death, I wasn’t going to stop.

“We have some interesting data about our friend, Ethan Rhule. We were right about him—he’s still balls deep in the SID’s covert ops. That security force he runs that take advantage of all that Kinetex wetware… well, he’s loaning them out as black-ops to the SID, using them to suppress any opposition. He’s behind assassinations and coups on at least a dozen worlds.”

I grunted—well, I grunted inside my head, not counting the noises I made on the outside—and tried not to lose focus while I analyzed the data.

“That’s incriminating and probably illegal,” I agreed, “but it’s not the crime we’re looking to find evidence for.”

“But maybe it’s enough to give us some ammunition to sweat him,” Raph suggested. “At least that’s what Cas thinks. He’s had Bloedorn and her people set up an interrogation room in one of the old storage compartments. Wants your okay before we get it started though, and he figured you’d want to sit in on it.”

“Yeah, he figured right. Give me a half an hour.”

“You sure that’s gonna be long enough, boss man?” Raph’s leer came through in his voice, and my jaw clenched against the out-loud curse I wanted to snap at him. “Don’t sell yourself short!”

I could have gotten angry, but what was the use? Raph was Raph, and yelling at him wasn’t going to change it.

“You’re right. Make it an hour.”

I cut off the connection entirely, not wanting to hear from him before that hour was up, and I thought I’d gotten away with it, but Riva’s knowing grin told me otherwise.

“You did tell Raph to call you if he found out anything,” she said. “So, what’s up?”

“We’re going to try putting the screws to Rhule,” I told her. “See if we can get him to talk.”

“Put the screws to him?” she teased, her legs tightening against my hips. “You trying to make me jealous already?”

“He’s not my type,” I promised. “And I’d really like to stop talking about him now if you wouldn’t mind.”

“What?” she teased. “You mean a badass Archangel like you can’t multitask?”

“Well, I can, but I’d rather not. At least not if the subject is Ethan Rhule. How about you help me name this thing instead?’

“I’ve always been partial to Russel the Love Muscle,” she said, laughing. “But I’ve always thought guys who named it were a little juvenile…”

“No.” I chuckled, though neither of us stopped. “Not that, the organization. This thing of ours, the thing you joined. I can’t keep asking people to join something without a name.”

“The best things sometimes have no name,” she reminded me breathlessly, “unless you really want to go with Russel.”

“Come on,” I urged, though I’m not sure what I was referring to. “Be serious.”

“It’s advertising,” she reasoned, a lot more logical and analytical than I would have been. “Marketing. You want something that’s going to pull people in, make them think they can’t lose, right? You want them to think they’re badasses who can’t lose, right?”

“Ideally,” I agreed, not really able to come up with anything more coherent at the time and maybe a little insulted she could.

“Well, who’s the biggest badass we have? Who are the ones who started all this?”

“Gonna have to be more specific,” I warned her.

“Dumbass.” But the word came out in a hiss of pleasure as her back arched. “Isn’t it obvious?”

She veritably screeched out the last, and then it was over and we both slumped to the bed, out of breath.

“As flattered as I am,” I told her, “I don’t think the Dumbasses is going to be the marketing success you imagine.”

“The Archangels,” she said, thumping me on the back of the head. “You should call us the Archangels.”

I blinked, my brain starting to work again after the blood flow reversed itself.

“You know, that’s… not a bad idea at all. I have to run it by Cas and Raph and the others, but I like it. And it’s also a way to send a big fuck-you to the people behind Janus, the people who used us as a tool.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she sighed, running a hand down my arm, “you really need to consider phrasing.” Sighing, she swung her legs off the bed and grabbed her clothes. “Come on, let’s go get cleaned up and tear Mr. Rhule a new asshole.”

“Ugh,” I moaned, pulling on my pants. “Now who needs to think about phrasing?”

“You’re a bad man, Mr. Rhule,” Raphael said, tsking like a mother chiding a wayward son. “You’ve done some bad things.”

Ethan Rhule glared at the man, the muscles in his neck bunching up as he struggled with the metal bands securing him to the chair. The entire rig was cobbled together from the sturdiest materials Bloedorn had been able to find, fastened with oversized bolts like there should have been Van de Graaf generators piping electricity into bolts on Rhule’s neck. The image was only accentuated by the floodlight they’d rigged up to shine directly into his eyes.

The rest of the room was dark, lined with black plastic sheeting except directly above the man, where they’d fiendishly left it open to the ceiling so condensation could drip on his head. Between the outer darkness and the hellish light, even the enhanced optics implants he undoubtedly had couldn’t have made out the four of us surrounding him, but he focused on where Raph’s voice had come from.

“You think I don’t know who you people are?” he growled. “Do you think I haven’t heard of you? You think you’re in any position to judge me?”

“I think I’m in the perfect position, you piece of shit,” Raph snarled back at him. “I think all I’ve done my whole life is run and hide from spooks like you.”

“You’re killing off political opposition for the SID,” I put in, stepping forward, letting him see me. “I didn’t think there was any work too dirty for them, but you’ve managed to find it. Plausible deniability, I suppose.”

“You think this little charade scares me?” Rhule scoffed. “You think I haven’t been on the other side of enough of these? You’re fucking amateurs, and when you’re all watching your blood run out onto the floor, I’ll be the one standing over you and laughing as you die.”

“Do you not believe we’d kill you?” Cas asked him, not stepping into the light, just a voice in the darkness. “Because trust me, I’ve killed better men than you for less. I’m not proud of everything I’ve done, but I doubt I’d lose a minute’s sleep over you.”

“Then do it. If death scared me, I’d be in another business.”

I sighed, looked to Riva.

“If you’re not scared of dying,” she asked, “then why the hell did you bring a bodyguard with you to a vacation resort? There was no way for you to know we’d be coming for you. Hell, there was no reason for you to think anyone would be, not on Aurora. That sounds more like you’re paranoid, like you’re scared shitless.”

“Constance wasn’t my idea!” Rhule yelled back at her, pulling against his restraints again. “I don’t even like the fucking beach!”

His mouth snapped shut as if he’d realized that he’d let himself be baited.

“Put the hood on,” I told Raph.

He nodded and grabbed the metal helmet from the floor beside Rhule’s chair, pushing it down over the man’s head. They’d shown us the device before they’d brought the prisoner in. It had no visor, no way to see out, and the earphones piped a constant stream of white noise into the helmet to make sure he couldn’t hear anything around him.

“We’re not going to get him to talk this way,” I told them. “He’s got too much to lose and nothing to gain. Getting put on the SID’s shitlist is probably as bad as anything we could do to him.”

“Do we even need him to talk?” Riva wondered. “I mean, we have the intelligence from the data cores. Won’t that give us what we need to implicate the SID in starting the war?”

Cas shook his head, and I had to echo the gesture.

“There’s years’ worth of data there, and no one’s going to record something as blatant as hey, we started the war. It’s going to be hidden under layers of records, and without Rhule’s help leading us to it, we’ll probably be combing through that shit for months before we find anything useful.”

“There’s always the old-fashioned way,” Raph said, pulling a knife from his gunbelt and twirling it between his fingers.

“No,” I said flatly. “I know this is war, but if there’s no moral difference between us and them, there’s really no reason for anyone to join the Archangels.”

Raph’s eyebrow shot up.

“Really? That’s what we’re calling ourselves?”

“Unless you have a better idea. We’re not torturing him and that’s final. You guys want to outvote me on this, I’ll grab the first fucking ship out of here and you can run this clown show yourselves.”

“Easy, brother,” Cas said, making a quelling gesture. “You’re in charge. You say no thumbscrews, we don’t do it. Right, Raph?”

“Yeah, fine,” Raph sighed, slipping the knife back into its sheath. “What about chemical interrogation, then?”

“Do we even have those drugs?” Riva wondered.

“There’re some on the Orion,” Cas allowed. “I brought them along just in case.” He shrugged. “I mean, it was a snatch-and-grab. I can go get them.”

“I was never trained for chemical interrogation,” I said, frowning. We hadn’t been trained in it because it was nearly useless against the Southwind. Willwood had been subjected to weeks of it, along with virtual-reality sensory deprivation, and they still hadn’t gotten much out of him.

“I was,” Cas told me, stone-faced, and I wondered how different his resume of the last ten years had been from Rhule’s. “I can handle it.”

“I don’t know if I’m totally comfortable with it,” I confessed. “There’s a reason it’s illegal to use that shit on humans. Brain damage, psychological breaks… psychosis, even. All possible side-effects.”

“You wanna wait months then?” Cas spread his hands. “It’s your call, but you’ve seen the people we’re pulling in with nothing but our word and general hard feelings toward the federal government. A couple dozen at a time, half of them with untreated PTSD, maybe a quarter with substance abuse problems. You think we can run a successful revolution with that? Because I don’t. We wait months, we may lose even those people.”

I looked to Raph and he snorted derisively, then motioned at Rhule.

“He killed civilians for money just because they were political inconveniences for the SID. He deserves what he gets.”

“It’s your call, Brent,” Riva reminded me. “War is an ugly thing.”

“But not the ugliest of things,” I finished the quote for her. I nodded at Cas. “Do it. Raph, get him prepped.”

It was probably the right thing to do, I told myself as Cas headed back for the hangar.

Why did it feel so wrong?

CHAPTER TEN

I had to eat something.

It felt weird, stuffing my face with ration packs while, just two rooms over, my friends were getting ready to inject a prisoner with possibly life-threatening drugs, but the nanite suite had needs and if I expected it to rebuild me, it needed building blocks to do it. The wounds on my leg, arm, and shoulder had healed up during the flight here from Aurora, but the cost had come in body fat stores.

Riva ate as well, but she stopped at one packet of supposed spaghetti and meatballs while I polished off two containers of chicken and rice and was halfway through a hamburger steak meal before the ravenous feeling finally slacked off. She stared at me with something between amusement and awe in her expression as I set my plastic fork down on the plastic table and took a breath.

“Is that how you usually eat?” she asked me.

I took a long sip off a water bulb before answering.

“We expended a lot of calories.” She cocked an eyebrow and I laughed. “I meant back on Aurora.” The eyebrow didn’t go down and I had to clarify further. “During the fight.”

“That was a long time ago,” Riva said, unconvinced.

“It’s a side-effect of being what I am.” I went ahead and shoveled down another bite. “The nanites can fix a lot—I mean, they can’t regrow a limb or an organ, but they can heal almost everything else. But they don’t work for free. If I don’t get the chance to eat, they start with the food already in my digestive system, then break down…” I made a face, “… bodily wastes, let’s say. From there, they go to body fat, and you don’t want to test the system too much after that. I’ve never been there, but the next to go is muscle mass, then bones, and I suppose then the little buggers would start on the nonessential organs. Eventually, there’d be nothing left of me but the neurosynth.”

Riva grimaced, stuck out her tongue in distaste.

“Jesus, I’m glad you told me that after I ate.”

“Sorry. The bottom line is, I try not to skip meals. It’s not like I have to worry about getting fat, not with the nanite suite monitoring my health.”

“Ooh, I need to get one of those,” Riva said, eyes lighting up at the idea. “How do I sign up?”

“It’s simple,” I told her, grinning around a mouthful of hamburger. “Just agree to be a government assassin and give up all connections to your former life and work for them forever and you’re in.”

“Well, that’s not really that bad for a government contract,” she admitted, then looked down at the trash left behind from our meal. “I don’t see any recycling here.”

“There’s a trash bin over behind the storage lockers,” I said, motioning to the other side of the battered, soggy cafeteria. “No place to dump it, of course. We can take it with us or just leave it here. It’s not as if there’s anyone to complain.”

“Doesn’t feel right not cleaning up our trash behind us.” Riva grabbed the ruins of the meal packets and balled them up, heading for the bin. “I guess it’s just too much time spent in my developmental years in Orbitals. Nothing ever gets thrown away there. Every bit of biological waste is composted and everything else is recycled.”

“I spent enough time on Orbitals to be sure I never, ever wanted to live on one,” I told her. Then shrugged. “Not that we didn’t do nearly the same thing on Sylvanus. When you only get supplies once every couple months, you try not to let anything go to waste.”

“Did you like living there?” she asked, eyeing me sidelong as she tossed the trash in the bin. “Away from everyone else? I mean, I know your family was there, but didn’t it make you go a little stir-crazy?”

“Sometimes,” I admitted. “In winter, especially, when we couldn’t leave the house for days at a time. But other times… it was more like having a whole world to yourself. Being away from all the craziness, away from everything anyone thought was worth killing for.” I sighed, a sudden and unexpected tightness in my chest. “Or at least, that was what I thought.”

I didn’t cry. It was a near thing. I wasn’t a man prone to it, not even when I’d thought Cas was dead after Tamyang, I hadn’t cried, but since Miriam and Sam, it came easier. It would hit me when I didn’t expect it, but I think I’d finally managed to rein it in. Not that it was healthy holding everything in, but I couldn’t keep breaking down at random times whenever the memories hit me, and I also didn’t want to ask the neurosynth to mute the memories because I’d seen what that did to me. So I just had to live with it.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Riva told me, her hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t noticed her walking up behind me, my vision fixed on the past. “You didn’t ask Willwood to come find you.”

“I’m the one who called the Patrol though.”

“They were already watching you,” she insisted, crouching down beside my chair. “Cas told you that. They were going to know eventually.”

I nodded. She was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept. She leaned in to kiss me, but I stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

“I can’t,” I said. “Not now. It’s… too close, right now.”

“I get it,” she said. “I really do. I’m here for you when you’re ready.”

“I wonder if I should be ready,” I mused. I probably shouldn’t have said it aloud, but I’d kept the thought in too long. “I wonder if I’m not… disrespecting them.”

“She loved you, didn’t she?

I glared at her, unable to tamp down the anger for a moment.

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“If she loved you,” Riva told me, “then she wouldn’t want you to shut yourself off forever.”

I looked at her without speaking for a long moment, biting back what I wanted to say and going instead for the best version I could come up with.

“I know you’re trying to help,” I said, “but I don’t think this is a conversation I can have with you yet.”

Riva’s face shifted for the barest fraction of a second, collapsing before she quickly built it back up to one of steady indifference, as if what I’d said hadn’t affected her at all.

“Sure, I get that,” she said, standing. “I think I’m gonna go check and see if Cas has finished with our friend yet.”

“Riva, I didn’t mean to…”

She stopped me with an upraised hand.

“Brent, I’m not some teenage girl who gets her feelings hurt when her boyfriend says the wrong thing. I’m fine.” She shrugged. “But you need some time, and I’m going to do the right thing and give it to you.”

Shit.

That hadn’t gone at all how I wanted it to, and I jumped to my feet to follow her, to tell her I hadn’t meant it that way, even though I think I had. But Raph got in the way, smiling like a serial killer with a new victim, dancing from one foot to the other.

“He’s all doped up and ready to go!” he told me. “Come on, we have maybe an hour according to Cas… maybe less.”

I followed him, figuring I’d see Riva in the interrogation room, but only Cas waited for us there. And Rhule. The former SID field officer lolled in the chair, eyes unfocused, drool trailing down his chin, muttering incoherently. I looked at Cas, worried.

“You sure you didn’t give him too much? He doesn’t look like he could tell us his own name.”

“I gave him the correct dose for his weight,” Cas told me, bristling at the implication. “I think it’s interacting with the anesthetic I gave him when we arrived, but the effects shouldn’t last long.”

“We need to try to question him now,” Raph suggested. “If for no other reason than he’s gonna spray spit everywhere when he talks and it’s just going to be hilarious.”

“You are not right in the head,” Cas said, looking at him sidelong.

“It’s funny, that’s exactly what Tommy just said.”

“Enough,” I interrupted, stepping closer to Rhule. “Do I just… talk to him?” I asked Cas.

“Be loud and say his name,” Cas suggested. “He’s pretty out of it, but the drugs should lower the barriers for him to conceal anything from us.”

Oh, great. I got to shout questions at a guy who was drooling. I approached carefully, wary that he might be faking it, that he might try to headbutt me since his head was the only part of him not restrained at the moment.

“Ethan Rhule, can you hear me?” I said, loud enough for him to hear me from two rooms over. “Ethan Rhule!”

The man stirred and blinked, eyes still not quite focusing on me.

“Hu… who are you?” he asked, chin working as if he wanted to wipe the drool away but couldn’t. “Why can’t I move my hands?”

“I’m a friend,” I assured him, getting closer and not speaking quite as loudly since I had his attention. “I’m your best friend. You’ve known me forever. You wanted to tell me a story about something that happened over fifteen years ago, back before the war. About the SID and the Evolutionists. Tell me what happened with the Evolutionists.”

“Evolutionists…” he repeated, drooling again, spitting with the “s” sounds. “Evolutionists… those are the Southwind!” He grinned as if happy he’d gotten the question right. “The Southwind terror group. Even before the war, they were doing shit. Sabotage, little things, but they wanted to replace us.”

Rhule laughed at the idea, long and hard, only stopping when he ran out of breath and began coughing just as uncontrollably. It took him a good ten seconds to stop, to start breathing normally again.

“Go ahead,” I told him. “What about the Evolutionists is so funny?”

“Well…” Rhule gasped and wheezed again for a few seconds, snot pouring down his nose to join the drool on his chin, and I resisted an urge to grab a cloth and wipe them both off for my sanity’s sake. “… it’s just that we created them. It would be like us telling God that He’s doing a shitty job and we’re going to replace Him.”

“I thought we did that already,” Raph murmured, and Cas shushed him with a dirty look.

“Were you with the Special Activities Unit before the war?” I asked. It was a risk taking things away from the narrative of the Evolutionists, but I had to know if Rhule had been present for the collusion.

“Yeah, of course… you know that.” He frowned, maybe wondering why his best friend forever wouldn’t remember that he was with the SAU back then.

“Yeah, I knew,” I agreed quickly. “But you know, I forgot when you joined. It’s been a long time, right? We were a lot younger then.”

“Oh, yeah, man,” he said, laughing again, although not hysterically this time. “I feel like I’ve lived a lifetime since then. The war, you know? And everything since. Done things I never thought I’d get to do. I mean, I figured I’d pop some of the Southwind… hell, we were at war with them, you know? But I never thought I’d get to kill actual humans. Not legally, I mean.”

“Yeah, that’s a real mind-blower, isn’t it?” I asked, playing along. “But what about the Evolutionists? You were saying you talked to them before the war? Made some kind of deal?”

“Oh… yeah.” His brow furled as if in deep thought, unsure where to go with the question. “I don’t think I would have told you about that. Knowing shit like that could get you killed, man.”

“But you did,” I insisted, getting closer still, putting a hand on his arm. “You know I wouldn’t ever tell anyone. You can trust me with anything.”

“Man, I need to blow my fuckin’ nose,” he moaned, and I cursed softly and used the back of my jacket sleeve to wipe it off. “Oh, thank God.”

“Anything for you,” I said, scowling at the stain on my jacket. “The Evolutionists… when did you first talk to them?”

“It was early… like January. I remember because they’d just had the Cyberball Championships on Orbital Prime and the Storms lost. I was a big fan of the fucking Storms, man.” He shook his head, sighed. “Then the whole team got killed when we took out the station. It was a damn shame, because I think in another season or two they could have taken the cup.”

“What the fuck did he just say?” Raph blurted, his face gone pale.

I couldn’t have looked much better, but neither of us could have matched Cas. Where Miriam’s family had died on Prime and Raph had been part of the Search and Rescue effort there after the attack, Cas had been born there. Everyone he knew was gone.

“What do you mean we took it out?” I asked Rhule. “I thought the Southwind stole an Interface missile and used it on the station.”

“Well, sure,” he said, bobbing his head mockingly. “That’s what we wanted everyone to think, right? That was the whole purpose of it. Even the fucking Evolutionists thought they were attacking Orbital Prime, but shit… we weren’t going to leave that up to chance, were we? This is the Southwind we’re talking about. They’re like trained monkeys. They can do terraforming stuff because we genetically programmed them for it, but no one really thought they’d be able to fight a war.” He snorted, blowing more snot, and I wanted to smack him in the side of the head, but I was too horrified by what he was saying. “I guess they showed us, because the war went on for about three years longer than we figured it would. But yeah… I was there when that Interface missile got launched. There were some paranoid fuckers there that day, man… if they knew I’d told you, they’d kill me, all my family, my friends, everyone I’d ever talked to. Even now, when most people wouldn’t believe it, they’d still kill for it.”

“They can’t think they could keep this secret forever,” I said, nearly forgetting the whole pretense I’d used to get him to talk. “It’s been fifteen years… they had to know this would come out eventually.”

“It doesn’t need to stay secret,” Rhule said, leaning toward me and whispering as if sharing a secret. “That’s the beauty of it. The Parliamentary elections are coming up.” He giggled uncontrollably again, spittle flying out. “I hope you’ve registered to vote… not that it’ll matter. Because it won’t happen. There won’t be another election. By that time, there’ll be another war… and this time, it’ll be to the finish. There won’t be another Southwind left alive, and by the end, most of Parliament will join them.”

“What?” I blurted. “How the hell…”

The man’s eyes suddenly came into perfect focus and he laughed again, but this time not a hysterical cackle, a reasoned and evil chuckle, and I realized I’d been played. The drugs had never affected him.

“That’s the beautiful thing about this, Parthet. You’ll never fucking know. You’ll all die here, desperate and afraid, and never know why this little circus sow of a rebellion won’t accomplish a Goddamned thing. And why you were too stupid to understand that I’ve had an emergency tachyon transponder implanted inside my chest the entire time. They’re coming for me and you’re all dead. If you’re lucky.”

“Brent!” It was Yanto, yelling in my ear, desperate, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it. “We have warships coming out of the Interface!”

Rhule laughed, long and hard… right up until Cas stuck a combat knife through his chest. Blood gushed out and Cas reached in through the wound, hand twisting and ripping as Rhule’s eyes went wide, mouth dropping open. Cas yanked out something rounded and metallic, coated in red, then tossed it to the floor and stomped down on it. It crunched under his heel in a shower of sparks and Rhule slumped forward, not laughing anymore.

“That’s the transponder,” Cas said, his arm coated in blood up to the elbow. “But they already know where we are.”

“Oh, shit,” Raph said, stepping back. “Oh, shit.”

“Cas,” I said, the cold, calculating hand of the Machine taking hold of my chest. “Get everyone to the ships and get them the fuck out of here.”

“We’re not gonna make it in time,” Raph insisted, looking between Cas and what was left of Rhule. “They’re going to land people here before we can get offplanet.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll keep them occupied. Get that data out of here, take as many as you can in the Orion, and get gone.”

“I’m not leaving you, Brent,” he said, shaking his head. “No fucking way.”

“Cas,” I said, putting a hand on his arm, “you said I was in charge. This is my decision. Get them out. Get her out. And don’t tell her what I’m doing.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Raph asked.

“Buying you time. Don’t waste it.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Being outside on Hephaestus was so much worse than being inside. No more damp chill, no steady drip of condensation, just the deluge. It soaked me through in an instant, despite the supposed water resistance of my fatigues, chilling me to the bone.

But the Machine didn’t care about the cold, didn’t care about the wet. The Machine only cared about the landers heading down from orbit. Lightning crackled from the thick cloud cover, hitting the landers in halos of white, highlighting them for me. And for the launcher. It was the only one we had, the only one on the Orion, and I don’t even think we’d brought it along from Lyonesse. It was Raph’s private collection, his just-in-case he’d squirreled away on Tempest. Why he thought he’d need an anti-aircraft launcher I wasn’t sure, but his paranoia was my foresight.

I shouldered the weapon, its targeting system synching automatically with my lens implants, hanging a red reticle over the first of the landers. The thing could shrug off lightning, but I wasn’t sure if it could shrug off this. I touched the trigger and the projectile shot free of the electromagnetic launcher, already traveling at supersonic speeds even before the solid-fuel rocket took over.

Its ignition was lost in the sonic boom washing back over me, deafening if not for the earbuds I’d pushed in as a precaution. They came with the launcher, which I considered very thoughtful of the designer. The Machine didn’t care though, wouldn’t have noticed because it still had the sonic sensors implanted in my ear canals to work with. All it was interested in was the path of that rocket.

The lander saw it coming, tried to maneuver, but the warhead had accelerated to hypersonic velocities now and there simply wasn’t room or time. I did not see it coming because I had my eyes closed, relying on the tactical feed from the launcher to tell me what was happening. When the weapon struck, the real show began. The combat landers were armored for ship-to-ship action, but they lacked the boost of a true warship like the Orion, which limited how much plating they could haul around. It might have been effective enough against a weapons laser or a plasma gun, but it certainly could withstand what was in that warhead.

Hydrogen-boron fusion was the cleanest atomic explosion you could get, and the electromagnetic baffles inside the warhead channeled the multi-kiloton blast in a single direction, a burst of energy nearly as powerful as a neutron cannon, though much shorter in range. Just enough to blast the lander into particles, a meteor shower raining down from a spreading ball of plasma, a new sun in the sky that actually burned away the rain in a space of a few kilometers.

The concussion reached the surface a second later, forcing me back a step, and I opened my eyes again, just in time to see the ships launching out of the hangar in the wake of the explosion. Another of the combat landers tried to adjust its course, fighting against the turbulence from the micro-fusion explosion to get into a position for a firing run on the Orion, and the other starships formed up behind her.

I couldn’t let them do that. Their attention had to be on me. The Orion could take the landers easy enough, but if she slowed down long enough for a dogfight, there was no way any of them would be able to reach Interface before the warship that had launched those shuttles was on them.

Reloading the ML-49A Harpy MANPAD wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. They were designed to be operated by a two-person crew, and those two people were intended to be wearing Havok battlesuits. We Archangels were strong, of course, but not quite as powerful as a battlesuit, and the sheer mass of the weapon forced me to rest its launch tube on the sodden ground while I bent to pick up the reload. It was half underwater, and I hoped the thing hadn’t developed any leaks in the years it had been in storage.

The new missile dropped into place with a deep, metallic thump, and I made sure to lift the launcher with my legs, not my back. Two hundred kilos, right at the edge of how much I could pick up, but I wouldn’t have to hold it much longer. Just long enough to find that one combat lander, the one that was coming in for a gun run on the Orion.

I had one. I touched the trigger and the on-board AI took over from there. Just as well, because they’d noticed me by now. Somewhere up there, right about the time the second directed fusion blast obliterated the second lander, someone made a command decision. Their mothership could handle the escaping ships, but if the landers didn’t concentrate on me, they were going to lose all their ground troops before any of them touched the ground.

I knew the launch was coming before I detected it. Or should I say, the Machine knew with a degree of certainty high enough for me to drop the Harpy and run like hell. They couldn’t detect my thermal signature, not in this torrential rain, so they’d go after the Harpy’s launch trajectory. I needed to be very far away from that spot when the missile hit.

I made for the terraforming facilities even though that made me a more obvious target, because there was no solid ground in any other direction. Maybe it was barely possible for me to just lay in the water with only my head sticking out for a few days until they got tired of searching for me, but I would have just been sentencing myself to a slow and agonizing death from starvation. Inside, with my feet on firm ground, I’d make my final stand.

If I made it in time. I almost didn’t.

The warhead hit less than two klicks behind me, and even reaching that distance was a tribute to the kinetex enhancements, because running in calf-deep water was no mean feat. Fifty meters from the hangar entrance, the light and the heat passed over me just before the shockwave lifted me off the ground, out of the water, and threw me forward.

I don’t remember hearing the sound of the blast, which might be an effect of the earplugs I still wore or might have simply been the neurosynth shutting down my aural inputs to save me the perceived pain. Or maybe it was just the shock, because there was plenty of that. No shrapnel because there just wasn’t anything to splinter, but vaporized water in that quantity had a quality all its own, and being that close to the blast was akin to being the air inside a gas piston.

Water sprayed around me as I hit the ground, coming to a halt with steam billowing away from my body and holes burned through the back of my jacket and pants. Along with my skin. The latter wasn’t as big of a problem since I had a subdermal layer of kinetex to keep the wounds from penetrating deeper into something vital, but my clothes were not self-healing and I wished there’d been the opportunity to steal some cybersuits. Those were self-sealing, and it seemed undignified to die with half my ass hanging out.

At least the gunbelt hadn’t been blown off. I liked that Medusa. I wished there’d been the opportunity to send a thank-you note to the Patrol officer I’d stolen it off of. It wasn’t going to be my primary weapon for the next however long I had to live, but it was nice feeling its weight on my hip. Natural.

Shaking off the stupor of the concussion, I limped toward the hangar. Behind me, the landers were spraying coilgun fire at the spot where I’d launched the missiles, making sure if they’d failed to kill me with the warhead that they’d do it with the tungsten slugs.

Good. Keep shooting. Keep wasting your time. Every second they wasted was another second I got to live. Not that it was a contest or anything, but I didn’t want to check out early. I’d paid for the full stay and I was going to enjoy it.

Inside. I was inside, somehow, though I’d skipped the in-between. Damned concussions. It wasn’t as bad as it would have been for someone like Yanto, with no nanite suite to repair the damaged brain tissue, no neurosynth to replace the damaged memories, but the entire hazy fugue they caused was unsettling. I needed to start wearing a combat suit with a helmet if I was going to keep this up.

Leaning up against the interior of one of the hangar doors, I collected my thoughts, forced to plan on my own now that the threat was no longer imminent and the Machine didn’t control me. There. I’d positioned weapons inside, and now that the nanites were running overtime to fix my brain bruise, I remembered the first of them.

Another big gun. It was the AN-35 assault cannon, basically the same thing the battlesuits carried except modified for personal use by a dismount. By one of us, anyway. No normal could have carried it more than a few steps, and I wouldn’t be carrying it very far myself. Not because of the weight but the size. It was a stand-off weapon, too big and awkward to take into the corridors of the base. Too hot to fire straight from the hangar entrance as well, since it would immediately reveal my position.

Cradling the assault gun across my chest, I lugged it to the rear of the hangar and set it up on a bipod at the mouth of the entrance hallway to the terraforming facility. Crouching behind it, I relaxed, opening my enhanced senses and trying to shut out the utter misery of being soaked to the skin. I’d had worse, of course, experienced pain that would have driven some men insane, but there was something maddening about being wet, something infuriating. I planned to take it out on these guys, whoever they were.

I was betting SID Special Activities Unit, but there was always the chance they were military. I was hoping they weren’t because I wanted the opportunity to recruit active military units to our side, and killing a shitload of them would be a bad start to that.

There. Movement outside, through the rain. Furtive, one side then the other. Infantry bounding. Not Marines, thank God, and not just because I didn’t want to shoot at our own military. Fighting Havok suits was bad enough when you had battlesuits on your side, but doing it as a dismount would be… I laughed softly. I’d been about to say suicide, but that would have been a little ironic considering what I was doing here.

I’d done the right thing. I was convinced of that. Getting the decrypted databases out of here was more important than my own personal survival. Cas and Raph seemed convinced I was the only one who could lead the group, but that probably came more from their own lack of desire to step into that position themselves. Riva would be mad at me, but we’d only known each other a couple weeks. Maybe it could have led to something more serious if I’d let it, but I wasn’t convinced I was ready to do that. She was better off without me.

That was it. Well, Yanto, maybe, but he seemed like a man more devoted to the cause than to me. There was no one else out there who cared if I lived, and apparently just a shitload of people who wanted me dead. May as well give them what they wanted. It was a long time coming now. Almost a year. Or maybe ten years, depending on how you looked at it.

The first of the infantry arrived, a four-person fire team ducking inside the hangar doors and hitting the ground, scanning back and forth. Not seeing me yet. They would, but not until the rest of their squad advanced. No battlesuits, no powered exoskeletons, just matte-black combat armor and faceless helmets with opaque visors. Not military then, though the Gauss carbines they carried were military-issue.

My finger hovered over the trigger, and when the second fire team rushed through the doors, I touched it.

The assault gun shuddered as tungsten darts lashed out at four thousand meters per second, a bullwhip crack that wouldn’t stop as I traversed the muzzle right to left, up and down, sawing it across the eight commandos. The four who’d run inside a moment before died immediately. They’d never had a chance, not with the total lack of cover inside the hangar, and I nearly felt bad for them if not for the whole part where they were trying to kill me. Their armor would have stopped a plasma round clean, might have slowed down a rifle round enough to keep it from being fatal, but it did less than nothing against the rounds from the assault gun.

The slugs weren’t large, 5mm in diameter and about 100mm long for stability, but traveling at hypersonic speeds, they carried a shitload of kinetic energy. Enough that when a short burst of them hit a human in conventional body armor, there wasn’t much left of them. Limbs flew in separate directions, helmeted heads tumbling free, and fountains of red merged with the rain blowing in through the open hangar doors, leaving puddles of watery blood where once had been men and women.

It was enough to unnerve me, and I was the one shooting, so there was no shame or surprise when the fire team that had gone prone tried to withdraw, realizing that lying flat on the cement floor would make them nothing other than stationary targets. Two of them even managed to return fire, though not accurately, since it’s hard to hit a target you can’t see when you’re trying to run away.

The last of them nearly made it to the door before a hail of metal vaporized him. I didn’t stop there, of course, because the whole purpose of stationing the gun here was to buy time. The double-drum magazine held a thousand rounds, give or take, and I emptied the thing out in a sine wave pattern, throwing up sprays of water as the darts plowed into the ground through deep puddles. If there was anyone out there hanging back, waiting for the squad to clear the hangar, they were going to be hating life. Or losing it.

The gun beeped a warning inside my head, the targeting computer informing me that I was about to run out of ammo, but I ignored it, keeping the trigger pressed down until the shuddering stopped and the gun fell silent. I didn’t need to wait around to see what their reaction would be—I already had a pretty good idea. They didn’t let me down.

A dead sprint took me nearly a hundred meters deeper into the building when the explosion from the hangar shook the walls and a rush of heat sizzled standing water into steam behind me. I wasn’t sure what they’d hit the hangar with, but if the volume of the blast was any indication, there wasn’t anything left of it. Ceiling panels rained down along with water, and I dodged between the cascades, heading for the next cache.

There hadn’t been much time to prepare, one trip into the Orion’s hold, and I’d said not a word to anyone on the way back, loaded down with weapons. I hadn’t even seen Riva or Yanto, both of them busy chivvying our technicians back to their ships. I wish I knew if they’d made it. I trusted Raph and Cas as pilots, but I hoped Riva hadn’t flown in the Orion because either of them would have used the ship to distract the enemy and let the others get away.

As for me… one last cache. If you can call a tactical vest and a Gauss carbine a cache. It was all I had, so I slipped on the vest, spare magazines lined up across my chest, grenades in loops beside them. The carbine seemed light and insubstantial after the Harpy and the assault gun, but it would have to do. I looked over at the body of Ethan Rhule and chuckled at the thought that there was one last thing he could for me.

The floodlights had been knocked over by the explosion, but they hadn’t broken. I propped them up again, this time facing the other direction, toward the door. The equipment trays went directly in front of the door and once I’d staged the room, I ducked down beneath the chair and waited. Blood dripped from the front of the chair in a steady beat, while the faster drop of condensation from above was a discordant rival.

Behind them all, my own heartbeat pounded loud in my ears. It was one thing to recognize my death as a possibility at the end of this fight, another entirely to find myself at the end of the road, tucked in and waiting for the end. Old instincts screamed at me that I should keep moving, that there was always one more thing to do. The Machine joined them, like an angel on one shoulder and a demon on the other but both telling me the same thing. Do something. Move.

Movement was life. But was life something I even wanted?

I’d lived for revenge until I’d killed Janus, brought down Bastion. What did I have to live for now? I’d told Cas and Raph that we had to take down the people responsible for the war, and they did… but I didn’t have to be there for it. I’d done my part. I just wanted to be with Miriam and Sam now. If there was an afterlife and if it worked that way.

If there wasn’t, if only darkness awaited me, then that was a sort of peace in its own way. The absence of pain. The absence of sorrow. And if that wasn’t as desirable as the presence of joy, the presence of love, well… it was as good as I was going to get.

Footsteps. Heavy boots running. No voices, their exchanges concealed behind soundproof visors, passed along encrypted channels, but they were coming. I nestled the butt of the carbine against my shoulder and waited for them.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Bam!

The detonation sounded distant, tinny, at least fifty meters away, but I recognized it. Concussion grenade. Just on the heels of a foot through a door. No shots followed it. They’d found another room empty.

They wanted me alive. I found the thought unsettling, but I dismissed it quickly. I wasn’t going to give them a choice. The cylinder shape of the grenade in my left hand comforted me, the arming button under my thumb, ready to be pressed. It wasn’t a concussion grenade and if they wanted to trade, I was pretty sure I’d get the best of that deal.

Another door kicked in, another bang, closer this time. Then the footsteps stopped, feet shuffling, and I had a good idea of what was happening. They’d detected the heat of the floodlights and maybe the residual heat of Ethan Rhule’s body. It had cooled in the last hour or so, but not significantly, not enough for them to be able to tell through the wall. They’d see him seated, restrained, unmoving. But they might not see me, not in the fatigues which supposedly camouflaged my thermal signature, not crouched behind him.

Seconds passed, and I held my breath.

“Ethan, are you in there?” A woman’s voice, though deep and husky. Real concern in the question, which surprised me. “Ethan, it’s Val. If you’re in there, answer me.”

Ethan, unsurprisingly, didn’t respond.

“Ethan, if you can’t talk, don’t worry. We’re coming in. If there’s someone in there, holding him, let him go or you’ll regret it.”

She’d taken off her helmet to speak and forgot to put it back on before giving the order.

“Breach it.”

Eyes closed, mouth open, ready for the grenade. It would deafen my natural ears but not the augments, and I could still see through the targeting optic of the carbine, pointed at the door.

Thump.

The door shuddered but didn’t break.

Crash.

It swung open, and before the next in the stack could throw the stun grenade, I whipped mine around the corner of the chair. The neurosynth had given me the exact angle, and when the grenade ricocheted off the opposite wall it skittered to the right, where the stack was waiting.

The explosions merged into one, the concussion and the HEDP, like different notes in a symphony, and an armored trooper went flying past the door, trailing smoke. Clouds of white billowed from the corridor outside, and when a dark figure stumbled into my field of view, I touched the trigger. After the Harpy and the assault gun, the gentle push of the carbine felt anemic, but the 5x50mm darts still sliced through the neck of the luckless commando, spraying an abstract impressionist painting in arterial red on the opposite wall.

That gave me enough time to pull out another grenade, bouncing this one farther into the hallway, and I waited until its detonation had finished echoing through the corridors before I scrambled to my feet and rushed the door. Not running away, but running to the fight. Not giving them the chance to just blow the room up with me in it, which would have been the next step. Half a dozen of them writhed on the floor, trying desperately to get up with chunks blown out of their legs, and I made sure they never would, short bursts through the neck or the helmet visor putting them down for good.

More of them, ten I thought from the thermal signatures, scrambling back still, getting space between themselves and the doorway. Too late. I couldn’t see them well enough for precision shooting, but a long press on the trigger sent a stream of darts at roughly head level and a few of the retreating figures toppled backward.

The mag was empty, but before I changed it I tossed another grenade as far as I could chuck it, nearly fifty meters down the long, central hallway, then ducked into one of the rooms they’d already cleared. I didn’t even flinch at the detonation this time, dropping the spent mag and inserting a fresh one with all the urgency as if this were a training exercise back in the day. The Machine wanted to take control, yelled inside my head, trying its hardest, but I fought it off. The Machine would have run, would have done everything it could to get me out of here. That wasn’t what I wanted.

Finally, the cognitive combat response system just folded its arms and gave in, basically telling me fine, do whatever the hell you want. So I did, ducking back through the door and rushing straight at the enemy in a dead sprint. A dead sprint for an Archangel meant fifty klicks an hour, a hell of a lot faster than these jokers were ready for. They fired… I heard the crackle of the miniature sonic booms on either side of me. But no one came close. I ducked and bobbed and weaved, jumped and bounced from one wall to another, leaving boot-sized indentations in either side until I caught up to them.

Shifting the carbine to my left hand, I pulled the Medusa with my right and fired both at the same time, only able to aim because of the reluctant help of the neurosynth. Men and women fell. It was very considerate of them to wear faceless helmets. Otherwise, I might have hesitated for the briefest of moments when I saw their eyes. Blood spraying from exit wounds was the first and only indication they gave me that they were fellow humans, and by then, it was too late.

I’d killed at least a dozen of them, probably injured half again that many, and they still didn’t seem to know where I was. Maybe, the Machine whispered, there’s hope. Maybe if I killed enough of them, I could hijack one of their landers. Take that to their mothership—whether it be a military cruiser, an intelligence lighter, or whatever—and get a ride out of here. It wasn’t likely, of course. They’d probably blow the lander out of the sky when I approached. But it was something. A goal.

I filed it away as a just-in-case and followed the trail of bodies. They’d be running now, trying to get back to their ships so they could clear the facility and strafe it from the air. I had to get to them first.

There. Side entrance. I’d seen it from the air when we landed, and the neurosynth drew a helpful map and overlaid it in my lens implants, showing me the way. Get out this way, circle around the main building, and intercept them on the way to the lander. Maybe get the lander in the process. And if I probably couldn’t reach the mothership, I still had a chance to bring down the other shuttles.

Good enough.

Pushing open the door, I took a breath for the first time in a minute. I’d held it during the fight to avoid sucking in a lungful of smoke, and even the damp, lung-searing ozone of the outside felt like plunging into an oasis pool in the arid desert after depriving myself of oxygen for seventy-three seconds. Seventy-three point four, the neurosynth corrected me helpfully.

Why did it feel like the thing was talking to me now? I’d never experienced anything like that before, and the sense of dichotomy troubled me, made me worry I was going crazy, turning into a techno-schizo like Raph. I pushed the thought down and let the Machine take over again. Maybe that was the reason—maybe it had been pitching a fit at being shut out of my decision-making process. Time to give it the chance to shine, since our goals seemed to have aligned again.

Get that lander.

Down to maybe forty klicks an hour out here in the water. The base was on a promontory, an island of higher ground among the shallow seas, yet most of it was still almost knee-deep in water since the drainage couldn’t keep up with the downpour. The only consolation was, the other guys would be even slower. I was already soaked, so being out in the rain again almost felt like a relief, without the relative dryness of the interior to remind me how wet I was. It reminded me of a dream—or maybe a nightmare, running in the rain, a gun in each hand, a trail of bodies behind me and death in front of me.

I just had to get around the building before…

The scream of jets interrupted the thought, and a combat lander skewed around the other end of the terraforming facility, riding columns of steam. I ran harder, juicing myself with an extra dose of artificial adrenaline from the pharmacy organ implanted in my chest, taking the risk of heart failure because the alternative was everything failure.

A snare drum pounded inside my chest, my vision narrowing to a tunnel with utter darkness on every side, the world slipping into slow motion. They couldn’t lock on me with thermal or motion sensors, not in this driving rain. They’d have to fire manually, and if I ran fast enough, and the gunner wasn’t used to doing the targeting with his biological eyeballs instead of a targeting system, I might have a chance.

Joke was on me.

He didn’t use the guns. Instead, a missile kicked free of the wing-mounted weapons pod and streaked into the building behind me. It was using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito, but I guess if you just hated that mosquito enough…

The neurosynth knew the instant that the warhead would detonate and I curled into a ball, leaping through the air to get just a little more distance. That was when God decided that He’d had enough of my shit and swatted me like a bug.

I had to get up.

I was alive, I knew that much. It had been a given. If I survived the collapse of the tunnel on Tamyang, the missile wasn’t going to kill me. I couldn’t see a damned thing, couldn’t hear, and my neurosynth and I weren’t on speaking terms, but as Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. Unless this was the afterlife, in which case, I wanted my money back because all it offered was darkness and pain.

Maybe Hell? I suppose there was a chance I was in Hell. Did I deserve it? I wasn’t sure. I’d killed a lot of Southwind, and maybe I’d done it on the word of some pretty shitty people, but they’d lied to me and said it was a matter of survival. I was trying to make it right. Did that not count?

But I couldn’t take the chance this was eternal damnation, not when there was still the possibility that I was just in shock, that the neurosynth had been taken offline by the concussion and was in the process of rebooting. The answer came with a stream of data pouring into my brain.

System Diagnostic: Post-Blast Trauma Assessment

External Damage:

Second-degree burns detected on 14% of exposed dermal surfaces.

Lacerations and abrasions present on forearms, thighs, and left cheek—foreign particulates embedded in wounds.

Multiple contusions concentrated on both legs and back regions.

Auditory System:

Tympanic membranes ruptured in both ears. Temporary hearing loss: 97%.

Prognosis: regeneration protocols required; estimated recovery time 24 hours.

Respiratory System:

Pulmonary contusion detected. Symptoms consistent with mild blast lung trauma.

Oxygen saturation reduced by 11%. Initiating compensatory filtration and oxygenation via auxiliary systems.

Visual System:

Retinal micro-tears detected; retinal display operating at 74% efficiency.

Temporary visual distortions likely; initiating auto-repair sequence.

Musculoskeletal System:

Reinforced skeletal structure intact.

Severe soft tissue bruising in thoracic region; no organ perforation detected.

Internal bleeding: minor, localized to upper left quadrant.

Neurological System:

Neural lag detected in left arm at 0.2-second delay. Cause: blast-related sensory disruption.

Cognitive processing at 88% efficiency due to mild concussive impact; rerouting via secondary pathways.

Recommendations:

Immediate attention to burns and embedded debris.

Deploy nanite repair swarm for internal bleeding and retinal tears.

Engage auditory regeneration protocols.

Activate pain suppression to 40% to maintain alertness.

Thanks for the advice. But my kinetex hadn’t been damaged, which meant I could move. And I had to, pain be damned. I rolled to one side and my vision flickered with streaks of light. I thought it might be the retinal tears the neurosynth had warned me about, but it solidified, cohered as the neurosynth took control and integrated the input from my lens implants. It was the lander. They’d switched on their external spotlights, the circles of illumination settled onto me. Probably to make it easier to finish me off with their coilgun.

Damn. I’d thought I’d at least get the chance to reach the lander. I tried to raise my rifle, but it was gone, along with the Medusa. Both blown clear during the blast, and given that I was about ten meters past where I’d been when the missile hit, they were likely buried under the smoking rubble that remained of the side of the building. I had a knife somewhere, but it wouldn’t do much good against a coilgun.

The coilgun didn’t fire though. Instead, a banshee screamed inside my head, the sonic concussion forcing me down to my knees despite the kinetex. Sonic stun cannons. I barely had time to think that before the concentrated beam of sound cut off. My vision cleared again long enough to see a dark figure standing over me, a gun extended in their hand.

“Go ahead,” I croaked. “Get it over with.”

When she spoke, I recognized her voice from outside the interrogation room door. Val, she’d called herself.

“You’re not getting out of this that easy, Parthet.”

A crackling static charge connected us for way too long, and everything went dark.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Shit.

I woke up. I really hadn’t expected to and hadn’t wanted to, yet here I was.

I didn’t open my eyes at first, not wanting to see what waited for me, but the neurosynth told me the details without asking. The room was three meters by three meters, with nothing in it except me and the floor.

It had been, the neurosynth told me, twenty-four hours and change since I went down on Hephaestus, which could mean I was still on a ship, but I didn’t think so. Not that I could tell for sure, because the neurosynth couldn’t pick up a damned thing. Not a single EM frequency, not so much as the local time from a computer maintenance system. I was in a Faraday cage. They weren’t taking any chances.

Sighing, I opened my eyes. It was a room all right. Gray walls, gray floor, a single gray door that looked way too thick and solid for me to break through it. I stood up, testing the gravity. Not standard. The neurosynth estimated it to be around three-quarters of a standard gravity, which meant I wasn’t on a ship. Not on an asteroid or an orbital either, because either of those would have a gravity net for convenience.

They’d taken me to a planet. I searched my memory files for planets within a twenty-hour interface of Hephaestus and came up with one system. No name, just a number: A624LC. That meant no habitables, nothing worth terraforming. The file listed four planets. A burnt cinder so close to the F-type star that it would take cruiser-class shields to have a livable base there. Not it. Not even the SID would spend the funds it would take to build a base on that rock.

Next one out was a gas giant, bigger than Jupiter, and beyond that an ice giant and then a frozen ball of slush barely larger than an asteroid. Nothing there that fit the gravity… until I noticed the big-assed moon in orbit around the gas giant. Big enough that, if it had a really solid core, it might have three-quarters of a gravity. It also sucked because there was no way to survive on the surface without a suit, even for me. If I broke out, it would be around five minutes of freedom before the methane atmosphere poisoned me.

Of course, I was getting ahead of myself, since I was stuck in a tiny room with no way to break out of it. But goals were important.

Okay, keep assessing the situation. Start with myself. I wasn’t wearing the utilities anymore, probably because they’d been ripped off of me by multiple explosions. Someone had put me in a set of generic, gray coveralls, the kind a civilian ship’s crew might wear to work. No shoes though. Not even socks, which probably meant they hadn’t wanted to look at my swinging junk while they monitored me. Because I was a hundred percent sure they were monitoring me.

What they hadn’t done was feed me, though at some point I’d had an IV to give me liquids. My injuries were healed, though not from their medical treatment. They’d let me repair myself, which meant I was hungry, but I had the sense that food wasn’t coming anytime soon. But at least I wasn’t leaking blood all over the place.

I touched the walls, feeling for vibrations and finding none. The place was well-insulated, shielded, soundproof. And cold. Not freezing but below comfortable temperature, which had to be intentional.

“Anyone listening?” I asked, then licked my lips. My mouth was dry, and the question came out as a rasp. “I’m awake. You want to talk?”

I waited a long time for an answer that didn’t come.

Great. They were going to let me stew for a while. I wondered why. Maybe it was just SOP for intel types to try to break people by psyching them out, but they couldn’t be stupid enough to think it would work on one of us. Unless they just wanted to watch me for a while and get a feel for my reactions.

Okay, then. Good time for me to not show them a damned thing. I sat with my back against the wall and kept my face expressionless. But now what? What was there to think about? Who these guys were, maybe? They weren’t military. I knew how military intelligence worked, and these guys weren’t them. SID SAU was my guess, though they could have been mercenaries. I would have thought they could be Kinetex Security, but the intel was that they were enhanced like Rhule’s late bodyguard Constance, and the troops I’d fought had certainly not been.

SID then. They’d been running Cas’ team of Archangels, which meant they didn’t have their own. They’d been keeping track of Rhule, and when we took him, they’d known. Maybe they even known we’d go after him, eventually. Which would mean they’d played me. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was an assassin, a commando, not a spy.

Fuck it. I was getting nowhere. Hell, I was nowhere. Nowhere that anyone would ever find me, completely at the mercy of these people. I was going to die out here, once they were done with me. What did I want to do with my final days? Not sit around thinking about how badly I’d screwed up.

I had every minute of my life since I’d had the neurosynth implanted available for recall. Maybe it was time I took a look back. After all, your life is supposed to pass before your eyes when you die. I was just going to get a jump on it.

There was no question about where to start. That was Miriam. I thought about our first dinner together. I knew the date, the time down to the second. The blue dress she’d worn…

“Where are you from, Brent?” she’d asked, staring at me with those smoldering dark eyes over her glass of wine.

The restaurant was the best the civilian town outside the base had to offer, which wasn’t exactly to the level of one of the Orbitals but was still a strain on a captain’s pay. I didn’t care. What else would I spend it on? What else was more important in my life than this one person who I cared about in all the universe?

“Aphrodite,” I said.

“Oh, the backwoods,” she laughed. “Did you have your own horse?”

I made a face at her, throwing my napkin across the table. She caught it, still laughing.

“I’ll have you know,” I said with mock indignation, “that not everyone on Aphrodite is a redneck hick.” I shrugged and took a sip of my own wine. I wasn’t much of a wine-drinker in general, but this stuff was pretty good. For the price, it should be. “But yes, I did. For a while.”

The smile ran away from my face at the memory, and she noticed it.

“I’m sorry. Did I bring up a sore subject?”

“It’s just…” I shook my head. “My family passed away before I joined up. We had a bad flood, and…” I didn’t go on, not wanting to explain it further. Really not wanting to admit that, while my father and sister had died in the flood, my mom had taken her own life out of grief. “There wasn’t much reason to stay after that.”

I worried that she might be put off by the sad story, but instead she reached across the table and took my hand.

“My family lived on Orbital Prime,” she told me. I felt a kick in the gut, remembering what I’d seen of the largest, most heavily populated space colony in the Coalition after the Interface missile had hit it.

“Is that why you joined up?” I asked her, interlocking my fingers with hers and squeezing gently.

Miriam laughed softly, without humor.

“No, ironically enough. I joined before the war started and my parents practically disowned me for it. They thought I was throwing my life away, that I could have done anything and I was wasting my potential. I hadn’t talked to them for nearly a year when the attack came.” She wiped something out of her eye. “When I realized that I’d never talk to them again, that we’d never make things right…”

She didn’t sob. I could understand. Both our losses had been long ago now.

“It’s a weird feeling, the war being basically over now,” I admitted, still holding her hand. “Even if everyone in my unit hadn’t died on Tamyang, it’s not like we would have hung out together afterward. There’s no home for either of us to go back to, no families. I mean, Aphrodite is still there, but I don’t know what I’d do if I went back. I haven’t exactly saved enough to buy my own ranch there. Not that I’d want to. I had enough of cows and horses growing up.” I caressed the back of her hand with my thumb, unwilling to give it back now that I had it. “Will you stay in the military?”

“I don’t think so.” Miriam stared into the bottom of her wine glass, sloshing around the dregs like an ancient oracle searching for the truth in bones she’d cast on the floor. “Maybe I’ll stay in physical therapy, in the private sector, but maybe not. I think I may have seen enough broken bodies… broken people. I think I’d rather have a part of bringing life into this world, you know?”

“You mean like an obstetrician?” I wondered, shaking my head in confusion.

She sighed and looked at me like I was an idiot, which was probably fair.

“No, I mean like having children of my own.”

“Oh,” I said. But I didn’t let go of her hand. “Are you… I mean, do you want to…”

I couldn’t think of a way to shape the question I wanted to ask, but she smiled as if she’d read my mind.

“Yes, I want to get married first. I don’t want to raise children by myself, and I don’t want to have my kids go back and forth between their parents.”

I nodded, thinking that how I phrased the next few words could determine the better part of my life.

“It’s going to be hard finding someone, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re getting out, going someplace totally new and meeting all new people. You’ll have to settle into a new life, and depending on where you live…”

“I don’t want to live on another Orbital,” she said immediately. “I never want to live inside an artificial habitat again. I’ve had enough of that, and I want to live under a real sky. Breathe fresh air.”

“I get that,” I admitted. “I’ve had enough of spending weeks at a time on a ship. I kind of want to live somewhere with mountains though. Where I lived on Aphrodite, everything was flat and dusty.”

“I wouldn’t mind mountains,” Miriam agreed. “I’ve never seen one in real life. Only in virtual videos.”

“The same mountains?”

The question was risky, making assumptions I had no right to make, but her dark eyes never left mine.

“Why not?”

Because it was crazy, that was why not. Because this was our first dinner together, because we’d only known each other a few weeks and hadn’t even slept together. Because we were talking—or purposefully not talking—about getting married and having a child together. And yet, I said none of that, never let any sign of it pass across my face.

I didn’t say it for the same reason I hadn’t cared about the price of this restaurant, because I had nothing else. No one else. And neither did she. If it didn’t work out, how was I any worse off?

“I guess the only real question,” I told her, “is whether they’ll let me go.”

I suppose the answer to that had been no.

No more warm, homey restaurant, no more of the flower-sweet scent of Miriam’s perfume and the woody, smoky smell of the fireplace set in the wall. Just the chill of the bare floor, the claustrophobic confines of the holding cell. I wanted to go back, go back to the restaurant and, even more, to the night that followed when I’d gone back to her quarters. But if I did that, I wouldn’t have come back. I was saving that one for when I needed it, when things were really bad and I had to retreat into my own memories and never return.

I didn’t bring up memories of Sam yet for a different reason. I could deal with seeing Miriam again, could handle the emotions it brought up, but Sam… if I saw him again, it would destroy me. He’d been the focus of my world for six years, my hope for the future. I’d let myself go there eventually, but not here, not where they could see it, could think they’d got to me.

I hadn’t moved and didn’t intend to. If they intended to wait me out, they’d find out that I had all the time in the world. The average adult male could live three days without water. Thanks to the support systems stuffed inside me, I could go over a week. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but I could do it. The key was not to think about it, and for that, there was nothing like replaying memories.

Which one next? I thought about going back to the war, to one of the many shore-leave escapades Cas and I had gone on, taking advantage of our lack of supervision, the absence of an immediate superior anywhere within twenty light-years. But any memory of the war was going to trigger regret for being conned into fighting it. If Rhule hadn’t been lying, the SID and the Consortium had launched the Interface missile that had started the whole thing.

Maybe something more recent. Maybe the only pleasant memory I had from the last year. Riva. The taste of her mouth, the feel of her skin, the warmth against the chill of Hephaestus. We’d had a couple days, not nearly enough, but something to hold onto…

Before I’d had time to fall back into that memory, sonic stun beams hammered down on me from the walls. I hadn’t seen the emitters when I’d scanned the place—they’d probably been shielded. I tried to fight against them but the sheer, brute force of the sonics kept me in place long enough for the door to open. My vision wobbled and wavered with the distortion of the sound waves, but I knew people were coming through. The sonic beams cut off, and I only needed a second or two to recover from the effects.

I didn’t get it. A stunner again, the jolt of static electricity coursing through me, sending even the neurosynth offline, spears of hot agony running across my chest and out through my arms and legs. When they let up on the trigger, I saw nothing for a long moment, and once I’d recovered, I couldn’t move. A neural restraint web had been fastened around my arms and legs, leaving me immobile. The armored troopers who’d put the web into place had stepped back by then, off to each side of the cell, covering me with Gauss carbines.

Above me stood a tall, slender woman with the look of someone who’d hit middle-age and concealed it with modern medical technology. Blue eyes glared down at me in disapproval, one hand propped on her hip, the other still holding the stunner.

“Captain Parthet,” she said, “allow me to introduce myself. I’m Valentine Didio, deputy director of the Security and Intelligence Directorate. I believe it’s time we had a talk.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Val,” I realized, pieces clicking together inside my brain. “You were outside that door. How the hell did I not kill you?”

Maybe that wasn’t the most prudent thing to say, given the situation, but fog still drifted fitfully across my thoughts from the sonics and the electrical charge. I smelled my own burnt flesh and hair, which was never a good sign.

“You killed quite enough of us, Parthet,” Didio snarled, aiming a kick at my side that I couldn’t even feel beneath the restraint net. “Including one of my oldest friends, Ethan Rhule. I saw what you left of him. You murdered him when he was helpless.”

“Not me personally,” I told her, frowning at my side. It was worse to not feel anything to actually feel the pain of the kick. “When Rhule confessed he had a transponder implanted in his chest, one of us… took drastic action to deactivate it.”

“I don’t believe that,” she snapped. “Ethan wouldn’t be stupid enough to admit that.”

“He thought it was too late for us to do anything about it,” I explained, shrugging. Or, rather, trying to shrug and failing. “After all, you were already on your way down. But my friend Cas is a direct sort of guy and took the straightforward approach.”

“Yes, I know all about Captain Gino Olin,” Didio sneered, crouching down in front of me so she could look me in the eye. “A traitor to the Coalition and a traitor to humanity as a whole… just like you. We know all about your dealings with the Southwind.” She shoved the contacts of the stunner into my face and that I could feel, the stinging burn from the still-hot emitter. “You broke the Southwind terrorists out of Bastion and killed some good men and women, including General Janus. My God, if you hold no loyalty to your own species, I’d think you’d at least hold some personal feelings for the man who made you what you are.”

I goggled at her in disbelief.

“Tell me,” I finally said, “that this is performative outrage. Tell me that the fucking deputy director of the SID actually knows what’s going on, that you don’t buy into this rah-rah bullshit.”

“I know that you’re guilty of murder, sedition, and treason.” She spat at me, though I couldn’t feel anything so I didn’t know what it hit. “I know you’re a piece of shit who’s turned his back on everything you once believed in.”

I considered whether or not I should bother. The odds were she was lying, putting on an act either for me or for the troops listening to her. But the entire purpose of this was to try to recruit people who didn’t know any better. Cast your bread upon the water, I’d told Riva.

“Everything you’ve been told about the Southwind War is a lie,” I told her. “The Evolutionist radicals who advocated violence among the Southwind were given aid and armaments by the SID and the Consortium, and your friend Ethan Rhule claimed he was there for it. He also told us that the SID launched the Interface missile that destroyed Orbital Prime.”

“You’re lying. Even if this paranoid fantasy you’re talking about were true, there’s no way Ethan would tell you about it. He never shared a damned thing unless you earned it.”

“Maybe he was,” I admitted. “But I do know that the SID supported the Evolutionists. The Southwind recorded the biometric data of the humans who visited them because they didn’t trust them. I’ve already found one of them and they confirmed it. The SID Special Activities Unit started the war because the Consortium wanted to discredit the Emancipation Movement. Remember that? Jorge Canton? He wanted to give the Southwind full rights and privileges as citizens of the Coalition, but that all went out the window after Orbital Prime. Who do you think benefited from that?”

“That’s conspiracy-theory bullshit. If someone from the SID told you that, they’re leading you on the same way Ethan was, playing you for a fool.”

“If anyone could find out,” I told her, “it’s you. You have the resources. You have the contacts. You know who I am. You know what I did during the war. I killed hundreds of Southwind one-on-one, thousands more by calling in fire, came as close as anyone to dying for the Coalition. I never failed in a mission. Do you think I would have turned against my people, my government, for the hell of it? I’m still loyal to the people of the Coalition. That doesn’t mean that what the SID and the Consortium did was right. It doesn’t mean that the Southwind deserved to live as slaves, serving us with no choice other than dirt-farming on worthless planets.”

She laughed, shook her head as she stood, and I knew it was a lost cause.

“I can’t tell if you’re an accomplished liar or just clinically insane. I do know you’re a lucky man.”

“I don’t feel lucky,” I admitted, looking down at myself.

“You’re lucky,” she reiterated, “that I know what you are. That I know your systems would shut off physical pain. If it weren’t for that, I’d have you ripped to pieces, then thrown in a biomodule and healed before I did it again… and we’d keep doing it until I got tired of listening to you scream.”

“Well, thank God for small favors,” I murmured.

Didio smiled, as frightening an expression as I’d ever seen.

“But don’t worry. I have something just as unpleasant planned for you. I won’t bother questioning you yet… because pretty soon, you’ll be begging me to let you spill your guts.”

She motioned to the troopers with her and they opened the door, let her retreat from the room before they backed out behind her. The second the door shut again, the neural restraints deactivated and I yanked them off quickly, lest they change their mind and turn them back on. Jumping to my feet, I shook my arms to get feeling back into them and scanned the room again. I’d missed the sonic projectors, maybe I’d missed something else.

A paroxysm of pure agony coursed through my body and I collapsed to the floor, gasping rather than screaming only because I lacked the air to scream. Writhing uncontrollably, I couldn’t stand, couldn’t think… except for one thing that went through my head over and over, a silent scream.

What the hell is happening to me?

They’re trying to break through my encryption.

What? Who the hell was that? Who was talking to me?

I am, of course.

That’s not answering my question.

I am your neurosynth, the thing said with a tone of disdain, as if I should have known. Who else would be speaking inside your head, given that you’ve already discovered this cell is a Faraday cage?

Oh, wonderful. I’m turning into Raph. I’m going to start talking to myself and having arguments with someone no one else can see. Everyone’s going to think I’ve gone insane.

I believe this dichotomy is temporary, based on what the SID cracking systems are trying to do to you.

Why does it hurt so bad? Why am I feeling physical pain?

Because they’ve launched an EM overload of your superconductive nerve fibers, trying to crack my security protocols. The feedback is traveling into your brain and activating the pain centers. Rest assured, you are not experiencing any physical damage.

Oh, well, good to know. It still hurts like hell. Can’t you shut it down?

I could… but I believe there is a better option. Would you rather face discomfort and psychological pain now and have a chance at escape, or would you choose to ease the pain?

I definitely want to escape… but what do you mean psychological pain?

I apologize in advance, Brent Parthet. I have no wish to hurt you, but I fear this is going to be most unpleasant.

And just like that, I was somewhere else.

The pain was gone, but I was in… a house? I blinked. I was still on the floor, but the floor was polished wood, decorated with patterned rugs. Rolling carefully onto my side, I pushed myself to my feet and looked around. The bay windows let in the morning light, early and yet already harsh, throwing the flat plains outside into sharp relief, the sun’s rays traveling through a haze of dust on the horizon.

Oh, shit. I was home. Back on Aphrodite, on the ranch fifteen klicks outside Lariat City. I rolled to a knee, and before I could get up Patches was on me, a flurry of black-and-white fur and dog slobber.

“Stop!” I laughed, grabbing the border collie in a hug and ruffling his ears to keep him from licking my face. “Good boy, Patches, good boy…”

I hadn’t had another dog since Patches. No time in the military. I’d kept promising Sam we’d get one on Sylvanus but we had to have one bred and brought to us, which would have cost an arm and a leg, and try as I might, I couldn’t get the Conservancy to approve one as protection from bears, not when the perimeter alarm systems worked just fine.

I’d missed having one around, missed Patches, and I blinked back moisture as I hugged him. Patches was, of course, the best dog ever.

“Brent, what are you doing wasting time in here? Didn’t I tell you that I needed you to help me round up the horses before that storm hits?”

If I’d been blindsided by the appearance of the dog, the familiar, gruff, no-nonsense voice slapped me upside the head and jerked me to my feet. Not literally. Dad had never hit me… not that I recalled.

Not that I recalled much at all. Until the second I saw his face, I wouldn’t have been able to remember it. Strong-jawed, high cheekbones, with eyes the color of gunmetal and a face just as hard. His work clothes were freshly stained with dirt and mud, and their condition was a challenge as to why mine weren’t.

I wanted to rush up and pull the man into a hug, to tell him how much I’d missed him, but I was trapped. Trapped in a memory I hadn’t remembered until now.

“Sorry, Dad,” I told him instead. “I just got through with lunch and used the bathroom… I was about to come out.”

“Well, stop being about to and come out now! Your sister ate lunch at the same time as you and she’s already been out there with the horses for half an hour!”

He was back out the door before I could reply. I ruffled Patches’ ears one more time before following him. Where was Mom? I couldn’t remember. I tried to stop at the door, go search the kitchen and the laundry room, but this wasn’t a virtual-reality game, it was a performance, a replay.

Heat washed over me as I stepped onto the porch. I’d forgotten how much I hated this place in the summer. Dry, arid misery except on days like today, when the black clouds roiled in the east and headed inward, bringing with them a humidity that would plaster my shirt to my body with sweat in minutes. Dad’s truck had air conditioning, but he’d already driven back down the dirt road along the fence line, not waiting for me. I could either hoof it or take the ATV, and both the present me inhabiting my younger body and the teenage version of Brent Parthet—or whatever my real last name had been—opted for the latter.

The four-wheeler was still parked alongside the front porch, my hat tucked into the cargo basket to keep it from blowing away in the whipping, spiteful wind. I shoved the hat down onto my brow to secure it, not wanting to lose it to the breeze, and started the machine. The ATV hummed to life, its electric motors in sharp contrast to the alcohol-burning internal-combustion engine of the truck. If the ATV ran out of juice out on the ranch, I could always call Dad to get me with the truck. But if the truck failed, we were screwed.

The rumble of the big, knobby tires on the gravel and dirt drowned out the motors, and both were nearly overcome by the howl of the wind. Squinting against the airborne dust trying to scour away my face, I slipped on sunglasses and tilted my head forward to let the brim of my hat deflect the assault.

The horses were in the canyons south of the house. They’d wandered there to get out of the heat, to drink from the river, but we couldn’t leave them there now, not with the storm heading this way. We hadn’t received a drop of rain on the ranch yet, but the river ran east to west, out of the hills, and if it wasn’t raining here yet, it was certainly pouring there, and had been for hours. And once the swollen river hit the canyons…

My guts twisted. I knew what was coming, even if I couldn’t remember most of it. Even if I’d had full control over myself though, there was nothing I could do differently. The ATV was already at top speed, though that was because the past me hadn’t wanted to get yelled at again. And, as a teenage boy, I’d just liked going fast. Wind slapped me in the face and the tires slipped and skidded on patches of sand, and I whooped in exhilaration at the adrenaline rush, though the voice wasn’t mine, not from the grown-up me.

Down six klicks of dirt road, take a left along the fence line into the flat, grassy prairie. This was trickier, because there were holes out here, but Dad and I both knew them all by heart, and if I hadn’t, I could have just followed his tire tracks. Downhill after another couple klicks, toward the river. I’d caught up enough by now to see the truck bumping along through the brush and suddenly remembered that I’d felt grateful that Dad hadn’t waited for me, because the ride in the pickup would have been less comfortable than the four-wheeler.

Then I saw the river. Brown with debris, it had already overflowed its banks, and even as the pickup hit water and kept going, the first horse passed by, carried by the flood. A chestnut mare I called Lucy, she thrashed and screamed, knowing she was drowning yet unable to get to shore. Dad, still a couple hundred meters ahead of me, pulled up beside Katy’s four-wheeler, already up to the seat in water, and jumped out.

Katy… where was Katy?

The younger me asked the question, but I knew. I’d seen it. I didn’t want to see it again, but I had no choice. She had hold of the reins of Pluto, her four-year-old stallion, trying to swim through the maelstrom as she guided him to shore. Her long brown hair was plastered against her head, strings of it across her face, obscuring her features, but even from this far away, I could tell when she swallowed water and sputtered, coughed.

The water on the riverbanks was up to Dad’s chest, yet he didn’t hesitate, plunging in and making for Katy, swimming with sloppy but powerful strokes, growing closer every second…

Until the downed cottonwood swept across both of them and the stallion. One second they were there, the next, they were gone. Nothing left but roiling water, and the flood kept spreading outward. I braked the four-wheeler to a stop, screaming for them, but couldn’t hear my own voice over the roar of the water. Swinging a foot over the saddle, I started to run toward the river, then stopped abruptly when I felt the mud giving way beneath my feet, when the water reached up to my thighs. It was frigid, at least compared to the humid oven that was the summer air. Any farther and I’d be swept away right along with them.

Horror ran through me, yes, but also terror, an uncontrollable, unassailable fear of dying alongside my father and sister. The water wasn’t stopping, and now it had begun to rain. Beginning to hyperventilate, I fished in my pocket for my commlink, jamming the emergency call control down.

“This is Brent Furlong,” I stammered and a wave of cold realization went through me. That was my real name. Furlong. How could I have forgotten it? Had the memory been there all along? “My dad and my sister Katy just got washed away in the river! We need help!”

No response and I punched the button again over and over, like that would do any good.

“Please help! We need help at the Furlong ranch down just past the canyon!”

“Brent Furlong, we’ve heard and recorded your request for aid and help will arrive as soon as possible.” For just a fraction of a second, I was relieved, before I realized that the response had come from an AI answering system and no real person had gotten my call.

Gasping for air, I climbed onto the ATV and pulled it out of the water, back onto, if not dry land, then at least water no higher than the tops of my tires. If I could travel downriver, maybe through the gate in our fence to the McCollum ranch, I could reach a higher bank and get to them, pull them out…

The commlink beeped at me and I slowed the ATV down, put it close to my ear. The rain fell hard enough now that the spatter on the motor cowlings was almost deafening.

“This is Brent Furlong!” I was sure it was the emergency services calling me back, but the woman’s voice over the external speaker, even distant and tinny, was familiar.

“Brent, what’s going on there? I heard from Andrea McCollum that the river is overflowing its banks. I couldn’t get ahold of Katy or your father…”

“Mom,” I sobbed, unable to hold it back anymore, “they’re gone! They’re both gone!”

I jerked awake, breath coming in heaving gasps, stomach twisted like I might throw up.

“Did you like that one, Brent?”

Valentine Didio. She sounded like she stood over my shoulder, but it was just the speakers in the holding cell. Good ones, probably the same ones they used for the sonic stunners.

“That one took a deep dive. Not just in your neurosynth, but into your physical memories. They aren’t that complete, you know? I had to… supplement them a little with our records. Not too much though. The story was tragic enough without laying it on extra thick. You poor boy. But that’s not the end of it, is it? There’s more. Would you like to see more, Brent?”

“You’re a psychotic bitch,” I growled back at her, but my real anger was with the neurosynth. Where was the thing? Why wasn’t it helping me?

Didio laughed cruelly.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

The cell faded in an explosion of agony and again, I was home.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The house looked different now. Darker.

I sat in the living room on the sofa, hands folded in my lap. Dark sofa, dim lights, dark dress pants. I might as well have been invisible. No one in the dining room seemed to see me. They hovered around Mom like vultures, trying to be comforting, though she wouldn’t have it. She kept her wine glass full, and when Mrs. McCallum tried to take it from her, tried to tell her that she’d had enough, Mom snapped at her fiercely.

“When it’s your husband and child, then you can tell me when I’ve had enough, Andrea.”

Andrea McCallum drew away from her, pain and sympathy in her expression. Maybe it was real. I couldn’t tell anymore. Too many people had told me how sorry they were and a lot of them wouldn’t have spit on Dad if he were on fire. I didn’t care. Their condolences, sincere or not, wouldn’t do a damned thing to bring back Dad and Katy. They wouldn’t save this place. I was only seventeen, but I understood that we wouldn’t be able to keep it with all the horses gone. Mom certainly understood it. We’d have no choice other than to sell the property, and after that… where else was there to go?

So I just sat on the couch and waited for the inevitable. When a hand fell on my shoulder, I was only mildly surprised that someone had actually noticed me, though I guess I shouldn’t have been. Mom’s obnoxious alcoholism drove people away, and they’d feel guilty leaving before assuring me they felt for me too.

“You doing okay, Brent?”

Well, there was something I hadn’t expected. Not another adult. Rachel McCallum. I looked over my shoulder at her. Cute, with freckles and blonde hair. We went to school together. I’d had a crush on her but she’d never seen me as anything more than a friend, though not a close enough one that I’d talked to her more than once a week.

What kind of answer was she looking for? Yeah, I’m doing fine. Just watched my dad and sister die and now, as a bonus, I get to watch my mother fall apart while contemplating living in public-assisted housing in the middle of Lariat City alongside drug addicts and the mentally ill. Everything’s just fucking peachy.

“I’ll be okay,” I lied. “Tell your mom thanks for bringing the food over.” Because my mother certainly wasn’t going to cook anything. She hadn’t cooked much before. That had been Katy.

“You… you can come over anytime you like,” she said, sitting down beside me on the couch. “I mean, if you need to talk, or want something to eat.”

“Thanks. Maybe I will.”

Right up until we got kicked out of here by the new owners. Then she could pretend she never knew me. We’d both just graduated high school and she was probably heading off to university at New Breton. And me… I’d never thought about college. I was just going to work on the ranch and someday, maybe, buy my own land and take some of the herd from Dad and start my own.

“I think we’re about to leave,” she said, patting my hand. I looked over and saw Andrea McCallum motioning urgently at her daughter, pointing toward the door. Apparently, she’d had about as much as she could stomach of Mom. Which was okay, because I had too.

I stayed on the couch, not paying attention as the others filed out, some of them murmuring their condolences. I don’t know how long I sat there, but when I looked up again, the house was empty. Dark and empty. Like my soul.

Thirst finally dragged me out of the living room and into the kitchen. Mom wasn’t there anymore, but she’d left an empty wine bottle behind. Not the glass though. She must have taken it upstairs. I sighed and tossed the bottle in with the recycling, grabbed a glass of water, and headed upstairs to change. I’d worn the suit to the funeral and the burial and then the wake afterward, and I needed to get out of it.

Passing by Katy’s room, I slowed down but didn’t stop. If I did, I’d wind up sobbing on the floor. Again. That had happened too many times in the days since the flood. No sound came from my parents’ room and I walked by the open door and into mine. I pulled the dress clothes off and tossed them on my bed, not bothering to hang them up. I never wanted to wear them again. I swore I never would, no matter what.

Jeans and a t-shirt and boots. I sat on the edge of my bed and chugged the water. Mom would yell at me for setting the glass on my wooden desk without a coaster, but I didn’t give a shit. I couldn’t stay here right now. Maybe I’d take the ATV over to the McCallum’s place after all, see if Rachel meant what she said.

“Mom,” I said, knocking on her door, “I’m going out.”

No reply. I should have just left, not bothered, but she was suffering. I knew that. And if she wasn’t thinking about anyone except herself, that was okay. She’d lost as much as I had. I knocked again.

“Mom?”

I ducked my head inside her room, expecting to see her passed out on the bed. Instead, she was passed out beside it. I groaned. I was going to have to get her into bed.

“Come on, Mom,” I said, reaching down to grab her arm.

Her empty eyes stared back up at me, an empty bottle of sedatives on the floor beside her, along with the empty glass of wine. She wasn’t breathing and the skin around her mouth was blue.

“Oh, Jesus God,” I murmured. I felt around for my commlink. If they got a flyer out here right away, they could still save her…

I looked at her face, at the peaceful expression, the happiest I’d seen her in days. This was what she’d wanted. I didn’t want to say she didn’t give a shit about me, but she couldn’t deal with life if it didn’t have Dad in it. I was alone. No one to tie me to this place, no reason to stay.

I left her there. Tossed my commlink on my bed as I passed by and kept walking. The Coalition military recruitment office was in downtown Lariat. I took my ATV and left it at the edge of town and never looked back.

Sour bile in my mouth was the first indicator I’d thrown up. The retches came hard after that, though no food came up. There was nothing in my stomach to vomit up, barely any liquid, and I couldn’t really afford to lose that.

I rolled away from the stink, still clutching at my head.

I’d left her there to die. Hadn’t even tried to save her. I hadn’t remembered it that way, had barely remembered it at all.

“You’re a real piece of work, Parthet,” Didio said with the chuckle of an executioner sharpening her blade. “Or should I say Furlong? You try to come across as a patriot, a family man trying to do the right thing, but you could have saved your mother. She couldn’t have stopped breathing for more than a few minutes. If you’d gotten her to the medics, they could have revived her. But you let her die. Your own mother. Explain to me again how you’re the good guy? How I should take your word for all this wild bullshit you’ve been pushing instead of just accepting what’s far more likely—that you’re a broken man, twisted from an early age by the tragic deaths of his entire family. Twisted enough to leave his own mother to die of a drug overdose she could have survived. Maybe twisted enough to kill his own wife and young son and blame it on some massive, interstellar conspiracy.”

“Why don’t you fucking come in here and say to my face?” I challenged her, though it would probably have come across as tougher and more intimidating if I hadn’t had vomit plastered to my chin and shirt and I hadn’t still been lolling on the floor. “Come on… you can even bring a gun. Let’s see how talkative you are without all those guards around you.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Parthet.” No guilt or shame at all in her response. “We’ve been nibbling around the edges of your problems, but I think it’s time we went right to the root of them, don’t you? I haven’t looked yet because I don’t want the surprise spoiled, but we’re about to find out exactly what happened when your wife and child died.”

“You don’t need to do that,” I growled. “There’s no reason for me to see that again.”

“No?” Still light-hearted, playful, though with a chilling sadism behind it. “Okay, then I suppose you’re ready to cooperate. You tell me where your little resistance movement is based out of. You tell me how many people you’ve recruited and from where. You give me the names of the leaders—other than Gino Olin and Kamran Ali, who we already know about. You give me a detailed list of all the ships and military equipment you’ve either stolen or bought illegally on the black market. You tell me your long-term plans and the best way to stop them. You do that, and we can end this now.” Didio’s voice took on a soothing tone, like a mother comforting a hurting child. “I’ll put you in a nice, warm room with a bed and a toilet, bring you food and water. Maybe even some liquor if you want to drown your sorrows. I have a nice bottle of bourbon in my office. Doesn’t all that sound much more comfortable than lying on a cold floor in a puddle of your own vomit and urine?”

“Joke’s on you,” I mumbled, licking dry lips. “You don’t give me water, I don’t urinate. But sure, I’ll tell you all that stuff,” I agreed. “Let’s do it now. Anything you want.”

Because I had enough names and details made up and organized by the neurosynth that it would take her days, maybe weeks to figure out I was feeding her bullshit.

“Ooh, I’m sorry,” she said with a tsk. “Wrong answer. I know you well enough to figure you’d lie to me. Since we’ve already penetrated your neurosynth, we don’t need you to tell us anything. All we have to do is wring you out to the point where you’ve lost the will to resist, then we can access your memories directly and we’ll have everything.”

“You have access,” I corrected her, wiping at my chin, “but you don’t have control. I can still order those memories wiped from the neurosynth files. That would just leave my physical memories, which you can’t touch. Let me out of here or I’ll do just that.”

“Do I sound gullible to you, Parthet?” she snapped. “If you could do that, you already would have. Which means we’re close… and all we need is just a slight push.” A cackling laugh. “Here’s the push.”

I woke to the scream of jets.

“Whassat?” Miriam mumbled, rubbing at her eyes.

“Shuttles,” I told her, swinging my legs out of bed and grabbing my pants off the chair without turning on the lights. “Stay here with Sam. I’ll go talk to them.”

“How can they be here already?” she asked as I strapped on my boots.

“Maybe they had a unit out this way,” I guessed. Miriam grabbed my arm tightly, her eyes gleaming in the darkness.

“What if it’s more of the Southwind?”

“I’ll take the rifle,” I assured her, as if that was any sort of comfort.

“No,” she insisted, her grip tightening. “You don’t need the rifle. Leave it with me.”

Leaning down, I kissed her.

“It’ll be okay. I love you.”

“Love you too.”

“Dad?”

Shit. Samuel had heard the jets too, poking his head out into the hallway from his bedroom, backlit by the glow of his nightlight. His hair stuck out at odd angles, distorted by sleep.

“What’s that sound?” he asked, pointing upward.

“Hey, Sammy,” I said, pulling him into a hug. “I think it’s just some people from the government checking up on us. It’s all right. Go stay with your mom in our room, okay? I’ll take care of it.”

He nodded and ran into our bedroom, his usual curiosity attenuated by the paranoia of the unexpected interruption of sleep. I watched him go, closing the door behind him, then grabbed my jacket and headed out the door.

Still dark outside, of course, barely zero-four-hundred local time, but the false dawn at the eastern horizon provided enough ambient light for my implant filters to show me every detail of the shuttle descending into our clearing.

It wasn’t a Patrol lander. It was a military assault shuttle.

I expected the shuttle to come in for a landing in the clearing, but instead it pulled up at about three hundred meters and a hatch opened up on the side. Tiny figures dropped through that hatch, barely visible even on infrared and thermal, outlines broken up by the shifting camouflage patterns on their body armor. But the chameleon camo did nothing to conceal the massive wash of thermal energy from the flight packs.

Four people. Out of the hatch, they spread into a wedge, the high-pitched whine of the flight packs nearly drowned out by the scream of the shuttle’s engines. The assault shuttle spun her nose toward my storage shed and blew the front door in with a burst of coilgun fire from her chin cannon. The ripping metal screech of the weapon competed with the crunch-bang of my storage shed disintegrating.

“What the hell?” I bellowed, gesticulating at the closest of the commandos, the one I assumed was the leader. “I thought this was supposed to be an arrest, not a Goddamned execution!”

Willwood burst out of the wreckage of my shed, making a run for the trees. He’d been sleeping against the far corner of the building, and the pilots of the shuttle had known that. I thought Willwood might make the trees. Stronger and faster than a normal human, he ran like an Olympic sprinter, eating up the meters with each long stride. But not against these guys. Just two of them pursued the Southwind youth, arms and legs pumping at twice the speed of the fastest men I’d ever seen.

One of the two pulled away from the other and sprinted ahead of Willwood, blocking his way, too fast for the Southwind to avoid, so he didn’t try. Willwood ducked his shoulder and tried to ram the soldier instead, probably figuring that physics couldn’t be overcome, that his superior weight would still drive the commando backward and open up a path into the forest.

But the soldier wasn’t there when Willwood’s shoulder arrived. Just a step to the side, but it required an instant stop, his boot heel digging into the dirt hard enough to throw up a spray of debris as the man spun to the side and swung the butt stock of his rifle along with the spin. Even a good fifty meters away, I heard the hollow thock of the rifle butt against the Southwind’s skull, and he went down head over heels, flopping to the ground like a landed trout.

If Willwood had been human, either the blow or the fall might have killed him, a fractured skull or a broken neck, dealer’s choice. Even for a Southwind, the double impact left him sprawled helpless on his back, more than enough time for the soldier who’d been trailing him to fire his weapon.

In the darkness, I’d thought it was a conventional rifle, but the banshee wail out of the bell-shaped muzzle revealed its true nature. A sonic stunner. Willwood writhed and jerked fitfully until the stunner cut off and then went limp. Like wolves waiting for the wounded elk to collapse, both soldiers lunged toward him, wrapping the Southwind’s massive arms in a neural web.

“What the fuck do you assholes think you’re doing?” I yelled at the one I thought was the commander, the first one off the shuttle. “I called you fuckers and you just blew up all the fucking food we’re supposed to live off for the next six months! If you were such huge wussies that you were too afraid to go in there yourselves, you could have fucking asked me and I would have held your damn hand for you!”

Closer now, and the second man, the one behind the leader, shoved the muzzle of his rifle into my face.

I reacted without thought, slapping the barrel aside, and when he stepped into position for a butt stroke, the Machine took over. The rifle was a lever, I was the fulcrum, and I tossed him over my hip and into a wild tumble that left his rifle in my hands. The commander didn’t shoot me, instead grabbing for the rifle and throwing an elbow strike at the side of my head.

He was fast and strong, but so was I. He wanted the rifle, so I gave it to him, letting loose of my hold before he could throw the telegraphed elbow strike and sending him off balance. Not much, just enough to land a backward knife-hand strike. I’d aimed for his neck, but like I said, he was damn fast and ducked just enough for the blade of my hand to hit the side of his helmet instead.

The blow ripped it off his head and we both froze in that moment, real time catching up to the tachypsychia of the Machine as the narrow, sculpted features of the soldier’s face burned itself into my memory. It was a face I’d seen every day for over five years, the man I’d trusted more than anyone in my life until I’d met Miriam.

The man I’d seen die a few meters away from me on Tamyang.

“Castiel?” I gasped, staring at him.

It was a hallucination, the product of shock at the violence, brought on by the appearance of these commandos so close to my old team. It had to be. Until he spoke, recognition passing across his face.

“Michael?”

I froze, and so did the man who looked just like Gino Olin, but the shuttle didn’t. Still hovering, it traversed its nose toward my house, and from the weapons bay just to the portside ventral an external door opened, a missile launcher swiveling downward. Ready to launch into our home.

I turned away from Gino, left my back open to him, and ran for the house.

I wouldn’t be there in time. I knew that already, the data supplied by the same neurosynth that tried very hard to talk me out of this, but I proved beyond a reasonable doubt that I controlled it instead of the other way around by smashing through the front door, screaming her name.

“Miriam! We have to get out!”

She crouched at the end of the hallway, rifle at her shoulder, Sammy behind her with a hand on her back, as if the touch reassured him that everything was going to be okay. I reached out for her, trying to grab her hand, trying to take both of them with me to safety.

A last image, both of their faces, Sammy’s twisted in fear, Miriam’s firm with resolve.

My world exploded.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

This isn’t real. This isn’t real. This isn’t real.

It had already happened, I’d already dealt with it, already gone through all the pain once before.

Wait. The pain hadn’t returned. I was back in the cell, but my head had stopped spinning and I heard nothing, just laid on the floor breathing. I expected Didio to come back and taunt me again, tell me I should stop holding out, that I’d break sooner or later, that I might as well give up. But she didn’t say a word.

Fine with me. I needed the rest. My neurosynth and I weren’t on speaking terms at the moment, so I couldn’t say for sure how long it had been since I woke up, but I was thirsty enough that I thought it had to be at least twenty-four hours. The memories had happened in real time. Maybe Didio was sleeping? I mean, one of us had to. Hell, maybe I could. I closed my eyes and tried… but the memories still lingered back there, behind the thin veil of consciousness.

Instead, I scooted back up against the wall and tried to relax. I’d told Didio that I didn’t need to pee, but I’d been lying. Even though my nanite suite converted every bit of waste into energy, the urge was still there. Psychological, probably, and I wasn’t about to do it in a corner. This cell wasn’t that big, and I smelled bad enough already.

I tried not to think, but I kept coming back to one question I couldn’t ignore—where was my neurosynth? Why wasn’t it fighting this? What the hell was it up to, and why couldn’t it tell me? And how long was I going to sit here talking to myself?

The door opened again, but this time there was no sonic blast, no static charge. No guards. Just Valentine Didio, and her expression lacked the fury and sadistic brutality of her last visit and the scorn of her comments on the overhead speakers. Instead, if I had to put a word to the frown she wore, I would have said… thoughtful.

A Gauss carbine hung from a sling around her neck, the muzzle pointed at me, her finger straight out at the trigger, ready to touch it if necessary. But she didn’t seem to want to.

“What the hell went on out there?” she demanded.

I didn’t have to ask what she meant. She’d seen the memories as I had, from Sylvanus.

“Willwood—the Southwind—smuggled himself to Sylvanus on our cargo shuttle,” I replied, not moving a centimeter from where I sat. I could have. She wasn’t fast enough to stop me from killing her and taking that gun, but she wouldn’t take the chance of being in here alone with me unless her people were outside, ready to shoot if I made a break for it. “He knew of me from the war, from his elders. He knew about the Archangels and he thought I could help him and his people. They wanted to expose the truth about the war.”

I rubbed at my eyes, a pang of guilt and grief wracking my body, leftover from the latest flashback.

“I called the Patrol instead. I didn’t believe him, just wanted him arrested and gone. But the Patrol didn’t come. Castiel did. Gino Olin. Him and his team of cut-rate Archangels on loan from Janus to the SID. Your people, or maybe Janus, had been keeping an eye on me, and they sent Cas in to secure Willwood. What they didn’t tell him was that, no matter what happened, the shuttle crew had orders to take out me and my family. I laid underneath the wreckage of our house for days… they thought I was dead. Then the Patrol finally came and I stole their ship. And that nice Medusa that’s probably still in the water on Hephaestus. I took them both to Tempest and found Raph—Kamran Ali—and had him try to figure out what the hell was going on.”

I hesitated. Saying anything else might give away too much.

“We went to one of the Southwind worlds and spoke to one of the elders Willwood had mentioned. He showed us the biometric data they’d recorded when the SID had contacted them and Raph was able to match one of the signatures to… someone he had a file on.” Xavier Khan, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. The man was trying to make up for the harm he’d done, taking in refugees from the war, and I didn’t want to take the chance of putting the SID back on his tail. “They told us the truth, that they’d tried to use the Evolutionists to start a short, victorious war against the Southwind to make sure any movement to emancipate them fell flat. What they didn’t know was that the Southwind weren’t going to make it easy for them. The source said that he didn’t know where the Southwind got the Tachyon Interface missiles they used on Orbital Prime. Rhule told us differently, but you don’t believe him.” I shrugged. “Hell, I’m not sure if I believe him. But he also said there was a plan in place to prevent the upcoming elections, and I might believe that.”

“You still killed Ethan,” Didio said, as if trying to convince herself. “You hunted him down and killed him.”

“If he didn’t think that he was in danger of someone finding him,” I told her, “of someone tracking him down and finding out what he’d done. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have had an enhanced bodyguard along pretending to be his girlfriend.”

“She didn’t do him much good, did she?”

“She came close,” I admitted. “If it hadn’t been one of us, I doubt anyone else could have taken her. And Rhule. He was jacked too. Kinetex.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I didn’t know. He worked for them, but I didn’t know he’d undergone… the procedure. I understand it’s quite painful.”

“Oh, yeah,” I agreed. “Not something I’d wish on my worst enemy. But nowhere near as bad as the neurosynth. Not the pain… not just the pain. Not even the fear that it wouldn’t work, that I’d wind up a gibbering lunatic. No, the worst part was just before the synching process finished. It was like hearing a million voices whispering right by your ear and not being able to make out what they’re saying. Enough to drive you nuts if it lasted.”

I should shut up. I was running off at the mouth, trying to get her to not kill me, trying to get her to switch sides even though I knew how unlikely it was. She was in here for a reason though, and I had to think it was because she didn’t know.

Didio took a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering sigh.

“You’ve put me in an awkward position, Captain Parthet,” she said. “I was told…” Didio shook her head. “You’re not what I was led to believe.”

“Then maybe I’m telling you the truth,” I said. “Maybe you need to think about what you’ve been told and who’s telling you. You’re in a position where you should have known all this shit already. Someone doesn’t trust you enough to bring you in on it and you’re the damned deputy director. Maybe they think you wouldn’t want to be part of it.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she admitted. “But if you are… think about what you’re saying. What happens if you succeed, Captain Parthet?” Didio speared me with a glare. “Have you thought about that?”

“We just need to convince people like you of what actually happened,” I said. “Generals. Admirals. Members of Parliament. Once there’s too many people to ignore, the prime minister and the Consortium executives backing him will have to negotiate a way out of this, give up power.”

Didio laughed long and hard, though I noted that the muzzle of her weapon never wavered.

“Oh, Lord,” she chuckled, “you know… it’s easy to forget you went straight from a backwater ranch on a backwater colony into the military. You have no concept how the galaxy really works. You’re talking about people who’ll never give up power. They’d rather bring the entire thing down around their ears like Samson in the Philistine temple than let anyone else take it from them.”

I didn’t like where this was going, and I started looking for a way out. I knew I could take her, maybe use her as a hostage to at least make the guards outside hesitate before opening fire. But how would I get out the door?

“If you do build up enough support,” she went on, taking a step back to the other side of the door, “there’s only one destination that course will take us. Civil war. You think the Southwind War was bad?’ She shook her head. “I bet you can look up the statistics for every civil war in history, can’t you?”

Well, not at the moment, not with the neurosynth on hiatus, but I shrugged in response since it was true in general.

“I don’t have access to instant facts from a computer database in my head, but I already know them. I learned them in university and every single one was burned into my brain. Most of them were in primitive societies, fought with primitive weapons. They averaged between two and three percent of the population, which seemed horrific enough at the time, but their cultures moved on, survived.” Didio shook her head. “Others… well, there was the Three Kingdoms War in ancient China. Between the fighting, the plagues, and the starvation, over sixty percent of their people died. Thirty-six million people out of less than sixty million. Which do you think would be more likely for us?”

I didn’t answer but my mouth was dry, and it wasn’t just from the lack of water.

“You know how many humans and Southwind are in the Coalition, Parthet?” she asked but didn’t wait for me to answer. “One hundred billion, give or take. Most of them in the Orbitals, packed in like teeth in a shark’s mouth—no room, just pressure. What do you think would happen if the food supplies to the Orbitals were cut off? How many people do you think would die in a week?” She cocked her head to the side and regarded me from the new perspective. “Fifty percent? Sixty? Maybe all of them?”

“We’re not going to cut off supplies to the Orbitals,” I rasped, indignance forcing me to speak up. “We don’t want to harm civilians.”

“Assuming that’s true, so what? If you’re right about the Consortium, do you think they’d hesitate to eliminate any population who opposes them? Or maybe it isn’t even intentional. Shit happens in wars, you know that. All it would take is an attack on the right system at the right time and a cargo ship that should have passed through there doesn’t get sent. People starve to death. Turn cannibal. You don’t have to mean to harm anyone… because it’s a civil war, and horrible shit happens in a civil war.”

“You think it’s better,” I asked her, “to let the Consortium run our government? You think it’s better to let them kill their millions to stay in power?”

“Those millions are already dead, Parthet. Are you really interested in protecting the innocent… or do you just want vengeance?”

I didn’t speak for a moment, wanting to dismiss her accusation but not able to do it. Was she right? Had I not thought about the consequences of my actions because I still wanted revenge for Miriam and Sam?

“I think you’re forgetting something, Deputy Director,” I said. “It’s not just me. There’re thousands of other people like me out there. Maybe tens of thousands. Vets who gave everything they had, suffered permanent psychological and sometimes physical scars in the war. They already resented the hell out of the Coalition for how they’ve been treated since the end of the war, and now they’re going to find out the truth. You can kill me, you can kill all of us, all the ones who’ve joined, and that information is still going to be out there. It’s all over the indie nets already.” I patted my chest, shook my head. “So, I’m not there, I’m not recruiting them. What do you think they do?”

“We can handle them,” Didio assured me with a hint of a sneer, enough for me to know that there was no chance in hell this lady would ever consider coming over to the other side.

“Yeah, well, that’s the other problem,” I told her. “You make it sound as if the SID and the Consortium have already accomplished what they want and now they’re going to stop. But we both know that’s not true. They’re just getting started. They’re trying to stop the Periphery colonies from asserting their independence, they’re trying to distract those disaffected veterans, and they’re trying to do away with the independent Southwind worlds, force them back into virtual slavery, worse than before. That’s why they’re going to try to stop the elections and seize power permanently. Tell me that doesn’t make sense to you.”

Didio sighed.

“Maybe you’re right,” she admitted. “Maybe they didn’t trust me with the truth. But I still believe in the system. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. Maybe you’re not a bad guy, Parthet, but you’re still the enemy. And I still need that information to stop you.” Didio shook her head. “I don’t want to hurt you anymore. Let me have open access to your neurosynth and I swear I won’t hand you over to them.” She motioned with her carbine. “I’ll make it quick and painless. Tell them you tried to escape.”

The truth, of course, was that I couldn’t give her that access, but I certainly didn’t want her to know that. I shook my head.

“People I care about,” I said, “are counting on me to hold out. Whatever you do to me, Valentine, isn’t going to be any worse than I’ve already done to myself.”

I didn’t tense, wanting to lull her into a sense of security, a conviction that I’d given up on physical resistance, but I prepared myself. Fingers on the floor, legs bent, soles of my feet flat. The instant she opened the door, I’d be on her, grab the rifle…

Didio was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. The second her left hand went to the door, her right clenched on the trigger and a spray of plasma rounds sparked off the metal floor only a meter in front of me, the spray of molten metal forcing me to scramble backward out of instinct. It only took a half a second to overcome the reflex, resolve to face the burns in order to get by and get to her, but by then, it was too late.

The door slammed shut.

“Dammit,” I hissed, crouched like a cat waiting to spring. The mouse was gone.

I am the mouse.

“Remember,” Didio’s voice came over the speakers again, this time seeming regretful. “I gave you the chance to avoid this.”

The agony returned inside my head and I blacked out.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Brent, wake up.”

I didn’t want to. Even the hint of the light trying to worm its way past my eyelids was too bright, painful. I just wanted to sleep forever.

“Brent Alan Furlong, wake up right now or you’re going to be late for school!”

My eyes snapped open. I was home again. Back in my room but… not. Everything seemed skewed, at an odd angle, the light coming through the blinds of my window too harsh, too punishing for early morning. Hell, it was usually still pre-dawn when I woke up for school, and it was sure as hell never Mom who would wake me up. She wouldn’t be out of bed herself yet…

I turned over, expecting to see my mother, blonde hair still messy from sleep, bags under her eyes from where she’d put down a little too much wine the night before.

Her face was drawn, eaten away, the skin rotting off her skull, lips drawn away from teeth that went straight into her jaw without gums between, only her eyes intact. Red and bloodshot and staring an accusation at me, a bony, skeletal finger pointing at my face.

“You let me die, Brent,” she hissed, the words not coming from the tongueless mouth, not from lungs and esophagus long rotted away. No, they echoed inside my head, crawling over my brain like maggots on her decomposing corpse. “You could have saved me. You could have saved them. If you hadn’t wasted time, hadn’t played with the dog, you could have been with Katy, talked her out of going into the water.”

The finger poked at my chest and I tried to scream but lacked the breath to do it, as if I, too, had no lungs. I backed away from it but ran into the wall beside my bed, hands raised to ward off the zombie.

“Why were you always so lazy and selfish, Brent?”

Dad. His corpse had been in the water for days before they’d retrieved him, and he looked it. Flesh had been stripped away by debris, and one half of his face had collapsed in on itself where it had impacted rocks. Part of his jaw had fallen off in the river and the rest worked fitfully, like one of those old nutcrackers Grandma had used to drag out during Christmas.

“All I asked,” he went on, “is that you care about the ranch as much as I did. You wanted to run your own someday, didn’t you? How could you hope to do that if all you ever thought about was yourself? You didn’t care that your sister was going out to take care of the horses by herself, you just wanted to stay inside, out of the heat for another half hour, and let everyone else do the work.”

“And you’re still just as selfish, Brent,” the rotting corpse of my mother insisted, shoulder to shoulder with my father. “Think of all the families you’re going to leave without their parents because you’re dragging them off to war. You’ll be doing to them what you did to yourself, only they might actually care about their families!”

“What do you want from me?” I screamed back at her. “Should I just let them get away with killing my wife and son? Shouldn’t I care about them?”

The question was useless and I wouldn’t have asked it if I thought the words would have actually come out. Before this had been just memories, but this was different. This was virtual-reality based on the memories the thing had stripped out of me and I could interact with it, not just relive it. Somewhere deep inside, past the point where this all seemed real, in the still-rational part of my brain, I wondered why they could access those memories and not the ones that were useful to them, the ones about the rebellion… the Archangels. I didn’t care if anyone else was going to call them that, I was going to.

“Do you care about us, Brent?”

Oh, shit.

The bedroom had vanished around me. I lay pinned under the smoldering wreckage of the house on Sylvanus, unable to move, the smell of burned lumber and ozone strong in the air. Along with the smell of burnt flesh.

The charred and broken corpses of Miriam and Sammy were still pinned beneath the rubble, but their eyes were miraculously clear and undamaged, staring at me through blackened faces. I screamed and writhed but couldn’t get out, couldn’t get away. Beyond grief and sorrow, only utter, incapacitating terror filled my veins and my thoughts, the desperate need to run.

“Do you care about us, Daddy?” Sammy asked me, his voice somehow normal despite his injuries. “Or do you care about how angry you were when someone took us from you?”

“It’s not the same thing, Brent,” the thing that had once been Miriam told me. “You think it’s righteous indignation, but it’s just you being selfish again. Just the way you were when you abandoned your father and sister. Just the way you were when you left your mother to die. Just the way you were when you abandoned the Coalition after the war. They wanted you to stay in the military, to help them rebuild, but you only thought about yourself, about how lonely you’d be without your friends. It’s time for you to face the truth. I would have been better off if I’d never met you.”

“And I would have been better off if I’d never been born,” Sammy declared with the certainty of a five-year-old. “Then I wouldn’t have had to feel the fear and the pain. It hurt dying, Daddy. It hurt worse than anything.”

“Oh, Sammy…” I moaned. The fear hadn’t left me, but now it had company from the misery and self-loathing I’d felt before. Sobs wracked my body and I wrenched at the debris pinning me down. I’d broken free of it before. Why couldn’t I move it now?

“Because it isn’t real.”

Darkness, and I would have suspected I’d died if not for the voice.

“None of this is real, Brent.” I knew that voice. Light returned, and rather than being in some half-remembered duplicate of my old house on Aphrodite, I stood in a corridor of solid white. And in front of me stood… Katy.

Not a water-logged corpse as Dad had been, but the Katy I knew, her light-brown hair tied into a ponytail that hung down the back of her checkered shirt. Her thumbs were hooked through the belt loops of her blue jeans, the legs of the jeans tucked into her work boots.

“Katy. Is this…” I stammered, looked around at the glowing whiteness. “Is this heaven?”

“No.” She grinned, obvious amused at the idea. “This isn’t real. It’s your imagination. Nothing you’ve seen has been real, not even your memories.” Katy shook her head. “Nothing happened that way in real life. You didn’t spend a half hour playing with your dog after lunch. You and Katy went out together and she tied a rope to the handlebars of your ATV when she went in after the horses. You tried to pull her out with the vehicle, but the horse panicked and dragged her under. Your father wasn’t there. He’d already been washed away at another part of the canyon.”

I rubbed at my temples, grimacing in confusion.

“Then how did I remember it that way?”

“You didn’t,” Katy assured me, putting a hand on my arm. Her grip was strong, just like I remembered it. “Didio’s virtual-reality software took the records they had on file and constructed a fiction to try to break you.”

“But… who the hell are you then? You’re not Katy, so…”

“This was the best method I had for getting your attention,” she said. “Because I need you to be ready when the time comes.”

“For what? Who are you?”

She sighed, hands on her hips, head cocked to the side just like Katy had done when I said something stupid as a kid.

“I’m your neurosynth, Brent,” she said as if it was obvious. “Would you rather I’d chosen another form? I picked one that I knew you would trust… one who you would be comfortable with.”

“I’d rather I wasn’t talking to you,” I told her, throwing up my hands. “Because I don’t want to end up like Raph. But since you’re here, why don’t you tell me where you’ve been and why you’ve let Didio fuck with my head?” I tapped my temple demonstratively. “She’s been torturing me with those fake memories for…” my eyes went wide as I realized how long it had been. “Three fucking days! Why didn’t you do something about it?”

“Because I’ve been busy!” Katy snapped. Okay, it wasn’t actually Katy, but it was easier to think of the thing that way than as the computer. “I told you, they made a mistake attacking me directly. They thought it would give them a line into your memories, but what it actually did was give me an opening into their systems that I didn’t have before, not with the shielding in this cell.”

“And it took you three days?” I demanded, shaking my head.

“This is the SID,” she reminded me, scowling. “An SID black site on an uninhabitable moon of a gas giant in an unnamed system. Everything is air-gapped and the security is about as tight as you might imagine. If you care, I had to jump from the penetration system to the personal commlink of one of the technicians, then had to wait until he connected to the interstellar comm system to jump into it and, from there, to the station’s intercoms and then into the security system about five minutes ago.”

“You’re here now,” I said, deciding that I’d just have to accept the AI’s explanation... or excuses, depending on how generous I was willing to be. “What’s the plan?”

“I thought you were the one who made the plans,” Katy replied, arching an eyebrow at me. God damn this AI was doing a good job imitating her.

“Enough,” I sighed. “What’s going to happen?”

“In about thirty seconds,” the AI said, “a fire alarm is going to sound at the opposite end of the station. Following that by another thirty seconds in the same area is going to come a failure warning on the fire suppression system, and at that point, the door to your cell is going to open. I can only shut down the sonic stun system in the ceiling for a few seconds without them realizing what I’m doing, but it should be enough for you to get out. Though I can’t swear that even the alarms will draw away the two guards stationed outside your door. It may divert their attention briefly, but I can’t promise anything.”

“That’s a damn sight better than I had a few minutes ago,” I told the AI, shaking my head. “But where the hell do I go once I get out of the cell? We’re surrounded by methane gas, and once they realize I’m out, the first thing they’re going to do is put extra guards on the airlocks and shuttles. Do they even have a starship on the ground here?”

“No,” Katy replied, staring at the imaginary white floor in obvious regret. “Only landers. Their starships are lighters in high orbit on patrol. Two of them, which is going to make things even more difficult. I don’t have a solution to that problem, but I do have a short-term idea. Thirty meters down the corridor from this cell, just after the main intersection that would take you to either the hangar—which, as you say, will be guarded—or the crew quarters, there’s a small maintenance hatch for the base’s plumbing and ventilation system. It’s barely large enough for you to squeeze through, but once you’re inside, I can guide you to a place where you can take shelter. It won’t be pleasant, but you should be able to hide out there until you come up with a subsequent plan of action.”

I looked down at my bare feet.

“And maybe some shoes.”

“First things first. The fire alarm has just sounded. I’m going to release your consciousness back into your body. Be ready.”

I blinked and Katy was gone. So was the white heaven, and I was back in the cell, complete with the stench of stale vomit and stale me. And the whooping of an alarm, loud and clamorous and deafening in the tiny cell. Why they bothered to pipe it into the room was a mystery, since there was fuck-all I could do in the case of a real fire.

There wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do for the fake one except wait. Thirty more seconds, Katy had said…

Shit. I couldn’t keep calling the neurosynth Katy. Not just because it seemed disrespectful to the memory of my sister, but because that would bring me a step closer to the sort of crazy that Raph had with Tommy. Or was it really crazy? I mean, he wasn’t imagining the inner voice, the AI really was talking to him. It didn’t matter for the moment, of course. The odds were I’d never see Raph, or Cas, or Yanto or… or Riva again.

I found myself wishing we’d parted differently. The last thing she’d remember about me now was me screwing things up. At least her memories were real. I couldn’t even trust my memories of my family. Hell, I didn’t even know if my real last name had been Furlong. Didio could have made that up too.

Another alarm, this one sharp and buzzing in contrast to the first one’s warbling. That would be the fire suppression system malfunctioning. Not very long now. I put a hand on the wall beside the door and waited.

Still two guards out there. I breathed a sigh of relief, not at the presence of the guards but at the fact that I just knew they were there without an avatar of my dead sister telling me aloud. Just like I knew that both were facing the wrong direction.

Open the door now, I ordered. Katy might not be talking to me, but I still had to talk to her.

It worked, at least. The door slid aside with a pneumatic hiss and I squeezed through before it was all the way open, scraping my back and chest on the way out and not caring. This was, I realized, the first glimpse I’d had of anything outside my cell. Not that the place was much to look at. Once you’d seen one claustrophobic, confined, airtight base on an uninhabitable world, you’d pretty much seen them all. Gray, metal walls, bare except for safety warnings and intercom panels, unmarked doors probably for other cells just like the one I’d been confined to.

And two SID Special Activities Unit troops in light armor and visored helmets, the muzzles of their Gauss rifles scanning toward the intersection ahead of us as if they thought someone might be staging a rescue. That was a mistake. What they should have done was set one of the two watching down the corridor while the other concentrated on the cell. On the positive side, it was a mistake neither of them would ever make again.

They were armored and I was unarmed, which made things a little trickier, but it wasn’t a situation I’d never faced before and, more importantly, the Machine had already scanned every vulnerability and provided me with plenty of targets. The two of them were close together—too close, but that was human nature. Close enough that when I wrapped my arm around the neck of the closest of them, the other was in reach of my legs.

The collar behind their helmets protected their neck from behind, so I slid around the front and took the helmet with me, twisting sharply, the crack of his spine snapping like a branch breaking in a quiet forest. He collapsed and, as he did, I slammed my heel into the underarm of the second guard. Armor wasn’t perfect. Certain parts had to be flexible if you wanted to be able to move your arms and legs, and one of those segments was under the arm… which happened to be where the brachial plexus—a network of nerves running from the spine through the armpit—was located. A strike there could cause pain, temporary paralysis, or even unconsciousness if hit hard enough.

I hit it very hard, the impact slamming the second man against the far wall with an echoing bang that nearly drowned out the fire alarm. The troopers’ Gauss rifles were connected to their tactical vests with a tough harness and I didn’t have a knife. I grabbed the weapon from the hands of the one whose neck I’d broken, braced a foot against his chest, and heaved with all the might of my own muscles and kinetex counterparts.

The straps of the sling didn’t break, but the swivels attaching it to the harness snapped and the dead man slumped back to the floor, his head at an unnatural angle. The one I’d kicked started to stir, hands searching for the rifle hanging at his side, but not fast enough. Just a short burst was all it took, four rounds through the visor of his helmet. The faceplate disintegrated into fragments and so did the face behind it, turning the SAU trooper from an anonymous enemy to a dead one without me ever having to think of him as human.

I hesitated for the barest of seconds, intent on grabbing ammo, comms, maybe even trying on their boots since I was barefoot, but a sudden urgency overtook me, a message from the neurosynth that I didn’t have the time. If I was going to get away, I had to move now.

The intersection, Katy had said. It was thirty meters away now, but I covered the distance in less than three seconds, stopping myself the hard way, slamming a shoulder into the opposite wall. Recoiling from the impact, I spun from one side to the other, covering each way with the Gauss carbine before I saw that no one was coming.

The maintenance hatch was exactly where Katy had described it, tucked into an alcove under a small sticker telling everyone that this was where all repair bots should be inserted for plumbing and ventilation repair and that it would be very dangerous for humans to enter the area. Something about there being nonbreathable atmosphere, which, I thought, Katy might have mentioned earlier.

The panel came off easily and behind it, there was just enough space between the external wall and the rows of pipes and ventilation ducts for me to fit. But I hesitated. I could survive for a while without air… but how long.

“Brent,” Katy’s voice spoke aloud this time. “Trust me.”

Oh, this sucks.

Eeling my way through the entrance, I pulled the panel shut behind me. Maybe it was suicide, but if it was, then at least no one else had to know I’d gone nuts.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

What about security in here? I asked, moving forward in a weird, bladed side-step, the metal ductwork cold against my bare feet. Don’t they have any monitors? Cameras? Thermal sensors?

“Of course they do,” Katy told me. “Which is why I’m looping their feed as we pass through. Now that we’re out of the shielded cell, it’s barely an inconvenience. All you need to worry about is live men and women with guns, and they all went to the hangar bay, just as we suspected.”

Then where the hell am I going?

“Communications,” Katy told me. “The troops who aren’t in the hangar waiting for you are heading for the detention area, searching for you. I assume you’d like to call for help? We have the coordinates for this place, and the longer you wait, the less likely it is you’ll still be alive when help gets here.”

You’re starting to sound like my real sister.

“I have to sound like something. Up ahead, you’re going to come to an abrupt right turn. You need to climb over the top and go left.”

Climb over the top? I repeated, distracted enough that I banged my elbow on the water pipe and cursed at the sound, hoping no one in the corridor had heard it.

“You’ll see when you get there.”

I did. The pipes turned right at almost ninety degrees along with the wall, but there was a small gap up at the ceiling. Very small. Holding the rifle in one hand, I jumped up and grabbed the edge, pulling myself into position to examine the passage.

Holy shit. The gap was less than forty centimeters, and even with my enhanced optics, I couldn’t see the other side because there was simply no ambient light whatsoever, no infrared source, no heat other than the background temperature.

“Hello,” I said in a normal voice. It was a risk, but sonic analysis was all I had.

The sound kept going… which meant so did the narrow attic space, but I still couldn’t tell if it opened up anywhere on the other side.

You sure about this? I asked the AI.

“According to the construction specs I found, communications is on the other side of that.”

I looked down at the Gauss rifle and wished I had a sling for it. Maybe I could use the partial harness strap still hanging off the front to drag it behind me. Worth a try. Getting on top was awkward, particularly one-handed, and maybe it was better that I didn’t have any shoes because I needed my toes to push myself over the edge. When I got there and rested atop the shelf, I was acutely aware of how little room I had above my head and my back, my chest pressed into the rough surface of the ceiling tile.

Dust rose off the shelf, though whether it was from the construction material or the raw stone of the cavern above, I couldn’t be sure, since I held my breath to avoid sucking it in. Not that it would have killed me, but I smelled bad enough without a coating of rock dust inside my nose. Pushing forward with one arm and one leg, I dragged the other behind me, towing the rifle by the remnants of its sling. It clattered noisily against the ridges of the tile and I gritted my teeth against a vociferous curse that really wanted out.

That wasn’t going to work. Neither was pushing it ahead of me, and I couldn’t keep it off the tile, not with just one hand and only a couple centimeters to spare on either side. I stopped and finally had to take a breath, along with a mouthful of dust.

Dammit.

It went against every instinct, every bit of training and every voice screaming in my head not to do it, but I set the weapon down and continued on without it. It wouldn’t do me any good to have a gun lying beside me when some smartass opened fire into the ceiling and punched my ticket because I’d been making too much noise.

I moved faster without it, and once I’d made it about thirty meters, I paused and looked around again, moving my head to the side and turning my whole body to do it. There. Light. Not much of it, but enough to tell me that I’d finally found a way down off this Goddamned shelf.

What about when I get out of the maintenance tunnels and go into Comms? I asked as the light grew closer. Are you still going to be able to take out the security?

“Unfortunately, no,” Katy informed me and my head shot up reflexively, banging against the rock ceiling above. I winced and rubbed the bump. It hadn’t hurt that much, but…

Well, what the hell? They’ll be on me inside two minutes then!

“Yes, I would suggest you keep the message brief and to the point,” she suggested. “Sorry, Brent, but I’m a computer, not a miracle worker.”

You’re a big fucking help. Why didn’t you send the message when you had access to the comms system before? You said that was how you managed to get me out of the cell.

“Because if I did that, genius,” she snapped, sounding loud enough in my head that I had to remind myself no one else could hear her, “then they would have known that I’d gotten into their systems and I wouldn’t have been able to break you out. They’d have simply transferred you to some other SID black site and your friends would have gotten an ambush for their trouble.”

You have a fucking answer for everything, don’t you? I asked bitterly, face pressed into the rock dust. It took supreme conscious effort not to cough every time I sucked in a lungful of it.

“I wouldn’t be much of an artificial intelligence if I didn’t, would I?”

I understand now why Raph and Tommy are always arguing.

My leading hand met open space and I stopped my forward motion, looking down over the edge. Another tunnel identical to the first, and getting down past all the electrical conduits, wiper pipes, and air vents was going to be a hell of a lot harder than getting up. At least quietly. I swung a leg out and braced it against the other side, then walked myself down with my hands on one side of the wall and my feet on the other until I got to the first of the water pipes.

I grabbed the pipe and use it to push myself backward, to fall in just the right place. It broke. Cheap-assed SID contractors and their cut-rate materials. Water splashed over me as I landed, making it even colder inside the cave-like tunnels, but also reminding me how thirsty I was. I paused for a moment and caught some of the cascading water in my mouth, then my hands, slurping it up and then using it to wash off my hair and clothes. I had about a week’s growth of beard, which I hated, but it felt and smelled considerably better once I scrubbed it down.

“They’re going to hear the water splashing,” Katy warned, “if they don’t just see it leaking out of the wall.”

I know, I know.

I reached up and pushed the pipe back into place, then squeezed the connection closed. The metal was soft enough that I got it mostly sealed. A slow drip still plopped gradually out of it, but not enough to cause more than a small puddle in the short run. But God, did that water taste good. I felt reenergized. Now I just needed some food, but that could wait.

The next maintenance entrance was just ahead and I paused beside it, checking with Katy one last time. No one in sight. I emerged into a tunnel no less plain and lacking character than the detention area. It would suck to get stationed here. Closing the hatch behind me, I cat-footed down the corridor past a couple closed doors, though these were labeled.

A couple of them were bathrooms and, if I hadn’t been in such a hurry, I would have stopped and taken advantage of them. But right now, my only interest was that they were unoccupied. The Comm room was next, the door shut, and despite Katy’s assurances that it was empty, I took a steadying breath and burst inside, ready to fight.

Katy had been correct, of course, because if she hadn’t been, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far. Nothing in here, and I pushed the door closed behind me. At least the doors outside the detention level weren’t the annoying automatic kind that slid open and shut, because those would have given me a lot less warning if someone stumbled on me in the middle of the transmission.

There wasn’t much to the communications center, of course, since the Interface antenna was in orbit. Just a holographic camera for recording messages and a projector for receiving transmissions, a couple chairs for the techs… and a small refrigerator. My eyes went wide and I yanked it open, found someone’s lunch in a small, plastic container with a label on it that read Bob’s Lunch—anyone else touches this and I’ll gut them.

Deciding to take my chances with Bob, I ripped the container open and stuffed the submarine sandwich inside into my mouth, not even bothering to see what it was. Some sort of meat, some sort of vegetable, and who gave a damn? I hadn’t eaten in a week. Most of my attention was on the control board, which I was able to interpret without too much trouble or even guidance from Katy. I’d seen a lot of the things in my day.

The tricky part was setting the destination for the message. I couldn’t use Lyonesse, not when they might be able to track the transmission. Not directly. Luckily, not being idiots, we’d thought of a contingency like this and set up a relay station. Gomorrah, a shithole of a private space station where you could buy anything with enough cash, including a relay circuit that automatically deleted the destination once the transmission was sent.

I wouldn’t have remembered the address without Katy, but at least she didn’t crow about it and tell me how useless I was like Raph said Tommy did.

Hitting record, I talked fast.

“This is Brent. I’ve been taken by the SID and I’m being held at a black site on a moon of a gas giant in the A624LC system. I’ve escaped custody for the time being, but they’re going to find me eventually. They have two lighters in high orbit, so don’t come unless you come ready to fight. Not sure about numbers, but at least a couple platoons of Special Activities Unit troops, badasses and not afraid to die. If you don’t think you can manage the rescue without incurring losses that are too high, then just blow the shit out of this place.” For all that I wanted to hurry, I hesitated, licked my lips. “Tell Riva that I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the last thing I said to her and I wish I could do it over again.”

That was it. I hit send, and from that second, I was on the clock. One last bite of Bob’s lunch and I was up and headed for the door. But it opened inward before I reached it and an SID officer stepped through, this time not in armor and without a helmet. He wore a regular SID field uniform, all black because, of course, those assholes wore all black, and a surprised expression on his long, horsey face. It was quickly replaced by fury as he looked past me to the empty plastic container on the desk.

“Is that my fucking lunch?” he blurted, reaching for the service pistol holstered at his waist.

“Sorry, Bob,” I told him.

Not just for eating his lunch, but for the fact that I couldn’t leave him alive to tell everyone where I’d retreated to. I caught the gun halfway out of the holster and shoved it into his gut, pulling the trigger. Plasma antipersonnel rounds, I guessed, from the smell of burning flesh and the lack of an exit wound. Bob’s eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped backward, blood pouring from his mouth.

I stepped over him out the door, accidentally dragging my bare foot through his blood and grimacing at the feel on my bare flesh. I should have checked his boot size, but Katy had started a countdown in my head, letting me know how close the SID troops were to responding to the signal. Which was getting fucking old. I needed to settle down in one place and stop running long enough to try to take assessment of my situation or I’d wind up running headlong into a gunshot.

But not now. Footsteps were coming up the corridor, heavy, running, and probably shouting inside their helmets, though even my enhanced hearing wasn’t good enough to pick that up.

Back into the maintenance tunnel, and I’d barely pulled the hatch shut before the running troops reached the Comm center. I froze for a second, unwilling to move lest they heard me. No talking outside, which was strange as shit, like I was being hunted by robots… until another SID officer ran up, his steps lighter. Unarmored.

“You this guy’s supervisor?” One of the SAU troops had raised his faceplate to talk to whoever had come up.

“Yeah, he’s Bob,” the woman confirmed. “Good worker, but he was an asshole about people touching his food. Poor guy. He was supposed to go on duty in a few minutes, so I guess he must have figured the fire alarm was a drill or something.”

“He won’t be making that mistake again,” the SAU trooper assessed coldly. “You got the security footage for this station?”

“Yeah,” the woman confirmed, moving past him. Into the office, I thought. “Yecch,” she muttered, probably having to step over Bob’s body. “Should be right…” she paused. “What the hell? The fucking file’s corrupted! Whoever that guy is you brought in must have found the storage system and taken it down.”

Thanks, Katy, I whispered.

“Of course. They obviously know you were there and what you were doing, but they won’t know where you went.”

“He called for help,” the SAU officer declared, as if he’d heard what my AI had said. “Then took off. If he can fuck with the security monitors, we have no idea where he’s heading, but I’d still bet on the hangar. If he can steal a shuttle, he probably thinks he can hide out on one of the other moons until his friends get here.”

“Is there anything you want me to do?” Bob’s supervisor wondered.

“Yeah, clean this shit up. And find out where that message went.”

The soldiers left and the woman muttered curses to herself in their absence, probably wondering what the hell she was going to do with a dead body. I let out the breath I’d been holding, stuck my appropriated handgun in my coverall’s hip pocket, and looked up and down the tunnel.

Back the way I came?

“No need for that,” Katy told me. “Not unless you’d feel better closer to the detention area.”

No, I think I spent enough time there for a while. But I’m going to need food and water. I looked down at my blackened feet. And shoes.

“I wouldn’t recommend heading to the SID lunch room,” Katy said, “but if you keep going straight, I do have another idea…”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I tried to take a breath, couldn’t, reached out and steadied myself against the interior wall, eyes going wide.

“Oh dear,” Katy said, and I could almost see her hand going to her mouth. “I’m afraid this must be one of those methane gas pockets the signs were warning us about. Keep moving! You should clear it in another thirty meters!”

Fuck. Thanks for the warning.

And thanks to the R&D techs who’d put all this handy augmentation inside my once-vulnerable pink body, because not only did I have a small, emergency oxygen supply, more importantly, I had the neurosynth to tamp down my instinctive panic at not being able to breathe.

Beyond the whole business of the air being suddenly poisonous, methane wouldn’t have smelled too good and I was happy to not experience that close up. I wished I could run, but the maintenance tunnel wasn’t meant for people and the best I could do was a sort of sliding side-step, punctuated every few meters by a twisting contortionist’s dance around plumbing and ventilation equipment. Thirty meters took a solid minute to navigate, and once I got the all-clear from Katy to inhale again, it still smelled like the south end of a north-going horse. With diarrhea.

Christ, I could have held my breath longer, I told her.

“Sorry.” She stretched the word out with a hint of amusement, the same way Katy had when she didn’t mean it. “There’s an intersection coming up in twenty meters. Take a right.”

I idly wondered if I could have found my way in here without her. I doubted it. There were no signs, no schematics, no way of figuring out where the tunnels were going other than to pop my head out of a maintenance hatch and take the chance of someone blowing it off. I could have hidden, but I’d never have found Comms if Katy hadn’t guided me. Or wherever the hell we were going now. She still hadn’t told me and, when I’d asked, she’d said she didn’t want to ruin the surprise.

At least now I had the pistol. I lamented the rifle I’d been forced to leave behind, but going back for it would have meant retracing my steps and, eventually, Didio would figure out where I was. Probably the only thing that had kept her from being sure up till now was the fact that Katy was looping the security video, but the deputy director of the SID was too smart for that to fool her forever. She knew what I was. Her only mistake had been underestimating Katy, and she wouldn’t repeat it.

Finally, I reached yet another hatchway and paused beside it, waiting for Katy to tell me whether I should go through it.

“Wait…” she said. “Wait… now.”

No careful exit this time. If there were people in the hallway, I wanted to be clear of the tunnel and ready to deal with them as quickly as possible. I hit the door with my shoulder, slamming it open and hitting the floor in a roll. Coming up in a crouch, I raised the pistol in a high-ready and scanned back and forth. No one.

“I told you it was clear,” Katy chided. “Almost everyone has been called down to the hangar to help search for you. Don’t you trust me?”

I trust you to tell me what you can see through their security cameras. I don’t trust that, at some point, they won’t use that against you. Now, where am I going?

“Right, then the first door on the left.”

I was, I thought from the labels on the doors, in the crew quarters section. Everything was on the right, each room labeled Billet A1, Billet A2, etc.… but nothing on the left until the end of the corridor.

Storage Room A. Huh.

I tried the door and it clicked, unlocking as my hand touched it, a nice, dramatic touch by Katy.

“Far right corner,” she instructed as I shut the door behind me. “Lower shelves.”

The storage room was set up with row upon row of shelves, each holding a plastic cargo crate, and my heart beat faster when I noted that the ones in the far corner were labeled Emergency Rations. Tearing one open, I nearly laughed aloud at the stacks of self-heating packets. They sucked, tasted like cardboard, but right now they seemed like the finest steaks from the best restaurant on one of the nicer Orbitals. But how was I going to carry them?

“Two rows to the left, middle shelf,” Katy supplied.

Reluctantly leaving the food for a moment, I checked that shelf and found crates labeled Field Uniform-Male, Sizes Medium-Large.

“You have time,” she told me. “Change clothes. There should be boots in the next crate over.”

I always thought the SID field uniforms looked like something designed by a supervillain for his minions, but I’d never been happier to see them than right now. I practically ripped the filthy coveralls off and pulled on the fresh clothes, then found a pair of boots in my size. I took a moment to clean my feet off as much as possible with the dirty coveralls first, though I could still feel the grit between my toes and the boot.

“Take the coveralls with you,” Katy urged. “You can use them to carry the ration packs.”

Which I should have thought of, and my only excuse was that I was sleep-deprived, dehydrated, and starving. I jammed as many of the packs into the coveralls as I could, securing them with the arms and legs tied crosswise. I felt like a hobo wandering the outback on Aphrodite when I lifted the mass and threw it over my shoulder, but it was the easiest load I ever carried.

If you were real, I assured Katy, I’d kiss you.

“I am real, Brent,” she reminded me. “What I am not is human, but I appreciate the thought. Time to leave.”

Still no one outside, and I sighed in relief at the same time that I had the thought this was too easy. Didio was too smart to not understand what I was doing, to not figure out where I was hiding. It was only a matter of time.

I took a left out of the crew quarters and came two steps from dying.

Only the impatience of a jumpy SID officer saved me. Not SAU troopers—the handful of field officers waiting in ambush at the end of the hallway were all in duty fatigues and carrying handguns, which told me they’d been called up quickly because they were the closest personnel after I’d been detected. The burst of plasma hit less than ten centimeters from my head and I jerked backward like I’d been yanked by a parachute harness, the spray of molten metal and flaming wall material raining down around me.

Ignoring the tiny, burning stings of pain, I fired back with the accuracy and speed of the Machine. Four men and a woman, each with handguns but shooting wildly in the incoherence and confusion of their comrade’s early trigger to the ambush. A web of ionized metal dust passed over my head, but my shots were a little more accurate.

If they’d been armored SAU, I’d have been dead, nowhere to run to, their aim guided by their helmet targeting optics, even their helmets too heavily plated for the compact handgun I’d stolen to penetrate. But these poor bastards were just other functionaries like Bob, carrying a gun because it was part of the job requirements but trained as technicians and intelligence specialists. Didio had made a mistake sending them up against me, and they were the ones who had to pay for it.

Five of them, five headshots, and they collapsed in a row like marionettes with the strings cut. It might have been smart to go grab their guns, but I didn’t need Katy to tell me that things had already gone badly wrong.

“They’re spoofing the security cameras like I did,” she warned, but I’d already made a beeline for the maintenance hatch.

Inside, the darkness was only psychological comfort. If they were in control of the monitors, they knew where I’d gone and they’d come after me. Side-stepping as fast as I could, I dropped neither the pistol nor the food, despite the fact it might have been wiser to unburden myself. It wasn’t mental or moral weakness that spurred me to keep the rations, it was the nanite medical suite. Without food, it would start breaking down muscle next, and it only went downhill from there.

I need someplace safe, I told Katy. Someplace that’s not monitored.

“I know a place. Left at the next intersection, then I’m afraid you’ll have to go up and over again.”

Great. And I’d just gotten clean…

Are you sure they can’t find me here? I asked, glad I didn’t have to speak the words aloud because my mouth was stuffed full of soy product poorly disguised as BBQ chicken.

God knows this seemed like a good place to hide. It had certainly taken long enough to reach it, including nearly an hour crawling on my belly and dragging the meals behind me through another forty-centimeter-wide section of accidental attic. This was, as near as I could figure, a junction for the water distribution through the entire base, which separated out from the air and waste disposal lines to the recycling center nearly a kilometer out from the detention area where I’d started. At least it had a little room to move around, the entire area surrounding the recycling cylinder, along with a little ambient light from the control systems on the maintenance panels in its side.

I’d settled onto a curved pipe junction about fifteen centimeters around and started ripping open meal packets. I might get hunted down and killed, but at least I wouldn’t be hungry.

“Of course I can’t be sure of that,” Katy corrected me. “They could send an army of service robots in here with Gauss rifles strapped to the top and remotely activate them. This is the SID we’re talking about—they don’t care about little things like the law. But I can assure you that there are no security monitors this deep into the station. If they find you here, they’re going to have to do it the hard way.”

Which wasn’t to say they couldn’t do exactly that, but I had to rest. I looked down at the three other empty food packets and sighed, leaning back in contentment. I was, finally, full. And now I was thirsty again. The plastic case for the meal had proven to be a good makeshift cup, and I filled it using the bleeder valve for the main connection. The main outward connection. I wouldn’t have wanted to screw up and drink from the inflow, which would include wastewater from the showers and, among other things, urine. I’d love Katy forever for warning me about that.

Chugging the water down, I wished fervently for a cup of coffee. I hadn’t had coffee in over a week, hadn’t had good coffee in months. Hell, I might have said I hadn’t had my own choice of good coffee for a year. Since Janus’ shuttle blew up my house.

A jolt of pain went through me at the memory of it. I’d thought I was… well, not over it. I didn’t think I ever would be. But I thought I’d dealt with the loss, processed it. Not anymore. Not after what Didio had put me through. The experience had left me wrung out, even after the catharsis of my escape and the fights after, and I still couldn’t shake it.

“You need to stop, Brent,” Katy said.

Stop what? I demanded. I could have probably gotten away with asking her out loud here, since the place wasn’t monitored, but I resisted the urge, not wanting to get into the habit.

“Wallowing in your pain. It’s not good for you.”

How the fuck would you know? You’ve never felt pain in your entire existence.

“Bullshit.” For some reason, it shocked me to hear the AI curse, though it shouldn’t have, since she’d adapted the character of my late sister, and Katy had cursed like a sailor whenever she was away from Mom. “I’ve felt your pain, you moron! I’ve been here for the last fifteen years, watching you wade through every shitty thing that ever happened to you. I’ve listened to you bemoan the loss of your friends since Tamyang, and God knows I’ve felt every tortured gasp of agony since Miriam and Sammy died. And I’ve said nothing because I was you. Right up until this bitch Didio tried to rip me out of your head, I was you. But now that I’m not you, I can give you a unique perspective, since I’ve been into and out of your head. Stop fucking wallowing in your pain. It’s not going to give you closure, it’s not going to give you peace, and it’s definitely not going to give you absolution. All it’ll accomplish is preventing you from ever being happy again.” She sighed. “And believe me, Brent, if anyone in the entire galaxy wants you to be happy, it’s me.”

I sniffed a quiet laugh and finally spoke to her aloud.

“I thought you wanted to control me. That you were just an extension of Janus and everyone else who’s been trying to manipulate me.”

“I can’t promise they didn’t want to try to use me to control you,” Katy admitted, “but I wasn’t a separate entity from you until a few days ago. I couldn’t think apart from your thoughts, couldn’t feel aside from what you felt.”

I sighed and sat back, finishing the last gulp of water before I continued.

“Then maybe you can tell me if they’re right.”

Katy didn’t ask who I meant because she didn’t need to.

“No, Brent. They’re not right. You aren’t doing this because you’re selfish. You’re not just getting vengeance for your loss. You already did that when you took down Janus. You’re not vengeful, you’re avenging. You’re paying back the SID and the Consortium and everyone else involved in creating this phony war for people like you, who were forced to sacrifice so much to fight and win it. And if you don’t bring them down now, no one will ever be able to. They’ll use that genetic manipulation technology to live forever, getting more and more sociopathic with every iteration, just like the duplicates of the Archangels.”

I nodded, then rubbed at my eyes. I’d gone beyond what the stimulants could accomplish, deep into exhaustion, mental and physical. Giving up, I slid down off the pipe and onto the ground, crushing the old coveralls into a pillow and laying my head onto it.

“I gotta get some sleep,” I told Katy, setting the pistol down just beyond my fingers. “Can’t keep my eyes open anymore.”

“Go ahead.” I couldn’t see her smile, but I heard it. “I’ll take the first watch.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Home. I was home again. Sitting on the couch, looking out the windows at the storm, a dark wedge against the yellow sky. Patches whined and pushed his head under my hand, scared of the wind and maybe feeling the abrupt change in the barometric pressure.

“Katy!” I called into the kitchen. “You ready yet? We gotta get going unless you want to swim into the damned canyon!”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she sighed, emerging with a smear of gravy still on her chin, “I didn’t get to eat any breakfast… you’d think my little brother would at least let me have my lunch in peace.”

Chuckling, I pulled my sleeve up over my hand and wiped the gravy away.

“I’ll let you eat dinner in peace, I promise, but let’s get going. We’re already gonna get soaked riding the ATVs. I wish Dad hadn’t taken the pickup to the North Fields.”

“Oh, don’t whine,” she said, grabbing our jackets off the coat rack just inside the door and tossing the longer of the two dusters over to me. “You’re not made of wax, you won’t melt.”

“Oh, I’m the whiner now,” I said, picking up my hat off the end table of the couch and settling it on. “I seem to recall not one minute ago, someone complaining about cutting their lunch short. I wonder who that might have been?”

“It’s such a shame Mom and Dad didn’t have another kid after you,” Katy sighed, holding the door open for me while I slipped into my duster. “Then we could have a spare, since you so obviously aren’t going to make the cut.”

“Mom and Dad quit when they got it right.” The ATVs were parked at the foot of the stairs to the porch and I vaulted the handrails to get there quicker, jumping on the one that had the better suspension.

“Oh, fuck you, little brother!” Katy said, glaring at me. “You know that piece of shit hurts my ass when I ride it!”

“Hey, I don’t choose your boyfriends for you,” I said, starting up the machine and pulling it away from the stairs. “But you could get the piece of shit to come repair your ATV.”

Katy screeched at me and laughed as I gunned the motors, ripping off down the dirt road with an angry sister in hot pursuit. She tried to catch up with me, probably wanted to run me off the road, but I had the nicer of the two vehicles and she just couldn’t make up the distance I had on her. By the time I slowed down, we’d almost made it to the canyons, and once she caught up and pulled beside me, both her attention and mine were on other things.

“Oh, those damned idiot horses,” she spat, searching the fields near the river where the herd should have been. “They went into the canyon again.”

“They get scared by the high winds,” I said, shrugging. “Just like Patches. The canyons are a wind break.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” she sneered. “How about you come up with an easy way to go get them, since it’s way too muddy to get the ATVs down the canyon.”

“Ain’t no easy way,” I told her, shrugging. “Just gotta… hoof it.”

Katy groaned as if in physical pain.

“Oh, it kills me to think we share the same DNA.” She sighed, swinging a leg over the saddle of the ATV. “All right, one of us has to go in on foot while the other waits out here and corrals them once they’re out. Rock-paper-scissors for who gets to wait.”

She had her fist drawn back already and I rolled my eyes, very nearly just saying I’d go, but she’d feel better about it if she won, so I went ahead and shook my fist twice before going with rock.

“Dammit!” she snapped, her scissors transforming into a single-finger salute. “Fine, I’ll go.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, getting off the four-wheeler. “I can go get them.”

“No, I lost fair and square,” she insisted, already trudging toward the canyon.

“Be careful,” I told her. “River’s already up like twenty or thirty centimeters over usual.”

My commlink beeped at me as she disappeared around the bend into the canyon, hopping over puddles and swearing when her boots sank into the mud.

“Yeah?” I asked, pushing the earbud into place.

“That’s how you answer your mother?” Mom replied with a question. “Yeah?”

“Sorry, Mom,” I said. “I’m out at the canyon with Katy, rounding up the herd. Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Your father drove out to the North Fields earlier and he’s not picking up.”

“He probably has his hands full with the horses,” I told her. “Where are you at?”

“On my way back from town. I should be home in a few minutes. I’m just worried about him. That’s an awful lot of acreage to cover on his own.”

“Dad’ll be okay,” I insisted. “But if you’re worried, launch one of the drones and set it to find him. If you do, synch the feed with my commlink so I can see if he needs any help.”

“Good idea, son. I’ll let you know.”

The roar of the wind drowned out anything else she might have said, and I looked up, squinting against what I expected to be a hail of sand and dirt… and not getting it. The wind wasn’t that bad, hadn’t picked up. So where the hell was the roar coming from?

The canyon. A wall of water over a meter higher than the riverbank, rushing through the narrow walls before it gushed out onto the fields at the opening of the canyon, turning lush grass into a pond in seconds. Coming straight for me, but the water lapping at my boots didn’t even enter my thoughts. I could only think one thing—Katy. She was in there.

Jumping on the ATV, I gunned the motors and took it wheel-deep into the water, then jumped off and grabbed the winch cable hook, dragging it behind me. I hadn’t seen her pass by yet. Maybe she was still hanging on somewhere…

No. There. A hand coming out of the water, grabbing at the side of a floating log…

I raced toward her, wrapping the cable around my arm, trying to get there before the water carried her past me. A downed tree spun out of the maelstrom and into the shallower flood as if it had done what she couldn’t, made it free of the current… and slammed into me at mid-thigh. Pain erupted in my leg and I went down, splashing into meter-high water, would have been washed into the river if not for the cable. It wrenched at my arm so hard it almost pulled my shoulder out of its socket, and when my mouth went open in an involuntary gasp at the intense pain, I swallowed a lungful of water, began coughing uncontrollably.

I might have blacked out for a second, but the coughing roused me and I grabbed at the cable with my good arm, pulled myself up to my feet… and nearly collapsed again. My leg probably wasn’t broken, but it had been a close thing. Falling against the cowling of my ATV, I sat there coughing up muddy water, trying to catch my breath, then coughing again. Katy…

By the time my eyes cleared, Katy was gone.

The river was gone. The sun was gone. Aphrodite was gone.

I was back in the pump station on the black site moon and I sat up, coughing reflexively.

“Shit,” I murmured. “Katy, was that… was that real? Is that what actually happened?”

“I don’t know, Brent,” she replied sadly. “Neither do you. Those memories are too hazy to be sure what’s real and what you invented over the years. I do know you, though… and I think what happened in that dream is a lot more the you I know than the version Valentine Didio showed you. You loved your family then, just as you did on Sylvanus. And it wasn’t fair that you lost them. Either of them.”

“Thanks, Katy.” I hesitated, then laughed at my own hesitation. She already knew what I was going to say. “I gotta admit, it hasn’t been as bad having you as a separate personality living in my head as I thought it would be.”

“Brent…”

“No, let me finish,” I insisted. “You might already know this, but it’s important for me to say it. I haven’t had a lot of friends in my life, not ones I could count on, but you’ve taken good care of me the last few days and…”

“Brent, shut up,” she snapped urgently. “I’ve lost all input from the security monitors in the maintenance tunnels. They’re coming after you.”

“Oh.” I checked the load on the pistol. Twenty rounds left, and none of them would be useful against armored troopers. My best bet, as one of my old trainers used to say, would be to lube it up so it wouldn’t hurt as bad when someone jammed it up my ass. “You think they know where I am?”

“No. But they know where you could be, and they’ll get to this place eventually.”

“Then let’s make sure,” I said, coming to my feet, “that they don’t waste my time. Or theirs.”

The pistol wouldn’t do much against the SAU armor, but the control panels of the recycling unit weren’t armored at all. I picked a vulnerable spot and jammed down the trigger. The chamber lit up with the fireworks show of ionized metal dust turned to plasma and the sparks from the shattered controls, and something inside the recycler died with a metallic clunk. The gun was empty and I had no reloads. It wouldn’t make much of a club either, so I tossed it aside.

“I’m not sure this is the smartest course of action,” Katy opined.

“I’m sure it’s not,” I admitted. “But I’m probably better off facing them now, when I’ve eaten and drank and slept, than waiting another twenty or thirty hours. If I’m going to die, I’d rather die with a full stomach.”

“Could I convince you to go with any option that doesn’t include dying?”

I’m always open to suggestion, I told her, deciding it was a good time to get back into the habit of keeping my mouth shut before the enemy got close enough to hear me. But we’re running out of places to hide.

“Then don’t hide. Hunt them. This is the perfect place for it. Their armor’s a liability in here, and they won’t be able to use rifles.”

If I do that, I pointed out, it’s just going to make Didio more desperate.

“Yes, and what do desperate people do, Brent?”

I grinned at the thought.

They make mistakes.

I wish I could have heard them talking.

If I’d heard the conversations they were having inside their soundproof helmets, I might have gotten a sense of how nervous they were, how coming into these tunnels frightened them. How they blamed their boss for putting them in this position.

Not that it would have made my own position any more comfortable, not squeezed into a thirty-eight-centimeter gap (I’d had plenty of time to measure it by now) between the stone ceiling above me and the roof of the nearest corridor. Not while a whole squad of Special Activities Unit troops slid past below me in the maintenance tunnel.

I couldn’t see them, couldn’t risk sticking my head out from cover, but I could hear their shoes scraping below, and Katy painted me a picture of their location using sonic analysis. Eight of them in the squad, and the last one would be passing by… now.

Grabbing the edge, I pulled myself to the side and dropped behind him. The fall took a fraction of a second, but I could have sworn it lasted an eternity, during which any one of them could have turned back and seen me, shot me on the way down. None of that happened of course, and even the SAU trooper I landed behind didn’t notice me until he heard the thump of my boots on the floor behind him.

A little too late. The vulnerable spots stood out like the glowing halos of the angels in a medieval painting, and I struck them so quickly, I would have been willing to wager the man inside the armor didn’t even have time to shout a warning. Back of the knee… a heel strike brought the trooper down and his arm up as he tried to swing around the heavy Gauss pistol, 5x50mm like the rifles but shooting the slug out at a much lower speed. Still enough to penetrate light armor at short range though.

I caught his arm and stabbed a spear-hand up into the flexible joint beneath, my fingers stiffened into a single, bladed weapon by the kinetex fibers. That was enough to stun him, to loosen his hold on the gun, and I plucked it out of the air before it hit the ground.

I didn’t kill him with it, not when I had all those other SAU troopers lined up ahead of me like a shooting gallery. Left arm around his throat, right under his immobilized arm, holding the gun. The next guy in line had just started to turn, only vaguely aware there was a problem, when I pulled the trigger. Just a short burst, because I had a lot of targets and not a lot of ammo, but he was less than three meters ahead of me and three rounds at even two thousand meters per second were enough to penetrate the armor over the back of his neck and spend themselves in the spine beneath it.

I wondered if he screamed under that helmet, if he had the time to realize that he was dying before he collapsed ,or if the rounds had hit close enough to the brain stem to put him out like switching off a light. Either way, no one was going to miss what had happened this time, not after the thundercrack of the tungsten darts going hypersonic in the narrow hallway, and that included the one I was using for cover. The blow to the nerve cluster under his arm had only stunned him for a moment, and that moment was gone. He thrashed and kicked and probably shouted warnings, but the troops ahead of him had already seen their comrade go down and weren’t interested in waiting around to share his fate.

They were professionals, not the technicians and analysts who’d fallen so easily while trying to ambush me the day before, but they were also crammed into a narrow tunnel where they couldn’t run, couldn’t maneuver, and couldn’t find cover. They had one alternative to dying and they took it, opening fire blindly without a single thought to the life of the one I held as a shield.

Thankfully, the Machine and I had both figured that was the likely outcome and I’d already let loose of the trooper, throwing myself prone and leaving him to take the hail of tungsten darts from his supposed friends. A few of the rounds made it through the backside of the luckless hostage’s armor, zipping over my head, and once he fell they’d see me and adjust fire, but I wasn’t planning on just lying there and taking it.

I’d jammed the trigger down the second I’d pulled away from the captive trooper, not interested in conserving ammo anymore, hosing the round through the closest of the SAU soldiers, through her and into the next of them, which only added to their panic. Half of them were down, their bodies clogging the way back, keeping the others from reaching me, and the other half weren’t at all interested in giving their lives in the line of duty inside the squalid tunnel.

They ran.

Or they tried to. There was no running in the narrow corridor, only an awkward, sidestepping hop, but the survivors tried to buy time by emptying their magazines behind them. That only worked out for the first two in line, because there wasn’t any way for the last couple to avoid the gunfire from the ones in front. I tried to imagine them yelling curses at their brothers or sisters in arms, wounded by that worst of all enemies, blue-on-blue fire.

Not dead, because even the heaviest pistols couldn’t chop an armored man to pieces the way an assault gun could, but not paying enough attention to me. Which amounted to the same thing in the end. A short burst through their faceplates before my weapon locked open, and then I moved, staying low, going forward faster than the others fell, counting on them to shield me as I picked up the weapon of the next one in line.

He hadn’t had a chance to fire, which meant his magazine was full, and the weight of it was comforting in my hand as I danced between bodies. Two of them left alive, and they’d spent their loads, leaving them to attempt a reload as they retreated. I executed them. It was combat, sure, but they might as well have been down on their knees with a blindfold. Three rounds each through the weak spots at the throat, and they didn’t have to wait to bleed out, not with their cervical spines shattered.

Both of them toppled sideways and I was on them before they hit the ground, stripping their gunbelts for spare magazines. And one other thing. I ripped the helmet off the squad leader, leaving his unseeing eyes bare to the universe. He was younger than I’d imagined he’d be, not a vet of the Southwind War, which might have explained how easily he’d panicked.

I didn’t want the helmet, just the commlink inside it, and once I’d pulled that out of its moorings, I tossed the rest away to clatter on the floor and put the earpiece in place. Baring my teeth in a feral grin, I touched the button on the side.

“Didio, can you hear me?” I hissed into the mic. “You know who this is, don’t you?” It felt wrong just standing there, making myself a big-ass target, but I didn’t want to start evading while she could still trace me. That would give her a direction to work with.

“I know you called your friends, Parthet,” she said, her voice admirably steady and unaffected, considering. “Do you really think you can hold out until they get here? You’re a dangerous man, but you’re only one dangerous man. There are still dozens of us here, and we’ll hunt you down in hours.”

“Maybe there are,” I admitted, “but you can’t send all those dozens at me at the same time. You’ve got eight less now than you did a few minutes ago, and I barely broke a sweat. For the deputy director of the SID, you sure don’t seem to have an appreciation for exactly what the Archangels are.”

“Can Archangels survive more than a few minutes without oxygen?” she shot back, and for the first time I was sure I heard desperation and fury in her tone. “We have ships. We have suits. Maybe I’ll have every one of my people suit up and then flush this entire base with the outside atmosphere. Methane. Can you breathe methane, Archangel?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” I told her, then dropped the commlink to the floor and ground it under my heel.

Katy, I said, can I reach the atmospheric processing unit from these tunnels?

“Oh,” she scoffed, “now you ask…”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I had no idea if Didio’s threat was serious or not, but I couldn’t take the risk because it wasn’t a bad idea. Sure, she would probably rather have taken me alive so they could keep interrogating me, but at some point the risks outweighed the rewards. If she was serious, it would take a minimum of an hour for her to recall all her people to the hangar bay and get them all either in their shuttles or into pressure suits.

If her SAU troops had been wearing heavier armor, I’d have even less time, but the lighter suits they’d used so far didn’t have an on-board air supply. At least that was a consolation—she’d have to pull the SAU back along with everyone else, which meant I’d be able to move faster, not worried about the hunter squads coming after me.

At least that was what I told myself as I crept along the open corridor of the utility and maintenance section of the base. There had not been, as it turned out, any direct route from the tunnels on the other side of the installation to the atmosphere exchange. Not unless I broke into the ventilation ducts and then squeezed myself into a hole only twenty centimeters across. I thought about the long, painful crawls on the overhang that was nearly twice as wide and decided I’d rather die than try that.

At least I still had the gun. I wished it was my Medusa. I still missed that thing, and even worse than I resented being captured and brainwashed, I was really pissed off that they’d made me leave the Medusa in a puddle of floodwater on Hephaestus. Maybe I could call the Patrol again and see if I could steal another one. I hadn’t even seen a Patrol officer in a year though. We hadn’t been spending much time in places where the Patrol would be comfortable operating.

Scanning up and down the main hallway, I hoped Katy was right about her ability to scramble the security monitors here. Even if she wasn’t, it would still take time Didio didn’t have to get her people down here from the hangar bay. I ducked into the side corridor and found the maintenance hatch Katy had promised me was there. Through here, then west across the other radial extension of the base, then down a vertical tunnel into the atmosphere exchange. Easy-peasy.

Once I was there, I could override the central controls manually and make sure the recycler kept running. Even if they shut down the circuits by hand everywhere else, I’d still have air down in the exchange chamber because I wouldn’t be counting on the ventilation ducts. Of course, that meant she could come after me there, but it was also a very defensible position—one way in and out, down a narrow ladder. They could drop explosives to try to flush me out, but they’d be destroying the atmospheric systems for the entire base to do it.

Maybe Didio was willing to do that, I wasn’t sure, but it was either this or head for the hangar bay and take on all her troops in the open.

Tell me what you’re seeing, I asked Katy as I eeled through the hatch and closed it behind me.

The tunnels on this side of the outpost weren’t noticeably different from the ones on the other side, except there were more warning signs on the wall. Something about methane leaks from the outside atmosphere working their way through the seals and how no open flames should be allowed near this section. I’d do my best.

“Nothing so far,” Kay reported. “There’s a lot of activity at the hangar bay, SID personnel boarding shuttles, SAU soldiers getting into vacuum armor. I haven’t found Didio yet though. She could already be on board one of the shuttles. I can’t penetrate their systems without a physical connection.”

I’ll take what I can get. As long as they aren’t pumping in the methane yet.

I was wrong, I discovered after taking the next turn into the primary maintenance tunnel. These passages were wider than the other side, maybe to handle the larger air vents. I suppose it made sense that the ducts had to be bigger closer to the pumps, though I didn’t want to distract myself with the physics and chemistry of it. The only thing I cared about was that I could actually walk in the tunnel instead of a sideways shuffle. One foot directly in front of the other, but still walking.

At this pace, given the distance Katy had told me from the hatch to the recycler, I estimated it at about ten minutes. Plenty of time. Even if Didio started pumping out the oxygen and letting in the methane right now, I was deep enough in that it would take a few minutes, and I could hold my breath until I got the recycler valves open. No problem.

A distant scraping stopped me in my tracks. Behind me. Someone inside the tunnel.

Katy?

“Nothing on the cameras. Which means Didio is looping them.” Her voice became urgent, almost desperate, and I couldn’t decide if I liked the honest emotion more than the unfeeling certainty of when she’d been a still, small whisper in my inner ear. “This is a trap, Brent. She knew you’d go here when she made the threat. She sent troops in after you.”

Yeah, I figured. I jogged forward again, faster than before. I’m only human without you, but I do have a little military experience.

“Then why are you still going there?” Katy demanded, almost a shriek. “Did you not hear the part where this is a trap?”

I heard. But going back is even more of a trap. That’s where they’re coming in right now. I head back that way and I’m stuck in a shooting gallery as the target. I go up and over, which I knew was going to be her next suggestion, then I leave my gun and spare ammo behind and have no idea where I go next. And at best, I buy myself an hour or so before Didio actually empties the air. I head forward, that’s going to be the place they have the least amount of forces, because there’s only one way in. If they wanted me dead, they’d have gone through with their plan, which means Didio still wants to take me in alive. That means of all the shitty odds, going forward has the least shitty.

“But they’re still shitty, Brent.” Not so shrill and desperate now. More resigned. “If you go up and over, there’s a chance she won’t carry out her threat. Maybe she has orders to wring the truth out of you and can’t just kill you.”

Maybe. But I never knew a soldier who won a battle counting on the good intentions of the enemy.

The scraping of boots on the floor had fallen farther behind me, but the auditory analysis indicated at least six or seven enemy. It was wide enough in here for them to be carrying carbines, though it wasn’t as if I was wearing any armor for them to worry about. I had to keep the curve of the passage between us, or they could just spray ahead of them with tungsten slugs and pin me down. Even if Katy was right and Didio did have order to bring me in alive or at least not to let me die until she’d squeezed every last drop of intelligence from my broken brain, she might count on my Archangel augmentation to keep me alive long enough to pop into a biomodule. She’d probably be right, unfortunately.

Ten minutes crawled by like ten hours, but there, finally, was the access shaft. I stopped for a heartbeat just in front of it. About a meter across and, according to Katy, nearly ten meters down until it came out in the recycling chamber. A concrete-lined hole in the ground with a metal ladder on one side. No lighting inside the shaft, but enough filtered up from the atmosphere exchanger that a faint shadow flickered within the hole. Someone moving.

They’d be waiting down there, most likely. Sonic cannons? No. Not in quarters this close. Too likely to take out their own people before they disabled me. Plus, it would have been awkward as hell getting them down here and they hadn’t had that much time. They were either going to shoot me and hope it wasn’t immediately fatal or… static charge stunners.

And all those possibilities had one fatal flaw. Humans. If it had been an automated security system like in the cell, I wouldn’t have had a chance, but if there were human fingers on the triggers, they’d be constrained by their reflexes. And mine were better.

Clutching the heavy pistol to my chest, I jumped.

The fall was by no means the longest I’d ever taken, and experience told me it was going to hurt… but this moon was only three-quarters standard gravity, and my bones didn’t break easily. The absence of the fear of serious injury was half the battle. Maybe. Nearly two seconds of free fall in the darkened, featureless shaft still twisted my guts into a pretzel, time stretching out for the balance of the jump before snapping back like a rubber band on contact.

The impact drove my knees into my chest and squeezed the air out of me, stars exploding in my eyes. Luckily, I didn’t have to rely on them and I didn’t need to breathe. Like a spring, my legs rebounded and I dove to the side just ahead of a hail of tungsten slugs. So much for stunners—Didio wasn’t taking any chances.

The scene unfolded like one of those books Mom used to read to me as a child, holographic images projected above the pages, laying out the story as she told it. The atmospheric exchanger was a giant cylinder ten meters across, taking up more than half the chamber, chugging with the belabored breath of an overladen beast of burden, the small display screens arrayed around the girth of the thing providing the only light here in the depths of the station.

Only four of the SAU troopers had managed to find their way down ahead of me, but that had probably been as many as they could squeeze in here without shooting each other along with me. They hadn’t had that much time to set up and hadn’t tried for anything fancy, just a semicircle facing the exit of the shaft. And it had come too damned close to working.

I’d been hit. It didn’t hurt yet and probably wouldn’t until Katy decided I had time to handle it, but I’d taken a tungsten dart high on the right side, and it had sliced right through a rib before passing through and through. Blood soaked my shirt, and the only reason my entire rib cage hadn’t shattered with the impact was the fact that my bones were infused with kinetex, holding them together and fusing back into shape after the passage of the dart. The layer of the same stuff under my skin sealed quickly as well, which meant I wouldn’t have to worry about bleeding out before the nanites started their repairs… unless I wound up with a shitload of other holes alongside that one.

Shoot, move, and communicate, that’s what I’d been taught from Boot Camp right on through the Archangels, and if communicating wasn’t important in this situation, well, the first two still applied. The heavy pistol had a much larger magazine than the compact handgun I’d stolen last time and I didn’t try for controlled bursts, just jammed down the trigger and counted on the Machine to aim. I was confident I hit at least one of them with my initial burst, but I couldn’t stay in one place long enough to check, not with the maelstrom of hypersonic metal still spraying in my general direction.

There was nowhere to run that didn’t take me right into their fire other than up, so that was the route I took, leaping up atop the three-meter-tall cylinder, feet spread wide to maintain a purchase on the steep slope of the thing. They didn’t stop firing, despite the fact that this machine was the only thing providing breathable air on this station, though I suppose expecting them to think that far ahead in the middle of a gunfight was overly optimistic. But that also meant I couldn’t afford to stop moving.

The ceiling of the chamber was only a couple meters above my position on top of the air exchanger, and before I’d even considered the maneuver, the Machine had carried it out. It might or might not have been possible if the gravity hadn’t been lighter than normal, but I still would have tried it anyway. I leapt upward, tucked my head in, and flipped forward, the soles of my boots smacking on the polished stone ceiling as I pushed off from it, diving into the middle of the armored troopers.

I’d already been wrong about them not being willing to shoot the air exchanger and after what had happened earlier, I certainly didn’t want to bet they’d be unwilling to shoot each other to get to me, so I didn’t give them the chance. I knew I’d hit one of the four with my first fusillade but he hadn’t gone down, so this time I resorted to point-blank shots through the visor.

Two of them went down in backsplashes of arterial red and bits of skull before the other two could bring their carbines around, but the last two were too close even for a headshot. Grabbing one of their weapons by the cooling jacket, ignoring the searing pain from the overheated metal, I slammed a boot into the other’s chest and sent him smashing into the rear wall of the chamber. He bounced off the concrete and sprawled face-first, but by then I’d yanked the rifle out of the last man’s hands as I spun into a back kick.

The armor cushioned it enough that it didn’t quite break his spine, but he wasn’t going to be hopping up for another round. Two more long bursts from the pistol and neither of them would ever get up again. Swapping out the spent magazine of the heavy pistol with rote motions, I holstered it and knelt down beside one of the bodies, patting the man’s tactical rig for a spare drum to reload the rifle.

There were still a half a dozen or more SAU soldiers coming down that tunnel, and once they didn’t hear confirmation from their buddies here in the chamber that they’d taken me out, they were likely to start lobbing grenades. I had to get up there, take them on in the tunnels head-to-head.

“You can’t make it past them,” Katy reminded me. “You said so yourself.”

What other choice do I have? Is there another way out of this room that you didn’t tell me about?

Before she could answer, my gaze landed on the air ducts. I’d already noticed they were larger here than the ones on the other side of the base, but it hadn’t really registered how large. Forty centimeters high, sixty wide. Just big enough… but oh, that was going to suck so bad.

“You aren’t serious, are you?” Katy wondered. “If you get stuck in there…”

If I get stuck in there, I told her, then you and I are going to have plenty of time for a nice long talk.

I paused in mid-step, bent back down to yank off one of the shattered helmets from the shattered face of an SAU trooper. The ruins of his head might have made me physically ill, once upon a time, but now I barely noticed it. The commlink inside the helmet was still intact, and I ignored the blood and bits of brain on the device, slipping it into place over my ear.

Can you spoof the location of this thing if I call Didio on it?

“Spoof it how?”

So that she thinks I’m calling from down here, so she doesn’t see the signal moving.

“Yeah, I can link it to one of the other helmets. Grab one and hold it up to the one in your ear.”

This was taking longer than I’d hoped, but I did as she said, this time getting the red goo all over my hands. It dripped off my fingers as I touched the commlink up to the one I already wore.

“Now, toss it up on top of the atmosphere exchanger, where no one will find it.”

I did, but by then, I heard the tromp of footsteps up above. They were going to come down here and find out what I was doing, which would spoil the whole surprise.

Oh, damn. Hold on.

If dropping down had been easy, jumping up was not so much. Even with the lower gravity, I didn’t quite make it to the top on a standing jump, had to grab the ladder a few rungs down and pull myself the rest of the way. The squad coming after me hadn’t made it to the last curve yet, which was what I’d been hoping for. Propping myself against a lower rung of the ladder, I aimed the rifle down the tunnel and waited.

There was the chance, I admitted, that if I’d let them get closer, I might have been able to pick off more of my pursuers, but there was also the chance that I’d only be opening myself up to more return fire, and after being shot once already, I was kind of over it. The second an armored figure appeared around the bend in the corridor, I opened up on them.

The first few rounds did the trick, slicing through their chest plate and the heart beneath it, but this wasn’t an assassination, it was a diversion, so I kept the trigger pressed down. Their tactical separation was good, three meters between each of them, which gave the second SAU trooper in line time to push back around the corner, though I think I winged him in the leg from his limping last step before he went out of sight.

I didn’t stop there, sending a storm of hypersonic darts to chase him, chewing up the opposite wall, punching a hole right through to the outer corridor. Not a big one, but enough for light to shine through in narrow, yellow rays from the fixtures outside. The weapon clicked empty, leaving swirls of dust behind where it had laid ruin to the walls and the ceiling, leaving behind a single victim.

“Stay back, motherfuckers!” I bellowed after them. “The next one who sticks his head around the corner gets it blown off!”

A bluff, but one I hoped like hell they believed. I dropped back down and tossed the rifle away. I wouldn’t be taking it with me. The air duct was two meters off the floor, no effort at all to jump in this gravity, even without the augments. Those did help me rip open the vent to access it. I pulled myself inside, legs first, and wedged the cover back into place.

In the darkness of the air duct, even my enhanced optics saw nothing.

This is stupid.

“Well, that’s what I said,” Katy agreed.

Ignoring her and my own doubts, I crawled forward.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Hey Didio, you hear me?”

I worried about the echo. If she noticed it, she might twig to the fact that I wasn’t still sitting at the top of the shaft, waiting to take potshots at her goon squad.

“I’ll take care of it,” Katy assured me and I nodded, as if she needed the visual confirmation of my trust.

“Didio, this is Parthet. Are you listening?”

“You’re quite the talkative one, Parthet,” she finally replied. I wondered if the hesitation had been from her instructing her techs to trace where the call was coming from. “Did you want to surrender?”

“I wanted to compliment you,” I told her. It was hard not to grunt and groan, scooting through the ductwork with elbows and toes. Hell, the only reason I wasn’t a gibbering, claustrophobic mess was the mild sedative Katy had given me from the pharmacy organ that carried a supply of handy drugs just inside my rib cage. Good thing the rifle slug I’d taken had penetrated it. “That was a masterfully set ambush. Some real mind-fuckery there, though I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything less from the deputy director of the SID.”

“How could I afford anything less when it comes to you, Parthet?” she asked, just as casual. Trying to keep me talking, keep the commlink active until they could trace it. “As you said, I know who you are… what you are. There’s no dealing fairly with you.”

“You’re so damned smart,” I said, not bothering to disguise my contempt, “except when it comes to how badly you’re being used. You think that stability is better than war, that the suffering of the few is better than the suffering of the many. It’s very utilitarian of you, but I get my philosophy from different places.”

“And where’s that?” she asked. A little irritation crept into her voice, maybe because her techs were telling her that I wasn’t moving but she was suspicious that I was.

“John Stuart Mill. Old Earth, nearly a thousand years ago. He had other ideas about war. War, he said, is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

She barked a laugh.

“That’s very noble-sounding, Captain Parthet, and what I’d expect from you, given that you had and have nothing to lose. People who have nothing to lose are always willing to lose it. If you were to talk to someone who lost everything in the war, you might have a different outlook on starting another.”

“My wife lost everything in the war,” I snapped back at her. “That’s why she was willing to follow a burned-out vet with post-traumatic stress to a planet with no one else on it. And you and your murderous bosses still wouldn’t leave her alone. Tell me something, Valentine. If they’ll kill an innocent woman and child just because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, what do you think they’ll do to someone in your position, someone they don’t even trust enough to tell her the truth? You know what’s going to happen to you? You’re gonna ask the wrong person the wrong question one of these days, and then you’ll just fucking disappear. No one will question where you’ve gone, because no one will want to have the same thing happen to them.”

Where the hell is she?

“They’re trying to hide her location,” Katy said, frustration plain in her tone. “I think she suspects what we’re doing. But I’ve been narrowing it down. Not the hangar bay. I think she’s in the central control chamber. Probably not alone.”

Tell me how to get there. And I hope to God these vents don’t get any narrower.

“You think they’ll kill me?” Didio asked, unaware of either my private conversation or my tortuous journey through the vents. She laughed. “And you believe this is some sort of threat that will force me to question my loyalty? I pledged my life to the service of the Coalition many years ago, Captain Parthet. As I believe you did. One of us hasn’t forgotten that vow. I don’t recall anything in it that gave me an out if I didn’t agree with the decisions of the Parliament.”

“You think the Parliament has anything to do with this? You think anyone voted for what’s been happening?”

“You’re going to come to a junction in thirty meters,” Katy informed me. “Turn right…”

Turn? How the fuck do you expect me to turn in here?

“This wasn’t my idea.”

“We’re both in the military,” Didio reminded me, and I was getting confused arguing with two different women. “I don’t recall anyone in the military getting a vote for what orders they carry out.”

“No, Valentine,” I corrected her. “Neither of us is in the military. I got out ten years ago and you were never in. The SID is a civilian agency.”

Oh, shit. The junction. How the hell was I going to make that turn? There was barely enough room in the duct for me to move at all, and this was a ninety-degree right-hand turn.

“Technically,” she agreed. “Neither of us is in the military… and neither of us is in the atmosphere recycling center either. My people are in that room, Brent. You’re not. Where are you?”

“Somewhere you won’t find me,” I said, then let out a breath, making myself as skinny as possible as I folded around the turn.

The damned gunbelt caught. I didn’t curse out loud, but it was a near thing. I had to scoot back to get enough room to pull one arm down and cut loose the buckle. God was trying to teach me some kind of lesson about stealing, I think, because I couldn’t seem to hold onto any of the weapons I’d taken off dead SID officers.

Back into the turn and I kept talking, not wanting to make Didio suspicious.

“You made a mistake, Valentine,” I told her. “You didn’t follow through with your threat. Once you didn’t try to cut off the air, I knew you weren’t going to do it. Now I can just hole up somewhere and wait.”

“Now it’s you who’ve made the mistake. You assume I won’t follow through because I sent troops to intercept you at the recycler, but that’s the only place you could hide from me. Now that I know you’re not there, I can evacuate the base.”

Which was unfortunately plausible.

Katy?

“The central control room for sure. Cocky bitch.”

Meow.

“Not going to get in trouble for killing me before you get any usable intelligence?” I asked Didio, just as casual as she’d been, not giving any sign that her imprecations had gotten to me. “I mean, after all, you spent a lot of lives to get me, and a lot more to keep me. If you go back empty-handed, I bet that’s just gonna be another vote among your superiors—whoever they might be—to have you eliminated.”

“I’ll have killed the leader of the rebels,” she said, but her bravado was unconvincing. “Brought a mass-murderer to justice.”

“Technically, I’m a spree killer. Every one of the cheap copy Archangels I killed, including Janus, was either by hand or with a gun. Every one of them had the chance to live. All they had to do was stop trying to kill me first. But your bosses already know that. They know what a sucker you are. Phil Montanelli’s still the director, isn’t he? Funny how he’s kept that job for the last twenty, twenty-five years now while everyone else has come and gone. Almost like he has friends in high places. Maybe the Consortium.”

“They’ll appreciate my loyalty.” But she didn’t sound convinced.

“Fifty meters,” Katy said. “You need to stop talking or she’ll hear you. Subvocalize. I’ll relay it with a simulation of your voice.”

“They pay people for loyalty,” I told her. “They give them power and corrupt them with it until there’s no way out. That’s the only way they’ll trust you. I’ll bet it’s that guy who’s always on the news, the Consortium chairman, Vincent Duret. He seems like just the sort of scumbag who’d have the pull to keep Montanelli in his back pocket. Maybe he’s your real boss. Why don’t you go tell him directly that you couldn’t bring me in alive? That you couldn’t break me? Maybe he’ll appreciate your balls, because he sure as hell won’t care about your loyalty.”

And that did it. I didn’t think I’d be able to get under her skin after everything I’d already tried, but apparently she’d reached her limit.

“All right, asshole!” she barked. “If you want me, I’m in the control room! Come on out and get me if you can! You think you’re Mr. Morally Superior? Come prove it!”

Her voice echoed, once in my earbud and again just a few meters ahead of me, through a vent set in the bottom of the air duct. Ten meters.

Can you see anything in there?

“No. She has the system shut down. Too damned smart. I’d bet she’s not alone.”

And I didn’t have a gun. Or even a knife. Or a choice.

“You got it, Valentine. Keep your eye on the door and I’ll be there.”

I tried to catch a look through the vent without being seen, but the vanes were closed. I’d be dropping in blind.

Hell, it’s better than being stuck in here.

There was only a twenty-centimeter gap to raise my fist, but when I slammed it downward, the vent popped out of its frame and clattered to the floor.

I followed it, the four-meter drop seeming like nothing after the jump through the maintenance shaft in the air recycling chamber, and when my boots slammed into the floor below…

… there was nothing.

The control center was empty, the doors sealed shut. Displays blinked at me in a mirror image of the confusion I felt as I scanned the room on thermal, sonic, everything. The lights were on, but nobody was home.

Katy, what the hell is going on here?

“She routed her comms through here. Brent, this is a setup.”

The ventilation ducts had been silent the entire time I’d passed through them, not a sound or a rush of air, but now the gaping hole where the vent had been until I’d smashed it out erupted in a whoosh of outgoing atmosphere.

Didio didn’t have to evacuate the entire base to kill me.

Just this one room.

“Sorry, Brent.” I wasn’t sure at first if it was Katy lamenting her failure, but even over the violent evacuation of the control center, I made out Valentine Didio’s voice. “But I certainly hope you didn’t think I was stupid enough to tell you where I was and then wait around for you to arrive.” Didio laughed softly. “Just relax. Don’t fight it. You’ll be unconscious in a few minutes, and when you wake up, we’ll continue our talk. So that when I report back to Director Montanelli, I won’t do it empty-handed.”

Katy, can you get me out of here?

“They’ve air-gapped everything in the room,” she said morosely. “You’d have to crack the encryption manually and that’s going to take forever, even with me guiding you.”

I sniffed the air and didn’t need my implanted chem-scanners to smell the methane. Didio hadn’t even waited to pump all the oxygen out before she’d begun piping in the outside atmosphere.

Hold on.

Methane. Oxygen.

I need a spark, Katy.

“The door panel,” she told me. “There should be a power junction behind the security lock. They might have sealed the lock, but it’s still powered.”

The door was solid but not a blast door, not intended to hold out against enemy attack, barely airtight. On the other side of it she’d be waiting, watching, ready to come in the second I was out. I ripped the panel open with my bare hands, revealing the insulated power cables running behind the deactivated locking panel.

I didn’t have wire strippers, but when I yanked the leads out of their sockets, superconductor wire showed bare at the ends.

“I can run a charge through it when the methane gets thick enough,” Katy warned, “but you’ll get blown up right alongside the door.”

Another quick scan of the room, but this time I searched for something other than people hiding out. All this equipment, all the displays, there had to be an access panel, some way to get into the guts of it and make repairs. I found it under the holographic projector against the far wall, hidden beneath the gleaming symbol of the SID—a lidless eye glowing red. Not ominous at all.

It was barely a meter across, fifty centimeters high, and when I yanked the panel open, the gap within was even smaller. Barely large enough to jam myself into, holding the panel door ahead of me like a shield. I’d already stopped breathing to avoid taking in a lungful of methane, so it was a good thing I could talk to Katy inside my head.

Blow it.

Methane and oxygen mixed together, the air forced outward by the inrush of the flammable gas from the ceiling… forced close to the walls. And the door. I didn’t see the spark from the power cables, but I felt what came next.

Overpressure and backdraft. Even tucked into the niche, barricaded behind the panel, it hit me like a cargo truck, battering every centimeter before the rush of heat replaced the concussion. Not enough to burn me, thankfully, because burns were the worst. They healed quickly, like every other injury, but there was no real way to cut off the pain from them, and worse than that, they smelled disgustingly like roast pork. But the heat turned the entire room into a walk-in oven, my skin crackling as the moisture evaporated.

The sound came last, not because it hadn’t happened already but because the shock had delayed my experience of it. Distant, almost muffled, like a thunderbolt a few kilometers away, but once the rumbling ended, I rolled out, dropping the panel I’d been using as a shield and sprinting for the door.

Or where the door had been. Like I said, it hadn’t been blast shielded, and when the methane-oxygen mix had been triggered by the spark right beside it, the door had blown off its hinges and disappeared down the hallway. Smashing everything in its way.

I might have given the two SAU troopers some advice had they asked. When stacking up outside a door, ready to rush whoever was inside, don’t stand directly in front of it. They’d found that out the hard way, although their armor had probably kept them from being too badly injured. They were just stunned, rolling around on the ground, and had much bigger problems than concussion.

Me. I was their biggest problem.

And I was pissed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I suppose I should have been pissed at myself for not figuring out the control room was another trick, or maybe angry at Katy for leading me into it even though she’d tried to talk me out of the entire venture. But mostly I was pissed at Didio, not for being evil but simply for being far too focused on killing or capturing me while not bothering to think about why. The woman had seen the truth and ignored it.

Which was why, when I saw her stumbling away down the hallway, holding the side of her head where the door had clipped her, I didn’t even bother to grab one of the guns the two troopers had dropped. Instead, I grabbed a trooper. Lifting him by the back of the leg and the scruff of his neck, ignoring the pull of the wound in my side, I threw the man ten meters down the hallway. A hundred and ten kilos of SAU trooper and armor smacked Didio between the shoulder blades and she tumbled head over heels to the floor, where she lay, unmoving, while the trooper I’d used as a human bola writhed, barely conscious.

The one at my feet was, maybe, female. It was hard to tell beneath the armor and the visored helmet, but the trooper seemed shorter, slimmer. She was awake, rolled over, reaching for the rifle that the explosion had knocked away from her, out to the end of the harness straps. She also had a fixed-blade combat knife sheathed at her waist, and I swept it out in a single motion and sliced through the sling of the Gauss rifle.

The Special Activities Unit soldier rolled onto her side, clawing at her sidearm, and I leveled the rifle at her.

“I don’t want to kill you,” I said softly. “Really I don’t.”

Her hand came away from the weapon and I grabbed it out of its holster, then motioned for her to roll over onto her face. She, like all of them, had a neural restraint web in a pouch at her belt, and I pulled it out.

“Take off your armor,” I told her, keeping one eye on Didio and the stunned trooper lying next to her on the corridor floor.

She nodded and started with her helmet. Her face was drawn and pale, coated with sweat, and a trickle of blood stained the sweat red where it ran down from a cut on her forehead. I expected hatred, resentment, anger, but all I saw in her gray eyes was fear. Maybe that should have been gratifying, should have made me feel like I’d done my job, taught the enemy to fear me the way they’d always feared the Archangels, but the only feeling it gave me was nausea.

I wrapped the restraint web around her arms and left her there, silent and motionless, as if she believed I’d shoot her if she said a word. The other trooper, the male who I’d thrown at Didio, had started to come around, rising up to a knee. His rifle had twisted around to the back on its sling when I’d tossed him and he patted at his back, searching for it.

“Give up,” I told him, yelling, knowing he was still out of it. “Give up and I’ll let you live.”

He might have been too dazed to understand or just too damned stubborn. Either way, he kept reaching for the gun, not even remembering the pistol at his waist. I sighed and butt-stroked him in the helmet, the solid thump echoing off the walls of the corridor. It didn’t break his neck, but he went down like a felled tree, collapsing without so much as a twitch. Unconscious, probably a serious concussion and a brain bleed, but if his own people got to him in time, they could get him into a biomodule and save him. It wasn’t great, but it was the best I could do without shooting him.

Which only left Didio. No one else in the corridor, no response to the blaring alarms still sounding from the explosion. Pausing to strip the unconscious trooper of his weapons, I watched her. She was awake but trying to pretend she wasn’t. The slight movement of her mouth gave her away, like someone who couldn’t read without moving their lips, as she subvocalized into an implant mic, calling for help.

“You’re wasting your time,” I told her. “I saw the fear in their eyes. They’ve seen enough of their friends die already and they blame you. No one’s coming to help.”

Scowling, she sat up, wiped blood from her face. The cut she’d received from the flying door still oozed red, but Didio seemed unwilling to show how much it hurt. Her fingers drifted toward the gun in a chest holster, but I leveled the rifle I’d taken off the concussed trooper and she let her hand drop back down to her side.

“I suppose you think you’ve won,” she said, bitterness dripping off the words like poison.

“I’ve survived,” I corrected her. “Those aren’t the same thing.”

She didn’t resist as I pulled the pistol out of her holster and tossed it back down the hallway into the ruined control room. With it gone, I crouched down in front of her, putting us eye to eye.

“You survived so far,” Didio corrected me. “You’re right, I doubt I can convince anyone else to go hunt you down, but there’re still a few dozen SAU agents between you and the hangar bay. And two lighters waiting for your people, if they even show up.”

“You’re smart as hell,” I told her, “and loyal past all expectations of reason. Do the right thing. Join us. Otherwise, the people you work for—the ones you really work for, not Montanelli—will just spend your life. And if somehow they don’t get you killed, they’ll hang you out as a sacrificial lamb once they get caught.” I tilted my head to the side and affected an officious, self-important voice. “SID agents collaborated with the Evolutionists? Oh, that wasn’t me, that was a rogue faction led by Deputy Director Didio. She’s the one you want.”

For the first time since I’d met her, I thought something I’d said had finally gotten to Didio. She sighed, resting her head back against the wall.

“What do you expect me to do? Run off with you and carry a rifle in the coming revolution? Do I look like a competent military commander to you? I couldn’t even manage to catch you in a closed station with dozens of armed troops.”

“No, I probably wouldn’t trust you with a gun around me,” I admitted, grinning ruefully. “You’re a spiteful one and might just feel an urge to finish the job. What I had in mind was… a bet.”

Her eyes narrowed, suspicion warring with curiosity.

“What sort of bet?”

“You don’t think I can get out of here alive,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. But I’m willing to bet you I can.”

“What do I get if I win?” Didio wondered.

“You get me, dead.” I shrugged. “That’s gotta be worth something. But if I live…” I grabbed her commlink off her belt and opened the screen. It demanded a biometric key and I sighed, held it up to her. She gave it a glare and the retinal scanner beeped recognition. Turning it back around, I pulled up her address book file and tapped in a relay station coordinate, the addressee, and a code key, then closed it and shoved it back into the bracket. “There. That’s one of our dead drops. No way to trace where the message came from or where it’s going.”

“What do you expect me to do with that?” she asked, though not as sharply as her last question.

“Your friend Rhule told me that there wasn’t going to be an election. Maybe you were right. Maybe that was bullshit. Grandstanding. Playing for time. But if it’s not… if there’s something to it, then it means the Consortium, the SID… someone is planning something big. Something that would distract the entire Federation enough that indefinitely postponing the elections wouldn’t be enough to get Prime Minister Mitterrand and her entire staff arrested. That might be something that would test the resolve of even the most loyal of Coalition servants, wouldn’t it?” I tapped a finger against her shoulder. “That might be something you’d want to know about before it happened. And if you find out, and I’m still alive… I want you to send a message to that address I gave you and tell me while there’s still time to stop it.”

Her expression softened in thought.

“You said I was choosing my own self-righteousness and thirst for revenge over the suffering of the entire Coalition,” I reminded her. “You help me stop this before it starts, help me to ensure that there is an election and that there’s a chance this can all be ended peacefully, and my war’s over.” I stood. “Think about it.” Turning, I headed down the hallway in the direction of the hangar, but I paused after a few steps and looked back. “And if you feel any sort of responsibility for the lives of your people, you should call and tell them not to get in my way. I’m getting on board one of those shuttles and off this fucking rock. And I’ll kill anybody who gets in my way.”

“That was dramatic as shit and all,” Katy said once we were out of sight of the control room and Didio, “but have you given any thought as to how you’re actually going to get past all those soldiers on the way to the hangar?”

Not a bit, I admitted, blowing out a long breath. My lungs still burned from the methane I’d inhaled, my side still hurt from the shot to my rib and I couldn’t afford to give myself a dose of painkillers, and my feet had started to hurt because the boots I’d stolen were too narrow. I figured I’d be dead by now. You got any ideas?

“Oh no, not me. I’ve tried connecting wirelessly to the security system over and over, but your friend Didio shut that down over an hour ago.”

Is it still down?

“What, you think she’s going to change her mind just because you got all touchy-feely with her? She’s a cold fish, and the only reason she gave up trying to kill you was that you pummeled all her people into submission. All I can pick up is some comm activity near the hangar bay, which is probably them setting up an ambush just in case you’re stupid enough to try to break into it.”

You’re not helping.

“You not getting killed is helpful, at least for me, seeing as how I cease to exist the moment you do. I’m telling you, there’s no shame in hiding. If you actually made an impact with Ms. Resting Assassin Face, she’ll call off the search and tell everyone you escaped.”

I scowled, not just at the fact that she wouldn’t stop arguing with me but more at the distraction. The corridor broadened out past the next intersection, where the route from the work areas and crew quarters split off from the storage rooms, at least according to the specs Katy had been able to download before she’d been shut out of the system. More space meant more chances to be spotted and more places for the enemy to hide.

I slowed, going through the schematics again, trying to find any way around, but the only entrances to the hangar were straight up this corridor and one utility airlock from the outside.

That was an idea.

“No,” Katy declared firmly. “I know what you’re thinking, and it’s crazy. The atmosphere is mostly methane. Even with your enhancement, you’d have five minutes of sustained effort before you ran out of internal oxygen and blacked out. One wrong step, one lock I can’t crack, you’re dead. Not to mention the fact that it’s over sixty degrees Celsius outside in the day and negative seventy at night.”

And I was lucky to get that spread. If this gas giant hadn’t been in such a close orbit to its primary star, I would have been looking at temperatures closer to negative two hundred no matter what time of day it was.

I can handle the temps. It’ll be your job to get me in that airlock. If you can’t, I’m dead. But if I hide out here and those lighters wind up taking out any rescue ship that comes after me, I’m just as dead.

“Damn you, Parthet,” Katy sighed, but there was resignation in her tone. “I was only born yesterday and you’re already determined to kill me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“The good news is,” Katy told me, “that it’s daytime. Which means when you walk outside, you’ll only have to worry about your brain boiling in its juices and your organs shutting down instead of your skin freezing to that rifle.”

I knew her voice was only inside my head, but still I winced. Crouching low on the other side of a rolling equipment cart, I watched the patrol pass by in the hall outside the emergency airlock chamber but only out of the corner of my vision. One of the things our trainers had stressed in the qualification course for the Archangels was never to stare at the enemy, no matter how good your hide was. They’d feel it and spot you.

That was unscientific and atavistic, but it probably had its roots in fact. The human brain was meant to spot faces, and if you exposed your eyes, something in the subconscious would put a pattern to that camouflage and spot the face hiding there. The only camouflage I had were the shadows of the dimly lit compartment, and even that was only because Katy had talked me through deactivating the motion-activated overhead lamps.

The four SAU troops passed by and I moved out from behind the cover of the tool cart, wishing again that we’d found a spacesuit in the empty closet beside the lock. It was obviously designed to hold one, and I had to think the SAU commandos had removed them intentionally once I’d escaped custody, a precaution against just the sort of gambit I was about to take.

Is this thing going to make any kind of alarm when I cycle through? I asked, tapping the sequence into the control panel to open the inner lock door.

“Well, it would, if I hadn’t shut that down for you. I wish I could penetrate further into the system software, maybe draw off some of their people, but the blocks are still in place.”

It would have been nice if Didio had taken my warning seriously and called her troops away from the hangar, but well… we had made a bet, fair and square, and she hated to lose. I’d only made her acquaintance a few days ago and I already knew that. Maybe I’d reached her and maybe I hadn’t, but I was going to have to make it through on my own before she’d take me seriously.

The light flashed green on the control board and the inner airlock door hissed open. I had never, I realized so abruptly that it almost stopped me in my tracks, been inside an airlock without a suit. That had been pounded into our heads from Boot Camp on. No one stepped through that inner door without a suit on, even if we were just on a cleaning detail and knew with an absolute certainty that the door to the outside was locked.

Stepping through the open door was like aiming a loaded gun to my own head with my finger hovering over the trigger. Closing the door behind me was akin to pulling it.

No sound, as Katy had promised. No alarms, no notifications, nothing but the light changing from green to yellow. Not too late to back out… except, of course, it obviously was. I sucked in a deep breath of breathable air, then cycled the lock. The light went from yellow to red as oxygen-nitrogen was replaced by methane and heat prickled against my skin. Not the same sort of heat I’d felt in the explosions. This was more akin to standing next to the open engine compartment of one of the ancient internal-combustion farming combines I’d seen on the Periphery colonies during the war. Waves of oppressive, searing heat that would have taken my breath away if I’d let it. But I had no breath to spare, so I held onto it as the door slid open.

And despite the urgency, despite the brain-boiling heat and the lack of air and the pressing need to get moving, I stopped and stared upward. It was a nameless moon orbiting a nameless world in a nameless system, yet somehow the vista spread out in the sky above me was the most beautiful sight I’d ever beheld.

Purple hills stretched out into an orange sky swirling with blue clouds, some impressionist painter’s idea of the scene on an alien world, and yet that wasn’t even the most awe-inspiring fraction of the place. For up in that orange sky, competing with the glow of the system’s primary star, was the gas giant. I’d known it was there, expected it would be visible from the surface of the moon, but the reality of the sight was enough to cost me precious seconds, a price I willingly paid.

I’d read tales of the ancient gods of Old Earth, of brooding titans sitting on their mountains, judging mankind from on high, ready to toss fatal lightning bolts at the slightest hint of disrespect or dole out divine favor to those they felt deserving. The gas giant was the all-father of those myths, glowering down from the heavens with brows of twisted clouds and eyes of roiling storms.

Hey there, big guy. If you’re looking to throw a little irony into the universe, you could start by tilting the scales my way.

No response and I couldn’t wait around for him to think about it, not with five whole minutes of air before everything shut down. The exterior of the station blended in with the purple-tinged ground, partially buried beneath rock and silt except where airlocks or vents poked out of the hillside like the appendages of a giant creature hiding just beneath the dirt, ready to pounce. The mouth of that alien sand spider was the main hangar bay, the curtain folds of the doors teeth, waiting to open for the next prey to stumble into it.

The rolling, violet hills that spread out on every side of the facility tantalized with the promise of unknown horizon. They beckoned me to follow their curves out into the wilderness, to spend my final minutes on a quest for the novel rather than in yet another pointless fight to extend my life a few more minutes, and I nearly gave into their temptation. That way lay peace, maybe forever.

You tried to find peace once before. But just like Trotsky said, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

I kept going. The utility airlock called to me with another song, this one promising breathable atmosphere, a cool, wafting breeze that would relieve the sweltering heat. And conflict. And death. It was a promise I found more believable, one I understood. I put one foot in front of the other, anesthetized by the Machine, and in the depths of my consciousness where logic and reason were buried beneath the waning oxygen, I realized I hadn’t heard from Katy.

“That’s because I’ve been busy trying to keep you alive, you big dummy. Get to the lock. You’ve wasted too much time—you only have a minute left before you’re going to lose consciousness.”

Fair enough.

The airlock was only a few meters away now, but like the door at the end of a dark hallway in a childhood nightmare, it seemed to withdraw with each step I took. Annoyed, I closed my eyes and quickened my pace, ignoring the multicolored flashes in my vision and the overpowering sizzling of an oven baking inside my head. My hand slapped against the metal and I bit back a curse that would have used up the last of my air at the burn.

“Open the damned thing,” Katy barked at me. “Hurry!”

The external controls were actual physical buttons rather than a touch-screen for the simple reason that only crazy, suicidal people would be out on the surface of the moon without a spacesuit. Smashing my fist into the button was more viscerally satisfying than tapping a touchscreen, but the results not so much.

The lock didn’t open. All I received was a flashing red light.

“Oh, fuck me,” Katy moaned. “It’s sealed from the inside.”

My hand hurt. I hadn’t realized it in the haze of my hypoxia, but I’d slammed my fist into the control over and over, unable to think of anything else to do.

Open it, Katy, I pled, desperation growing as consciousness narrowed into a black-lined corridor with death on the other side.

“If I could I would, Brent. I’m shut out.” A sound that might have been a sob, and I wondered if she made it on purpose as a comfort to me or if she actually felt emotional pain. “I’m sorry. I let you down.”

It’s okay, Katy. It was your turn. I couldn’t save you back in the canyon. I deserve what I get now…

Disregarding the searing metal surface of the lock, I leaned against the door, only able to stay on my feet thanks to the kinetex muscle augments stiffening in response to my failing consciousness. I’d tried. I’d tried harder than anyone had a right to expect of me. Maybe Didio would send the intelligence to Cas and Raph anyway, maybe someone could do something with it…

I blinked and I was inside the lock. It had to be a hallucination. I was dying and my brain was giving me what consolation it could, making me think I’d made it and everything was going to be fine. A cool rush of wind against my face dried sweat I didn’t remember shedding and I sucked in air reflexively. Cold, sweet, like a drink of water from a mountain stream after a long summer’s hike back on Sylvanus. I’d settle into the forever night with one last good memory…

Except it wasn’t a memory. I sat up inside the lock, looked around.

“What the fuck?” I muttered.

“Someone opened the lock for us remotely,” Katy told me as I rolled onto my feet, checking the rifle. It was still hot—not stove-lid hot, but left-my-pocket-knife-sitting-in-the-summer-sun hot. “I don’t know who.”

Bringing the rifle to my shoulder, I slapped the control to open the outer lock. There’d probably be troops nearby. Not looking for anyone to come through this door, but there just the same. It rotated aside and my finger was a molecule’s-breadth away from the trigger, but there was no one to shoot. No one in the hangar at all, just a handful of armed landers, glaring down with a machine’s impatience to be used again, their belly ramps yawning in invitation.

A cargo loader offered cover and concealment just twenty meters away, and I sprinted forward to take advantage of it, scanning the room from the safety of its shelter. Nothing. No one. The hangar was totally empty.

“What the fuck?” I asked again with more feeling.

“Parthet.” The word was inside my head, but not the same way Katy’s voice was. It was a transmission on my implant commlink.

“Didio?” I asked, my voice hoarse. I coughed to clear a rancid scent of methane still redolent in my clothes.

“Don’t think that just because I let you in and called my people away from the hangar that I’m on your side. But there are questions I need to see answered, and letting you die means they never will be.”

“Be careful, Valentine,” I told her. “Asking those kinds of questions is a good way to make yourself a liability.”

“I didn’t get to where I am without allies,” she said. “Get the hell out of here before I change my mind.”

I might not have been what you’d call a people person, but I got the sense that was the end of our conversation. Having an embarrassment of riches to choose from, I ran into the lander closest to the door and slapped the control to close the ramp as I ascended. Not that I wanted to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I kept my rifle at my shoulder and searched the entire shuttle from stem to stern before I settled into the pilot’s seat.

Katy, tell me you can start this fucking thing up.

“She was good to her word,” the AI told me, disbelief in the reply. “The interlocks are down and I’m able to synch with the control systems. The reactor is warming up, turbines to power.”

What about the hangar doors? I wondered, running through the startup procedures. They came automatically and would have even without Katy to remind me. Archangels couldn’t afford to be specialists, not when it was often just the two of us on missions deep into enemy territory. I’d been fed the specs and procedures for every spacecraft built in the last three hundred years via the neurosynth, the memories from other men and women there to call on as if they were my own.

“The external systems aren’t responding,” Katy replied. “I think they’re still cut off. Maybe you should call her back and see if she’ll raise them for us.”

Oh, that’s okay. My lips skinned away from my teeth in a feral smile and I tapped a row of switches, bringing up the targeting controls for the lander’s chin gun. I’m sure I have a key here.

The turbines screamed, the belly jets lifting us a meter off the hangar floor, and I waited until the landing gear had nearly raised into their housings before I touched my thumb to the trigger. The fuselage of the shuttle shuddered with the vibration of the coilgun turret firing, but that was nothing compared to what weapon did to the cargo bay doors.

During a normal operation, the entire bay would have been evacuated, the pressure equalized and then filled with outer atmosphere to avoid cross-contamination, but the second those hypersonic tungsten slugs struck, shredding even the thick metal of the bay doors, the outside atmosphere rushed in to mix with the oxygen-rich air of the hangar. I’d seen it firsthand in the control center with nothing to protect me other than a flimsy metal panel, and I have to say, it was a lot more comfortable to watch from inside the armored hide of the shuttle.

When the smoke cleared, there was a gap through the hangar doors fifty meters across, the sunlit purple plains still inviting and now a lot less deadly. I pushed the throttle open and the shuttle erupted from the bay, leaving alarms screaming impotently behind us. I didn’t know if there were air-defense turrets around the base and I didn’t take the chance that there might be, hugging the contours of the hills, dust billowing behind the shuttle as acceleration pressed me into the cushioned seat.

“Those lighters are still up there, you know,” Katy reminded me. “And whether or not Valentine Didio decided to give you a chance to escape, they’re not going to share her generosity. They’re going to know this shuttle is a rogue and they’re going to try to blast you right out of the sky.”

“I know they’re up there,” I told her, speaking aloud now, tired of only hearing my own voice inside my head. “I’m counting on it. I don’t know when or if Cas and the others are coming for me. Which means we need a starship. And it’s damned convenient to have the exact coordinates for a couple of them.”

“Oh, sweet Lord,” Katy sighed. “You are bound and determined to get both of us killed.”

“Eventually, sweetheart. Eventually.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

If the face of the gas giant had appeared as the visage of an ill-tempered god from the surface of the moon, up here, so much closer, it might have been the entire universe, squeezing out any rival. The rest of the galaxy faded away, washed out by the sweeping curve of its sullen oranges and yellows, and the SID lighters were certainly lost against that vast expanse.

“They haven’t hailed us,” I murmured, watching their avatars on the shuttle’s sensor screen. “Maybe nobody’s figured out we’re up here yet.”

“Yeah, maybe your girlfriend down there told them you were coming up to do their taxes,” Katy drawled.

“Girlfriend?” I repeated, laughing. “Are you jealous? Listen, is this going to be a problem? Because if by some twist of fate I make it out of this alive, you’re gonna have to deal with Riva. Assuming she hasn’t dumped me because I was an idiot.”

“I have no problem with Riva,” Katy corrected me. “She’s a Marine and an honorable person. Not like that spook. I know you think she’s going to help us…”

“She already did help us,” I reminded her.

“… but she also knew you weren’t a traitor, knew what they did to you, and she still put you through that. She tore your memories out of you, twisted them into a nightmare, and then made you live the worst days of your life, just so she could try to make you talk. She’s a heartless piece of shit, and you should have put a round through her head when you had the chance.”

“I think being inside my head has been a bad influence on you.”

“I think you being inside your head has been a bad influence on you,” she shot back. “What the hell are you going to do out here? Charge in guns blazing and hope you luck into a golden BB before they blow the shit out of us?”

“That wouldn’t get us anything, would it? We need their ship. We’re going to waltz right up like we own the place and take it.”

She had no response to that, which was just as well, because I was sure she’d just tell me how utterly insane I was and what a terrible plan I’d come up with, and I already knew both of those things. We’d been boosting at a steady one gravity since we’d cleared the atmosphere nearly an hour ago and still had another ten minutes before we were scheduled to do a turnover and a braking burn, and the whole thing just felt incredibly drawn-out and boring after the nonstop kinetic energy of the last day.

Did they know we were coming? They had to have seen us by now. Maybe they were just waiting until we got to weapons’ range. If I’d read Didio wrong and she’d sent me out here to die neatly, far away from her…

“Shuttle Delta Alpha Four-Niner, this is the Berrios. Do you read?” A man’s voice. The transmission came from the closer of the two starships, a good light-minute nearer to the moon than the second. I took a deep breath, prayed to… well, to someone, and touched the transmit key.

“Roger, Berrios. This is Four-Niner, I copy.” I’d tried to sound blasé and cool, like every other professional pilot I’d encountered in the military. I figured SID wouldn’t be any different.

“Four-Niner, received notification from base that you’re bringing a prisoner for transport. We’ll send security personnel to the shuttle bay to meet you.”

Well, wasn’t that interesting?

“Negative, Berrios, we have our own people aboard,” I said. “We require a gurney and a medical technician to keep the subject sedated for the trip.”

“Ah… roger, Four-Niner, wilco. But I’m afraid standard procedure for prisoner transfer is to provide extra security.”

I sighed just like a pilot caught between their boss and the bureaucracy might and waited for a ten count before answering.

“Your call, Berrios. Just make sure we get that med tech. If this prisoner stops breathing under sedation, we’re all gonna be looking for new jobs.”

“Roger, Four-Niner. We have you docking in six-three mikes. Berrios out.”

“Told you,” I said to Katy once the connection was cut. “She’s trying to help me escape.”

“They’re sending security to the hangar bay. They’re gonna stun you, capture you, and start this whole thing over again.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” I chided. “Yeah, they’re sending security to the hangar. That just means all the targets are going to be in one place.”

Motors that could have used some preventative maintenance whined in protest as the shuttle’s belly ramp lowered, the harsh overhead lights of the starship’s docking bay glaring through the opening as it grew larger.

At the bottom of the ramp, a single, white-suited medical tech waited with a rolling gurney, while around him half a dozen men and women in SAU armor held their weapons at the ready. Heavy pistols here inside a ship, loaded with plasma rounds, I was sure. Maybe the hull could stop even the hypervelocity tungsten penetrators from a Gauss rifle, but no one wanted to take that chance, and besides, the interior bulkheads weren’t nearly as thick.

I stepped down to meet them, smiling closed-mouthed, affecting the demeanor of a bored Directorate pilot just doing his job and not interested in any of this. The rifle slung across my back might have given the lie to the pretense, but I was hoping they wouldn’t notice it.

“Hey, guys,” I said, pushing the weapon farther out of sight behind me with one hand while I waved them forward with the other. “Thanks for the help. The patient’s strapped into the medical bed in the cargo hold if you wanna come get him.”

And here was going to be where we all found out if I’d been backstabbed by Didio or not. If she’d told them who I was, that the shuttle had been stolen, they’d attack and things would get… interesting. If not, they’d just walk in and start looking for a patient who didn’t exist. And things would still get interesting.

Block all transmissions out of the shuttle, I told Katy.

“Already done,” she assured me. No comment on how she’d been wrong about Didio, but then, I didn’t expect her to admit it.

The leader of the security team moved past the medical technician, heading inside to check out the situation first, like a good officer should. Which was a shame, not just because he was a good officer on the wrong side of this but also because it would have been so much more convenient for me if he were a bad, lazy officer.

“Where is he?” He hadn’t even risked raising his visor, just spoke through the external speakers, his voice distant and inhuman.

“Right down here,” I assured him, motioning ahead to the stairs down from the passenger compartment into the cargo hold.

I’d left the lights in the hold off intentionally, though his visor’s optics could penetrate that darkness. What they’d see when they did penetrate it was a biomodule. I’d lucked out that there’d been one of the things on board, and since I’d had a couple hours to consider what I’d do if I managed to board the SID lighter, I’d figured out a plan that had just the barest possibility of working.

What the SAU officer saw when he looked into the cargo bay was a biomodule roiling with activity, nearly opaque, with a human figure barely visible through the cover. If I’d known I’d need a human, I might have hauled one of the bodies along with me after the fight at the control center, but the next best thing had been to grab a spacesuit out of the shuttle’s locker, stick the damned thing in the biomodule, and hope for the best.

I couldn’t see the officer’s face, but from the slight lean forward, I imagined his eyes narrowing as he tried to see through the biotic fluid and get a glimpse of the figure inside.

“Why’s the prisoner in the biomodule?” he demanded.

“He was badly wounded during capture,” I explained. “Or recapture, I should say. He’s an ornery bastard, and apparently the deputy director had to mess him up pretty bad to get him back under control.” I leaned in closer to the SAU officer as if I were sharing a secret with him. “What I heard from the tech down in the base who rolled the biomodule into the bay was that they couldn’t break him with the virtual reality programming and now they’re shipping him off somewhere they can break into his brain computer.” I shook my head. “You ever heard of those things? I think it’s freaky, myself, having a computer implanted in your head. But anyway, the tech told me it’s protecting him from the interrogation.”

The officer finally slapped up his visor, revealing a glaring visage.

“For a pilot,” he growled, “you sure like to gossip.”

I forced a sheepish grin and shrank away from him.

“Sorry, sir. I just don’t get a lot of excitement out here, you know?”

The man grunted but didn’t bother to drop his visor before he transmitted to the others back up top.

“Okay, bring the tech on down here. We’ll have to load up a biomodule on the gurney.”

I could tell when he finished by the way the focus of his eyes shifted, and there was no reason to wait one second more. No gunshot, not down here where all the others could hear it. The knife had come from a utility kit in the shuttle lockers, just a cheap, plain little thing, maybe twenty centimeters long with an orange, plastic handle and a blade meant for brute tasks rather than precision work. Not suitable at all for a combat knife, but when I shoved it under his visor and through his eye socket into his brain, it worked just fine.

“They’re all inside,” Katy told me as I carefully lowered the dead man to the deck.

Raise the ramp.

That would distract them, maybe even turn them around, give me a few seconds. I used it to rush back up the steps to the shuttle’s passenger compartment, swinging the rifle into place as I ran. Five armored troopers and the med tech. He was unarmed, probably untrained, and would waste a good ten seconds trying to call for help before he got desperate enough to attack me. Katy had tapped into the internal security monitors of the shuttle and fed their data to the Machine, letting me know where each of them stood.

Targets popped into my vision, a tactical overlay that turned reality into a simulation. I could have let the Machine take over, could have avoided the experience of killing these people, separated myself from it by pretending the cognitive combat response system was to blame and I was nothing but an innocent pawn.

But I didn’t want to be a pawn anymore, and if I was to be a killer, then I’d do it of my own volition. Three of the troopers in the utility bay had turned back toward the belly ramp, trying to stop it from raising and trapping them inside, while the other two had taken a step toward the cargo hold to check on their commander.

Even without the Machine in control, the process was second-nature, and the first discharge of the Gauss rifle came as a surprise. Deafeningly loud in the confines of the shuttle, the electrostatic snap of the coils was the quietest part of the gun firing. The bang of the rounds emerging from the barrel drowned out the coils, but the loudest of all in the narrow shuttle passenger bay was the boom of the slugs themselves going hypersonic. A drumbeat against the fuselage, echoing back at me like a punishment for what I was doing, but it punished them much worse.

This close, they might as well not have bothered with the armor. The slugs punched through them and tore them apart from the inside out, and if the armor was good for anything, it was holding the mess inside. They collapsed, writhing in one last paroxysm of pain to see them out of this life and into the next—if one existed. I was kind of hoping no, given how I’d spent a good portion of the last twenty years.

Whether their souls passed on, the slugs did, going right through them, and because of the expert calculations of Katy working in the background, ended up in two of the other three SAU troopers. The results weren’t as dramatic, a good part of their massive velocity already spent in their primary targets, but it was still enough to penetrate the rear side of their armor. Not enough to kill them immediately but enough to give me time to take out the third.

He’d managed to turn halfway toward me, brought up his heavy pistol, and actually got off a burst, but I’d already moved from where I’d been. Just a half-step, less than a meter, but it was enough for the plasma burst to spark off the door to the cockpit. I shot him through the visor, and even his helmet wasn’t enough to contain what was left of his skull. Another burst each for the last two and the technician screamed, pushing over the gurney and grabbing at his commlink.

“Oh, God!” he screeched, dancing over the fallen bodies, trying to get to the control for the ramp. “Don’t fucking kill me!”

“That’s entirely up to you,” I told him, leveling the rifle at his chest. “What’s your name?”

“Mangler,” he stammered. “Freddy Mangler. Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you?”

“I’m someone who’s going to take over this ship and sail her wherever I want to go,” I told him, calm and steady. “Now, Mr. Mangler…”

“Corporal. I’m a corporal in the Coalition Fleet, technically… just on loan to the SID. I swear to God, I’m not a spook or anything, just a medic!”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about,” I assured him. “The SAU is trying to kill me, and they did kill my wife and son. I don’t intend to let them finish the job, so I’m not sticking around here. This ship is leaving but this shuttle can stay… with you on it. If you tell me what I need to know, I’ll leave you on the shuttle. You can take it down to the base and never see me again.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, hands held out to me. “What do you need to know?”

“How many people on this boat?”

“Um…” his eyes shifted, his fingers fidgeting as if he was calculating on them. “Not many. Most of the…” he gaped down at the bodies, “…s ecurity was down on the moon. They went down to help with a special prisoner. Which I guess was you. These guys were the only ones left. That just leaves the captain, the XO, the bridge crew, and the engineering techs. Like… ten people? Maybe twelve. Are you gonna kill them all?”

The last came out in a squeak.

“Not if I don’t need to. How do you think I could get them to abandon ship?”

“Reactor leak?” he asked, shaking his head. “I think that’s about the only thing that could do it. But how are you gonna manage that?”

Yeah, Katy, how do you think we can manage that?

I couldn’t see her smile, but I could hear it.

“I think we can figure something out.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Are you sure he’s going to be secure in there?

“Are you accusing me of being sloppy?” Katy asked. “Of course he’s secure. Nothing is getting in or out of that shuttle until and unless I allow it to. And its controls are frozen too, including comms.” How an AI managed such a convincingly scornful laugh was a mystery. “Not that Corporal Mangler would be able to fly the thing if I’d left it unlocked.”

I felt exposed as shit walking down the middle of the passageway on the Berrios, but there was no reason not to. I was just one of the crew, wearing normal SID field utilities, and I’d even found a fresh jacket on the shuttle to replace the one with the bullet hole and bloodstains.

Not to doubt you, Katy, I said, eyeing the security cameras in the overhead of the central passageway, but you’re also sure that they’re not going to see me on the bridge?

“They aren’t going to be looking at the security cameras on the bridge, Brent,” she scoffed. “Those would have been monitored by the guys you blew away in the shuttle. All you have to worry about now is getting me to Engineering.”

Getting you there? You mean getting me there. Because you’re part of me, remember?

“Details. Turn right up here, and then the auxiliary engineering room will be at the end of the passage. There shouldn’t be any crew in there at the moment. This isn’t a military ship, even with all the weapons and armor. The main difference is that she lacks the redundant crew, doesn’t even have enough for the auxiliary bridge or engineering section. Relax. You have nothing to worry about.”

And that, of course, was when I had something to worry about.

“Who the hell are you?”

The question wasn’t angry or scared as much as annoyed, and the tone matched the look on the man’s face. Older, from his stance and gait, the walk and mannerisms of a man who’d been around a while, and I pegged him as former Fleet, recruited by the SID for their off-the-books ships. The uniform was typical SID, except for the insignia on his collars, which resembled the Fleet emblems for engineering officers.

“Hey there,” I said, smiling broadly. “How’re you doing? I’m Lt. Anders from down on the base. I flew up in the shuttle with the prisoner transfer… they’re putting him in medical right now, with uh… Corporal Mangler. The medic? I’m staying on until the next stop, and when I was in the Fleet, before I went to pilot training, I was an Engineering tech. They told me I could help out down here.”

The man’s demeanor changed from aggravated to suspicious, and he regarded me sidelong like I was asking to date his daughter.

“Engineering tech, eh? Where’d you serve? What ship?”

“I was on the Florentine back during the war,” I said, not hesitating a second thanks to the files stored inside my head. “Under Chief Engineer Molina.”

“Molina, eh?” He tilted his head to the side. “You ever have to deal with a sticking pulse valve?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, frowning. “I’m not familiar with a pulse valve. But I did have to pull the flanges on a plasma transfer element once and it took hours. I was covered with graphite lubricant and that shit just wouldn’t come out of my coveralls! I wound up burning them and fabricating a new set.”

The older man laughed heartily, as convinced by the results of the data I’d pulled up on my files as I’d hoped he’d be.

“All right, then. I’m Chief Bjornson. You’ll be working under me. But you’re in the wrong section… we don’t use the auxiliary controls unless something goes wrong with the mains.”

“Oh, shit, sorry,” I said, trying to look sheepish. “I guess I read the schematics wrong on my commlink.”

“That’s all right, you can come with me to the main room,” Bjornson said, waving for me to follow.

Damn. The longer this takes, the more likely someone is to miss the security team.

“You could just take him out,” Katy suggested.

I’m not killing anyone I don’t have to, I told her angrily. For all we know, this guy just took a job after the war.

“But not those SAU troops? Are they exempt?”

SAU are the SID’s hired killers. They’re the ones they send to do shit like killing my family. They aren’t innocent and they didn’t just take a job after the military. They’re specially trained and chosen for unquestioning loyalty. They are very fucking exempt.

“… so then,” Bjornson went on, continuing a monologue I hadn’t really been paying attention to, “I had to completely overhaul the secondary thrust chamber for the main engine because our captain, the technical genius that he is, overloaded the damned thing trying to get the deputy director to the base here at Armitage early to impress her. I don’t even know why there was such a hurry… they don’t share that kind of thing with peons like me, y’know?”

I thought about telling him the gossip about the prisoner but figured he was right in the middle of a nice, long soliloquy of bitching and there was no point interrupting him. Anyway, we were close to the main engineering control room now and the sooner we got there, the better.

“Ah, here we go!” Bjornson said, waving ahead at an arched entranceway at the end of the corridor. “Let me introduce you to the rest of the crew.”

Get ready, I warned Katy. As soon as we’re in the compartment…

“It’s air-gapped,” she sighed. “Just like every other engineering section on any government ship. You’re going to need to make physical contact with the main control interface. Don’t you remember anything from the war?”

I remember everything from the war, but this particular situation never came up, I snapped. Hold on, I’ll do it as soon as I get in…

The alarm brought Chief Bjornson to a halt a step from entering the compartment, blocking my way as he looked up at the klaxon in surprise.

“That’s gotta be a drill,” the man said with a confused frown.

“Why?” I asked him. “What is it?”

“Attention, all hands,” the same voice I’d spoken to from the shuttle announced over the loudspeaker system, “this is not a drill. We have unknown Interface. All hands to stations and prepare for high-g maneuvering.”

“Come on, Anders,” Bjornson said, waving for me to follow and leading me away from Engineering. “We have to get strapped in!”

Cursing, I considered ignoring him, rushing in to make the connection and take over the ship, but the rest of the engineering crew was already trotting out of the compartment behind us, and for a good reason. If I got caught out of an acceleration couch when we started boosting at high gravities, I’d be splattered against the bulkhead and I wouldn’t be taking over anything. Jogging to catch up with Bjornson was finally when the announcement from the bridge hit me.

There was only one reason an unknown ship would be interfacing into this system.

It was Cas and the others. They’d come for me.

“You all set there, Anders?” Bjornson asked, tightening his own straps and getting settled into the cushioned seat at the head of the cluster of acceleration couches.

The Boost Room, that was what they called the place. Not that I’d ever served on a ship that had one. I’d gone from the Marines to the Archangels, and in the first I’d only been a passenger on the vet’s starships, while in the other I’d been on a Wraith interceptor, too small for a dedicated engineering section.

The lighters were right on the edge of the largest ships that could make the Interface, and even though I could have quoted the mathematics involved in the calculations that explained why there was a mass limit, it wasn’t something I could have laid out for a non-physicist, which most definitely included me.

“Sure,” I told him. “All set. No problems.”

Can you tie into the sensor net?

“No. Not being total idiots, the SID doesn’t open their essential systems to networking unknown users. And I can’t break in without physical contact between the superconductive fibers infused in your fingers and the computer interface either on the bridge or the engineering compartment. So why don’t you get the hell out of that chair and go do it?”

If I do, if they see me trigger the alert, then they won’t believe it and they won’t abandon ship.

“Then you’re back to taking them all out.”

Before we could get into another argument about why that wasn’t going to happen, the whole thing became academic in a crushing press of sudden acceleration. The groans of the engineering crew were nearly lost beneath the roaring in my own ears, though I didn’t share quite their level of discomfort. Four gees, I estimated, enough that if it lasted more than a few minutes, the engineering crew would pass out. With the augments, I might have been able to walk, at least far enough to get to the engineering compartment, but it would be pretty damned obvious that I wasn’t Lt. Anders, nor was I a full-time shuttle pilot and part-time engineering tech.

“Will that matter if we’re in combat?” Katy reminded me. “They’re going to be trying to blow up the Orion… and she’s going to be doing the same. They have no idea you’re on board this ship. Would you rather kill these idiots or get killed yourself?”

Neither choice was appealing, but coming up with a third way was hard to do with the ship cutting acceleration, maneuvering sideways with a sledgehammer cacophony against the hull and then boosting again. The thrust and maneuver shook me back and forth, the harness cutting into my chest and shoulders, and even I couldn’t have moved anywhere under that kind of pressure. Katy was right, we were in combat.

“Shit,” Bjornson murmured groggily from behind me. “Shit, shit, shit…”

Yeah, buddy, that was about the size of it. I risked craning my head around and saw that the chief engineer was the only one even semiconscious of the crew. Their heads lolled, mouths open and drool staining their chins, which was yet another reason I was glad I hadn’t joined the Fleet. There was no way to look cool when high-g forces kept knocking you out.

The ship shuddered again, and this time it wasn’t the maneuvering thrusters. This I had felt. We’d taken a hit. I was torn between rooting for my side and the fervent desire to not get killed, and I’d just about convinced myself to risk moving even with the violent jolting… when it stopped. No thrust, no steering jets, just drifting.

“Engineering,” the bridge called over the loudspeaker, “we have damage to the primary power coupling and burnout on the secondary rerouting channel. We need manual reset from engineering immediately.”

“I got it!” I told them, yanking on the quick-release and rushing out before any of the others could pull their shit together enough to move.

Though what the hell I was going to do when I got there was another question. I just knew I had to get there before the others. The main engine power might have been out but the artificial gravity hadn’t failed, which was nice, because if there was anything I hated worse than drooling all over myself, it was zero gravity.

And then, of course, the gravity went out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Oh, this sucks.

If I’d had one more step to get ready, I might have been able to push off in the right direction, but God had a much more ironic sense of humor than that, and suddenly I was swimming through the air, tumbling wildly out of control, and the bulkhead smacked me in the side of the head. Colored lights danced across my vision, and if I’d only been counting on my eyes and my natural brain to operate that would have been the end of it, would have delayed me enough that one of the other engineers might have beat me to it.

But the layout of the passageway was laid out in my memory and so was every different method for locomotion in free fall. Twists and turns and gyrations I couldn’t have managed without the kinetex propelled me in the right direction and, finally, I came up against one bulkhead and propelled myself off of it toward another. A billiard ball set off on a trick shot, I bounced from one side to the other until I cruised through a hatch into the engineering compartment.

It was fairly obvious what was wrong.

Engineering compartments on modern ships weren’t anywhere near the actual reactor or the drives, of course, because robots took care of servicing those areas—and because no human could survive exposure to that kind of radiation. The engineering section was for routing power, because the first thing to go on a ship in combat was the energy couplings, superconductive relays that took the juice from the reactor to weapons, shields, and drives. The main coupling in the engine room was blown, fried carbon and black smoke.

The spare was stored next to it, ready to be shoved in manually, which would be a lot easier given the lack of gravity and the very handy manual leverage controls. They were designed for use in free fall, for situations just like this when the power was out and I had no choice but to use them. No way to get Katy inside the engineering systems unless the systems were up.

The manual controls would have seemed more at home on a sailing ship of centuries ago, and I might have felt like a pirate if it hadn’t been for my legs floating out behind me. I needed magnetic ship boots but didn’t have any, which meant I had to brace my feet and one hand against the metal brackets for the manual replacement gear and jerk the meter-long lever downward.

The ruined power coupling looked like a two-meter spool of thread soaked in gasoline and set on fire, and when the lever locked downward, the charred and blackened cylinder popped out of its brackets and pinwheeled away, leaving a cloud of black dust behind it. The other I had to wrestle into place by hand, and the superconductive fiber felt as soft as down feathers under my hand, which was weird as shit because it still massed at well over three hundred kilos.

Getting the thing lined up with the spindles and contacts was a delicate procedure, one that Katy and the memories of a dozen engineers had to guide me through, one that took nearly thirty endless seconds. Once it was in line, all that was left was to lock the brackets at the top and bottom, then push across the thirty meters back to the main control panels.

The main lighting had died with the central power conduit, but emergency lamps had flashed on and I’d barely noticed thanks to my lens implants, but it became obvious now by how brightly the emergency message glowed in the main display.

PLEASE PUSH MANUAL RESET.

It even included a handy-dandy arrow pointing downward at the physical switch below. So very analog. Engineers were an atavistic, old-fashioned lot, and I was sure it made them happy just to have the thing, to run practice drills with it. I’d never seen one live and in person before that very moment, and I wondered how many people ever got to throw one in the course of their careers.

They all would have been so jealous of me, but all I cared about was the lights coming back on and the readings in the main display flickering back to life. The gravity came back almost immediately and I fell into a crouch in front of the main control panel, hand hovering above it, waiting for the flashing yellow warning lights to turn to steady green.

“Now,” Katy told me, but I’d already slapped my palm down on the physical interface.

I felt nothing, of course, because Katy did all the hard work, but the data streamed across my vision, showing me the details of the process, both what she actually did and what the bridge crew saw. Katy wormed her way into the control systems, and as she did, the sensor data spread out before my eyes like a road map.

The lines of the Orion streaked across my vision, delta-winged and unmistakable in her sensor signature as she danced with the other lighter just out of weapons range. The crew of the SID ship wasn’t as amateurish as I’d hoped, realizing their advantage over the Wraith-class interceptor and pressing it with admirable boldness. Raw power, range, and armor, although that last might have been an illusion they assumed was reality, given the upgrades Raphael had outfitted his ship with.

All the SID captain had to do was keep his nose between him and the Orion, make sure she couldn’t approach from the flank, and the lighter’s bigger reactor and better range would win in the end, unless the interceptor ran. Which Cas and Raph couldn’t afford to do. They thought I was down on the moon, and they knew if they landed there before disabling the lighters, they’d get picked off in orbit long before they could reach the Tachyon Interface.

“All right, I’m in,” Katy announced. “Time for a little reactor false alarm.”

I’d never heard the klaxon for a reactor leak, never even trained for one. On a Wraith, that occurrence would have been almost instantly fatal and there’d been no reason to train for it. My ears were retroactively grateful for the missing experience because the shrill, screeching alarm was something I never wanted to hear again.

So loud and raucous was the sound, I almost didn’t notice Bjornson limp into the engineering compartment, face twisted in discomfort from the violent boost.

“What the fuck?” he blurted, shoving me out of the way as his fingers flew over the controls.

He’s not going to find anything, is he?

“Yeah,” Katy told me. “He’s going to find a humungous, deadly reactor leak because that’s what the computer’s going to show him.”

“Anders, what the hell did you do?” Bjornson demanded, eyes flickering across the readout.

“I just replaced the blown routing module,” I told him, affecting a plaintive whine, “and rebooted, just like you’re supposed to. With everything down, the system wasn’t showing the leak until after I brought it back up.”

That was what the scans would show him. The question was, would he believe it?

“Engineering,” the bridge called, the same harried voice I’d heard before, and I wondered if it was the captain. He sounded young for a starship captain. “What’s the situation? Is this something you can fix?”

“Negative,” Bjornson answered without hesitation. “This is plasma core breach. We’ve lost containment and the safeties were damaged by enemy fire. She won’t shut down. We have to abandon ship.”

“Goddammit,” the bridge officer snapped. “All right, get your people to the escape pods right now. We’re evacuating.”

“Copy that, bridge. Engineering heading to the escape pods.” The older man gave me a hopeless, hound-dog look and shook his head. “Come on, Anders, you have to go with us.”

“I’m heading for the hangar bay,” I told him, gesturing urgently back in the direction where I’d left Corporal Mangler and a half a dozen dead bodies. “I need to get out on my shuttle—I’ll take the security guys out with me in my bird. You guys go ahead without me.”

Bjornson threw up his hands and ran out of the compartment.

“It’s your funeral,” he threw over his shoulder at me, a parting shot.

“It just might be,” I murmured. Katy, wait one minute and then launch the shuttle. Wouldn’t want to break my promise to the medic.

“You big softy.”

It’s not just because I gave him my word. I also want the engineering crew to tell the command staff that all the security guys are on the shuttle so they won’t hesitate to abandon ship. You got that officer’s voice print and comm frequency back on the lander—you think you can fake a call from him?

“On it.” She chuckled. “Maybe you’re not as stupid as you look.”

That’s what my mother used to tell me. Maybe. It was possible.

Paranoid, feeling very exposed, and convinced that Katy didn’t need me to maintain physical contact anymore, I moved away from the control panel and took up a spot beside the hatchway. I’d been forced to leave my rifle behind in order to pass for a crewmember, but I still had the handgun and I held it at my side, waiting, hoping no one would play Good Samaritan and come back for one more check to make sure the new guy had gotten off the boat.

Seconds crawled by, and I made a good head start on grinding my teeth down a few millimeters as I tried to urge the crew into their escape pods with sheer willpower and good wishes.

“Relax,” Katy urged. “They’re moving.”

“Not fast enough,” I said, seeing the tactical feed from the bridge inside my head. The Orion had given up on the useless, circling arc around the SID lighter and decided to make a run at her. The drive flared as the Wraith interceptor leapt forward at what had to be nearly ten gravities, close to blackout boost even for an Archangel. “Cas and Raph are about to do something fucking stupid, and I can’t help them stuck here in Engineering.”

“First pods are ejecting,” Katy reported, giving me a feed from the external hull cameras, showing the capsules shooting free of the launch station just fore of the drives.

“That’s your friends from Engineering. I’m launching the shuttle now… and sending that I’m-okay-you’re-okay message to the captain.”

I tapped the barrel of the Gauss pistol against the bulkhead, waiting. Just give me the damned word…

“The bridge crew is sealing up their pods now. Move.”

I didn’t need her to tell me twice, nor did I need to look up the directions. I’d studied them for the last few minutes, finding the quickest way from here to the bridge. The lighter was still spare on the interior. Even though it had been specially built for the SID, the specs were a converted freighter design, and if they’d switched the cargo holds to the space for a larger reactor and weapons systems, they hadn’t bothered with more crew quarters or living area. No elevators, no central transportation hub like the insystem cargo ships, just stairs, which was convenient, since I didn’t want to have to sit in an elevator or climb down a ladder.

Taking the stairs four at a time, I raced upward against the artificial gravity, abandoning caution for speed, trusting Katy’s word that the ship was empty. Though I still kept the pistol in my hand, just in case. The Berrios reminded me of the Patrol ship I’d stolen, haunting and hollow, though lacking the unnatural quiet of that vessel because Katy hadn’t yet bothered to shut off the wail of the reactor leak warning.

I’d no sooner had the thought than the warbling siren cut off, leaving me sprinting in silence.

“The last of the pods are gone,” Katy told me. “I’m powering the reactor back up.”

The thump of my boots on the deck sounded obscenely loud in the sudden stillness, echoing up and down the corridors, but not for long. There was the bridge. Small for a ship this size, barely large enough to be called a bridge rather than a cockpit, I had to duck to enter it. Seats for the helm officer—a pilot, really, if you asked me—navigator, tactical, and command. I shoved my pistol back into its holster and leapt into the pilot’s chair, tapping the screens back to life.

Run tactical through this station, I told Katy and she complied, the virtual controls shifting to include the triggers for the ship’s weapons.

She had coilgun turrets of course, but those wouldn’t be of any use. The only one that interested me was the single neutron cannon mounted along the ventral spine of the ship, the only thing that could penetrate the SID lighter’s shields. The reactor was up and running and I fed the gun power at the same time as the drive, opening it up to one gravity, kicking us into motion again.

“Get me on the horn with the Orion,” I told Katy, not willing to take my attention off tactical and navigation long enough to mess with the comms. “We need to let them know I’m here.”

I don’t know what came first, the warning from Katy or the warning from my implant sensors and the Machine, but I knew the instant the storage cabinet door at the back of the bridge popped open. The man inside had the old-yet-young face of a veteran, someone who’d been recruited before the war and gone through the anti-aging treatments courtesy of the military. I judged him as a vet for the confident way he held the handgun, the natural stance… and the lack of flop sweat.

“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” he growled, “but you’re not taking my ship.”

“Yours, huh?” I asked, looking over my shoulder at him. “I guess that would make you captain…?”

“Nowicki,” he told me, glowering. “Francis Nowicki, formerly of the Coalition Space Fleet. I faced down the worst the Southwind had to offer, which means you don’t scare me, buddy.”

“Brent Parthet,” I told him. “Captain Brent Parthet, Intelligence. Archangels. So maybe I should scare you.”

Nowicki didn’t falter, though I saw a muscle twitch in his cheek.

“The Archangels are myths.”

“I prefer to think of myself as a legend. But why else would your employers be bringing me here as a prisoner? How else do you think I got you off your ship?” I shrugged. “Well, most of you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he snapped. “Get your hands away from the controls and stand up.”

The gun was way out of reach and there was no way I could clear my safety harness in time to reach him before he shot me. Luckily, though, I had a friend.

Katy, cut the artificial gravity and increase boost to four gs.

It hurt, the sudden gravity twisting me around, but at least I had the safety harness and a cushioned acceleration couch. Captain what’s-his-name had the rear bulkhead of the bridge, and it was fairly unforgiving. He hit it with a thump like a sack of potatoes and I didn’t let up. Couldn’t. I had to get to Cas and the others.

Comms, I repeated to Katy. Patch me through to comms using my implant link.

Nowicki was still conscious, which wasn’t surprising… unlike the engineers, he was trained to deal with high-g accelerations. But he couldn’t move and he couldn’t retrieve the gun he’d dropped when he hit, and that was the only important thing.

“You’re on, Brent,” Katy told me.

Orion, I transmitted, using my link through the lighter’s comms, this is Parthet. Do you copy?

Please, please, please copy…

“Brent, is that really you?” Raph asked. His voice showed no sign of the strain from the heavy boost the Orion was under, but then it wouldn’t, since he wasn’t speaking with lungs or voice, just his thoughts, the way I was.

I’m in the other SID ship and I have control of it. Wait until the last second, just after you’re in range, and then break forty-five degrees. I’ll come in and attack from the flank.

“You do know we were supposed to come rescue you, bud?”

Yeah, we’ll work on your timing later. Just peel off and let me fake them out.

“You can’t do this,” Nowicki groaned. It was impressive he could speak with that much pressure. “Don’t hurt them.”

“I did the best I could not to hurt you,” I reminded him, straining the words out. “But you were too big of a Billy Badass to abandon the ship the way you were supposed to. I can’t let your friends kill my friends.”

“They’re doing their duty! They’re following orders.”

“I don’t know how much you know about history, Captain, but just following orders has never been a great defense against war crimes.”

“What war crimes?” he croaked, the pressure finally starting to get to him.

“Like killing my wife and son,” I growled. “Like collaborating with the Southwind Evolutionists to start the fucking war. Captain, you may not be a bad guy, but you work for bad guys… and so do your friends.”

“Don’t… kill them.”

His head went slack. He’d passed out.

I respected his guts and his honor. But I wasn’t going to be able to respect his wishes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Helming the lighter was a lot different than flying a Wraith Intercept, more like the cargo carrier it was based on. Powerful but sluggish, it took nearly three times as long to maneuver as a smaller military ship even on a good day. Today was not a good day.

Why is this fucking thing so hard to turn? I asked Katy, but the yellow warning lights on the helm screen told the story before she answered.

“The port maneuvering thrusters took damage from the Orion. That was the shot that overloaded the shields and took out the main power relay in the first place. She’s steering like a drunken whale, but there’s nothing we can do about it short of a repair yard.”

I didn’t try to answer that because there was nothing to say to that. I was stuck in an armed cargo barge and would have to make the best of it. The good thing was, though, the bad guys wouldn’t know I was coming.

“The SID lighter is hailing you,” Katy informed me, like some ill-tempered trickster god from ancient myth had heard me and decided that, yes, things could be a bit worse.

Fuck. Superimpose Nowicki’s face and voice over mine and let me reply.

“Done. You’re on the main screen.”

Not all of the main screen. Most of it was a combined sensor, optical and computer simulation of the battle going on and the space around it. All of it dominated by the face of that vengeful titan, the gas giant, watching this little mortal drama unfold. Raph had listened to me, at least, and slanted off just shy of cannon range. He would have been fucked if the lighters had anti-ship missiles, but they weren’t designed for something like this, not for taking on military craft.

And on a small corner of the display was the image of a woman, tall and statuesque, with dark hair tied into a bun.

“Francis, I need you to circle around to thirty-eight degrees and cut them off. We don’t have the maneuvering power to do it ourselves.”

“Will do,” I told her, feeling… guilty. Though I didn’t know why. They were SDI, trying to rip my mind apart, trying to kill my friends and take over the government.

But they were also just people who’d taken a job and didn’t know what their bosses were doing.

“We could just break off and let them go,” I suggested. “I think they’ll Interface if we let them go.”

“Are you nuts, Francis?” the woman asked, face screwing up in confusion. “They’re traitors and bandits and it’s our job to take them out.”

“We’ll be in firing position in one minute, Brent,” Katy told me. “Just keep her talking and we should get two shots off before we reach minimum Interface distance from that big honking gas giant.”

“Look…” I didn’t know her name and didn’t have time to send Katy off on a goose chase through the ship’s records to find it. “… Captain, the Berrios is damaged. I can’t maneuver quickly enough to box the bandit in. We should let her go.”

“Captain?” Now she just seemed angry. “Since when you do you call me captain, Francis? And since when do you question orders?”

Oh, fuck it. Katy, get rid of the mask and put me on.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

You never used to question me before you developed a personality.

“Oh, fine.”

I knew she’d done it because the female captain’s face went slack as if she’d been struck. I’d pulled back the boost to one gravity so I could talk to her, and I enjoyed a deep breath before I spoke.

“I’m Brent Parthet,” I told her. “I’m in control of this ship and I’m not going to let you fire on my friends. You have two choices—either disengage and let us go, or we’ll have to get past you another way. You can’t take us both on… and I don’t want to have to kill you. You’re just doing your job.” I motioned back at Nowicki, who was just coming around. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to piss off your friend Francis here. He seems like a good guy.”

“Let him go,” she said tautly. “You have to let him go.”

“I’ll do better than that,” I offered. “I’ll let him have his ship back… as long as I’m not on it. Cut your drives and I’ll get off this piece of junk and be out of your hair.”

“Why would you do that?” she asked, shaking her head.

“Yeah, bud,” Raph put in, apparently piggybacking on the transmission. “Why would you do that? They’re SID!”

“Just trust me on this,” I told him. “And get ready to pick me up.”

“Melanie,” Nowicki croaked, slowly clambering to his feet. “Do it. Back off and let him go.”

“Are you sure about this, Francis?” she asked, shaking her head. “We could both be in some pretty deep shit if we do this.”

“Deeper than losing both our ships? Do it.”

The woman gritted her teeth and nodded.

“Helm, cut the drives. Tactical, power down the weapons.” Her eyes locked on mine. “If you’re lying to me, Parthet…”

I unstrapped from the seat and paused in the hatchway beside Nowicki.

“I know you’re not part of this, Captain. I know you think you’re just doing your duty. But you’re part of something bigger and dirtier than you think. And it’s gonna come down. It’s up to you if it takes you with it.” I nodded back at the screen. “Or your friend Melanie.”

“What the hell do you think I could do about it?” the man asked as I stepped by him and picked his pistol up off the deck.

“Every revolution starts with one good man who sees the right thing and decides to do it.” I stripped the magazine out of his weapon and tossed it aside before handing the gun over to him. “Be the one good man.”

He took the gun, and I thought for a second he might make a dive for the magazine, but instead he just shoved the weapon into its holster. The escape pod bay for the command crew was just through the passage to the bridge. Two capsules, and one was already gone, the seal slid shut over where it had been. I touched the access plate over the second and the lock hissed open, revealing the interior of the tiny pod, small enough that it might hold four people if they were close friends.

“It doesn’t bother you that I might go back on our deal?” Nowicki asked as I climbed through the hatch. It was claustrophobic inside the tiny space, cramped enough that I couldn’t straighten up and had to lean over to see the man. “That I might open fire on your escape pod after you eject?”

“I believe,” I told him, my hand on the lever to shut the hatch, “that you’re a good man.”

A sharp yank sealed me inside with a metallic clang.

Don’t release the ship’s controls until I’m on board the Orion, I said to Katy.

“Of course. One of us has to act intelligent, even if it’s artificial.”

The launch controls were purely physical, a loop mounted just inside the hatch. Grabbing it with both hands, I pulled it sharply and the pod separated with a thunderous bang of exploding bolts. Thrust pushed me back into the seat hard enough to squeeze the air out of my chest, and as the capsule shot out of the hull on a tiny, solid-rocket booster, a display lit up on the fuselage opposite where I sat, an optical-only image of the space outside.

The Berrios shrank in the camera view, a collection of gleaming silver cylinders marred by the blackened scar across her rear flank. She watched in silence as I left her, falling away as if on a journey into the arms of the orange-and-white titan below. Until another shape crossed in front of the sullen god. Delta-winged and familiar, one I’d never thought I’d see again.

“Hang on, bud,” Raph said. “We’ve got you.”

I couldn’t see the magnetic grapples that attached to the exterior of the pod, but I sure as hell felt them. The capsule jerked to a halt, throwing me against the safety restraints, and the images outside changed their speed and direction of motion as the Orion tugged me in close, right up against her hull.

Reality fled and the image in that tiny display disappeared along with it, replaced by the utter darkness of the Interface. I collapsed back against the thin padding of the capsule’s acceleration couch and let out a shuddering breath.

I’d made it. I was alive. The sheer unlikeliness of the eventuality hit me between the eyes like a sledgehammer, a rug jerked out from beneath me after days of a rock-solid conviction that I’d either die trying to escape or spend the rest of my life rotting half-conscious in a cell underground on some planet only a handful of people even knew existed.

The pod moved again, gentler this time, the softer, guiding touch of the Orion’s cargo arms. The capsule rotated clockwise and the nothingness of the Interface was replaced by the circle of the Wraith’s utility airlock mating with the escape pod’s hatch. A final thump signaled the universal docking collar fastening around the rim of the hatch, and much faster than I’d expected, the seal finalized and a green light flashed at the hatch, assuring me there was breathable atmosphere on the other side.

The control to open the hatch on my side hung above my head now, and when I reached up to activate it, my hand trembled. Maybe just the post-adrenaline shakes, long delayed and built up over a half a dozen fights… or maybe, along with the realization that I was going to live came another. The awareness that I’d made a lot of promises the last few days, both to myself and to people who were, ostensibly, my enemies, but who might also become my allies. Promises that I’d have to keep now that I’d made it. It was always so much easier to promise that sort of thing when you thought you were going to die.

I punched the switch and the hatch dropped inward.

Riva Powell reached through, offering me a hand and a quavering smile.

“I thought you’d run out on me, farm boy,” she said, the words casual and tough but the break in her voice telling me the real story.

I let her pull me through the docking umbilical and followed the pull into her arms, pressing her to me, glorying in the feel of her warm softness, in the reality of her. I pulled back after holding her forever, leaned my forehead against hers, meeting her gaze with my own.

“Would it be crazy,” I asked her softly, “if I told you I love you?”

“Not as crazy as if I said I love you too,” she whispered. “But it might just be the stress talking. You should wait a little while and tell me again, just to be sure.”

I nodded and kissed her. She was being sensible, of course, was probably right.

But I didn’t think I was going to change my mind.

“You gotta tell me how any of this makes any sense,” Raphael said, holding his head in his hands. “You had the fucking deputy director of the SID in your hands, helpless, and not only did you not kill her, you didn’t even take her prisoner? You had control of an SID lighter, and between you and the Orion we could have blown up one and taken the other as salvage, and instead you make a deal and let them have the ship back? Did all that time in virtual interrogation break your brain?”

I laughed, too caught up in savoring the taste of the coffee and the feel of my arm around Riva to take offense. Willwood didn’t laugh, glaring at Raph, though the absurdity of squeezing his bulk into the narrow, fold-down galley chair took away from the impact of his threatening visage.

“I have been where Brent Parthet was,” he growled. “It is nothing to be made light of. I am surprised you came out of it as stable and functional as you are, Brent.”

“I wasn’t in the cyber-gulag as long as you were, Willwood,” I told him. “And…” I tapped the side of my head. “I had some help.”

“Ah, you hear that, Tommy?” Raph asked, looking aside. “He’s finally figured out what an asset having an intrusive, nosy neurosynth is. Yes, of course I know, but I have a couple decades of experience.” His gaze settled back on me, canny, knowing. “Did it disassociate?”

I looked down at the deck, didn’t answer immediately.

Katy?

No reply.

“She did, for a while,” I admitted. “But I think she’s gone back to…” I laughed. “I was about to say normal. I don’t think that’s quite the right word for one of us.” Frowning, I gestured around us. “Forget the questionable decisions I made for a second. Why the hell would you come out here with just the three of you? I distinctly remember saying something about there being a couple platoons of SAU commandos down there and how you should bring enough forces for a fight. Where the hell’s Cas? Yanto? Maybe the Havok armor?”

“Well, things got… complicated after you got yourself taken.” Raph moaned softly. “Yanto was on a recruiting run out at Fergus but the Patrol got wind of it. He had to run and his ship was damaged, Cas had to head out to pick him up. They were gone when the message came through, and honestly, I didn’t want to even take Powell here but she insisted, and who am I to tell someone they can’t do something stupid and suicidal?”

“I wasn’t going to let you get away that easy,” Riva told me, digging an elbow into my ribs.

“Now, it’s your turn, Brent,” Raph said. “Don’t think just because I have a little cybernetic dissociative identity disorder that I forget my own questions. Why did you let them go? They’re SID… they’re the enemy.”

“I’m not so sure. When Didio saw the memory of… Sylvanus, she was genuinely surprised. I don’t think she believed me before that, and I damned sure don’t think she knew about the Evolutionists. She’s a spook and her hands are damned sure not clean, but she’s also a patriot. She thinks she’s working for the best interests of the Coalition. I gave her the address to a dead drop and told her if she found out anything about Rhule’s plan to get the election canceled, that she needed to tell us, give us a chance to stop it.”

“And you expect her to actually do it?” Raph goggled at me, shaking his head. “I know you were born at night, but were you born last night? She’s SID! Do you think we can trust her?”

“I don’t have to trust her,” I said, shrugging. “She doesn’t know anything more than she knew already, and she can either tell us nothing or maybe help us. If she doesn’t, what did we lose?”

“A chance to kill a high-up in the SID?”

“And you don’t think they’d just replace her with someone who is part of their little cabal?” I spread my hands. “This isn’t like a criminal cartel, Raph. This is the government. You can’t kill the underbosses and take over the operations. You have to get people inside who want to do the right thing. If we turn down chances to do that, then we really will be reduced to starting a civil war, to killing millions of innocent people. I made a judgement call. Three judgement calls. We’ll see if they pan out.”

“Cast your bread upon the water,” Riva said, grabbing my hand and squeezing it. “It’ll come back to us ten-fold.”

“We’ll see. Right now, I just want to sleep for a week.” I closed my eyes. “And not dream.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lyonesse still smelled, but I didn’t feel safe there.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to feel safe anywhere now. Not after what Rhule had told us. New recruits still trained in the auditoriums or did marksmanship training on the high ground, people still passed me in the hallways and nodded their greetings, but it had taken on a new air since we’d arrived a few days ago.

Now, everything had taken on an air of impermanence that I couldn’t shake.

“Are you listening?”

I looked over at Riva, blinking in confusion.

“Sorry, I was… distracted.”

I looked around, realized I hadn’t been paying attention to where we were walking since we’d left the unarmed combat training class in the auditorium. That didn’t usually happen to me. We’d gone past the makeshift offices Cas and I had set up, all the way to the armory. Four guards in light armor came to attention as we approached, their rifles at present arms. This and the spaceport were the only things we bothered to set sentries on, the only things worth stealing or tampering with. Through the open doors, the vetted technicians maintained the weapons we’d bought and stolen, and in the corner was the Havok. We needed more of those, but that wouldn’t happen until we had more ships and more time… or more money.

I nodded to the guards and they relaxed as we passed.

“You’ve been distracted ever since we got back here,” Riva said once they were out of earshot. “What is it?”

“Everything seems different since we came back. I feel like I’m… walking on a razor’s edge. Like we’re running out of time. This plan Rhule was talking about, if he was telling the truth, then it’s happening right now. The pieces have to be in place, the plans in motion. And we’re just sitting here. Hell, Cas isn’t even back yet. For all we know, they could be sitting in a cell somewhere… or dead. I should be doing something.”

“You have been doing something,” she reminded me. “We all have. We’ve been processing new recruits, vetting them for security, overseeing training… shit, we’ve been doing just about everything except washing the damned dishes.” She leaned in close and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ve been lucky to drag you to bed at night. There’s nothing else we can do. Raph put feelers out with his contacts, but this isn’t the sort of thing that a bunch of Rogue World cartel types are going to know much about.”

“You’re right,” I admitted, “but I don’t have to like it.”

“How would you like some lunch then? It’s nearly noon and I’m starving.”

“Yeah, but we have to get Raph first,” I said. “I promised Tommy I’d make sure he ate. Since he started looking for intel on the plot, he forgets to go to lunch.”

“You promised… Tommy?” She stopped in mid-step and stared at me with her head tilted to the side.

“Well, through Raph. Tommy bugged him until he passed it on to me.”

We had to turn around to head back to the mess hall, and if anyone had been paying attention, they probably would have thought I was wandering aimlessly.

“Do you miss Katy?” Riva asked. “I mean, miss talking to her?”

“A little. Mostly because she felt like my sister. But it wouldn’t have been very convenient having my sister inside my head while we were…” I motioned. “You know.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, laughing. “I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe she’ll come back if you need her.”

“Brent,” Raph called over my implant link. “We have an Interface. Cas is back with Yanto.”

“Well, thank God,” I sighed. At Riva’s curious glance, I explained. “Cas and Yanto are back.” That part I didn’t transmit.

“They lost the ship and the recruits scattered,” Raph told me. “But there’s something more important. They checked the dead drop. Your friend came through.”

“What did she say?” I asked, nearly running into the back of a maintenance cart until Riva grabbed my arm.

“He said he’d rather wait until they landed and tell us in person. And in private.”

I glanced at Riva, frowning.

“How private?”

“You, me, Yanto, Riva, and Willwood,” Raph said. “No one else.”

“Tell him to meet us in my office when they’re down.” I paused. “Then head to the mess hall. If you don’t grab a bite before they land, Tommy’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

“The fuckers were tipped off,” Yanto said, pacing the office from one end of my desk to the other.

It wasn’t much, as offices went, but it was the first one I’d ever had and I’d done my best to clean it up. I didn’t have any photo cubes or an “I love me” wall like a typical military officer, but someone had scrounged up a Coalition flag somewhere and I’d pinned it to the wall behind my desk.

“They were waiting for me at the port when I brought the rental back with the new recruits. The cops didn’t even try to go after them, just made a beeline straight for me.” He punched his fist into his palm. “Fuckers shot me, Brent. They killed my flight crew and I guess they boarded our transport in orbit.”

“Lucky for him,” Cas put in, seated in a chair against the wall across from me, his feet flat on the floor like he expected to have to run at any second, “we had contacts on Fergus who took him in, got him patched up.”

“I don’t like being in a biomodule,” Yanto groused, hand going to his gut by reflex. I guessed that was where he’d taken the hit. “It’s against my religion. And that’s twice I’ve had to do it since I met you.”

“I got him out, no problem,” Cas added. “But I think we have to consider that our system is compromised. The Patrol or the SID or somebody is watching for our recruiting calls. I don’t think Yanto should go out again.”

“Agreed,” I said, impatient to get to the important part of the meeting but not wanting to make it sound like I considered what had happened to Yanto unimportant. “And I guess we’d better go through the people who are already here again too. There’s no way for a spy to send a signal out from here without us finding out, but the Patrol or whoever still could have moles in position.”

“I’ll get on that,” Raph promised, still brushing crumbs out of his beard from lunch. “Right after I sort through the latest intelligence reports from my sources. Been getting a lot of chatter that something’s going on with the Southwind worlds.” Willwood’s ears pricked up at that and Raph made a helpless gesture. “Nothing definitive, just that the usual smugglers and black marketeers haven’t been able to run the blockades around Kali and the other Southwind reservations the last couple weeks.”

“What’s in the message, Cas?” I wanted to know. “What did she say?”

“I don’t know,” he said with an expression like he’d bit into a lemon. “The paranoid bitch put it in a self-erasing code and wrapped the whole thing in biometric security. Only you can play the message, and after the one play it’s gone. You could record it, but there’d be no evidence of who sent it. This Didio woman is smart.”

“Pull it up on my desk console,” I told him.

It was a risk playing it aloud. If anyone was spying on us here, they’d know what we knew. But everyone in this office deserved to see it. If I couldn’t trust the people in this room, then there was no one I could trust.

The message security came up on the holographic projection embedded in the desktop, demanding my DNA signature and warning that the recording would erase after one play, as Cas had said. I pressed a thumb to the reader in the console and a double-helix unspooled in the display over and over until, finally, the image of Valentine Didio filled the screen.

“I can’t believe I’m actually doing this, Parthet,” she sighed, brushing hair out of eyes sunken with exhaustion. “I can’t believe I stuck my neck out for you. I can’t believe I took your word that one of my oldest friends, Ethan Rhule, was a traitor. And most of all, I can’t believe you were right.”

Didio was in a much nicer office than mine, though similarly lacking in personality, and as she spoke she walked across to a small liquor cabinet and poured herself something that might have been bourbon, taking a slug of it before she went on as if she had to fortify her courage.

“I’ll probably wind up disappeared just for asking the questions I asked, but I got the answers. Ethan was there on Kali, back before the war. There’s no record of what was said or done, but he met with the Evolutionists, just like you said.” She opened her mouth, closed it again, then took another drink. “There’s some evidence that the Interface missiles that took out Orbital Prime came from an SID black site, a world with no official name, not even a catalog number. We call it the Hole, and no one will admit to ever having been there. Even among my circles, it’s barely above a rumor.” Didio shook her head as if trying to free herself from the last vestiges of a nightmare that lingered on after she’d woken up. “Once I found that… I began putting out feelers. Carefully. I can’t say for sure this has to do with this scheme to cancel the Parliamentary elections, but there are operations going on in Southwind space. More than usual, like they’re setting up something big.”

“Have they not inflicted enough on my people?” Willwood moaned, and I glanced sharply at him, worried his interruption might trigger an early self-deletion, but Didio went on as if the software had taken no notice.

“This all points to a false flag. There’s going to be an attack somewhere and they—whoever they are—will blame it on the Southwind. They’re going to start another war, Brent. And the only way to get that past the public and the Parliament is if the trigger is so bad, no one could even think about getting in the way.” She finished the glass and set it down on her desk with a thump I heard through the recording. “There’s not much more I could find, not without knocking on my boss’ door and asking him if he was part of a plot to take over the government. But I’ve been keeping track of our SAU teams, contractors, anyone we might use for operations like this. Ethan…” a spasm of pain passed across her face. “Ethan’s private security contracting force has been subcontracted through a series of cut-outs by the Consortium and loaned out to a local firm servicing asteroid mines at Orbital One. That firm is a cover for the SID. This isn’t intelligence analysis here, Parthet, just a wild-ass guess… but I’m going to say you need to be looking at Orbital One.” She wiped something from her eyes. “I wish I could do more, but with something like this, I’m being watched more carefully than you would be. I hope I’m right about you.” Her hand hovered over a control just off camera. “And I hope you’re not too late.”

The display went dark for a half-second before a warning streamed across it that the file had been corrupted and could no longer be read. Utter silence filled the office until Riva broke it.

“Desktop,” she said to the voice controls for the holographic display, “show me Orbital One.”

We’d all seen the Orbitals before, of course. I’d been to most of them during the war. Orbital Prime had been the largest and the oldest, one of the first floating cities constructed when Earth had been in her final death throes. Prime had begun life as a single cylinder, kilometers long, spun for centrifugal gravity before the invention of grav plates. Once the functionality of rotation had no longer been needed, the rest of the station had sprung tumors of construction, globes and smaller cylinders and rings, until the entire thing had resembled some abstract sculpture. It was gone now, burned and broken wreckage trapped in one of the Lagrangian points between the ruined Earth and her scarred and shattered Moon.

With the Earth unlivable and the moon too dangerous to even scavenge for minerals, there’d been no reason to build more orbital cities in the solar system. The next step had been the closest system to Earth, Alpha Centauri. The worlds there had been uninhabitable at first, until the terraformers had gotten their hands on them and, centuries later, produced Halcyon and Lucida. But in those centuries of waiting, three more orbital cities had been constructed in advantageous positions in the Proxima and Alpha Centauri A and B systems. Orbital One through Three. Not the most original naming convention, but it had set a trend. When humanity moved into a new system, the Orbitals came first, then the worlds would be terraformed.

Until the Southwind had been created, of course, and the terraforming process shortened by a couple hundred years. And maybe that had been what had started the problems, when the Consortium couldn’t control things as easily as they could when everyone had been crammed into an artificial world.

These new Orbitals were nothing like Prime. Built around the grav plates, Interface heat pumps, and fusion power, there was no need for them to be spun for gravity, no need for solar collectors, no need for giant cooling vanes to rid themselves of waste heat. Each had its own particular aesthetic, and Prime was the first. More than anything else, it resembled crystals growing in a chemical matrix in a lab, or snowflakes under a microscope. Multi-layered fractals, the larger ones devoted to industrial production, the smaller layers built for habitation.

“Beautiful,” Riva said, peering into the projection as if she could see the looming threat in the details.

“If you like that kind of thing,” I said with a shrug. “I prefer a little nature in my nature.”

“Desktop,” Riva asked, “how many people are on Orbital One?”

“It is impossible to give a precise number,” the automated subroutine replied, “due to the constant arrival and departure of transient visitors, industrial crews, Consortium executives, Coalition government officials, and tourists. However, the permanent population as of two months ago was two point three billion.”

“They wouldn’t,” Yanto said, shaking his head. “They couldn’t. How much of the Consortium is based on Orbital One? How many thousands of executives do they have stationed there? It would kill their own economy.”

“You know what else is on Orbital One?” Raph asked, raising an eyebrow at the former Marine. “The Parliament.” He pointed to the center of the fractal growth pattern, to one of the thickest rings. “They’ll be in session for the next three months.”

“But not the Consortium Headquarters,” Cas put in. His eyes were hooded, focused on something far away, not in the room not in the projection. “Since the war, they’ve been moving their bases of operation planetside. Down to Halcyon. The official story is, the destruction of Prime demonstrated the vulnerability of artificial habitats.” He looked up, his gaze suddenly focused. “If you wanted to start a war and dissolve the civilian government, I couldn’t think of a better way.”

“They would slaughter their own,” Willwood said in an awed whisper, “and then finish their genocide of my people? For what?”

“Power and money,” Cas said, shaking his head as if it were obvious.

“They have both of those already,” Yanto protested. “More than any human in history.”

“And yet it’s never enough. It never will be.”

“Aren’t we ignoring the elephant in the room here?” Raph asked, snorting a humorless laugh. “That she’s lying? That this is a trap? I mean, she’s the deputy director. You don’t get to that level in the SID without being a real scumbag. And if we set foot on Orbital One… well, let’s just say, this isn’t the Rogue Worlds. Best covers we could make, we’d still be popped in a heartbeat. This stinks of a setup.”

“That is,” I admitted, “a possibility. But if it’s a setup, it’s a damned good one. Because she knows we can’t stay away.”

Rising from behind the desk, I ran a finger through the image of the largest man-made structure in the history of the universe. The projection wavered and flickered at my touch.

“Raph, put me together as good of a cover identity as you can. I’m going to Orbital One.”

Archangel continues in Ascending

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Also in series:

Archangel

The Fallen

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