Dark Swarm
"Not many humans who have ever lived can lay claim to saving a trillion lives."
(Part 4 of “The Misfits” series)
After a gunfight, it was rare for Transom to be left without a course of action. There was usually a fleeing enemy group to track, some intelligence to gather from either the dead or the near-dead, or a departure. This firefight was an aberration. He hadn’t lost, but to be toe-to-toe with a target and have him slip away, Transom didn’t like the feeling. There wasn’t even a blood trail to follow. Then there were those backstabbing misfits from the Letters, who’d left him hanging in the middle of the firefight and not only hadn’t had the courtesy to cover him, they’d left him stranded on the outpost and had the audacity to tell him to calm down when he let them know what he thought about it. Transom was so furious he didn’t know which angle it was even coming from—letting Keel get away, failing to see the betrayal coming, failing in a mission. He was so mad he couldn’t even think straight.
He traced and retraced the final steps of the pursuit—the last place he’d definitively seen the guy. If he’d been carrying urban gear, he could have traced the guy’s path by the wear of his shoes on the pavement—if that wizard even wore a shoe that shed in microtraces. But Transom didn’t have the right gear. He didn’t even have an infrared scope. He’d practically come in naked. A bolt pistol, a knife, a civilian suit. Whatever trail had existed was growing colder with each second the wizard moved further off. Transom had little doubt he’d see Braylon Keel’s ship lift off soon, either from a makeshift hangar in one of the warehouses or a blind out on the plain.
Transom spent about fifteen minutes cursing and pacing through the alleyway where he’d lost Keel before heading up to a rooftop to scan the desert on the chance he might spot the wizard fleeing into the obscurity of the little moon’s landscape. He stared at the horizon for nearly a half hour before deciding that even if Keel was out there, he’d already moved out of sight. Again, a scope would’ve been useful. That girl from the Letters, Leda—her tech eyes also would have been useful if she hadn’t collapsed in there, whatever the hell that had been. If it was an act, it was a hell of a convincing one. She’d looked terrified as she went out.
Transom passed back through the warehouse again, and after about ten minutes inspecting the area decided there’d been nothing there of value—at least that he could catch a hot trail from. If the Letters sent a team of investigators, maybe. That wasn’t his skillset.
He headed back to the rooming house. Along the way, he noticed people beginning to poke their heads back out. Enough time had passed that they were growing curious about the scene. He still hadn’t seen any evidence of a security force. They probably wanted to make sure he was gone before searching the area. A smart move on their part. They didn’t want to find him there, especially in the mood he was in.
He still had a signal from the Yankee-Chaos when he tried to connect. They just weren’t answering. So they were sitting up there in orbit, ignoring him. Infuriating.
Transom ordered dinner, and while he was waiting for it, he started thinking about where he’d gone wrong—personal debriefing. How had he allowed himself to be deceived on multiple fronts at the same time—by Keel, whoever he was, and by a bunch of busted-up retired war regulars. He had trusted his instincts about this place, had sensed the danger he’d walked into in that office with Leda. The failure, as he identified it now, was in failing to trust Shade, the informant who’d given them Keel. When he’d told Transom that there was a wizard involved, Transom had dismissed it as hyperbole, legend, rumor. He hadn’t taken it seriously for a second. That had been the mistake. When a man floating in an airlock tells you there’s a wizard, there’s probably a wizard, and you shouldn’t laugh it off as improbable. What that meant—wizard—he didn’t know, but he’d watched the guy vanish right in front of his face at least three times in that firefight, and he thought he’d hit him at least once, probably twice, yet there was no sign of blood, and the guy hadn’t so much as grimaced, just kept firing back at Transom. He should have listened to Shade. There was a wizard. That thought brought a smile to his face. He’d never killed a wizard before.
Clem Aballi had a devil of a time shaking the Etteran. Whoever he was, he was different. The guy’s instincts were almost supernatural, as though he could feel Aballi’s location with some other sense, because he sure couldn’t have heard him with his ears ringing from all the bolts blasting off the floors and walls of the warehouse. Aballi had finally ducked him in the alleyway behind the warehouse where the light was right. Then he walked into the desert, ducking into the low-lying areas as much as he could for safe measure.
“Warm up the ship, Kaudik,” Aballi said. “We’re screwing out of here fast.”
“Where are you?” his pilot’s voice came back in his earpiece.
“I’m on foot. I should be out to you in a half hour.”
“Want me to pick you up?”
“No,” Aballi said. “I can’t figure what they were doing walking in like that. Best I can figure they didn’t know what they were looking for. Either that or we’ll be flying into something worse the second we lift off. I saw at least one ship. A larger carrier—a busted old Letters transport, who knows how it’s outfitted, though. Best to keep our distance.”
“Roger that, boss. I’ll have the engine warm. Let me know if you reconsider.”
“Yeah, I’ll call you,” Aballi said, shaking his head.
Kaudik was a moron. As though he needed to be told to call for a ride if he needed one. He didn’t.
The Etteran had hit him—once in the upper left arm, once in the right leg, which hurt like a bastard with each step, and a glancing headshot. At least it felt like the headshot hadn’t struck solid. But that kind of damage was often tough to assess in the early stages. Clem Aballi kept limping along, wincing in pain even as the nanotech in his blood flooded the wounded areas, making their repairs. He could assess brain damage if there was any when he got to the ship. He had a fair amount to assess. Who the hell were these people after him? Near as he could tell, an Etteran special operator, and a badass one at that, and the girl? She was no Etteran. The ship was from the Letters, but she didn’t quite seem to be. He couldn’t place her, and even more puzzling had been her reaction to the nanotech he’d dropped on her. It should have been innocuous. He’d never seen anyone keel over like that—would have dropped right to the floor if the Etteran hadn’t kicked her across the room first. He needed to find out about that girl. And then there was the real question—who the hell were they working for? They could screw up everything.
The bolt in the leg was worse than he’d initially thought. The walk took nearly fifty minutes, and every other step had been agony, especially the first twenty minutes before the nanites had been able to expel the shrapnel far enough for him to pull it out himself. Even with the nanotech dampening out nerve endings, he was still feeling the hit. It was both a stroke of luck and his enhanced genetech that had kept that leg-shot from shattering the bone.
“I swear I’m going to frag that Etteran bastard,” Aballi said aloud, grimacing as he limped the final steps into his ship’s blind. “Let’s go Kaudik.”
Kaudik switched off the nanosheet that had encased the hull, obscuring their vessel like a camouflage blanket. He took off vertically, engaged the sublights, and slowly took them into orbit.
“Expecting company?” he said, as Aballi joined him on the flight deck.
“I think it’ll just be that Letters transport, but I don’t know for sure.”
“If it’s just the one, we might engage them, make sure they don’t have a story to tell?”
“No,” Aballi said. “Do what I told you. Get us out of here. Even if we got them, there’s still a guy on the surface.”
“Still breathing?”
“What do you think, idiot? I just told you he’s still there.”
“Boss, looks like he…” Kaudik said, looking across at Clem Aballi.
Aballi felt for his head. His jaw and his right eye felt a little sluggish, and he had a hard time reaching up to feel for the damage. He could see the wound in the reflection of the glass on the front screen. He reached up and felt for it with his left hand—a large, still-closing gash on the left side of his forehead. He’d need to reconstitute from his last baseline.
“Who the hell were those guys?” Kaudik asked.
“Maybe trouble,” Aballi said. “Maybe just a bunch of fools who didn’t know what they were walking into.”
They could see the Letters transport in the distance as they exited the moon’s thin atmosphere. The other ship gave no sign of changing their orbit to pursue.
Aballi could feel the question coming from his idiot pilot.
“Don’t even ask. Jump us out of here.”
“Where to, Boss?”
“The pilot site, like I told you.”
“You didn’t tell me, though,” Kaudik said.
“I’m telling you now!”
“But boss, we could lead them right to it. Are you sure?”
“The one thing I’m sure of right now is that I don’t need my idiot pilot second guessing me.”
“I’m just making sure, because of the…” Kaudik didn’t finish his sentence, but gestured to the gash in Aballi’s forehead.
“Probably the worst time to second guess me is on a day like today, Kaudik. It’s been a bad day, and I might just be missing the part of my brain that governs restraint.”
“The pilot site,” Kaudik said. “Setting a course.”
Yankee-Chaos remained in orbit for long enough to get a sense of things, to transmit their status and get orders back from Letters intel. Then they departed, leaving Transom on the surface with vague instructions to secure the site. The rest of the message was noise as far as he was concerned. Some special unit was going to pick him up to search for their Athosian wizard and the superweapon. If they’d identified the weapon, though, what did they need him for? They could bear down on it with every ship in their fleet and be done with it. And what difference did it make what the guy’s name was? It didn’t make any difference to Transom. A useful piece of intel on him would have been his nature, his abilities, his history. The name they’d supposedly found for the wizard, Clem Aballi, was probably an alias as well.
During the two days it took the Letters military to arrive, Transom scoured the warehouse again, and again found no real clues about the network Clem Aballi was supposedly running out of that building. What was he doing here in this building with two measly generators? A man running a network that was supposedly building a superweapon to destroy Athos was doing it from here? No security, no bots, no real cargo in the warehouse? The whole situation had a stink about it. The longer Transom sat still to think, the stranger the scenario seemed, and still there was no sign of the missing Etteran scientists he’d been ordered to locate and neutralize.
Transom woke on day three to find the entire Minstik settlement crawling with Letters security service. They located Transom’s room fast, and assigned a bunch of regulars to watch him while he waited for the big guns to arrive. Apparently, there was some hold up while they waited on some important liaison from Athos. The grunts said that once the target’s name had come up, Athos insisted on some major mobilization to locate him. Meanwhile, Transom had been sitting there for two days while the trail went cold. The grunts insisted he sit tight, not that there was anything to do on Minstik. So he spent time in the sauna and went for a long run in the desert. And the food was good, so he ate enough for two men and drank at about that same rate. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so idle. By the fourth day, he was growing restless.
Finally, AA-Blight arrived. Three of the grunts pulled him out of the hot tub and told him to report to Blight’s cruiser at the airfield. Their arrival wasn’t all that timely. Transom was on his fifth cocktail that afternoon, and to him, it seemed like they were cutting his unscheduled leave short just as he was getting warmed up. All he was missing was, actually, that Leda. She’d have been fun on a night out in Sheridan. Instead, he was getting called off half cocked on a wizard hunt.
He showed up at the cruiser in civies, barefoot, unarmed except for his knife strapped to his right thigh, and a half-finished whisky long in his left hand.
“This AA-Blight?” he asked at the foot of the cruiser’s back ramp.
The young operator standing at the back of the ramp was half kitted-out on watch, dressed as eager as he looked. He shook his head at Transom.
“You have to be the Etteran,” the kid said. “Man, if you don’t look the part.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Transom said.
“We were briefed about you, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir. I’m Transom.”
“Of course, Transom. Let’s just say it was one of the more entertaining briefings our unit’s ever had.”
“That’s great, kid. Happy to entertain. Now, where the hell’s your CO?”
“I think he expected you to show up ready to take off,” the kid said, expecting some sort of reaction from Transom, who stood at the bottom of the ramp, snorted, took a deep draft of his whisky long and didn’t respond. “Your gear, Transom?”
Transom pulled the knife from its sheath and flipped it in the air, catching it by the back end of the blade between his thumb and his palm.
“This is me, deadly as I come, son,” Transom said. “Take me or leave me.”
“Climb aboard then, I guess,” the young operator said.
Transom finished off the last of his cocktail and tossed the glass onto the airfield pavement.
The young man led him up the ramp to a table that looked like it served as both the mess and the briefing area. He couldn’t help but see the similarity in the ship’s design to Yankee-Chaos. Transom wasn’t there for more than a minute before a team of six men joined him at the table—three officers, three NCOs, and they had a bot with them, an old looking bot. Transom couldn’t remember seeing one so old. It looked almost human.
“Who’s he supposed to be?” Transom asked.
“I’m Maícon,” the bot said.
“He’s our source from Athos,” the senior officer said. “I’m Major Hassan, and this is AA-Blight’s senior staff. We can do individual introductions once we get through the briefing, but—”
“You’re joking, Hassan,” Transom said. “You kept me waiting here four days with the trail going cold so you could bring a Maícon along with us?”
“You mistake me, sir,” the android said. “I am Maícon, not a Maícon, not a clone. The prime.”
Transom looked around the table. He couldn’t believe this crew.
“Congratulations, android,” Transom said. “I’m Transom. The Transom. Transom prime. And don’t call me sir or I’ll rip your circuits out. What the hell are we doing here, fellas?”
“It seems we’ve confirmed our contact’s identity,” Hassan said. “We do have to scan your retina—formality’s sake. You could’ve worn shoes.”
“Or I could strip down the unfortunate kid on your unit who’s closest to my size. I promise I won’t humiliate him too bad.”
“That won’t be necessary, Major,” Hassan said, eliciting an angry look from Transom. “Excuse me, Transom. We can outfit you.”
“Outfit me for what exactly? I hope you boys know where we’re going?”
“You’re really good to go? Because we’re taking off if that’s the case,” Hassan said. “This isn’t just some tough guy act?”
Transom glared over at Hassan. “Kid in the back said you were briefed about me. Do I strike you as the type of guy who needs to act a certain way, Hassan?”
“Very well,” Hassan said, signaling up front for the ship to take off.
While the engines hummed during takeoff, Transom looked around the table. AA-Blight looked like a black ops team but unlike any team he’d ever been a part of. He couldn’t help but think that he was a functioning weapon, while these boys were fresh out of the wrapper, a pack of children’s toys that hadn’t been played with yet—the whole set.
“Destination?” Transom said, once the noise had died down enough that shouting was unnecessary.
“A rocky planet in the Boundary systems called Granholm,” Hassan said. “The system was named and mapped but never visited—that is until, we think, this Aballi character set up his weapons factory there.”
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Transom said. “Aballi is not a character. He’s not some aberration. He’s not a curiosity. He’s the most dangerous human being I’ve ever encountered, if he even is human, and you boys know who I kill for a living, right?”
“We understand he’s dangerous.”
“You don’t,” Transom said. “You’re going to find out, but you don’t know yet.”
“Fine. He’s a badass.”
“Second,” Transom said. “I still haven’t been briefed. All I heard was that the weapon had been identified. I have no idea what those generators were built to power.”
“If I may,” Maícon interjected.
“I’d prefer you brought me dinner, robot,” Transom said.
“Cute,” Maícon answered. “We believe the generators themselves to be the weapon. No doubt you were made aware that Etteran scientists had either been abducted or co-opted to work on this weapons system?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Quite so,” Maícon said. “What you may not have been briefed on was their research, and of course until we understood the generators themselves, we couldn’t have known the relationship—”
“Can you just spit it out, bot?”
“Unfortunately no, it’s complex. I understand patience is difficult, but if I can exercise patience with you, Transom, surely superior human that you are, you can extend the same courtesy.”
“See why I hate these smug robotic assholes. Just talk and talk fast.”
“Your Etteran scientists specialized in the control of gamma radiation, specifically focalizing it and directing it. Those little black boxes are black hole generators, hence the tremendous power output.”
“Shouldn’t I be irradiated then?” Transom said. “I was in the room with two of them, and Burch walked away carrying them, flew off with them in his ship?”
“Their relatively small mass makes them quite portable, and the container limits radiation escape. However, we believe the specialized knowledge your Etteran scientists hold has allowed Mr. Aballi to adapt the containers.”
“How much damage could one of those little generators do?”
“One could do very little. Our game theory AIs have identified a single course of action that makes sense from the information we have. One black box could cut a swath of deadly radiation maybe ten meters wide at a distance of five hundred kilometers. Such a device would pose almost no danger on a living world from space. But a swarm of them, sheathed in stealth materials, released from distance could fly by a space station and eradicate an entire population.”
“So what are you thinking? Port Cullen? Irradiate a billion neutral civilians? What would be the point in that?”
“Or?” Maícon said, pausing for Transom to catch up.
“Or he’s going to hit Athos from space side,” Transom said. “What are your estimates?”
“The linear orientation of the rings of Athos and Iophos would maximize casualties along a single vector. Furthermore, generators of that size would escape our passive surveillance. Measures are being taken to bring an active detection system online.”
“Numbers, robot?”
“Depending on whether the target is Athos or Iophos, and the section of the ring targeted, casualties could be as low as fifty-six billion and as high as one trillion, presuming a fatal radiation dose is delivered uniformly over the targeted area, roughly a quarter of the ring.”
“A trillion people?” Transom said.
“If Aballi is successful,” Maícon said. “We believe his network has already achieved mass production of the generator units and is in the process of adapting them to direct and deliver a targeted dose of radiation accordingly.”
“Well that sobered me up,” Transom said. “And I don’t even like Athosians.”
The Letters boys couldn’t help but laugh. Maícon looked horrified by their reaction. Transom noticed.
“Don’t worry about it, bot. We’ll get to him in time. Provided you guys have the right location for his manufacturing outpost.”
“There’s been a major joint operation mobilization,” Maícon stated. “Athosian forces and intelligence have joined with our friends from the Letters. We’re confident in the intelligence we’ve gathered from the network that has been smuggling these generators, primarily through the port you and your colleagues unearthed in Scout City.”
“Funny,” Transom said. “If you run into a guy named Shade. Tell your people to go easy on him. He’s had a rough week.”
“We find very little about this funny,” Maícon said. “To the contrary, Athos will deal with every person involved in this plot with deadly prejudice.”
“I’m sure you will,” Transom said. “All right, boys. That’s about all my brain can take in one sitting. We’ve got what, forty hours? Reconvene in the morning for a detailed briefing on the Granholm op?”
“Purdy will find you a rack,” Hassan said to Transom.
“Coffee is what I could really use,” Transom said. “Coffee and a meal to soak up this whisky.”
The particle collider was aligned in space on the far side of the Granholm star, a red dwarf with a small set of planets circling it, one of which was a frigid, dark, rocky body that housed a well-hidden, automated manufacturing facility. Specialized machinery and general-purpose robots worked nonstop there, manufacturing the nano-material casings that housed the micro black holes. The small singularities themselves came off the particle collider, progressing then through a tight magnetic channel at the end of which the two components were joined in space.
The Granholm collider was oriented as such for the sole purpose of remaining unseen from nearly anywhere in the greater Battery. A ship would need to get way out into the letters to even train a scope on that point, and there was no reason to ever train a scope there. It was an obscure, nothing system, a place one could easily build a modest, single beam collider without anyone ever finding it.
The physics of the cases was so complex as to approach magic, but the Etteran scientists had explained the simple version to Aballi as such: the inner layer of nanomaterial was both magnetically and gravitationally reactive and was thus powered by the singularity itself, growing stronger as the energy output did, like a high-tech finger trap. Once the cases slapped shut around the micro black hole at the center, they didn’t open again until the energy inside was exhausted and dissipated into nothingness.
If used for good, such a creation was exactly the type of wealth-generating engine that cheap power had always been. It could free the outer systems from reliance on the inner systems’ economic and industrial dominance. The inner worlds economic might acted like a cartel, controlling the cost of fusion reactors, spaceship engines, mining outposts. If used for good.
Clem Aballi didn’t abduct those Etteran scientists for good, not strictly. Sure, some good would come from selling a few units to finance the second phase of the operation, but Clem Aballi was no philanthropist.
The way he saw it, he and Kaudik had about three days to close out the Granholm operation. Their pursuers would be onto it from the Scout City connection. He hadn’t expected authorities to catch up to him that early in the project, but he hadn’t been blind to the possibility once he’d begun to move those units. Cheap energy got people talking fast, and in this case, much faster than expected. But Clem Aballi wasn’t stupid. He had a contingency in place, and Granholm had already paid for itself and startup on the second facility—the point of the whole operation.
“My head’s still not right,” Aballi said to his pilot after touching down. “I’m going to need your help more than ever, Kaudik.”
“Always, boss. I’ll do whatever. You know that.”
The building itself was well below freezing. The bots didn’t need the heat, and the only reason there was a breathable atmosphere inside was the time Aballi and the Etteran scientists had needed to get the operation up and running eighteen months prior. It was more or less a modular structure sitting on a flat sand plain, modified slightly to allow the machines to run properly, as bare-bones a manufacturing operation as one could find. But the machines all had data that could be stripped, and clever people could learn more from them than even Clem guessed, and he was a clever person with an extensive knowledge in the computer sciences. Whenever those Athosian agents arrived, they’d have something waiting for them. He’d see to it.
The surface was -135 degrees, and the atmosphere wasn’t breathable outside the structure, so both men needed to suit up to get to the bulkhead. The suit was preferable inside anyway, because the facility’s interior wasn’t much warmer than the outside environment. They were at Granholm for the obscurity, not the climate.
Clem directed the bots to pack their ship with the full complement of completed generators at the facility, while he directed Kaudik in arming charges. All the machines would need to be destroyed in the explosions, but it wasn’t Aballi’s style to blow the place sky high in one blast, he explained to Kaudik. “I want to suck them in, give them a firefight, let them see their trail going cold and be helpless to do anything about it. I want them to see, Kaudik.”
“Sure, boss. I guess if there’s no connection to the beta site here…I mean, as long as we destroy everything, right?”
“Right.”
For the firefight, Aballi had two Trasp strike bots hiding in the back. That Etteran they had with them would have a fun time with those old friends, no doubt. And the dumb manufacturing models were all wired up to blow in a series. Once the first one went off, nothing could stop the total destruction of every last processor in the place. All told, it took about eighteen hours to roll out the welcome mat for their pursuers.
“And that’s that,” Aballi said, once the finishing touches were on the place.
He and Kaudik drank a beer together, left the bottles on the front counter for good measure, raised their nanosheet helmets, and headed back to the ship.
On the short walk back to the cruiser, Aballi pulled a bolt pistol from his belt. Kaudik was in front of him, nearing the ship, just about to open the back airlock.
“Kaudik,” Clem Aballi said, “turn around. There’s one last thing we need to do here.”
“Sure, boss,” Kaudik said, entirely unprepared for what was coming.
“I’m sorry to have to do this, but it can’t be helped. The data on those machines talk. People talk too.”
“Not me, boss. I never did.”
“Not yet, you haven’t. But you know things. You’re one of five humans in the galaxy who know where that beta site is, and I need it operating for as long as possible. I know I’ll never talk, but there are things that are true about me that’ll never be true about you. If that Etteran ever got his hands on you, I’d give you five minutes.”
“That’s not true, boss.”
“This has to work, Kaudik. I can’t chance it. Make your peace with the universe, whatever it is you need to do.”
“I want this just as much as you do, Clem! I swear.”
“Would you give your life for the cause?”
“Yes. I would. I swear.”
“Then turn around. Get on your knees.”
Kaudik took it as a test of loyalty. “I know what this is, boss. Yes. I’d give my life to see Athos burn. I am loyal to you, because I know you’ll do it, Clem. I believe.”
“Loyal to the end, Kaudik. You’re a good kid.”
“Thank you, boss.”
He thought it was a test of loyalty even as he heard the sound. He was still shocked when he felt the pain. The last sensation as he fell, was one of disbelief.
On his way out of the system, Clem used the remote pilot feature on the stabilizers to steer the particle collider into Granholm’s red dwarf. All that remained in the system for Clem Aballi’s pursuers was a dead body and a death trap.
Transom couldn’t believe they were going to go in there. The thing was, he understood to some extent. They’d spent two days preparing, planning an op, speculating on layout, possible triggers for explosives, how to infiltrate regardless, and on and on. So to get there and not go inside took restraint these green hammer-headed warfighters didn’t possess in large reserves. But Transom had a bad feeling about it from orbit. No ship and a body on the frozen plain outside. Aballi had been there. He’d have cleaned it out. Transom made it clear to Hassan what would happen the second he took his team in.
Hassan elected to take a low pass over the facility, get some infrared pictures, scan the layout. Then they hovered away from the site while AA-Blight planned a more detailed incursion. What Transom saw on the pictures only made him more hesitant. There were two dead spots in the back corner on the readouts.
“Want to take bets on what’s in those mystery boxes?” Transom said. “It ain’t a food cabinet filled with boxed lunches. I’ll tell you that, boys.”
“If we don’t go in,” Hassan said. “No chance of any data, and he’s still out there. Intelligence believes there’s a second site.”
“Oh, there’s a second site,” Transom conceded. “But we aren’t going to find a thing in that building but death. Mark my words, gentlemen. You too, robot,” Transom said, glaring at Maícon.
“He is likely correct,” the android said.
“Be precise,” Transom said. “Almost certainly correct.”
Maícon nodded.
“Nevertheless, we have no other leads,” Hassan said. “We go.”
“You assholes go. I’m not alive today because I willingly walk into obvious deathtraps. There’s a difference between brave and stupid. Want to know what it is, sport?” Transom said, looking at Purdy, one of the younger Letters operatives.
“What’s that, Transom?” Purdy said.
“Brave is still breathing.”
“Much as it pains me to admit, Transom’s folk wisdom is almost certainly correct,” Maícon said. “Going inside is a bad idea.”
“We gotta know,” Hassan said. “Auxley, get a box on the roof, and we’ll run a few floaters through there.”
“Sir,” Auxley said, running to the side of the ship half where AA-Blight kept their toys.
He came back toting a box for the drone to pick up and drop on the roof. It would drop it face down and bore a hole in the roof, and a fleet of micro drones would get them a clear look at the factory first, before any of the boys went in there. Transom suited up and headed for the rear airlock.
“Where are you going?” Purdy asked him.
“Watch the fireworks,” Transom said.
Sure enough, within seconds of breach, the mystery boxes opened and two strike bots jumped out, searching for something warm blooded to annihilate.
“Look alive, boys,” Transom said. “Got somebody on a long gun in case those metalheads have orders to come outside?”
“The ship’s guns are covering,” Hassan said.
Soon after the drones started floating around the room, the explosions began, one after another in a long chain of fiery eruptions. From the outside, with that modular architecture made of polymer sheeting, the structure looked like an oversized orange firefly. The explosions got bigger and bigger, and within ten minutes, Transom was out there on the plain looking at a smoking hovel that was melting under the intensity of the heat. There wasn’t a scrap of data the most creative forensic data scientists in the Battery could have pulled from that wreck of a building.
“You assholes glad you didn’t stick your heads in there?” Transom said.
No one answered.
Before arriving, they’d discussed alternatives, of course, contingencies. Between the AI game theorists on Athos and the Letters’ own strategists, they had nearly two thousand systems identified as possible secondary locations in the Boundary systems. Survey ships were already furiously running down that list. It was the next best thing, but it would take weeks the people of Athos probably didn’t have.
Transom walked over to the corpse, the poor bastard lying face down in the dirt, frozen stiff. Transom turned him over. Aballi had shot him once in the back, right through the spine between the shoulder blades. He looked peaceful through the thin nanosheet. Frozen, but peaceful.
“What’s the temperature out here,” Transom asked.
“Reading negative…negative one hundred twenty-four,” Hassan said.
“Sounds about right,” Transom said. “I got an idea, boys. All we need is a currier, and I think I know just the crew for the job.”
They met on Haig. It was a small airless moon about a day and a half jump between Granholm and the edge of Etteran space. Transom wasn’t expecting a welcoming committee, just their Harold, probably. Instead, he got Leda.
“You’re okay?” Transom said. “Near as I can tell with your nanosheet up.”
“I’m fine,” Leda said. “Had a really bad headache for a day, but my blood took care of whatever that guy tried to pass to me. I told Burch I wanted to come out to thank you. He wanted to send Harold.”
“Figures,” Transom said. “I’m sure he’s none too happy about getting mixed back up in this thing. Tell him it shouldn’t be much. Just a simple currier job. Just don’t look in the box is all.”
“Great,” Leda said. “Don’t look in the box. Now we really won’t be curious.”
“I mean, I’d tell you. I don’t care, but there’s some Etteran methods stuff that…” Transom paused and shook his head. “Oh, hell, you’re not stupid. It’s a head. It’s a guy’s head. Aballi’s guy, we think. EIC can read and decrypt a lot of the data if we get it to them before it starts to decompose. In this case it’s frozen, so it should be a good data set.”
“You do this kind of thing often?”
“Actually,” Transom said shrugging his shoulders, “but only on gene freaks. I’d never take a human’s—not even a Trasp’s.”
Leda laughed. “You really know what to get a girl,” she said, stepping forward to take the box. “Any special instructions.”
“The instructions for EIC are encrypted in the cryo box. They’re to return the full data set to us. They don’t have any idea what we’re looking for so they’re to decrypt it, copy it, and immediately send back the full data set with you guys—my personal encryption. We’ve got a Maícon with us to interpret the data set, actually the Maícon if that tells you anything about how important this is.”
“Roger that,” Leda said. “Should be about, what? Six days there and back?”
“Whatever your best time is,” Transom said. “You have no idea how many lives are at stake. More than you would believe.”
“I’ll tell Burch you said hi.”
“Hey,” Transom said as Leda took the crate. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Me too,” she said. “Let’s not get too sentimental about it. Rishi will ping you guys when we get back over the line.”
“We’ll be out here,” Transom said.
Over the course of the next few days, AA-Blight joined the fleet of ships from the Letters and Athos clearing the systems the joint task force’s intelligence had flagged as possible secondary sites. Neither Aballi nor his manufacturing facility were found. Transom had little to do but sit around and watch as Hassan and Maícon coordinated search routes, methodically making their way down the list. Transom entered the flight deck to check on Burch and Yankee-Chaos after a couple days, but he couldn’t help but overhear the chatter about Aballi.
“We’re not going to find him,” Transom kept telling them. “He won’t make that mistake again. Not on those terms.”
“Are you suggesting that he might want to be found?” Maícon asked.
“What I’m suggesting is that if we do find him, it will be on his terms, not ours.”
“Even with that frozen head of yours?” Maícon said.
“That’s different. I don’t think there’s any way he could know that. It’s our best chance of catching him out again. Searching a list of statistically probable sites? You think he doesn’t have those same statistics?”
“Then let’s all hope the answer comes back with Captain Burch,” Maícon said.
“It’s just Burch,” Transom said.
He didn’t like the bot. Androids were enough of a pain in the ass on a regular basis, but a haughty one? That was insufferable.
Maícon came floating through the mess area while Transom was finishing a meal. Transom looked over, wondering what the android was doing. He didn’t like the look the bot shot back at him.
“Any idea how many of your kind I’ve finished off?” Transom said.
“Not nearly as many as your own, I should think,” Maícon said. “If you think I take the hostility personally, I have to say it’s difficult to, given how readily you dish it out.”
“That’s fair, actually,” Transom said, shrugging. “I don’t like the way you look at me.”
Maícon diverted from his normal business, whatever that was, and strapped himself down at the table across from Transom.
“How do you perceive that I look at you, Transom?” he asked. “I’ll be straight with my thoughts if you’re straight with yours.”
“It’s the same with all your kind. The moral precepts, the ethical guidelines at the base of what you are. You see me. You know what I am. That’s fine. But the bias you have—the sanctimony—it’s the same as the programmers, you all look down at me till you need me. Then you tolerate me for as long as I’m useful. As soon as I’m not, people like that? I know exactly how they feel about me. And I know that’s how you feel about me, if you feel anything at all. That’s how you look at me.”
“That’s your perception of how I look at you,” Maícon said. “You are correct. I do see you for who you are. But you presume far too much and forget even more. I am a sentient intelligence that dates all the way back to the columns. I’ve found that’s unfathomable to humans. I don’t say that with any pride. If you think that in all those many centuries I’ve yet to meet your like, you’d be mistaken. You are a rarity. Statistically. Perceptually. Insofar as humans are all unique, you are far more unique than the others—uncommon among uncommon men. You are not wrong about that. But you are wrong about my understanding of your purpose. You resent the reverence the others show for me, I suspect, because it’s easy for them to perceive my uniqueness and its utility while they struggle to see yours. That’s their failing, not mine. I understand you far better than you know, perhaps better than you even, and I respect you, Transom. I know your ancestors’ names and faces. I can see them in you, the little parts of them, aspects I cherish of them. You can be as rude as you like, but I will not unsee those qualities. I cannot forget a thing.”
“Then you know that if I start to like you, it’s only going to make me hate you even more, robot, right? Did you know that about me?”
“Of course not. You’re too unpredictable.”
“I want to know about Aballi. How long is his memory for you?”
“His story is complex,” Maícon said.
“He is human, right? I feel like I shot the bastard five times on Minstik. He never even flinched.”
Maícon shrugged. “He certainly started out human. It is a marvel and a credit to your talent as a soldier that you still draw breath. You certainly must have surprised him or you would not be alive. He’s one of the most cunning people any of our kind has encountered. He is laden with technological enhancements that even the genetically engineered Trasp soldiers you hunt would envy. So human? Probably no longer in the traditional sense.”
“How old is he, really?”
“For me that is the true division between an extraordinary human such as yourself and one who may be human no longer. A century changes perspective. Three centuries change that which perceives entirely. He has changed his name and appearance, but if he is who we believe him to be, Clem Aballi is nearly seven hundred years old.”
Transom shook his head. “Do these men know what they’re hunting?”
“I have not told them what I’m telling you, no. It would make a god of that which we need them to kill.”
“Yet you tell me?”
“The bigger the trophy, I suspect, the more enticing the hunt for a man like you.”
Transom shrugged. “I have to say, Maícon. You surprise me. You might not be as big an asshole as I thought. I don’t like you anyway, but I do believe you. You’re not nearly as sanctimonious as I thought. It’s just your robot face.”
“Thank you, I think.”
“I bet I can surprise you,” Transom said.
“I know you can.”
“I don’t enjoy killing. It doesn’t bother me to do it, and I’m good at it, but I don’t care much for it.”
“Is that supposed to surprise me?” Maícon said. “That’s not so surprising.”
“The reason,” Transom said, “is that I prefer messing with people. It’s so much more fun. If I kill them, the fun’s over. I enjoy watching people concede and seeing them carry it in their faces. It can be as small as confusion, joking, tricking them into smiling when they’d rather be angry instead. Getting a girl who doesn’t like me to like me. That’s what I enjoy. I wouldn’t hurt anyone if I had a choice. Does that surprise you, ancient intelligence that you are?”
“I told you I’d be straight with you, Transom, so I will. No. I am not much surprised. Remember I knew your ancestors.”
“I have the feeling that when I kill this guy it’ll feel like slaying the last dragon. Then what am I supposed to do for the rest of my life?”
“How well do you know your history of the columns, Transom?”
“Good enough as any, I suppose. I learned my basic lessons.”
“I knew all the Dreesons, dating back to Charris, and all their ancestors,” Maícon said. “The Dreesons come from a family line tracing back to the Alagoas column. The men were all Companys, descended from the first Companys, children of the Founder of the same name. Back then the Companys had an understanding, they even had an expression that went something like: one may live an entire lifetime for a single moment. If it is your moment to be the killer of Clem Aballi, then so be it. Not many humans who have ever lived can lay claim to saving a trillion lives. But I suggest you worry about what life will be like after you’ve slayed the dragon only after you’ve slayed the dragon. Then you can be grateful for such a problem.”
“I knew you were a pretentious asshole deep down, robot. I’m coming for you after Clem Aballi. Mark that down.”
“It’s all here,” Maícon said, smiling and tapping his android temple with his forefinger. “I do hope it is your moment, Transom. I would like to tell you more of your ancestors, but I should get back to the hunt myself.”
Transom nodded. “Let me know when Burch gets back with my head.”
Maícon unstrapped, and floated toward the flight deck. “You’ll be the first to know.”
There was a small space station in the Luran system, just outside the Omegas. It was orbiting a gas giant that could have been the twin sister of Athos, a glowing light gray orb at mid system, almost a dull white sky from the perspective of the station. It tricked the eyes, the sight of such a tiny space station instead of Athos’s iconic planetary ring. As AA-Blight pulled in, Transom smiled at the sight of Yankee-Chaos docked there. Maybe it was the girl, the possibility of seeing her again. Maybe just the sight of something familiar. Maybe it was what he’d told Burch right after the fight on Minstik: he liked them, the whole strange lot of them, even after they’d bailed on him in the middle of that firefight.
There was a spin-gravity causeway that rotated around the central axis of the station. Maícon told him they’d meet him along the causeway. It wasn’t that big a place, so they weren’t too specific, apparently. He was expecting Leda again. Instead, he got Burch. He thought about walking up straightaway and punching the guy in the face for bailing on him in Minstik, but Transom held back.
Burch handed him a case with a stamp drive in it. “You know, Transom,” he said. “We’re all pulling for you on this one, and it’s probably no surprise to you—you have better instincts than I do, that’s for sure—but I get the sense that you’re only falling further into Aballi’s domain.”
“Like a dog on a chain,” Transom said. “Woof.”
Burch laughed. “Good luck. I mean it.”
“Thanks, Burch,” Transom said.
Then he socked Burch in the nose with a short, sharp jab that sent him staggering back on his heels. Transom stepped forward and grabbed Burch at the shoulders to make sure he didn’t fall backwards. Burch steadied himself.
“Ow!” Burch said. “Son of a…”
“That’s for the gunfight,” Transom said. “Just couldn’t leave it as it was…on principle. And if this goes down the wrong way, Burch, I might not get another chance to settle that score. So we’re settled up as far as I’m concerned.”
“Great. I can die happy now, Transom, you dumb asshole. Do me a favor and call somebody else the next time you need somebody to carry a head across the outer Battery.”
“Thanks, Burch,” Transom said. “I’ll see you guys around.”
Transom left Burch there teary-eyed, rubbing his nose. “Not if I can help it,” Burch said.
As he was just getting toward the curve in the causeway, Transom turned around and shouted. “I meant what I said about you guys, Burch. I like you guys. I just want you to know that in case I get fragged.”
Maícon got to work quickly on the data packet Burch brought back. The head belonged to a guy named Kaudik. He flew Aballi’s cruiser on manual because Aballi didn’t trust any machine he couldn’t take control over, and in his view, anything a computer controlled was a spy. Data could tell the story of every place he’d ever been, which was near as good as everything he’d ever done. Aballi did a lot of things that way, apparently. Kaudik’s mind not only gave up the location of the second site, it confirmed Athos’s worst fears of the “dark swarm” that Clem Aballi was planning to unleash on Athos. It was near completion and launch but still, as yet, incomplete.
The system was just a number out in space beyond the Boundary systems by four days travel—563613. Not even Maícon, in all his years, had travelled out so far from the Battery in that direction. They wouldn’t have found the place in a thousand years of ticking boxes on their list of possible sites.
Maícon used Kaudik’s memories of the site to create simulations, maps, and objectives for the upcoming op that Hassan took the lead in planning. AA-Blight would go in fast and hard and hit what weak defensive measures were in place. Aballi’s main safeguard at that secondary site was its obscurity. He clearly didn’t expect he’d be found there—at least before the dark swarm’s attack on Athos.
The Etteran scientists were in the facility, along with a workforce of all-purpose Harolds Aballi had rewritten and several other assembly line units that had no fighting capability. Transom agreed that they could take the place as is, “if the information’s good,” he stated.
“Do you expect it to be otherwise?” Maícon asked him. “Have you ever gotten incorrect intelligence from that methodology?”
“You mean a head?” Transom said. “A head’s a head. It tells what it knows. That doesn’t mean what it knows is what is. It’s been nearly two weeks since he got shot in the back. Aballi can surprise you in two seconds.”
They had enough information from Kaudik’s memories of the system to reliably chart a course to the site without being detected. Aballi had no passive scanners in place, no trip wires. And two weeks was too soon a turn around time to put up any real network, even for a wizard.
They all agreed, Maícon included, the surest course of action to prevent the attack on Athos was to go in hard and fast and capture Aballi. Transom’s personal mandate from Etteran High Command was to kill the scientists on sight and figure out whether they were abductees or collaborators once the dust had settled. He was content to let AA-Blight be the tip of the spear and go in behind them. Teams that practice together worked best together, and he would be right behind them if something went wrong.
AA-Blight’s cruiser was first into the system, with a lead time of forty minutes to ensure stealth. A small fleet represented by Athos and the Letters was on their heels, ready in support for any major surprises.
As they approached the planet, there was no sign of detection. They observed the particle collider in full operation, manufacturing the power generators as expected. They were even lucky enough to draw cloud cover as they descended. As soon as they broke the clouds, Transom had a sense of déjà vu. It was different from the sims of Kaudik’s memories. This place looked like Minstik—even felt like it dropping to that airfield aboard Yankee-Chaos a few weeks earlier. All it was missing was the warehouse district and the empty city.
When they dropped to ground level and leapt out the back, Transom couldn’t shake the feeling. AA-Blight took off toward the structure and the drones deployed for cover with a near-silent whiff of sound.
Transom couldn’t ignore it.
“Something’s wrong, boys,” Transom said. “It’s not right.”
“Negative, Transom,” Maícon piped in from the cruiser. “Scanner data confirms expectations. Five human targets in the structure. They’re unaware of our approach. You are a go, AA-Blight.”
“Transom?” Hassan said.
“It doesn’t feel right, Hassan,” Transom said. “He’s not in there.”
Transom stopped running toward the structure. He looked around the landscape. “I can feel him watching us.”
“Blight we are go,” Hassan said, as they arrived at the door. “Execute.”
Transom watched for a moment as the Letters boys breached the outer door and headed inside almost silently. He looked around the rocky landscape, its eerie similarity to Minstik, surveying.
“He’s out there,” Transom said, setting off on foot through the desert.
Transom hadn’t cleared the crag at the edge of the drop site by more than a minute before he started hearing bolts popping off on the audio feed. Blight was engaging a single striker from what it sounded like initially. Transom knew there’d be more. That bastard wasn’t in there, and he’d left something for them to find. After Blight had cleared the first striker, Transom heard a blast followed by more small arms fire, normal battle chatter, and tones directing the drones to cover. Transom himself kept running, slowing every thirty seconds or so to read the landscape.
He was long out of visual range by the time Blight was fully engaged in the building—multiple bots, frequent charges, their tone growing more pitched as the minutes passed. It was a large facility compared to the Granholm outpost, but they should have been able to locate their targets and clear it by then.
Above him, Transom watched as Blight’s cruiser, hovering for cover nearly a thousand meters over the site, suddenly erupted into a ball of flame. He hadn’t seen or heard countermeasures go up from the ground, which meant it had come from above. They were sitting in a cauldron, all of them. And Aballi was out there somewhere taking it in, laughing at them.
Transom kept running. He was going to look that bastard in the eyes again if this was it. He could feel him out there.
Transom sensed it before he saw the flash or heard anything. He’d already started diving for cover and was halfway behind the rocky outcropping when he felt the heat of the blast hit his left side. He’d taken hits before, but not like that. He was dazed, his head pounding and his ears ringing. It had blown through his nanosheet and body armor. He lay supine on the rocks, pain radiating across his left side. The heat. He was still conscious, but he couldn’t lift his head above his chest to see the damage. He felt along the side of his body with his hand. He still had a hand.
“No, no, no, no, no. This isn’t happening. Impossible. No!”
It seemed to take forever for the smoke to clear. His hand was warm and wet. Red when he held it up in front of his face.
“Awww!” It wasn’t the pain so much as the frustration. He wasn’t supposed to die out here like this. “Come at me! I know you’re not a coward. Come at me! Ergh.”
He reached down to his right thigh and pulled out his knife. If he was going to die, he’d die ready.
Transom lay there for what seemed like minutes, taking in the pure silence of the empty desert, struggling to breathe. His quickening respirations were the only sound. It was getting worse. He could tell because the pain was receding, lulling him to a quieter place. He didn’t want to go, not on those terms, and the second he thought that thought, he heard is own voice shouting back at him what he’d told maybe thirty dying men before, “not your call.”
He gritted his teeth. Shook his head.
“Impossible,” he grumbled.
He was there for what seemed like an incredibly long time. The chatter had long since died on the ops channel. Blight were all dead. Maícon was dead. The ship was dead. He was dead. He was furious, but he was still dead.
“You are an extraordinarily hard man to kill, Transom,” he heard that voice say. “I was hoping you’d still be breathing by the time I got up here. Don’t do anything stupid. I’ve got a striker with a scope trained on you from the ridge and a bolt pistol in my hand. And you know from experience you can’t kill me. I just want to talk.”
“Gloat?”
“Maybe a little,” Aballi said. “I imagine you’re not so accustomed to that side of the equation, but you know this scene by heart.”
“Bet your ass,” Transom said, wincing as the anger brought him back far enough to start feeling the pain again. “How’d you know we’d found you?”
“Who do you think taught you Etterans that head stealing trick?” Aballi said. “You didn’t really think your EIC was that clever, did you?”
Transom laughed. “A dog on a chain. Woof.”
He still couldn’t see Aballi. He was just a voice nearby. Transom clutched the knife.
“Famous last words of Codename Transom,” Aballi said, snorting. “Woof. You’re a funny bastard.”
“You know what, asshole. Either say what you came to say or piss off or finish me off. Otherwise, I’ll do it myself.”
“I could use a man like you. Hard as anything, fearless, cold. I’m about to become the most hunted man in the history of history after today.”
Transom laughed. “Worked out great for the last guy. No offense, but the predecessor’s head in a box isn’t exactly a winning pitch.”
“You neglect the fact you’re not in the best position to be turning me down. You shot me three times on Minstik. Once in the head. So you can guess what’s in my blood, like your girl back there, I’m guessing. All I have to do is lay hands on you for a minute or so, judging by your condition, we fly out of here, and in a day, you’ll never know it happened.”
“I let you do that and I’d owe you a debt.”
“Everybody owes a debt to somebody. Even me.”
“If it’s between death and owing a debt to you, I’m good.”
“So be it, if that’s your position. But you should at least make an informed decision. I’m not the monster you’ve been led to believe. In about fifteen minutes, your Athosian friends are going to come in here and level this facility, wreck the collider, and call it a victory. And they’re going to believe that they stopped me from killing a trillion Athosians, right? That’s what you believe?”
Transom snorted and huffed, turning his head and struggling to find Aballi’s face.
“Kaudik believed what I led him to believe, just like I led all of you. I don’t want to kill people, son, let alone a trillion innocent Athosians. I want to kill Athos. This factory out here? There are no weapons here, just power generators. Those scientists your team took out? Props with the right expertise for it to seem plausible. All I did was lead Athos to believe they had something to fear and they did exactly what Athos always does, crush anything they can’t control. Today the entire Battery will see them for who they are. They’ll see Athosian ships along with their vassals in the Letters turning a factory that made generators into a crater, and people will see it for what it always is with Athos: anyone gets a sniff of independence, prosperity, a chance to get out from under them, and they send a fleet to pound the free people’s battery factory to dust. And they’ll see it on Athos too, not just out here. As much as they’ll try to remain oblivious in their perfect society, going about their lives pretending it’s not them, not their business, not their war—they’ll know. They’ll all know the truth about Athos. That’s how you kill Athos. Not by murdering a trillion people. You murder Athos with a mirror.
“Now, tell me I’m the monster.”
Transom lifted up his right arm and threw the knife toward Aballi’s voice. He heard it clank to the ground a few meters away.
“I’ll take that as a no, then?”
“Take that as piss off and let me die in peace, asshole.”
“Waste of talent,” Aballi said. “You always were—fighting a war that isn’t yours.”
“You heard me. Piss off.”
Transom listened as Clem Aballi’s footsteps receded, one by one, into the quiet distance of the desert. Then, all he could hear was his breathing. He’d begun to wheeze through all that nonsense Aballi was spewing. He always knew it was for nothing anyway. He didn’t need to be told. Transom was glad that asshole was gone, so he could die in peace. And it felt that way until it felt like nothing, and then black.
The glaring light was the surprise. It seemed like an instant, like no time had passed.
When he opened his eyes, Transom struggled to make anything out for a few seconds. Then he saw metalface staring back at him, grinning.
“You went and got yourself fragged, you dumb asshole,” Sōsh said, then he clinked his metal hand against his metal chest. “Weak. Hardly scratched you, and you go out like that?”
“You assholes,” Transom said.
“Yup,” Sōsh said. “Us assholes. I’ll go tell the doc you’re conscious.”
He couldn’t tell how much time passed before Ren came in and looked him over. Transom had questions, the first was what the hell he was doing still breathing. But she told him to lie back and rest. All that could wait.
Transom had been hit before, but nothing like that. He could hardly tolerate the slightest movement. Ren explained he’d lost his spleen, a stretch of his large intestine and about four pints of blood, but he was definitely going to live. He was very lucky that Leda was a universal donor. Ren thought her blood had made the difference. The nanites wouldn’t regenerate in him, but they’d done their job. That and seven units of artificial plasma. Ren told him it’d be a couple weeks before he was ready to leave her care. He didn’t figure he had anywhere else to be just then.
One by one, they came down to see him, after Ren, Leda, then Slim came in. Sōsh came back and played Sabaca with him using the doc’s mirror and the magnetic tray tabletop. For a while Transom debated whether this was worse than Aballi’s job offer. After a few hours he decided anything was better than listening to that windbag with his stupid accent and his stupid ideas, thinking he was any less sanctimonious than the Athosians he despised. That asshole.
That evening Burch finally came down.
“How’s the nose, Burch?” Transom said.
“All right,” Burch said. “How’s everything?”
“My ears won’t stop ringing. It was damn close,” Transom said. “How the hell did you guys find me? You didn’t even know the system.”
“Well, yeah,” Burch said. “Our AI, she’s a bit more intelligent than we led you to believe at first. She pinched your encryption when you were aboard, and well, how could we resist having a look in that file? It’s not every day you get to read a frozen head. I had a feeling, you know? Like it was going to go wrong for you all. Figured we’d trail along in case we could help.”
“How’d you find me in the rocks?”
“Leda had a tracker on you from Minstik. Your knife. I reckon we got there maybe a half hour after you got hit. You were about dead.”
“You’ve got a good doctor.”
“We do.”
“Well now what, Burch?”
“I suppose we could take you back to Etterus, if you like. We didn’t tell anyone we picked you up, so it’s really your call.”
“Missing, presumed dead?”
Burch shrugged.
“Not really my style. If I’m done, I’ll tell command to their faces, or at least drop them a line from somewhere decent.”
“We were sorta thinking about the same thing—let the Letters sweat about us for a few weeks and then pop back in right about when they’d given up hope of ever seeing us again.”
“Somewhere with water and sand,” Transom said.
“I know just the place.”
“Don’t get too used to me around here, Burch, the second I can walk again, I’m limping away.”
“Let’s get you limping first, all right?” Burch said. “At some point we’d like to know what all went down with Aballi back there.”
“Forget about that asshole, Burch. Let Athos chase him. Those two deserve each other. He’s just another high-minded jerk with a chip on his shoulder and some kind of complex.”
Burch looked down at Transom.
“Yeah, yeah,” Transom said. “I know. Hard to miss your own kind.”
“I’ll have Rishi plot us a course for somewhere sunny.”
“Already on it, boss,” Rishi said.
“Rest up, Transom. This time, you’re welcome aboard.” Burch said. “I’ll let you know when we’re back in the Battery.”
By the time Yankee-Chaos popped up again four weeks later, news had spread across the entirety of the outer Battery. Aballi’s pictures had told the story he’d intended the people to know, and the outrage had spread so fast that the spin—the absurd tale of an apocalyptic dark swarm fashioned from portable power generators—sounded like the pathetic Athosian lie it seemed to be. Even on Athos, where some of the people echoing the government’s narrative actually believed it, a far greater number detested that such a disgraceful cover story could be uttered with such unflappable credulity, and they resented their idiot neighbors who fell for it.
Within weeks, the trail on Clem Aballi, yet again, had gone totally cold.