At first the damage to the shuttle seemed—relatively—minor.
“We’ve lost communication and sight,” Laughton said. “But autopilot seems fine.” He switched auto back on. “We’re still moving, anyway.”
“Deaf and blind,” Nika murmured.
Laughton flinched.
“Sorry,” although she wasn’t sure what she was apologizing about.
He shrugged. “Sensitive subject. Going blind. My biggest worry when I came out of that machine of yours, and the one on the Boost, was that you’d have tried to fix my eyes.”
“Surely you know that’s impossible.” She’d seen the mods, seen the way the electronics had been connected. “You don’t have human eyes, Agent Laughton. Why do you think I agreed to come?”
“Call me Alistair.”
“Likewise, Nika.” Her reply was automatic. “You do know you have to be careful which modders you go to.” What if he went to someone who didn’t understand his eyes? Or even to a hospital?
Laughton—Alistair—nodded. “I know.”
Good.
Nika busied herself inspecting the contents of the shuttle. “There are space suits,” she said. “Can we use them to communicate?”
“Maybe.” Laughton—Alistair, she’d have to think of him as Alistair—came over to look.
They pulled one of the suits out.
Suits had a range. Nika remembered Roystan saying that, after Josune had been lost in space when they had escaped from Atalante. She couldn’t remember how far the range was, but in space it was tiny.
They both suited up so they could use the suit communicators.
Nika tried to contact Another Road.
She’d known how unlikely it was to get an answer, but she had to swallow hard when she couldn’t.
“Nothing from Zell either.” Alistair sounded as depressed as she felt.
“What about the other shuttles? There were some out there.”
They found six lifepods nearby, but the occupants weren’t answering. Nika remembered Josune saying some lifepods put you into suspended animation. Maybe the occupants of these were unconscious.
Or maybe no one was talking to them.
“I hope they all brought food,” Alistair said. “There isn’t much on Zell.”
One of the lifepod signals dropped out.
Then two more.
“I think we’re off course.” Nika didn’t want to think of the other option. Surely Norris wouldn’t destroy potential mercenaries, especially if he didn’t have to pay a fee for them. “One of us needs to go outside this shuttle and see what’s happening.”
She’d been in space twice. Both times attached by rope to Josune, who’d given some basic instructions on what to do if you found yourself out there. Not panic, breathe evenly, and use the suit link to call.
None of which looked to be of much use right now.
“How will that help?”
She had no idea, but it was better than sitting in the dark, knowing you were off course.
She checked her suit to be sure it was airtight and found two ropes with latch hooks on either end.
It had been a lot simpler when Josune was there to help.
“Talk to me while I’m outside. It can be scary out there.”
“I presume you know what you’re doing.”
She didn’t, but she didn’t think he knew any better than she.
“Something other than that, please.” She closed the inner airlock door. “Can you still hear me?”
“Yes.” Suit sound was clear. But then, it would be, wouldn’t it? This was Another Road’s shuttle. Josune and Carlos maintained it. She cycled the air out of the airlock. Opened the outer door. “Talk to me.”
She didn’t want to step out. Not into that vast blackness of space. Although, it wasn’t exactly black. Half the sky was a dirty, pulsing gray. The rest—there was light. A dim red star, nothing else. She hoped the suit was strong enough to cut the radiation she’d be exposed to.
Weren’t they supposed to be heading for a planet? Shouldn’t she see it if they were only an hour away?
“Talking,” Alistair said. “What do you want me to talk about?”
Anything. Didn’t he understand she needed conversation, something to concentrate on rather than what she was doing? “Tell me how you met the Ort. Zell. How you see. Anything.” She moved cautiously away from the airlock.
“The Ort. They’re like cylinders with four legs and four arms. They’re almost as tall as I am, and they don’t turn, they just change direction.”
That would be an interesting mod. How would you manage the joints?
Nika turned around again. There had to be a world out here somewhere. The only explanation was that the shuttle was blocking it.
Josune had shown her the holding loops built into the outside of the ship, and the markers on the ship itself that showed where each loophold was in relation to the ship. It was a way, Josune had said, to move around the ship without using power. “Always, always, always, be sure one latch is securely attached to the ship loopholds, the other attached to you. You can drag yourself around the ship by attaching and releasing the ropes. Always hook and unhook the right-hand side so you never accidentally break the loop.”
No knowledge was ever wasted. Unfortunately. “I’m going to the other side of the shuttle.”
“Do you have to?”
“Trust me, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t have to.” Nika found the next loophold to latch on to. “Keep talking.”
“The Ort are green, except I see them as white. You’ll meet them soon.” He paused.
“Keep talking.”
“It’s amazingly difficult to talk to order, you know.”
“If you were out here, you’d understand why I need you to.”
“Let me think. I have a different range of vision. When I look at walls, I can see the wires because of the heat passing through. I can see the heat of a person from the other side of a thin wall or of plastiglass.”
“Like infrared?”
“I suppose so, yes. Ultraviolet too.”
“Doesn’t that make it awkward?”
“At times. But I wouldn’t want to lose it.”
“I would love to see how you see.” Nika clung to the side of the ship while she looked around. It was worse than waking up early in the Dekker.
“Are you still out there? Are you all right? You’re breathing heavily.”
“So would you be if you were walking around the outside of a spaceship.”
Snow’s vitals hadn’t increased when he’d gone out to help Josune or Roystan do repairs. How many times had he been outside a ship? When would a modder, or a doctor, ever have had the need?
“Do you want—”
“Just shut up and keep talking about something else.”
Nika kept moving. Attach loop. Unattach. Attach. Unattach. Until finally she was at the top. Off to one side, no longer hidden by the bulk of the shuttle, was a planet.
“I can see Zell.”
“Are we heading toward it?”
She had no idea. She looked around. There were several specks reflecting red from the sun, heading toward the planet. “We’re not going the same way as the other lifeboats.” She hoped they were lifeboats. “Can you see what I’m seeing?” She’d been pushing her camera feed through all the time.
“Yes, and I don’t think I like it.”
Neither did she.
“I can’t steer this thing blind.”
How did you steer a shuttle? By firing the rockets. Nika didn’t plan on staying outside while Alistair fired rockets around her, trying to get them back on course, but maybe that was what it took.
“I’d also like you to know that while I have landed a shuttle on manual, I’ve only done it the once, and that was twenty years ago. Back when I did the training.”
He was really inspiring confidence.
“We can only pray the autopilot’s still fine and will land us, once we get back on course.”
Nika looked around again. “How many suits do we have?” Josune liked a lot of suits. One for everyone, even on the small shuttle.
“Six, counting yours.”
There were four engine jets. Two on one end of the shuttle, two on the other. Coming in to land you fired the jets to slow you down, which said to Nika that you’d enter the atmosphere with one set of the jets facing forward, the other facing back. “I’m going to take two of the suits. Fix them to the ends of the shuttle. I’ll set the camera to transmit, then we’ll have a view from outside.”
There was silence from inside. Eventually, “That might work.”
If her logic was wrong, they wouldn’t be alive for her to regret it.
She’d have to do it fast. They’d only been an hour from Zell when they’d started. “Prep two suits. I’m coming back in. Keep talking while I do.”
He had the suits, sans oxygen, prepped and ready. “Thanks.” She clipped both suits to her own and went back into the airlock.
It was worse going out the second time.
“How did you start working for the Justice Department?” People who took contracts on places like Zell weren’t generally Justice Department material.
“I was a career agent. I—” He checked himself. “You mean after Zell?”
“Yes.” Although, she wouldn’t mind hearing the rest of the story one day.
“We—Cam and I—went back looking for you. That’s what we’d promised the Ort. Initially I thought it would be easy. I thought we could do with any modder.”
Of course he’d think that. Alistair Laughton had no appreciation of the body as art.
“Cam knew where to find you, but there’d been the explosion at your studio and you’d disappeared. We were still looking for you when Paola, my old boss, sought me out. She was looking for you too.”
Everyone seemed to be looking for her at one time or another. “Why?”
“You killed an executive.”
“I what? Me?” She missed a loop, had to scrabble for the rope. Yes, she’d killed people, from Alejandro and Wickmore’s henchmates on, but this? “When?”
“Six months ago. You did it publicly, and you leered at the camera while you did it.”
She knew where this was going.
“Paola ran the stats. In every way, except for it being public, the killing matched the modus of a known assassin.”
“Tamati Woden.”
“Yes.”
She’d kill him if he wasn’t already dead. “So he plastered my image all over the vids, and used my new body to do it.”
“Yes.”
Nika shivered.
“Paola knew I was looking for you, and I had worked on the Woden case before I was suspended.”
“You were looking for Tamati Woden, and you never caught him. In all that time.”
Alistair ignored that. “She was worried Woden had found a way to steal bodies. I thought he’d taken on an apprentice. It turned out she was right.”
At least he’d come to that conclusion.
Nika reached the first two jets. She pushed the feed from the other suit to her own camera so she could check it was positioned correctly, then lashed the suit to the outside of the shuttle and adjusted it until the camera faced forward.
One done.
“I took the job,” Alistair said. “Two people looking for a woman who’d gone to a lot of effort to disappear were never going to find her. But with the Justice Department behind us—”
“So we have you to thank for putting Wickmore back on our trail.” Eaglehawk had used the Justice Department before. It made sense.
Nika started across to the other end of the shuttle. This was easier somehow, as if she was getting the hang of it. Or maybe she was starting to panic, for Zell was looming so large in her visor—and off to one side—that it didn’t matter where she was on the shuttle, she could see it.
“We didn’t know Wickmore was involved,” Laughton said. “Although, I must say, I certainly suspected him in the past. How did you manage to get both him and the Boost on your trail? And is it true that Arriola came from the Hassim?”
She didn’t answer that. They didn’t need another treasure hunter on their heels.
He continued after a few moments of silence. His voice sounded strained. “After I agreed to work temporarily for the Justice Department again—to find you—I looked up the report Cam and I had made about Zell.”
She didn’t need him to tell her what had happened. “Case closed?”
“There was no record of it.”
Nika had been like that once. Naïve, believing that justice was justice and people were basically decent. Some people were, she supposed, just not the ones who were supposed to uphold decency.
She couldn’t help Laughton with his demons.
There. Last camera in place. “How does that look?”
“Terrible,” Laughton said. “We’re way off course.”
“I’m coming back in.”
As soon as she was inside, Laughton fired the jets to correct their course. It took two tries, but eventually there was the bulk of a planet in front of them.
“We did it,” she told Alistair as he set the autopilot.
Just in time, for an alarm sounded. “We’re coming into atmosphere.”
A moment later it seemed every alarm on the shuttle went off. Lights flashed amber, warnings screeched, and numbers scrolled across the screen in an energetic stream. The jets fired, front first, then back. The shuttle slowed.
“Are you doing that?”
Alistair shook his head.
At least something was going to plan. Nika hoped it was, anyway.
The flashing lights turned to red.
Maybe not fully to plan. The cabin was getting hot. “Is it just me, or is it stifling in here?” Shuttles could take a reasonable amount of heat. They had to, on entry into the atmosphere.
“It is stifling,” Alistair said. “We’re not slowing down fast enough. If this is a cheap shuttle, we’re done for.”
Josune bought quality, but sometimes, like Nika, she had to buy what was available. They’d find out, Nika supposed. She went through the shuttle cupboards, found some fire blankets. “Help me wrap these around the Netanyu.”
“Shouldn’t we use them for ourselves?”
“We have the suits.” The suits would protect them better than a fire blanket. Besides, what did they have to offer the Ort if they didn’t have a genemod machine?
She hoped Snow and Giwari’s Songyan were safe.
“You’re crazy. You know that.”
“That’s not exactly a new insult. Wrap this.”
The jets fired again. From the front, this time. The pressure knocked them both to the floor.
“At least it’s slowing us down,” Alistair said. “Provided it’s not too late.”
“Are you always such a pessimist?”
“Under the circumstances—” He struggled to his feet again, helped her pull the blanket over the Netanyu. Even lifted it so she could wrap it around. She used all four blankets. “Are you sure these wouldn’t be better around us?”
“Yes.”
Nika snatched up the fire extinguisher, waved it at him when he looked as if he would take the blankets off. “Our suits will protect us.”
He picked up his own extinguisher.
The alarms increased in frequency and volume.
“Time to strap in,” Nika said. If they could, with their suits.
They managed, although she wasn’t sure how. It was suffocating in the cabin. She sealed the helmet and hoped the oxygen tanks on the suit were safe.
A speaker blared. “Crash positions.”
The shuttle hit the ground, kept going.
The cabin grew hotter.
Nika blacked out.