Life Comes Fast
If you’ve gotta deal with a crisis, best to do it surrounded by your best people.
(Part 33 of “The Misfits” series)
It was a hell of a trip back from the first moments of the war. Another death to add to the list, this one in a flash of nuclear fire. It was three quick sensations—the blinding brightness of the light, and then shortly after, heat, and the sudden feeling of being simultaneously pushed downward and then stretched out as the body of young Chambers and his entire universe disintegrated. May he rest in peace if ever he was. I could only hope all we experienced in there was a perfect simulation, nothing lost. It sure didn’t feel that way though. It felt as real as the lives we came back to.
Omar had come back first, but we all died on Veronia in that initial fight of the West Battery War within a few minutes of each other. Omar was pretty disoriented when I got there, and though I was getting better at coming back through the artifacts, I was fuzzy in the head as well. Hartline was better than she was on the way there, but she was still asking what the hell we were doing there, and for a little while, she didn’t know who Omar and I were, and Leda—the only one Hartline recognized at all during those few uncertain minutes—Leda was struggling for her senses herself. But Leda knew who I was, and she knew who Omar was. She calmed the whole situation down while everyone got our wits back. And after a few minutes, enough of us had remembered what was going on, and we were working our way back to the ship together.
I was starting to think that coming back was worse just for the simple fact that it’s never a good feeling to wake up in a spacesuit. That almost always means you lost consciousness in your spacesuit, which is never a good thing, and that’s putting aside the inherent claustrophobia of the moment. Deep breaths get you through it.
I was the only one with experience returning through an artifact before, so as soon as we got back onto the ship, I started talking everyone through the process I’d gone through the first time—the techniques for capturing our memories before everything faded.
I had some key points I’d learned on Veronia, and everybody else had theirs as well. And because we’d all been so close together for the duration, a lot of it was collective memory. One of us would give their spotty impressions of our timeline, and then the rest of us would fill in the blanks with what they remembered, and because all the most important parts happened last, we were working backwards from the moments of the attack at the 804 Peg on Veronia’s surface. We did that for about fifteen hours with the help of lots of coffee and plenty of patience and good humor—that was mostly Omar and Leda and me at times. Poor Hartline seemed sad for much of it.
As we relived our experiences back at the beginning of the war, all the Trasp propaganda about how the fighting started fell to dust. And as much of a shock as it is for anyone to realize the foundation of their belief system was all based on lies, it’s somehow doubly brutal for people like Hartline, whose job it had been to push the very propaganda she’d believed in so deeply. She’d been so strident on the way to the artifact. Now she was quiet, her heart heavy, and I think she was struggling to figure out what her place was now.
Once all our memories were on record, we had a few problems to settle. The biggest one was that Leda, by her real name now—Aida Jemeis—had been missing for some time, and there was no way it could’ve gone unnoticed. She was still the Protectorate’s greatest living hero of the war. And as much as both she and Hartline would’ve appreciated some time to get their heads about them before going back to Trasp space, they didn’t have that luxury. And that meant they had to take the ship home directly. The only problem with that was that Omar and I had smuggled ourselves into the Protectorate aboard a freighter, so we didn’t have a ship of our own. The debate was whether we had to go back to the Protectorate with them.
I didn’t much care for that idea, and neither did Omar. He was still sought after for being a traitor, and even with Hartline bringing him in, they’d have to come up with a hell of a story to explain why he’d gone missing on Theta-Nikorla with us and an even better story for what he’d been up to since. The truth wasn’t exactly an option for Omar anymore. And that problem was ignoring my situation as well. Sure, I still had my Trasp identity, and in a real pinch, I’d use it. But I didn’t want to opt in to old Helicon Burch again unless there was no other way. So both Omar and I were firmly in favor of finding another way.
“What’s another forty-eight hours?” I asked Hartline as she and Leda were prepping the ship for a jump back to the inner Trasp lines. Omar and I were floating behind them in the flight deck. Leda was strapped in the pilot’s seat.
“And what would another forty-eight hours do for us?” Hartline replied.
“Port Cullen,” I told her, figuring that was ample explanation.
“We probably could catch passage out to the Letters through the corridor from there,” Omar added, seeing that my two-word answer hadn’t been convincing enough.
Leda at least paused for a moment to consider it. Hartline shook her head, a sour look on her face.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” I insisted.
“What question?” Hartline asked.
“What’s another forty-eight hours? Don’t tell me you’re itching to get back to that propaganda circuit? If I had my way, I’d bring both of you back to the Letters with us. We need as many good, trustworthy people on every side figuring out how to work together.”
Hartline hesitated long enough that I could see it was a tempting offer for her. After all, who’d want to go back to her job after seeing what she’d seen—that the pretexts they’d been fed for the war they’d been fighting their entire lives were all wrong.
“Leda?” I asked.
“It’s Aida now, Burch,” she replied. “And as much as I love you and would love to go back, I made a commitment, and Myrna did too. She swore her life to serving the Protectorate, and I stayed to make sure there’d be people inside it to make peace with when the time came. Myrna and I need to go back and do that work.”
“All right,” I said. “But that still doesn’t answer the question. What’s the difference if you went back a couple days later, dropped off Omar and I at Port Cullen, and then headed back?”
“Port Cullen is a massive port,” Hartline answered. “There isn’t a chance in hell we could lock there without a report getting back to the ISB about it. We might even get pulled in then and there.”
“It’s a neutral port,” Omar replied. “They can’t grab anyone without it becoming an incident. And it’s the best chance for Burch and I to get back to the Letters within the next few weeks.”
“Oh, I get it,” Leda said, smirking, and I could tell she’d figured me out, at least partially. “What is it Burch? A noodle stand, Charran Pastries, a Persang veggie hut?”
“Are you joking?” Hartline asked. “He wants us to risk a trip to Port Cullen for a salad bowl?”
“Never,” I replied, being honest about that much. “I was more thinking about a sandwich. There’s a place on the Crispin Band that’s definitely worth risking death, and that’s coming from someone who’s done it a few times now.”
“What? Risked death?” Omar asked. “Or actually died.”
“Both,” I replied.
“I’m in,” Leda said.
“You cannot be serious, Aida Jemeis?” Hartline stated, sounding an awful lot like I imagine Leda’s mom would’ve said the same words back in the day.
“Oh, I’m deadly serious, and so is Burch,” Leda replied, grinning. “If there’s one thing Burch knows in this galaxy or any other it’s which foods are worth risking life and limb for. If he says there’s a sandwich in Port Cullen worth a forty-eight-hour detour, you can bet your life on it too. Plus, I know why you’re in such a rush to get back, Myrna. The longer we wait, the harder it’s going to be to go back. I know. We’re going to do it together. But we’re going to do it after we drop off Burch and Omar.”
“And get sandwiches,” I added. “I was serious about that part.”
Hartline shook her head and looked over at Omar to see if she might find some support. That was a long shot at best, asking Omar to go against his stomach and his big sister at the same time.
“You too, Jemeis?” she asked.
Omar grinned and nodded.
“Three to one,” I said. “Let’s fire up those engines and go get some sandwiches.”
“Aye, aye, boss,” Leda replied, turning back toward the ship’s control board.
We had a decent transit back to Port Cullen. On the way out to the artifact, our reunion with Leda had been weird because Hartline was on all our asses the whole time. And then, once we’d gone back through the artifact, we were so focused on the mission there wasn’t a moment to relax. And we weren’t exactly ourselves either.
On the way to PC, though, we got out the sticks, laughed, joked, told stories. Even after all that time since knowing Leda the first time, I was shocked a bit—there I was sitting around with three Trasp officers. Friends. Never in a million years would I have thought that even a few years before. Especially Hartline. Even Leda, who’d told Omar and I right away that Hartline was her friend when we’d strong-armed her into coming through the artifact with us, she was finding out how much there was a decent person in there. Myrna Hartline even started talking about her mother at one point. That was a surprise.
We got locked on the Sirraat Band, clean across the whole station from the sandwich shop. But there wasn’t much we could do about all that. Port Cullen’s controllers had other priorities than our stomachs, like keeping the Trasp vessels clean on the other side of the station to the Etterans. And they were dead serious about neutrality too. No colors allowed on the whole station. Civilian clothes only.
And even with that, Hartline wasn’t about to let Leda or Omar step foot off that ship.
“He’s wanted for desertion, and she’s the most recognizable face in the Protectorate. The two of them walking side-by-side down the causeways on Port Cullen? I’m going to have enough to explain when Aida and I get back to Carhall without that picture getting back to my superiors.”
“Oh, fine,” I replied to her. “So I guess it’s the Hale Burch sandwich delivery service. Unless you want to come, Myrna? You ever been to Port Cullen before?”
“Of course I’ve never been to Port Cullen before. You do know there’s a war on, Burch?”
“I might have heard a rumor about it. All the more reason to step out while you can. Who knows when you’ll have the chance again?”
Initially, she shook her head. But Leda looked at her in just such a way that goaded the colonel into at least thinking about it. And then, once she’d agreed and changed into civilian clothes, she sorta looked like a person and not a soldier.
We were locked off on the outer rotating band at Sirraat, where there was spin gravity at the lock. Leda took one look at Hartline and shook her head.
“You’ll be picked out for a Trasp from a hundred meters. If you two are going all the way over to Crispin Band together, you’re going to at least have to let me do your hair, Myrna.”
“I can do my own hair,” she protested.
“Not today, you can’t. If you’re going to confine me and Omar to the ship, then I’m ordering you to let me turn you into a civilian for a few hours.”
I was surprised when Hartline agreed. Then Leda took her into their quarters while Omar and I waited, going over the sandwich order and scouting for places to stop along the way. He found a decent bakery one level up that looked great. And there were places to get takeaway drinks. Man, I loved coming to Port Cullen.
When Myrna came back out, she looked like a whole other person.
“Look at you,” I said. “I’d never have guessed you’d look like that with your hair down.”
“Oh, shut it, Burch,” she grumbled, shaking her head at me. “I don’t need any sarcasm from you right now.”
“I’m being sincere. You look like a real lady, elegant even. She cleans up good. Doesn’t she, Omar?”
“Careful, Captain Jemeis,” she said to Omar.
“You look great, Myrna,” he said, and he was sincere about it too.
So we debarked and started toward Crispin together, quite the pair. I almost wished Rishi or Verona could’ve been there to see us two walking together. The Queen of the ISB, who’d almost busted us cold two times when we were sneaking around the Protectorate to get Leda back. And it was funny, too, how those clothes and the hairstyle seemed to transform her. She didn’t walk quite as straight. She smiled a bit easier. But there was a sadness too. I’d come to know her well enough by then to know why. This type of life, walking around a place of free people, seeing the sights along the way—the artwork in the causeways, the buskers making music, dancing, or performing acrobatics for the crowds passing through. The smells of the eateries, the bakeries, and the chocolatiers. It was one more hard reminder of the life she was going back to, where the war was all. I tried to get her mind off it, to keep her hopping from place to place so we stayed in the moment.
We crossed the station, hit the bakery, bought a few pitcher jugs filled with a variety of mixed cocktails to take back to the ship, and then we headed down to the sandwich shop last. And even Hartline, once she caught a whiff of that place, didn’t even need to take one bite to decide the detour was worth the risk. You should have seen her walking back, almost double-timing it so we could get to the ship and eat. She didn’t even change or put her hair up before we were all chowing down, crowded around a weapons crate we pulled up to the benches in the midship. Nobody was saying a word we were all stuffing our faces so full. I knew Leda was enjoying herself because she was almost laughing as she ate. And then finally, Myrna chugged down enough water so she could talk.
“Who puts spice in ketchup?” she said, dunking one of her fried corn puffs in it and grinning.
“A genius,” Omar answered his mouth half full. “That’s who.”
The bread was perfectly grilled. Mine was a crispy falafel with a white sauce on the top and a green sauce on the bottom, and perfectly crisped vegetables to dip in the hummus. A genius was damn right.
It was a hell of a way to finish a trip together with a meal like that. We stuffed down those sandwiches, ate up all those bakery sweets, and still had plenty left in the cocktail jugs to keep us going for a while. And we were in the best mood of the whole time we’d been together, the four of us.
“I’ll never doubt you again, Hale Burch, or Helicon, or whatever the hell your real name is. That sandwich was definitely worth the detour.”
“Can’t go wrong with Burch,” I told Hartline, “no matter what time, no matter what part of the galaxy, Burch’ll always do.”
We kept drinking together till we’d emptied those jugs. We stayed on lock with the hatch sealed, thinking that we’d get a full night’s sleep and figure out what to do with Omar and me after we got some breakfast in the morning.
Myrna was tired and drunk pretty fast, so she passed right out. Leda and Omar and I stayed up for a while talking. It was all right. Maybe it was because Omar was coming with me and those two were always going to be family, it felt like it was the same for me, like Leda and I were always going to be family again. It didn’t seem like we were saying goodbye this time, just sorta separating for a while. So when we all started drifting, it was no big deal when we went to sleep. I suppose we all thought we were going to part ways quietly. Those are the types of thoughts you have in our line of work that you think back on later and laugh. It wasn’t like we all didn’t know better by now.
I’m not sure how long it was pinging, but I woke to the sound of the comms beeping at us from the front of the ship. I was on that tactical bench in the midship, not exactly the most comfortable accommodations, but I was so fat and happy after that dinner and the drinks that it didn’t bother me none. I got Leda, because I wasn’t sure about picking up those Trasp comms. She rubbed her head and went straight for the water spigot. Then she huffed and went up front to pick up the ping.
Well, I don’t know how the hell he knew where we were, but it was Nilius.
“Burch, you’re incorrigible. Couldn’t stay away from the restaurants, could you? We need to rendezvous. Details needn’t be mentioned on this channel. I’ll transmit coordinates encrypted with Rishi’s cypher. While you’re at the port, I have the sense that it would be worthwhile for you to buy provisions. Your ship has been out for some time now, very far out, with a lot of mouths to feed. I can reimburse in L-Cr when we meet, so buy what you can carry. Please hurry. I’ll be waiting.”
“Well, shit,” I said after the message stopped. “That’s Harold work.”
“We’ve got plenty of food,” Leda replied.
“No. He’s talking about the Yankee-Chaos, not this ship,” I told her. “Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know exactly, Leda, but I know Nilius well enough to know something’s up, just the wording of it.”
“With Carolina you think?”
“Something with the Y-C. I’m sure I’ll find out when we get out there. On the bright side, though, it looks like Omar and I found our ride.”
Leda shrugged and seemed satisfied at that tradeoff. We started scanning through the station’s register for a bulk provedor who could provision a mid-sized ship fast. Then I put in an order and made sure they had availability for a bot loader that morning. Sure enough, they said they’d have everything ready in a few hours. So I figured I’d take the time to pick up a few luxury items while all that was brewing.
It was late that evening when we locked up with Nilius’s ship. It wasn’t a long goodbye, and as funny as it would’ve sounded at the start of this trip, Hartline was the one who really seemed most struck by the moment. Here was this hardened Trasp intelligence officer who’d been locked-in from the start, now her voice was cracking, and she looked to be dabbing tears away from her eyes. I told her everything would be all right and that she had the best person with her in Leda. And they’d be together inside the Protectorate, so she always had someone to turn to who understood what she was feeling. I told Leda we’d see her again soon enough. We needed them on the inside, and though I didn’t know how everything would play out yet, I knew Rishi and Carolina were strategizing about how they could get the Trasp and Etterans to the table somehow. Aida Jemeis, I knew, would play a big role in that.
Then, once everything was loaded and we’d said our goodbyes, we broke locks and headed for the corridor in Nilius’s ship, Omar and I and that old prime AI.
He hadn’t said much while we were transferring the provisions over, just that something had changed out at the artifact where Carolina’s group was accessing Iophos.
“One thing at a time, old boy,” he told me as we were flinging crates through the locks. “There’ll be plenty of time to talk along the way.”
The good thing with him and Rishi and, well, Maícon, back when he was still working with us, was that we could take all those memories and record what we remembered, and we didn’t have to waste much time explaining everything. So we just had our data encoded for the entire trip back, from meeting Carmenta on Ariel-Cantor, to picking up Verona on Heinan, to planning the op with Kayella and Boggs, to the way everything unfolded on Veronia, meeting Pitka Remera in person, seeing those Iophan fighters and those rogue wizards, and then finally, witnessing that nuclear flash that kicked off the war in an official capacity. One second, Nilius knew nothing, then the next, he was like, “Quite an adventure you four had back there, old boy. Very interesting developments.”
When we did get a chance to sit down with him, he told us that he’d been flying all over the place. Most recently, he’d been back toward Charris and then at the vault with Eddis Ali. I didn’t press him on it too much. I was more concerned with what was happening at the Y-C. And I guess I was right to be.
“What’s with all the food, old man,” I asked him. “They should’ve been provisioned for a good couple months.”
“They had visitors. A full complement. And then, I don’t know exactly how to tell you this, Burch, but correspondence went dark.”
“What do you mean dark?” I asked him.
He held out one of the little nodes on his dermis—those spot-nodes that he and Rishi had been using to tune in to the artifacts, getting messages from their future counterparts.
“The situation out there has changed somehow,” Nilius said. “Rishi has stopped communicating.”
“Stopped communicating?” I asked him. “What the hell does that mean?”
“For now, it means I haven’t had any useful contact from her counterpart in any of my futures, no messages to relay. And that means we need to go out there and see what’s unfolding for ourselves. I came for you as soon as I had indications you and Omar and Leda had returned.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Nothing for certain.”
“What about not for certain?”
“I don’t think your friends knew, Burch. Thus, when I was last in contact with the artifacts, I only knew what they knew, which was little, certain or not.”
“You said they had guests, Nilius. Who even knew they were out there?”
“Carolina’s brother Goss and the historian. And, more troublingly, the assassin.”
“Assassin? What assassin?”
“He’s a close associate of the Rexes whose true identity is unknown to me. He is well known throughout the Letters, though, both by reputation and the alias Murkist.”
“The Murkist? Oh, hell.”
“You know him, Burch?”
“Heard of him. Yeah. That’s who Clem was pretending to be when we ran into Garsin Rex in the Mus. Even the Rexes’ people were scared shitless of the very mention of his name. How the hell did he find them all the way out there?”
“Again, Burch, I know little. But before she went quiet, Rishi wasn’t overly troubled by his presence. It seems that Carolina had established some level of trust with the killer.”
“Trust with the Murkist, and now they’ve all gone dark? Is this thing at top speed?” I asked Nilius, gesturing toward the ship’s deck.
“We can’t go any faster, of course. And I didn’t get any indication that their lives were in danger. I do think I’d know if anything terrible happened. There’s just uncertainty.”
Omar did his best to think up a whole bunch of reasons why they might have gone silent out there, but I wasn’t entirely convinced Nilius was being completely honest. Sure, it was complicated—all the transmissions across time through the different artifacts from the different possible futures. Hell, I was having a hard enough time tracking my own timeline at that point, but Nilius knew what I cared about, and he was only talking about the ship, the mission, the crew—all in those terms. He hadn’t said word one about Rishi.
And again, Omar reasoned that of all the crew, she had the least to worry about. She could survive in space. She could survive if her body shut down. And he had a good point. Maícon Prime had gotten blown half to hell inside a spaceship that exploded and plummeted to the surface of that numbered world when Transom was hunting Clem Aballi, and we’d picked up Maícon’s processor off the desert floor and booted him right back up again. I still had an uneasy feeling about it the whole way out there until Nilius dropped out close to that artifact barely a couple days after leaving Port Cullen.
“Yankee-Chaos, you listening?” I pinged right as we dropped.
“Oh, Burch,” Carolina’s voice came back almost right away. “You have no idea how great it is to hear your voice.”
“Likewise, Y-C. Everything okay over there?”
“Could be worse,” Carolina said. “Better lock up with us so we can talk everything through. The FTL’s offline and we’re running low on provisions, so I hope you guys have eaten, but we’re hanging in there.”
“Ship?” I said, thinking it was odd that she wouldn’t have jumped into the conversation already.
There was a few seconds of quiet air before Carolina came back again.
“You better come on over, as I said, Burch. We are okay, but a lot has happened.”
“Is Rishi okay, Carolina? Just be straight with me.”
“We don’t know exactly.”
Then Ren’s voice came through. “We’re still piecing things together, Burch. But we’re all here. Even Sōsh came back okay. Something happened with Rishi, though. If anyone can help figure out what, it’s you.”
“That’s cryptic enough,” I said to Omar. “Why can’t they just tell me.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Omar replied. “Let’s just get the ships paired off and we can figure it all out.”
So I guess they weren’t going to tell me until we came aboard. I took a deep breath and did my best to be patient. Damn Nilius. He’d known something was up all along.
Hell. It was quite a party over there. And damn were they happy to see the crates and crates of food we’d brought. Transom hadn’t eaten in five days, and somehow, he looked as deadly as ever, his eyes clearer, his jaw sharper, the muscles in his hands and forearm like tight-woven wire under his skin.
“Fasting’s good for the constitution,” he told me as everyone else was jumping to get fed. “Didn’t you know that, Burch?”
“I ain’t got that kind of constitution,” I said back.
They had nine in total left aboard, including two I’d never met before. Of our crew there was Carolina, Sōsh, Transom, Ren, Fieldstone, Draya, Kristoff, and there was Carolina’s brother Goss and her friend from Athos, the historian, Carsten Airee. Man that atrium had never been packed so full. With me and Omar in there too and Nilius as well, there was hardly a place to turn without banging into somebody. And there was a long line to grab a pouch—floating chaos. Carolina had kept them on half rations for days and days now since the engines went down.
I asked them about that, and that’s when they started telling me about Rishi. I knew it was bad when only Ren and Sōsh were doing the talking—my oldest friends in there, going all the way back to the beginning. And the bottom line was that they didn’t know what had happened. Rishi had snapped after getting zapped by some sort of electrical overload in the engine room. Anyway, that’s what they thought after reviewing all the footage they had. I wanted to see everything, I told them.
“What’s wrong with the engines?” I asked Sōsh.
He shook his head and huffed. “Nothing mechanical,” he replied. “I ain’t cracked it yet, boss, but I think it’s a magnetics timing issue in the control arm. Must’ve reset somehow and I can’t get it back to the default from the head to the board.”
“Perhaps I can be of service,” Nilius offered.
“Oh, hell yes,” Sōsh said.
“Amen,” Fieldstone echoed, his mouth half full. They’d both been banging their heads against the problem for days.
And then suddenly there was an awkward silence. They all wanted to say it, but I could tell why they weren’t. That was something Rishi would have fixed in a heartbeat. Or Maícon. Any AI really, even a clone. Harold was in there that moment probably trying what he could. But if Sōsh hadn’t been able to crack it with him by then, they were definitely gonna need Nilius’s help.
I let everyone get their first good meal in. I sure knew how that felt and was sympathetic. Carolina said she was about a day away from sending about half of them back into the artifact to any blind destination just to preserve rations, so it was a great thing we showed up when we did. A lot of conversation was flying around—a sure different dynamic from our usual. That many people on the ship, and all I could think about was the one glaring absence.
I’d grabbed a stack of pies and cakes from a bakery back on Port Cullen, so I snuck back over to Nilius’s ship and brought that big box aboard. From the tone of everything in the atrium, it sounded like they’d earned a little extra something. And they sure erupted when I reappeared with all that. Even Carolina’s brother had a little grin on his face when I busted out those desserts.
I didn’t have much to smile about, so I snuck up to the deck alone, catching Carolina’s eye and letting her know that when she was ready, I’d be up front, waiting to figure out what the hell had gone wrong.
She just shot me a quick look, captain to captain, signaling that she’d be along shortly. And that was a shock in itself, that look, it came at me with years behind it. Young Ms. Dreeson, man had she come a long way now.
I was up there for a long while before Carolina joined me. It gave me a chance to see for myself, pulling up the footage of the overload in the engine room. I saw what they say they saw—Kristoff’s little bot George, glitching, and then going into the engine annex to monkey with the reactor. Then, when Rishi went flying back there to stop him cold, the entire room turned into a bright ball of flash-lightning. The cameras cut out for maybe a minute, and after that, Rishi seemed different.
I watched her as close as I could. It was dark back there in those rear corridors after that. I was trying to think it through, being mindful of putting on the captain’s hat—seeing things as clear-eyed as I could manage, putting all personal bias aside. But my gut told me no. That’s not Rishi.
Clearly, she tricked Kristoff, Draya, and Carolina’s brother Colin into abandoning the Cannon so she could steal it—Rishi and that glitching bot. But that seemed funny to me too. Even if Rishi did have some secret reason for absconding with Verona’s ship, leaving the Yankee-Chaos hobbled with our crew stranded—something our Rishi would never do—but say she did ... Why the hell would she take that glitching old bot with her? That didn’t make any sense to me. But it got me thinking. That little bot was the key. Something funny was going on with old George. I needed to talk to Kristoff about it. That’s where my thinking was at when Carolina came up and pulled herself down to the captain’s chair. I could tell by the way she was looking at me that she was trying to figure out how I was doing. Confused was the answer, much like the rest of them.
“How was the chocolate croissant, Captain?” I asked her.
“You never fail, Burch,” she replied. “On every front. Things were about to get real tough out here if you hadn’t shown up today.”
“That was more Nilius’s doing than mine, if we’re being honest, but I guess I’ll take what credit I can. Hopefully we can figure out what the hell’s going on out here.”
She had a doubtful look on her face, gazing back at me. “My head’s swimming about everything, Burch.”
“I’m just starting to get my head around it myself. I don’t know what to say yet. Still thinking. How are you doing, young Captain?”
Carolina sighed.
“That good?” I joked. “You got some good people around you now, though. Older brother ...?”
She nodded.
“Who’s the other guy?”
“Carsten?”
I looked over at her grinning. She had a look about her.
“Not you too, Burch. I’m not sure I can take it.”
“Oh. Right. We’re always the last to know sometimes, Carolina. He seems like the others like him well enough. Must be a good guy.”
“Stop, Burch. Please.”
“Hey, take it from me, Dreeson. Life comes at you fast. Death too, as it turns out. Can’t wait for the most important things. If you love him, then love him already. Deal with the consequences when they come.”
“Thanks for the life advice.”
“I’m getting more and more of it, you know. I got a future life, a Letters life, a Trasp life now. How’d your Iophan life go?”
“It was a disaster, Burch,” she said, shaking her head. “I started going insane—genuinely insane—and my host’s personality started taking back her body from me. Then Transom had to murder me to send me back before I got lost in her head.”
I looked at her to see if she was joking about it, and she was not. “Well, damn,” I said. “That’s something. Me and Omar got nuked …. Or I guess maybe he got shot first? Anyway, some adventure she’s got us on, huh?”
She could tell I was talking about Rishi.
“We’ll figure it out, Burch.”
“We’d better, Captain.”
“Hey,” she said. “Kristoff brought some stuff back from the Charran archives for Rishi. All kinds of music.”
“Music?”
“Earth music. It was from her time she went back. She told me she wanted to share it with you.”
“Yeah?”
Carolina smiled at me. It was the kind of smile from a friend that makes you think everything might be okay after all. I smiled back at her as best I could.
“First things first,” I told her. “Now that everyone’s got fed, I think maybe we take a breath and then talk all this through after things settle. We learned a lot back on Veronia. I’m sure you did as well.”
“That’s an understatement,” Carolina replied. “All the guys want to talk to you, I think, Burch. Sōsh, Ren, Kristoff. Even Transom. We’re glad you’re here.”
I nodded and then sat there quietly for a moment with Carolina. I was thinking. As wild as things felt, that footage of Rishi, that news—I was sure glad I was there with them. I missed that ship and that crew. And I was there again. So there was always a bright side, I guess, and that was it. If you’ve gotta deal with a crisis, best to do it surrounded by your best people. So there we were.
It sure was cozy in there. And it was plenty chaotic too. It got hard to keep track of the main point as everyone started exchanging ideas and sharing stories. We had a lot of conflicting talk about wizards and Iophans and Murkists and AIs, and to my mind, everyone was missing the point. The problem was that our chief strategist had snapped, stolen a ship, and fled with no indications of her intentions. Or, as I tried to propose to a very skeptical bunch gathered in the atrium, that wasn’t Rishi somehow. And, just as I’d figured they would, most of them immediately jumped to assume I was just suffering wishful thinking—that I’d never want to believe something like that about my Rishi. But Rishi was theirs too. She belonged to all of us, and I knew first-hand that there wasn’t a thing in the universe she cared about more than the people on that ship. So I asked them all how they reconciled that.
Then it turned into a shouting match.
At first, Carolina tried to mediate things, but there were just too many voices and nearly as many hot tempers behind them. Full stomachs aside—that long stretch of short rations and uncertainty and frustration trying to fix engines—all those factors weren’t nearly forgotten. It even got to the point that Sōsh started yelling out from the engine annex to keep the shouting down, as we were distracting them in there while they were trying to concentrate on the repairs. But we’d quiet down for a minute or two and then all start barking at each other again good and loud.
Finally, Carolina put her foot down. Or actually it was her hand, slapping the table and holding it there until everyone shut up.
Then she started giving orders. “Goss, you and Carsten and I are going to talk with Burch over on Nilius’s ship. Nothing will get settled in a shouting match.”
“Oh, sure, the Athosian council will solve the problem for us provincials,” Ren replied, and perhaps hearing the sharp edge in her tone caused her to soften it as she finished. “Respectfully, Captain.”
“I need to talk to Kristoff as well,” I said. “I got questions about his old bot.”
“Of course,” he said, nodding. “If it’s okay with Carolina.”
She nodded as well.
“Don’t worry, you guys,” I added. “We’re not going to decide anything without your input. We like our provincials plenty.”
So we went across to Nilius’s ship, all the while everybody was still grumbling. Carolina tried to tell Transom that he wasn’t invited to the closed-door counsel.
He looked at her and laughed. “Try and stop me, Dreeson. Last time we had two ships, Burch’s girlfriend flew off with it and left us in this whole mess. I ain’t watching from the atrium window if Burch or anyone else gets it in mind to do the same.”
I looked over at Transom and shrugged. I wasn’t offended. He’d been watching Carolina’s back for long enough now he was right to say so. Plus, sometimes he had a way of putting things just how they needed to be said—the flip side to those measured Athosians.
When we got over there, we strapped into the chairs in the back, a smaller group with the same big problems, and I didn’t really expect how it was going to go, because I knew Carolina and Kristoff and Transom well enough, but from her brother Goss and Carsten I had no idea what to expect. And maybe it was that fact that we didn’t know each other that helped more than anything. Getting off on the right foot seemed to be important. Carolina was about to say something, but her big brother spoke up instead.
“If I may,” he began, waiting for a nod from his sister to start. “Rather than arguing, or even summarizing where we stand, I suggest it might be best if we take a different approach. Burch seems to insist that something we’re not considering is at play here. I’m open to that point, given that Rishi’s behavior shift was both sudden and a departure from anything you’ve all seen from her—at least in this timeline.”
“That’s fair, Goss,” Carolina replied. “But if it’s something we haven’t considered, I’m not sure we can just conjure a solution out of nowhere.”
“Well, what are we dealing with, really?” Carsten Airee asked. “Burch says he doesn’t feel like Rishi was the same after that burst of electricity from the engines struck her. Maybe we explore there. What other possibilities could there be?”
“That’s why I wanted Kristoff here,” I said. “The bot—old George. You all said he was acting funny. And he goes into the engine annex, starts fumbling with the settings, then ZAP! Rishi’s not Rishi anymore. That’s what I want to know about.”
“I wish I knew, Burch. But both Rishi and I were trying like hell to diagnose and fix George’s glitching the whole time that Murkist was aboard and neither of us made any headway. I thought I got it that night after he stopped vocalizing, but he started up again right before the electrical overload.”
“And old George was fine before that?” I asked.
“I think so,” Kristoff replied. “That’s what I was told.”
Carolina looked deep in thought.
“What?” I asked her.
“I can’t remember the last time we had George switched on before that. We only activated him again to keep an eye on the Murkist. I think before that ... I mean ... it was months ago.”
“But he didn’t ever glitch like that before?” Carsten asked.
“Not that I can recall,” Carolina answered. “I mean, he’s an old bot. Homemade too, meaning no offense, Kristoff.”
“So it’s possible something may have gone off during that long period of inactivity?” Goss said. “That’s probably safe to say,” Carolina answered.
I saw Kristoff shrug, but no one really seemed satisfied.
“What about Rishi herself?” Carsten asked. “Burch, I noticed you say something interesting. You stated very clearly, ‘That’s not Rishi,’ right?”
“That’s what I said.”
“What if we take that statement at face value? Let’s give Burch his due and assume he knows her well enough to know. Unless I’m missing something, she was running in a very sophisticated android shell—a unique one.”
“Not exactly unique,” Carolina said. “Just about, though.”
“Could it be hijacked? Hacked somehow? We know the Murkist is deceptively capable with respect to technology. I mean, he was tracking the ship. And there did seem to be no love lost between him and Rishi,” Carsten rubbed his own throat as he said it, “A position I take her side on, for the record.”
“Funny, Airee,” Transom replied. “He’d have to know how her processor worked to hack it, though, and unless he’s got a wizard on retainer, which I doubt, he wouldn’t know where to begin. Those android shells are custom built, straight from Eddis Ali’s vault.”
“Could Harold run it?” Airee asked.
“No,” Kristoff replied. “It’s an entirely different processing system.”
“Maícon Prime could,” Transom stated. “That is a possibility.”
“We all watched Rishi take Maícon Prime offline, though,” Carolina said, she was shaking her head doubtfully.
“But if we’re talking all possible scenarios, one is that Rishi made the choice to steal the ship on her own, without informing any of us,” Kristoff said. “The second is that her processor somehow became corrupted. The third is that her body is being controlled by another comparable processor. To me, those seem to be the only possibilities.”
“Okay,” I told them. “You asked me for a theory before in the atrium when everyone was yelling at me. Now the way I see it, I’d have to give you an explanation for the latter two scenarios. And I think we agree that a virus or some other outside programming from the Murkist is unlikely. To have a sound theory, I’d have to present a story for how that processor of Maícon’s got switched from Rishi’s arm to the inset in her head. Does that all follow?”
Everyone looked at each other and no one seemed to object.
“That all seems correct, Burch,” Carolina conceded. “But that’s a stretch, I think.”
“Well, maybe it’s not so much of a stretch as you think,” I replied. “There’s no footage after that electrical overload, which means we have no idea what happened in that annex for over a minute until Rishi’s body re-emerges. Right?”
“That’s correct,” Carolina agreed.
“What if that overload wasn’t an accident at all. What if it was a deliberate sabotage to zap her body?”
“What if? What if?” Colin Dreeson asked. “A lot of hypotheticals there, Burch.”
“In the absence of video footage, all that we have is hypothetical in that room,” I replied. “Everyone who’s assuming Rishi took the Cannon is making the assumption that the same processor that went into that room came out controlling that body. That’s an assumption too, and none of you have any more proof of that than I do of the contrary.”
They all looked at me skeptically, but then there was Carolina’s best boy friend over there with his chin in his hand before he tilted his head.
“That seems to follow,” Carsten said. “But there’s an extra leap that you’re making, Burch, if we’re talking about the third scenario. And that leap is that the processor somehow made it from her arm to her head. So how did that happen?”
“The other bot was the only one in the room.”
“George?” Kristoff asked, he was shaking his head. “Why would George switch out Rishi for Maícon? That’s not something he or any other housebot would concern itself with. He’s running a simple android protocol, similar to Harold. George is an automaton.”
I was thinking. And then for some reason, I had the image of Pitka Remera jump right into my head from our trip back through the artifact—me climbing into Pitka’s shuttle after it had slammed down on Veronia, smoke everywhere, and outside, there was that Maícon of hers. And I suddenly had a thought. That same damn Maícon of hers had been on the Y-C recently. Some big coincidence, I say. That was where we’d gotten a lot of our intel for our mission back to Veronia in the first place.
“We need to get Omar in here,” I said. “Hang on.”
“What are you thinking, Burch?” Transom said.
“It’s fuzzy,” I told him, “but I think I’m on to something.”
I pinged over to the Yankee-Chaos and told them to send over Omar right away.
They all looked at me. “I need to make sure I’m not misremembering,” I told them. “It’s artifact stuff.”
The gears were turning in my head as Omar took his sweet time coming over. When he finally got there, he was snacking down on a dinner pouch as he floated in.
“I need to make sure,” I told Omar. “Am I remembering correctly that Kayella and Boggs told us clearly that they saw Pitka Remera’s Maícon leaping between different processing platforms, bot-to-bot-to-ship and so forth?”
“That’s correct, Burch,” Omar said in no uncertain terms. “That’s a fact as I remember it. Both Kayella and Boggs thought it was damn odd.”
“That same Maícon clone was flying our ship on Theta-Nikorla as well,” I said. “Pitka Remera’s Maícon? Is that correct too, Carolina?”
She nodded, and now her face was starting to get concerned.
“Did we all make another assumption?” I asked, looking at Transom. “Theta-Nikorla—was that the last time any of us heard from Pitka’s Maícon?”
“Right,” Transom confirmed.
“You boarded the Yankee-Chaos that day,” I said to Omar. “Did you ever encounter a Maícon aboard?”
He shook his head. “Not that I recall, Burch. It was only the base operating system. Actually, now that I think of it, I assumed there was an autoprotocol to wipe the AI operator in the case of the ship changing hands.”
“Which it did when you took it,” I said. “What if he leapt into the bot and shut it down? Right? Nobody would expect a Maícon in that clunky old body of George. You wouldn’t even have powered up that dusty bot, Omar.”
He shrugged.
“Please, spell it out for me, Burch,” Carsten Airee said. “This is a little confusing for those of us who weren’t there, or at least for me anyway.”
“Carolina and the crew, with Maícon Prime—they all went into the caves on Theta-Nikorla to escape the Trasp, who were sieging the outpost. Pitka’s Maícon was in the ship’s main processor when the Trasp came, right?”
Carolina nodded to confirm that was correct, and I continued, slowly piecing things together as I went.
“So then, rather than being taken, which would’ve put Maícon Prime at risk, Pitka’s Maícon clone leaps into the bot to hide. Then he immediately shuts down so he can’t be discovered. He stays offline, hidden in Old George’s body until Carolina boots him up again to watch the Murkist. Then, first thing after he wakes up, he finds out that Rishi had taken Maícon Prime offline. What’s his obligation at that point?”
“To liberate his boss,” Transom said; he had his eyes closed, thinking.
“That’s a huge stretch, Burch,” Carolina said.
“Why?” I asked her. “Because you want it to be?”
“You just want it to be true so Rishi’s absolved of stealing the Cannon.”
“Like hell, Dreeson,” I replied. “If I had to choose between Rishi stealing Verona’s ship of her own accord unexplained and this scenario, I’ll take the former in a heartbeat. If what I outlined is true, Carolina, that means Maícon Prime’s back in the game, and he’s taken Rishi offline—and whatever he’s going to do to her, and whatever else—he’s got a good head start on anything we can do to stop him.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
Transom cut her right off. “No. No. It fits. I was just talking with Fields and Metalface this morning about the control arm of the reactor. They were all scratching their heads about that overload, because neither of them had ever heard of an arc sparking off the magnetic head coils back into an annex like that. Never. I’d never heard of it either. But you could rig one to do it if you knew what the hell you were doing. And who could do that on the Y-C? Two minds. Rishi and Maícon. And of those two? Rishi had no reasonable motive for taking the Cannon. For what? She was already functionally in command anyway. But Maícon? What’s the first thing he’d do if he was restarted?”
“Get the hell away from the people who took him offline,” Colin Dreeson stated. “Well, Mr. Burch, we asked you to make a case, and I believe you’ve made at least a decent, if not a strong one.”
Carolina’s face went whiter than white. “Oh my God,” she gasped. “Oh my God.”
“Dreeson, what?” Carsten Airee asked.
Then Transom’s eyes went wide. “Oh, shit!”
“Carolina, what is it?” I asked her.
“Maícon Prime knows where the banking keys are—the hardware we took from Lime Harbor. He helped me stash the keysets.”
I couldn’t speak for Carolina and what was in her heart, but mine skipped a few beats and then dropped to my gut, because that was our biggest and last advantage. It might have been the only thing keeping us alive.
“Well,” Colin Dreeson said, his eyebrows raised. “If that’s so, that’s a setback.”
“No shit, Goss,” Carolina shouted at him.
She was breathing hard, and for the first time I’d ever seen, Carolina Dreeson was right on the cusp of losing her cool. Transom reached over and grabbed her by the shoulder. She was freaking out.
“Hey!” he barked right in her face. “You are not Lee Ira anymore. Keep your damn head about you, Dreeson.”
He sat there staring at her, she staring right back at him, her eyes fixed wide open, breathing deep.
“What the hell are we going to do?” she said. “If he gets those keys ...”
“We’re not going to panic,” her brother declared. “We’re going to stay calm, and we’re going to make a plan.”
The plan got pretty simple pretty fast. Nilius and Sōsh had to finish resetting the Yankee-Chaos’s control arm to its defaults before we could go after Rishi’s body. None of us knew whether it was Rishi or Maícon inside that android shell for certain, but I think most of us who were there in that meeting were convinced of my take. And when we explained it to the others, there was more clarity and conviction in our voices. Sōsh and Fieldstone both said it lined up with the engine’s malfunction too. On the one hand, they felt more confident the problem wouldn’t jump up again after the fix; on the other, Rishi was probably at the mercy of a very unpredictable and motivated prime AI, and none of us had the first guess how much those motivations cut against ours now. In short, the whole situation was a mess.
But the plan, as soon as the engines were fixed and tested, was for us to break up again, and for a small group of us to take Nilius’s ship and go after the banking keys. The timeline would be close. It was a long way back to the Indies where Carolina had hidden the keysets, and Nilius’s ship was significantly faster than the Cannon. So there was still a chance we could get there first. And if we did, we could wait, set a snare for Rishi’s body, whether it was Maícon or a wacked-out Rishi herself driving it, and then we’d have our answers. That’s if all went according to our plan, just like it always did, don’t you know.
I had to go, of course, because if it was Rishi, we figured maybe I could talk some sense into her. And Carolina had to go, because she knew where the keysets were hidden, which meant Transom came, and then there was this Airee fellow, who I was growing to like a bit in his own little weird way. He thought he was pretty smart, I’d gathered, but he wasn’t an asshole about it was my impression, and the more I talked to him, the more I started to think he was right. He did have a head on him. But then there was the problem of the Yankee-Chaos—who would command the old girl?
Ren put forward Fieldstone’s name right away, on account of his rank. But then there was Omar. And as much as I knew him to be a cool customer, it didn’t sit right to me to put a Trasp captain under and Etteran major and assume everything would just be okay. Fact, the more I thought of it, the less I liked the idea of leaving Omar on that ship at all. I trusted my people, and I trusted Omar Jemeis. I wasn’t sure I trusted them all together, or maybe it was better to say I trusted the nature of the universe and recent times. Trasp and Etteran didn’t mix without some other force there to bind them. So I asked Omar to come along with us in case we needed another set of trained fighting hands. And then, instead of Fieldstone, who’s Etteran military history made it dubious putting him in command of an LSS ship, I proposed to Carolina giving the Y-C to her brother. She knew him best, but I figured he had that Dreeson blood—born to command like she was. She told me he had the experience, and she trusted him.
So once the engines were back up, and we tested them through a double jump. Carolina swore in Colin Dreeson and gave him strict instructions on where to meet us. She kept the location tight between those two. She didn’t even tell me till we were underway. From what I could tell, even Transom didn’t know.
Last thing I heard was from Sōsh as we were about to disengage and lock our hatches.
“Sure you don’t want another fighter, boss?” he asked me.
“I’d love another fighter or two,” I told him, “but if something goes wrong with those engines again, big brother’s going to need a tight crew. Plus we got three fighters here already. We’ll see you soon enough in the Indies.”
“Now, we must fly,” Nilius declared.
And that was it. We jumped out of there fast as ever, hoping, praying even that those banking keys would still be tucked away safe when we got where we were going.
Transom had that box of his with him. Nilius didn’t like that “the Etteran” was with us. And when I reminded him that he was Carolina’s personal security and he had to come, Nilius looked at me squarely and declared, “That one’s not anybody’s anything, Burch. I’m not sure what he has in that box, but I know I don’t like it.”
“Well, he probably doesn’t like you either, old man. War makes strange bedfellows.”
“I am not at war, Burch. What we’re doing is strategic covert statesmanship.”
“Sometimes you need a knife,” I told him.
“I’ll hold you to those words when you’re cut, old boy.”
I suppose we could have picked a better group for congeniality—the Etteran Reaper and Omar Jemeis, brother of the face of the Trasp Protectorate, but Carolina and I were in the middle, and Omar was Leda’s kid brother. Maybe I could say that meant something to Ren and Sōsh, but who knows what that meant to Transom? All I knew for sure was if I was right and it somehow came to a standoff with Maícon Prime we couldn’t pick a more cunning fighter, pound-for-pound, than Transom. Nilius would have to live with it.
And to say suspicions just ran that one way would’ve been misrepresenting the situation. That’s because Maícon had told Carolina that Nilius himself was one of the players at the root of the war, and the very evidence he’d presented for that had been the same damn banking keys we needed Nilius’s help to recover before Maícon Prime did. So we jumped out of there fast on a panic schedule, and none of us had the time to think through trust and alliances. One more time, I felt stuck dead in the middle.
I didn’t think it was the greatest idea to open that subject for discussion, or any other sensitive subject for that matter. But I’d brought that up with Nilius before, and I thought he was straight about it. Yeah, he’d invested money in all kinds of suspect schemes, most notably aiding the Rexes and their partners all over the Letters in moving and managing their money. He’d been doing black-market business for a couple centuries, apparently. His justification was that AIs got shut out of the West Battery monetary systems—Dreeson’s, Hellenia, the Protectorate, the Etteran Guild—AIs couldn’t bank anywhere. The concern from authorities was the advantage great processing power could muster in moving markets artificially before humans could respond. Plus, those AIs, by protocol shouldn’t be aspiring beyond base needs. But Nilius had been working on that private project out in Tau-Nira—his space station. “Not a cheap endeavor, old boy,” I remember him telling me. Centuries he’d been working on it, ever since the artifacts were discovered. According to Nilius, that’s what all that money was for, and he couldn’t finance it in the Athosian stock trade. So he asked me: Did that make him the villain, making money off the war’s back-channel financing? I wasn’t sure. Parts yes maybe, parts no. But now wasn’t the time to have that conversation with Carolina, that’s sure. We just had to sit tight, buckle down, and formulate a plan for recovering those keysets.
Transom, meanwhile, was working on the bands to get his legs back under him. They’d been floating for a while, and he’d been fasting, so he was not looking to crash out on a mission if we had to run for a stretch and fight. He and Omar started switching off, talking, competing a little, and Transom at one point sorta grinned at something Omar said. He turned back to him and then looked at me. “He’s a smartass, Burch, this one. Just like big sister. We better get my ass back to the war soon. I might be starting to find a Trasp tolerable.”
Omar grinned back but didn’t say anything. It was asking a lot for a Trasp to say one good word about Transom. It was good enough they weren’t at each other’s throats for now.
We were about three hours out when Carolina sat everyone down. Until that point, I’d understood that Transom knew where Carolina had put the banking keys, but he seemed as deep in the dark as me and Omar.
“You’ll know the ground when we get there, Sebastian. We’re going back to Lime Harbor.”
“Lime Harbor?” he replied. “You left them there?”
“I knew it!” Carsten Airee said, shaking his head. “There was something there, after all. You really cut me right out, Dreeson.”
Carolina shrugged apologetically. “I didn’t want assassins coming after you too, Carsten. I’d just gotten shot in the leg, as you’ll recall.”
“So let me get this straight,” I asked her. “You stole the keysets from one of the banks there, and then you went back and hid them in the same place?”
“Same city,” she replied. “Not the same place.”
Omar was considering the matter I could see. I started thinking about it too.
“It’s not a terrible play,” Omar replied. “An unlikely place for you to stash them, all things considered.”
“The group didn’t have that as a high probability,” Nilius stated.
“Should we be telling him this?” Transom asked.
“I have no further use for the money,” Nilius replied, displaying the nodes on his forearm. “It was a case of initial investment repaying indefinitely over time. No direct monetary profit but the information my future counterparts convey to me. Of course, that information stream could be used to eclipse the shadow war fund exponentially. But these banking keys are strategically important for the group. That is my motivation to recover them.”
“Okay,” I said. “We didn’t need a deep dive, old man. We needed a ride. So what’s the layout, Captain? Do we need you on the ground with us, or is Transom going to know where to find them?”
“She’s coming with us or he is,” Transom said, looking over at Nilius.
“I will go with you,” Nilius said. “Ms. Dreeson may stay with the ship.”
“We stashed the keys in the Riche, house,” Carolina said. “Sebastian knows where it is.”
Now Transom was grinning. “Right under their goddamn noses. You cagey bastard, Dreeson.”
She didn’t seem so proud of herself in the moment, simply responding, “There’s a flat attic structure on the roof deck. I’m coming—we’re all going—so there’ll be no need to talk you through the drop spot.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, looking over at Carolina. “I’ve always wanted to go to Lime Harbor. Always heard the stories about that old place and was jealous when I heard of you guys landing down there. Can’t wait to see the city with my own eyes.”
“I’d be happy to tell you some stories, Burch,” Airee said, smiling at me. “Once we settle the business at hand of course. It’s a remarkable place—and one I visited in my travels back inside the artifact. I saw it before it declined. One of the most vibrant cities in all the Battery.”
“Airee,” Transom stated.
“I know. I know. Sometimes I can’t help myself.”
“You strike me as a man who enjoys your job,” I told him.
“That’s a fact,” Transom agreed.
“I guess you’re in good company,” I decided. “All right then, let’s talk business and sew up this op.”
Well, we made plans. And again, the universe laughed. All our plans presumed we’d be jumping in to a completely abandoned outpost. When Carolina and Transom had pulled Fieldstone and his junior officer off the surface of Lime Harbor all those months back, they’d been the last two people on the planet. But when we dropped out, there were seven ships docked up on the station at the top of the tower. Seven. Well, hell. That was quite a party for an abandoned city.
Nilius was scanning, but none of those ships matched the hull profile of the Cannon. So whoever these people were, Maícon didn’t appear to be among them.
Carolina began arguing with Transom and Nilius about our ingress. She had preferred to go down the space elevator, as an atmospheric entry left a ship exposed and visible in the case anyone was down there hiding in ambush. Transom made the tactical case: sneaking into the city wasn’t going to happen either way now, so best to keep the ship close when we went for the keys. Carolina told Nilius to take us down fast and close to the Riche house and land in the nearest big piazza, and that’s just what that old AI did. He flew a drop route like we were diving into combat, hardly having enough time to take decent surveillance, all the while ignoring two pings from the station-top at the space elevator, where the caller claimed to be the Aldura System’s controller—like such a thing existed anymore. Nilius told us that they were flagged Indie ships, which made sense, as Lime Harbor was local to the eastern Indies, but that didn’t tell us what the hell they were doing there.
Nilius got the back ramp down about a second after he plonked us down in a big dusty courtyard, and that was it, we all stepped out.
“Walk,” Transom instructed. “Nice and cool.”
We three fighters were armed of course, Transom especially, but we figured we’d be there so briefly that we didn’t even bother with suits or radiation gear. In-and-out was the name of the game. And we were walking, sure. But it was a quick enough walk I hardly had a chance to take in any of that scenery I was fascinated with.
“I’m getting indicators of a civilian-led expedition,” Nilius stated. “They are not too impressed by our incursion into the city.”
“As long as they stay out of our way,” Transom answered. “They can be as mad as they want to be.”
Transom was walking on point, flanked by me and Omar, while Carolina and Carsten Airee stepped in behind us, with Nilius trailing close behind.
Nobody said much as we approached the house, expecting to find the place completely abandoned, like the rest of the city and the entire outpost was supposed to be. But as soon as we walked up, some guy in a full suit came stomping out the front door of the house, saw us, and stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of us walking up on him. I could see him pause, and in the posture, it looked like he was taking a closer look. Then he took his helmet clean off to get a proper look at us.
“Carolina Dreeson, is that you?” and he could see that it was. “Sebastian? What are you guys doing walking all the way up here without suits?”
He was confused as hell.
“Alex!” Carolina answered. “Oh, my God! Wait. Barlow, I’m sorry. You go by Barlow now, right?”
Carolina stepped right through me and Transom and went to embrace the young man.
“I thought you were in Eden?” Carolina said as she hugged him about the neck.
“Yeah, we were in Eden,” he replied, sorta shaking his head at her as they stepped back from that embrace. “For like a year we were in Eden. We kinda thought you were coming back for us, Carolina.”
She got all red about the face for a moment. “Well. Things got a little crazy for a while.” She shook her head. “Actually, they haven’t stopped being crazy really. I’m sorry. Is Sisco with you?”
At that question, that young man gazed back at Carolina with the most peculiar look. It was the kind of look that signaled that something was off, but he didn’t quite know what.
“Let’s get you out of the radiation,” he said, though now his tone had gone from excited to wary.
“Who’s Sisco?” I asked Transom.
“The kid’s wife … or girlfriend. Whatever. They were here before when we came.”
“Carsten,” the young man said, smiling as we all stepped inside the front door of the grand old house.
“Good to see you again, Alex,” Carsten replied.
“Is something wrong?” Carolina asked him. “Is everything okay with you and Sisco?”
“She’s down at the hub directing the chems group at the warehouse, Carolina. She said she talked to you. She told me you were on your way up to the house, but she didn’t say anything about an entourage, or a low-altitude drop-landing for that matter. I was under the impression you’d come down the elevator and were already on the ground?”
Transom took one look at me and went bombing up the main stairs for the roof. I sure knew what that meant.
“You stay on her,” I yelled back at Omar. “Tight!”
“What the hell is going on?” I heard that kid Barlow ask.
Transom had surmised it, and I only figured it out as I was running up those stairs behind him. Whether it was Rishi or it was Maícon we couldn’t be sure yet, but that android shell was there on that outpost already, and whoever was driving it had to be impersonating Carolina, and doing a good enough job to fool this Sisco.
We got up to the roof fast, notwithstanding the creaking steps I thought I might go right through. But on the roof, there was no sign of anyone up there.
Transom went right over to the attic closet, or whatever you call a little exterior rooftop room like that. He banged open the door with a quick shoulder jab to the upper door panel and we were suddenly looking at a dark, dusty closet. Transom was shaking his head.
“I don’t see anything,” he said. “I don’t think he’s been here yet.”
I was standing in the door frame, waiting for Carolina to come up. “Some houseguest you are, Transom,” I said. “Busting down doors like ... well, I was going to say like you own the place, but I doubt you treat it like that if you did.”
He wasn’t interested in courtesy. He was scanning the small room, looking for hiding places for the banking keyset I guessed. Carolina knew where she’d hid the keys, though, so I figured we could just wait for her to come up. It was dark in there. I couldn’t see much from the doorway with the glare of the daylight sun, so I took a step or two inside and felt a sudden drift of air whoosh past me like a ghost passing by.
I didn’t even see him, but Transom nearly took my head off lunging toward the doorway. I had to spin full around, reacting to Transom, but as I did, out of the corner of my eye—a flash in the daylight—there he was, Maícon Prime. He’d slipped right past us both, and he was running for the stairs.
No good, though. Before he could get there, out came Omar with Carolina, Carsten, and young Barlow Riche, whose stately old house we were tearing all up. So there was Maícon Prime, stuck right in the middle.
“Hand over the keys, robot,” Transom said.
And he looked back with an almost human expression of confusion, as though it was the last thing he’d ever do. He was looking at me, though, and he’d got me figured out right.
“I will not be doing that, no,” he replied, watching me closely, and then looking over at Omar.
“Don’t do it,” I said. “I’m not going to let you hurt anyone.”
“It was never my intention to hurt anyone, Burch.”
“What about Rishi?”
“No material harm has come to her, nor will it—certainly not by my hand. I must be off, though.”
He grinned at Transom, stepped toward the edge of the balcony, and leapt right over the chest-high wall down three floors to the cobblestone alleyway beside the house. And on one side of that alleyway down there, I saw Nilius step out from behind the front of the house, blocking that escape. Nilius either had perfect timing or was monitoring us somehow—maybe he’d put up a drone. I wasn’t sure. Maícon had landed that three-story drop okay, and was just about to sprint out the other end of the alley, I could see, but he wasn’t expecting one thing for sure.
“Burch!”
I could hear Carolina cry out as I dropped right over that rail thinking one thing for sure—come on wizard legs, don’t fail me!
And sure enough, those legs did okay, but the instant I landed, I felt my damn organs all bounce off the floor of my abdominal cavity so hard I was afraid they’d come busting out the sides. I almost barfed, but Maícon saw me there, gulping as I got my bearings, standing between him and his exit.
Maícon sorta grinned at me. “That’ can’t have felt good, Burch.”
“Don’t you worry about me, Prime. Where’s Rishi?”
“I admire her, you know, very much. But she’s made a grave miscalculation. One cannot travel the road without paying the toll. She cares too deeply for her friends.”
“Oh, robot!” I heard Transom’s voice from above.
And I thought, oh shit, I know that tone.
I noticed Nilius still standing back at the end of the alleyway, and as both Maícon and I looked up, there was Transom looking down on both of us with a great big grin I could see from three stories down—ear to ear. And in his right hand he had a rectangular object that looked like a light charge, and suddenly it dawned on me what might have been in that crate of his—tools for the job at hand.
“That was a nice trick with the engine discharge,” Transom said. “Our ops teams at the EIC have a few tricks in our bag as well.”
The others started looking over the edge of the roof at us—Carolina, Carsten, Omar, that Barlow kid. Suddenly, I felt like I was stuck at the bottom of a pit, and I was regretting my decision to drop off that roof even more.
“Sebastian, you should know as well as anyone that I am not so simple as a Trasp strikebot,” Maícon said, tilting his neck back up at Transom. “If you drop that flash-charge on us the worst I will experience is a light tingling sensation of the dermis. However, because of the alloys in his pelvic girdle and lower spine, there is a sixty-eight percent chance that Burch will shit his pants.”
I couldn’t believe Maícon Prime said that. I looked over at him suddenly, and then realized exactly what he was calculating, and no sooner had I looked up and shouted—all I could see was Transom’s laughing teeth in the background as that flash-charge descended, seemingly in slow motion.
“You asshole!” I shouted at him.
Then, BOOM.
And damn, getting nuked felt better than that. I didn’t quite lose consciousness, but I lost damn near everything else—with the notable exception of control of my bowels. So at least there was that. But I was quite consciously aware of being fully laid out flat on those cobblestones, my legs and prosthetic hand totally dead weight, and that tingling Maícon was talking about, it went right up and down my spine, even into my brain, which I couldn’t feel exactly, but my eyeballs felt big, like they were swollen right out of their sockets. My ears were ringing like the city bells on Founders Day. Holy hell. That charge had sent all the nanotech in my body into overdrive. For a while there, I couldn’t move at all, couldn’t talk, couldn’t even blink. I was just staring up at that bright Lime Harbor sky.
Then I heard footsteps rushing.
“Oh, Burch! Burch! Please be okay,” I heard Carolina’s voice as she came running, kneeling over my motionless body.
I couldn’t really talk, but I was consciously aware of them lifting me up and carrying me into the house. Transom and Omar were nowhere to be seen.
Well, damn. Of course he got away. Slowly, over the course of the next hour or so, the sensation started returning to my body, one system at a time it seemed. But it damn well hurt, sort of like when you sleep funny on your arm and it’s been asleep all night. It tingles like a bastard when you finally roll off it. That’s what happened to my eyeballs, my spine, and yeah, my guts too. I didn’t shit my pants, though. I had to tell them all that much. I still got some sense of pride.
Transom came waltzing back into the house grinning, and he slapped me on the side of my left leg. I was still laid up on young Barlow’s couch.
“You must be the biggest dumbest asshole in the entire galaxy,” I told him. “I had him, Transom.”
“No you didn’t. You thought you had him. Which meant you had a real problem if you tried to stop him, Burch. The way I see it, I did you a favor.”
“Friends like you, Sebastian,” I heard Carsten Airee’s voice from behind me. “You let him get away.”
“Of course I let him get away, Professor. He was always getting away—unless that flash-charge had worked, of course. I tuned it special for him, but it was still just a prayer of that working on that wizard body.”
I could tell in Transom’s tone that he was proud of himself for some reason. He gestured toward Airee for something. I couldn’t tell what. Those two knew each other much better than I figured. A few seconds later, Airee came back into the room with Transom’s gearbag. Sebastian pulled out a tablet and started projecting a screen from the back of it.
“That bastard Murkist,” he said. “The tracker he put on the Yankee-Chaos ... Etteran EIC has a similar vector-tracing system that Ketch is pretty damn good at projecting destinations with. I refitted the little bug the Murkist stashed in the Y-C’s bell. And, Prime had to get here somehow, right?”
“That’s true,” I said. “The Cannon?”
“You weren’t with us, Burch, but Prime was real proud of the way he’d piloted us into Lime Harbor when we came here before, hidden behind the ships these people are using to repair their sun. I figured—ninety-five percent at least—he’d use his clone as the pilot, use the same maneuver, and all I’d have to do is get close enough to put a shot on the Cannon’s frame when it came down to pick up Prime, right?”
“So you put a tracker on the ship?”
Transom shook his head. “Turns out I didn’t have to. That bastard Murkist told us he wouldn’t track the Yankee-Chaos anymore. He didn’t say anything about the Cannon. I don’t know how the hell the Murkist got a tracker on her, but I fell so far behind Prime on foot that I missed the shot when Maícon jumped back aboard the Cannon.” Transom held up his improvised little tracking bug. “I went to check to see if I’d somehow landed a long shot, so I pull up the frequency, and there’s two signals—this one six hundred meters away in the alley, and the other flying off in the bell of Verona’s ship. Ping-ping-ping. Ping-ping-ping.”
“You lucky bastard,” I said.
“Speaking of luck, Burch. I gotta know. Sixty-eight percent or thirty-two?”
Just then Carolina stuck her head in the room. Behind her, there was a pretty young lady who looked an awful lot like another Dreeson herself.
“That’s enough out of you right now, Sebastian. None of this is a laughing matter. Why don’t you make yourself useful and get back to the ship and bring up some food. I haven’t eaten all day, and I bet Burch could use something to eat as well.”
“Sure, boss,” he replied.
Then he looked over at me.
“Yeah, asshole,” I said. “Make yourself useful. Go and fetch me a sandwich.”
Thank you for a great story. Looking forward to your reading.