TWENTY-SEVEN

 

 

I DON’T REMEMBER the dismount, but maybe it’s better that way. Every part of me is running too hot, like I’ve caught a shipboard fever, and a deep ache thrums with my heartbeat. The painkiller haze tries to hide it, but all they do is keep it out of focus: I can’t tell exactly where I hurt, or how bad, but there’s no doubting that I do.

My head has the worst of it. There’s pressure on either side of my eyes, and a ringing in my ears that seems to come from everywhere at once.

Judging by the scrap of plastic in my hand and the trail of crumbs across my lap, I’ve already auto-piloted through the calorie bar in my thigh pocket, but all it does is remind me how long I’ve gone without a meal. The hunger is a certain thing, and I cling to it; it anchors everything else. I know that I’m awake, and hungry, and alive enough to hurt, but after that I’m not so sure.

I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, staring at the same ugly stretch of peeling paint. It looks like a shipping container, thick and sturdy and tacky with machine smells, oils and acids. The walls are patchwork rust and grey enamel, but someone has tried to patch the holes with strips of salvaged insulation. A string of bulbs and heat lamps buzz, just enough to take the icy edge off my cheeks.

The floor is scattered with the remains of a dozen emergency kits: little piles of spent hydro sachets and empty bandage wrappers, lines of unrolled sleeping bags and empty bottles of blackout pills.

I catch the reflection of myself on a curve of something glassy, but I don’t get the whole picture all at once. I look like battlefield leftovers, propped in a corner and twisted over on myself, like someone tried to haul me into cover but couldn’t get all the way. Like I’m destined for a POW brig, or a meal for scavengers, whatever gets to me first.

The glass is my visor, I realise, resting at an angle and looking up at me.

Where are you?

But it doesn’t have an answer.

The thought drags me to my knees, pulls me forward on fingertips. One hand is wrapped in suit-glove, but the other loses skin as I fight for friction. Jesus Christ, Christa Isabella and all the fucking second-volume saints, it hurts. I snag a fingernail and almost tear it loose, but it buys me grip, and the pain earns my head a second in the clear. One foot on the deck, boot locked and muscle-fibres tensing. I haul my weight into the air, but the floor tilts and shadows creep in around the corners. I find a lock on the other sole, bite my tongue to keep myself here and now and the world from turning around me.

I risk a fall to find my helmet—

My flesh and blood.

It closes around me, feeds me familiar smells and animal warmth, but the counter doesn’t move.

00.00

“Where are you?”

The words grate my throat, call thick phlegm up from battered lungs. A shudder travels through me and panic ties knots across my chest. I’ve been cut in half, left a whole body somewhere I can’t see. Worse, I don’t remember the dismount. I don’t remember the break, the last time I felt connected. Fear turns me around, makes me howl.

WHERE ARE YOU?

“Easy,” from nearby, but I can’t see the source.

My eyes are full of sparks. My head swims.

“Easy,” again, and a hand around my shoulder. “Crash protocol,” this to my suit, quiet but clear. “Technician override, confirm voice sample and ID; NHC-782-081. I have authority to work this suit. Call out.”

“Override confirmed,” says the speaker built into the outside of the helmet.

“Good. Let her down slowly.”

I can’t help the fright as I tilt, but my reflexes loosen me in time for the suit to take over. It spreads my stance, uses the boot-locks and muscle-fibre to lower me to the ground.

A shadow passes overhead. “Diagnostic,” it says. “Why aren’t you treating for shock?”

There’s a pause, and a flicker of glowing eyes in the sky.

“Reboot internal logic platform.”

There’s a click, and a trail of text across my visor.

“That’s better. Begin trauma management.”

I don’t feel the pinpricks, but my heart runs heavy and my muscles constrict. The suit props me up, holds me tight while my skin turns electric.

“Christs, you haven’t been feeding her either? IV and suppressants. Now, please. Call out.”

“Administering nutritional admixture and hunger suppressants.”

“Good.” A sigh. “Anything else I need to know about?”

“Negative.”

“Don’t think I won’t strip you out when you’re on my bench again.”

The suit doesn’t respond to the threat.

Minutes pass, and my vision clears, opening up around a set of familiar features. He’s missing his ’dragger suit, traded out for a marine-marked coat and a heavy scarf across the lower half of his face.

“Folau? Is that you?”

There’s the top half of a smile, and a soft look. “Hello, chief.” He stands straight, looks me over. “Are you okay?”

“No.”

He chuckles. “Should’ve known better than asking.” He turns in place, and offers a hand to get me standing. “Do you think you can walk?”

 

 

FOLAU PUSHES THROUGH the covers and insulation and into an emergency airlock made of clear polymer, bonded to a hole in the side of the container. He probably didn’t have time to seal it on the way in, but its little compressor has already inflated it again, stretching it out on either side. He cycles it with a handheld pressure-release, nozzle whistling as he waits for atmosphere to equalise. When it splits, there’s a sudden rush of noise. Raised voices and footfalls, turned to hazy static on the high ceiling.

He spares me a glance. “You steady?”

I nod, unassisted.

He matches it. “All right. This is gonna be close, so I need you to call out if you can’t keep up. If you trip, anything, one of us will get you.”

“Us?”

There’s a strange look. “Search party,” he says, with a little twitch. “At least, that’s what I’m calling it. We thought we’d lost you.”

He means more than the kind you do at sea.

“You thought I’d caught it.”

He shakes his head a little too quickly. “I saw you after that fight with the hollows in 2-8. I saw you after your first day flying, before anyone knew there were hollows to begin with. I’ve seen enough, believe me.”

“But that’s not true for everyone.”

I can see the lost hours on him, in rings around his eyes. “There is no chain of command, Rook. No Tower. Andrade’s crew pulled three people out of the command levels. Three, and none of them are talking about what they saw. All of the conventional channels and ranks—all of that is dead. The unofficial stuff, the Werewolves and the honour codes and the straight-up muscle—that’s what we’ve got, and it’s loaded close to breaking. We don’t know how many are dead, and what’s left is only just holding together.”

“And some of it is looking for me.”

He looks away.

“They think I caught it, don’t they?”

He tries to find my eyes again, but he can’t hold it. “They don’t understand what they’re up against.”

“Lynch mob or kill team?”

“Unconfirmed, but probably some of both.” He deflates and puts his head around the improvised lock, waving to someone I can’t see. “Buy us some breathing room, sarge.”

There’s a tussle outside. Someone shouting.

Folau breathes in, lets it out slowly. “When I say no chain of command, I mean nothing; we’re running on an emergency plan that’s a century out of date, supplies are anything Andrade could scratch up, but even he didn’t think things would get as bad as they are. There are others, even a few more Wolves, but they’re running scared. All of us are. Scared and cut off and making damnfool decisions.” He rubs his eyes. “What’s important is that we got to you first, and you aren’t about to drop from shock. I’ve got three jarheads outside, armed and taking orders from me. That’s about as good as anyone can do right now.”

The crowd-sounds brew closer to a mob, but whoever’s outside is hesitating. For now.

He looks up at the sound, feels for the handgrip of the pistol on his hip. “We can’t hold here forever, so how about this—let me get you out of here, and I’ll tell you everything I can. Deal?”

“Deal.” I catch his eye before he turns. “Folau? Thank you.”

He offers me half a smile. “Don’t thank me yet.” He watches me for a second more, but the suit holds tight enough that he can’t see me shiver. “Come on.”

Folau helps me into an alley between this container and the next one down the line, and a marine meets us on the doorstep. The soldier is a whole head taller than either of us, and wearing a void-capable suit of armour plate, shoulders marked with a sergeant’s arrows. Two more stand where the alley spills into the open; breakers between us and the sea of faces ahead. They hold perfectly still while the crowd rolls around them, carbines aimed at the floor, free hands straight out, palms flat. A warning, and a demand.

It works. They wait in little islands of calm, surrounded by NorCol uniforms and knuckledragger suits, the marks of a dozen departments and a hundred decks, numbers and insignia from all hangars. They crane for a look as I clear the door, but the eyes are drawn and the cheeks are greasy, rubbed with ash and streaked with blood, tear-stained and singed around the edges. Not a soul steps closer. They fall away as the marines advance, always keeping the same distance. They know the marines won’t shoot, and that the powered armour won’t flag them as threats unless they cross the 2-meter mark.

“Quickly,” says Folau. We step between the two marines and they fall in with us, the sergeant closing in behind.

Container sides rise around us, galleries full of faulty wiring and barrel fires. The deck is arranged in an unfamiliar pattern, etched with grip-grids that might be a hundred years old, thick with dust.

“What is this place?” I manage, between awkward steps.

Folau’s jumpy, his hand on his hip and his eyes on every dark corner. “A refugee camp, I suppose. The best we can do with all of the crew coming in from outside.”

Outside?

I don’t get the chance to ask. We change course down another steel ravine, keeping a quick step so the walkway can’t fill up in front of us. There are stragglers, but most of them don’t seem to register us walking past. They’re too far gone, too bruised or battered to understand.

Some linger. Some even try their luck; most of them think better just as the marines come into range, but a man in an old gunner’s uniform holds his ground until we’re right on top of him, tries to force his way through the middle. NorCol armour drops him to the floor without even breaking stride.

“She is part of it!” he calls after us. “Don’t you see? She is part of their machine!”

I can’t help looking back. “What’s happening, Folau?”

The marines slow us down before he can reply, and herd us into an alley I didn’t see. One of them puts their helmet around the corner up ahead and the other stacks just behind them, like they’re about to make a breach. The sergeant never leaves us, eyes on everything and weapon at the ready. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were working silent, relying on body language and training to keep them all in line and all in time. I do know better, though: they’ll be trading notes and helmet-feeds across their net, just like jockeys do between their shells, but their combat channels are encrypted, hidden where my systems can’t reach.

An armoured hand flashes where I can see, using a language I can speak.

Hold.

For a moment, it’s all we can do.

“What’s happening, Folau?”

“I guess it can’t wait, can it?” He blows out his cheeks, but keeps his eyes up-front. “We were hoping you could tell us. Hail and Salt were still walking after the dismount, but they aren’t saying much, and what they do say isn’t making much sense. We had to pull you out of your saddle, Rook. Completely unresponsive. Hell, there was a second there where I thought we’d have to jump-start, and the crash-crew thought so too. The last I saw, you were on a stretcher, wheeling hard for medical. What passes for medical, anyway.” He spares me a worried glance. “We got a call a little while later, full of noise. They said you’d disappeared. Disappeared. They said you’d fought your way out, and damaged one of Jerea’s volunteers in the process. We thought we’d lost you.”

“Jerea?”

“An actual professional, in all of this. Flight surgeon, running triage for Andrade.”

Christs. “I didn’t mean to.”

Another signal from the marine up front, and the sergeant hustles us back out into the open, no explanation.

I see why we had to wait. The containers are lined with improvised windows and patchwork doorways, sealed with homebrew airlocks, emergency plastek, whatever was close to hand. Scrapwork ladders rise from the deck, still sparking as knuckledragger crews cut new shelters closer to the top. All of it, crowded with refugees.

“Didn’t mean to what?” asks Folau, as we make it back to speed. “Punch a nurse?”

“I don’t remember.” I wish I did.

He almost laughs, but it comes out bitter. “Figures. Andrade sent us out looking, once we got the call, but we didn’t know where to start. We were two compartments over when the marine checkpoints called in. Some jockey had pushed her way into someone’s berth, wild-eyed and looking like death herself.”

“I didn’t mean to—” I stop. I didn’t mean to what?

The marines close rank in front of us, and put their hands out flat again.

Ahead, a line of haggard NorCol uniforms, coiling tighter as we approach. Word has got ahead of us.

Folau turns us at the next alley, his eyes glowing. “Checkpoint six? This is Folau. I’ve got the jockey with me, and coming up on your door.” There’s a pause, and a reply I can’t hear. “No, the original path is too thick. I need a hotfix.” He nods. “Thank you. We’re thirty seconds out and bringing company.”

“They’re scared of me?” The words come out ragged.

“Scared, angry, whatever you want to call it.” Folau turns us again, this time down an even narrower passage, made for runoff and condensation.

The uniformed mob tries to follow, but it slows as the walls close in, tripping over itself and tussling for space.

“The nets went down early, but not before the crews heard the stories, or worse, seen the pictures for themselves.”

“Pictures of what?”

“Jockeys losing it, turning shells on their ground crews. A lot of dead knuckledraggers.”

“Christs—”

“Stop right there!” It’s the sergeant, holding steady somewhere behind us. She shouts again, her voice amped through helmet speakers.

Ahead of us is a little service-lock, already open, with two more marines gesturing inside. Our escorts turn and wave us through, a spare half second before they turn to join the flashpoint.

I look back through the airlock as hydraulics drag it shut, just in time to see the sergeant and her squad spread their feet, a warning shot sparking across the deck.

Beyond them, clawing hands and improvised weapons.

The heavy door leaves us in silence, but my breathing sounds as bad as it feels, loud and harsh past the beating in my ears. I have to fight to keep myself upright, to keep my insides from trying to empty themselves against my visor, but something stops me short.

00.81

“Where—” I swallow, and try again. “Where are we?”

Folau looks me up and down. “Old Horizon. Used to be part of the original reactor complex. Radioactive waste, fuel storage, spares and the like. All decommissioned centuries ago.”

“The bulkheads.” Even with the suit, I have to prop myself up. “Thicker than elsewhere.”

He nods. “Boron composites in the walls, among other things. Built to keep the rad from creeping out.”

01.67, barely a whisper.

“Where is medical?”

He frowns. “Deeper in. As far away from the ash pits as possible. Why?”

Oh.

“We were trying to find ourselves.”

“You’re not making any sense, chief.”

The readings spike as the other side of the lock swings open.

11.13

“I was still connected.” I’m gasping for air. “When they pulled me out of the saddle; I was still connected.”

20.54

“When I woke up, I couldn’t feel it any more. I was lost.”

26.12

Not anymore.

 

 

FOLAU WANTS ME out of sight and in the quiet, at least until he can find Andrade in all the mess and chaos. Until he can find someone—anyone—he can trust. For now, that means me, bundled in a corner, looking out over the ancient factory hall playing hangar to our shells. He knows hangars. It’s how he found this little rat’s nest, hiding in a gallery near the ceiling vaults, invisible unless you know exactly where to look.

Breakfast is his doing as well, though I don’t want to know what he had to do to get it. An eighty-year-old lasagne that warms my lap, fresh as the day it was packed, eighty-year-old heat-strips cooking it on command. There’s a cup on my knee that used to be a cam-head, cleaned out, and sprinkled full of something that looks like it’s turning into hot chocolate. The date on the packet has faded, but if I had to guess, it’d be to the nearest century. Still, it smells like it’s working as intended.

NorCol: building for the future.

All of it.

My helmet rests on the floor, close enough that I can feel it against my hip. I needed it when I woke up, but not now.

78.41

I can tell the sync levels by feel and instinct, and the way that closing one eye opens another in the distance, looking back up at me.

This part of me, anyway.

They say that pilot-sync goes both ways, but for all my time in the saddle, I’d always thought that meant feedback. Come down too hard, catch some hot sparks on the wind, and you’ll feel it as much as the steel does, your subconscious processing the damage reports coming in through the jacks.

This is something else.

Burgundy machinery stretches out in the glow of improvised daylight, and I can almost feel the warmth on my skin, here in the shadows. A pair of Decaturs move nearby, both marked with the red crosses we’ve seen on the other survivors.

One of them is Bor, the jockey from the tunnels. She didn’t recognise me, but I’m not sure she would. The last time we met, she was half asleep, half a beer down in the middle of Lear’s memorial.

I watch her as she moves around the Juno, pale shell holding a technician in one palm and a welding crew in the other. The other Decatur holds a replacement armour plate steady as the knuckledraggers cycle our mounting pins and seal it across our damaged shoulder. There are no scaffolds or working cranes, so the ground crew makes do with a pair of friendly shells.

If I look closely, I swear I can see Avery between our feet, waving his hands and directing his little band of overalls across the floor. They’ve copied the mind-state that used to be Hail’s Spirit, even if they can’t find a body for it yet, and found a way to silence the duplicate still living under our skin. They’ve filled our reactor back to pressure and replenished the magazines. They’ve treated the claw marks on our chest and splinted a minor fracture in our right leg, but the shoulder is going to take more than that. The glassy thing cut through every layer of armour we had, down to the bone, in a heartbeat.

Food in one half, new feathers in the other, and we almost feel alive again.

“We’ll have you flying soon,” says a voice behind me.

I spare Andrade a glance, but no more than I have to. I make him wait through a spoonful of lasagne.

“This is Folau’s bunk,” I say, steady as I could hope for. “You should knock.”

“He let me in.”

“He would.” I watch my breath steam. “You saved my ground crew.”

“I saved everyone I could.”

“Bullshit.” It comes out closer to a cough than I’d like. “Christs, Andrade. We’re half a ship away from D, and it sounds like it was one of the first hangars to fold. You flew a recovery op into occupied territory.” I try my eyes on him again, once I’m sure I can hold them level. “I was C-SAR, Wolf. I know what it takes to fly like that.”

Andrade subsides. “That machine”—he levels a finger downrange—“is the only one we know of to survive direct, confirmed exposure. I’ve flown against the hollows six times since the Demiurge hit, sent crews out another eight or nine, and that’s the only one. I needed to know why.”

I smirk. “And they didn’t have anything for you.”

He pulls a bitter smile. “Nothing usable. They’re ground crew; all I got was odd sync numbers and a history of acting out.”

“Nothing you didn’t know before.”

“You have that too. A history of acting out, I mean.”

“What can I say? Juno and I have a lot in common.”

“It seems so.” Andrade’s training keeps his features flat, but it’s starting to crack. You can see it in the corners of his eyes. “Add that to what Hail and Salt brought back, and it feels like we don’t have much of anything.”

“So you came to ask me.”

“You’re all I have left.”

I nod and work my way through another mouthful. “What do you want to know?”

“What did you find?”

“Outside?” I’d laugh if it didn’t hurt so much. “The same thing you always find. Dust and wreckage, open air and empty space.”

“And a prison.”

I shake my head. “We found a cell.” I measure the horizon with my spoon. “Everything—this ship, the Eye, the wind—that’s the prison. What we found was a cell.”

“For what?”

“When we found it—nothing.”

Andrade lets himself down carefully. I can see the discomfort, and hear the creaking joints as he folds his legs around him. He’s been on his feet a while, much as he tries to hide it.

“So what do we do?” He nods at the Juno, my other half. “I have one machine that won’t turn on me at the first opportunity, and a handful of jockeys so scared and shellshocked I can barely trust them to fly, let alone fight.”

“You don’t have a plan either.”

He winces at that. “No, we don’t. It was all we could do to survive.”

“Tell me what you do have.”

For half a second, I figure he’s going to hold out on me. Werewolf habits seize him, start spinning lies to fit, but he knows better than that.

“Thirteen shells,” he says. “The unofficial count is thirty to forty, and there are rumours of more outside. I’m not doing anything to make anyone think differently.”

“But thirteen it is.”

“That I can reach, and that’ll fly when I ask them to.”

“Walking and flying?”

“Whatever we need. Nine Decaturs, two old-gen Spirits, one Juno, one Mark 18.” He sees me raise my eyebrows. “My machine. Intruder series, variable geometry.”

“Is that all?”

“You don’t pull punches, do you?”

I flex my knuckles.

81.94

We both do. One little fist on my lap, another in the distance.

“Never.”

He breathes deep. “All right. I’ve got thirteen hundred souls and scatter. Of that, two hundred marines and anti-armour, and about half as many pilots and knuckledraggers. Sixteen jockeys. Everything we could pull out of the open decks before Horizon started locking up.”

“You’ve stopped.”

“We don’t have the firepower to keep going.” His eyes turn hard. “I lost six machines just trying to force my way into D. Another two getting your crew clear.”

“And Horizon?”

“What about it? It belongs to the hollows.”

“There are no other survivors?”

“Plenty, we just can’t reach them. There’s another Wolf holed up in F. Our last call said two thousand souls and an unknown number of shells. They managed to cut their networking and drop the siege shutters before the infection found them, but comms are tight and intermittent, and there’s no way they’ll open the doors now. There’s talk of some compartments near the engines as well, but we can’t get a count. It’s door by door, and not everyone keeps calling back. There’s a destroyer in drydock in C, locked down with all its crew aboard.”

“There were a couple of gunships outside.”

“Mine. Six in total, but I’m keeping them in the clouds as long as possible.”

“No shells?”

“Not that I know of. Tower pulled almost everything in after the fuckup in 2-8. I know of two destroyers that didn’t make it back in time. The Harriet Lane and Astaria Ali, but I’ve told them to run and hide until I can work out what to do with them.”

Christs. “That’s it?”

He actually laughs. “What more could you want? There probably are others—I’ve heard rumours of a carrier, too far out to make it back in time.”

“But you don’t know where it is, or how to reach it.”

“Tower might have known once, but there’s nothing left of it.” The smile lingers a while longer, but fatigue weighs on it. “On the upside, NorCol’s professional corps has pulled the plug. Admiralty, Executive, even the Authority reps on board—all of them pulled out during the initial engagement. I am now the highest-ranking officer on this ship. Horizon is a convict-only arrangement, no company to speak of. This ship is ours.”

“If we can take it.”

“What?”

“It’s ours—if we can take it.”

He looks up. “You have an idea.”

I nod, but Andrade doesn’t follow the look. Out below, a Decatur raises our inherited blade, and Avery waves it into the locks across our back.

“We do.”