Grytt was not often surprised, either by circumstance or by human behavior. But when she encountered Jaed Moss lurking in a side corridor, out of which he came more quickly than prudence might indicate, she was surprised in both senses.
The mecha eye made note of him first, flashing red threat on its HUD, reporting speed and trajectory that suggested a body
approximately one-point-eight meters tall and seventy-odd kilograms, probability: male
coming at her out of a passage that, at this point in second shift, was always empty. Although her endocrine system responded with increased adrenaline and accelerated heartbeat, Grytt did not jump back or cry out. She did as her training and habit dictated, and struck first: to pin the assailant to the wall with momentum and metal, reserving an option to inflict further harm.
Jaed would have acquired several new bruises, at the least, and some time with the chirurgeons, at the worst, had her mecha eye not identified him
Moss, Jaed
before impact. She promptly downgraded him from threat to nuisance and arrested her own forward motion in the same moment.
Jaed, to his credit, took a step back and raised both hands, palms out, presumably in some attempt to reassure her that he was no threat. Or perhaps he had realized exactly how close he’d come to making intimate acquaintance with the bulkhead. Both things were true.
There were protocols for addressing the Regent’s offspring. Honorifics. Rupert would know what they were, but Rupert was where he’d been for the past twenty days, locked in solitary detention and beyond anyone’s asking. That knowledge did not predispose Grytt to patience.
“What do you want?” she snapped.
The younger Moss boy blinked, clearly unaccustomed to being addressed in that manner. Then he tipped his head sideways, back down the corridor from which he’d emerged so precipitously.
“Can we step back a little bit? I’ve disabled the ’bots in this corridor.”
Grytt forbore the obvious how. She guessed Jaed was putting his new, unhexed pass-string to good use. Or rather, to some use, the goodness of which was subject to debate. This was, after all, the Regent’s younger son inviting her into an unmonitored patch of naked decking and bulkhead, into which he expected her to go on his assurance. She was not concerned for her safety. She could see, with the mecha eye, that the corridor was empty and devoid of hatches, doorways, or other strategic openings that might conceal a triad of Tadeshi security. But she did not have Rory’s fairy gift, and she smelled trap.
She shook her head. “We can talk here.”
Jaed closed both eyes. His jaw clenched. Then he took a visible breath and looked at her again. Credit to the boy: he did not flinch from her face.
“We can’t. We could be seen.”
“Better to be alone with the boy chasing Rory, then. Me. The Kreshti mecha-maid. That won’t seem suspicious, especially when you reappear with new bruises.”
Jaed blinked again. “No,” he said. “I mean.” He licked his lip again, and shook his head. “I’m not trying to set you up. I’m trying to warn you.”
“Why?”
He retreated a step into the passage, where, presumably, the ’bots would not be watching. “You’re supposed to say, about what?”
Grytt slid a foot closer to the passage and pitched her voice to follow him. “And I’m saying, why warn me, and not the Princess?”
Unless, she thought, sudden and horrible. Her mecha hand whined into a fist. “Has something happened to Rory?”
Jaed turned a visible two shades more pale. “She’s fine! As far as I know, she’s fine. I came to you because I knew you’d be here, now, coming back from the detention block, and I can’t just walk into the Thorne compound and demand an audience. Thorsdottir would kill me.”
“So I’m less terrifying and more convenient than Thorsdottir?”
“Rory can’t know. If she does, she’ll do something stupid. Now will you listen?”
“’S what I’m doing,” said Grytt. “Start talking. My lord.”
Heat flowed across his cheeks, settling on the points of the Moss trademark cheekbones. Handsome boy, Grytt thought, and wasn’t sure whether it was boon or curse that he did not share his father’s intellect.
“My father thinks.” Jaed looked up as if reading a script off the ceiling. “He thinks Rory’s trying to use me to get the Vizier released. So he wants the Vizier gone. Off Urse. There’s a shuttle set to depart for Beo during third shift. The Vizier will be on it.”
Grytt grimaced. Of course, that made sense. One did not just kill a Vizier and ambassador from a recent enemy with whom the treaty ink (metaphorically speaking) was scarcely dry. And one did not deport him, either, when doing so would put him right back in Samur’s confidence, her court, her bed. But:
“Why move him now?”
Jaed generated a grimace comparable to anything Grytt’s own features could manage. His fingers flexed, clenching on air. “My father thinks Rory’s using me to get media attention. That she’s going to make some public appeal for the Vizier’s freedom and he’ll have to do something. And she’s popular, so if he says no, he’ll look bad.”
“He cares what the public thinks?”
Jaed regarded her with surprising seriousness. “He does. He has to.”
And the Regent’s solution to Rory’s popularity was to send the Vizier to Beo before Rory could ask for anything. Assuming, of course, he arrived at all, and did not suffer an accident like Ivar’s mother, whose shuttle had joined the glittering dust rings around the darker Brother. Grytt had investigated the official reports. Accident, they called it. Mechanical failure, exactly the sort that regular maintenance was meant to prevent. Grytt supposed Tadeshi mechanics made mistakes only when the passengers were more convenient dead than alive.
Which Rupert would be. Grytt glanced both ways. No one coming, either direction, and the ’bot at the corridor’s end was angled at the main thoroughfare and the second shift public. She closed the gap between herself and Jaed mecha-quick, fetching up damn near on his toes. She thrust her face into his.
“What do you think I’m going to do? Storm the docks? Conduct a jailbreak? Ambush the guards when they transport him? You think I’m that stupid, my lord?”
Give the boy still more credit: he flinched, but he did not even break eyelock. His throat moved. He moved his right arm—slowly, very slowly—and lifted a tiny datastick between their two faces. “This is my father’s pass-string.”
She cocked her head, eyeing the datastick like a bird examining a particularly unappetizing insect. “What am I supposed to do with that? Besides get myself arrested. You notice I don’t look much like the Regent.”
“The ’bots won’t record you.”
Rupert would know if that were true, or even possible. Rory would know. Grytt wished for both of them, and added a wish for fresh strawberries, while she was at it, for all the good wishes would do.
She snorted. “Oh, so it’s a magic pass-string.”
“It’s my father’s,” Jaed said. “He doesn’t like the ’bots recording his movements.”
Grytt had little doubt of that; a man of Vernor Moss’s political ambition would require secrecy. She was also in little doubt that the laws of the Free Worlds frowned upon clandestine, off-record movements of its highest ranking officials. She harbored many doubts that his younger son would have gotten his hands on it unnoticed, unless Moss was a great deal less careful than she thought. Or Jaed was a great deal more clever.
Jaed interpreted her silence as a prequel to acquiescence. “The detention block’s guarded. That might be tough to manage. But the shuttle’s docked in R-5. No security until they bring the Vizier in.”
“How many crew on the shuttle?”
“One pilot.”
“And how many security?”
“Three’s standard.”
Grytt raised her eyebrow. “The Vizier is a standard prisoner?”
“He’s high profile, but he’s not dangerous.”
That was certainly true. Rupert was not a violent man. He was extremely unlikely to intimidate a pilot into taking him somewhere other than Beo, even if Grytt put a ’slinger in his hand and glued his finger to the trigger.
“The Vizier’s no pilot. Neither am I.”
“The shuttle’s got a smart turing. The Vizier could use that to get off the station. Hex it.”
Oh, boy. If you think arithmancy is some kind of magic, you will be sorely disappointed. Grytt didn’t say it. Nor did she reach for the data-stick.
Instead, she ran the calculations in her head. If Rupert could hex the turing and get the shuttle to the edge of the system, he could message one of the Consortium warships patrolling the border. They could come get him. Transfer him. Leave the Tadeshi personnel and equipment unharmed. If she could subdue them without being identified. If she could convince Rupert to leave Rory on Urse.
Grytt set the collections of ifs aside. Rupert was the arithmancer. She had a soldier’s mathematical sense that measured force and strategy, and in that, the numbers came down in her favor as long as they were on Urse. But:
“What stops your station from shooting the shuttle down the minute it clears the station?”
“That pass-string. The station will log my father on board. The shuttle’s military. It doesn’t have to clear through the usual channels.”
“Well,” said Grytt. “You’ve thought of everything. Except why I should believe you.”
Jaed’s face tightened, pulling swollen flesh white and tight over bone. The scab on his lip cracked again with the force of his scowl. “I’m not lying to you. I don’t want Rory to get hurt. Losing the Vizier will do that.”
Grytt had no fairy gifts. She had often pitied Rory for hers. Now, she began to see the usefulness. Rory’s well-being might be a genuine concern to him, but Grytt could think of half a dozen ulterior, parallel, and subordinate motives that had everything to do with what was best for Jaed.
Grytt was certain that her presence, and Rupert’s, were perceived as impediments to the Regent’s control over Rory, and by extension, to any influence Jaed might hope to wield. Their disappearance, together, would be seen as good fortune, a gift from the multiverse.
Grytt was a woman committed to her own survival; no one survives battles and bombs and the hex-grafts of mecha parts who is not. She had also spent her adult life in occupations in which her life was not always her priority. But since her own tasks were better accomplished alive, she was expected to exercise good judgment in the risks to which she exposed herself.
In her judgment, Jaed Moss was, if not a bad man exactly, not a strong one, either, and not the brightest star in the firmament. Were it only her welfare at stake, she would walk away. But there was Rupert, who, if Jaed told the truth, would be beyond reach and rescue in very short order, and, if Grytt had to lay odds, not long for this life after that. This would be the only opportunity to retrieve him.
And there was Rory, the other variable in the equation, the most important, whose health and happiness were Grytt’s concern in equal measure. Rory would, if Grytt reported Jaed’s offer, insist on effecting a rescue. Rory would, if Jaed subsequently offered her the pass-string, attempt the rescue herself, citing the same reasons: they would not have another chance like this, and Rupert would die if they didn’t act.
Grytt was certain the Princess of Thorne must not be apprehended with the Regent’s pass-string, attempting to hijack a shuttle and rescue the Vizier. That sort of incident could rekindle a war, or win from Samur concessions detrimental to the Consortium. So if Jaed was lying, well, better it be Grytt caught up in it. If she ended up in a cell beside Rupert, then Rory would have an opportunity to play hero and rescue them both.
Grytt plucked the datastick out of Jaed’s fingers with her own, original set. For a moment their skin touched. His, she noted, was cold and clammy, with what was almost certainly nervous sweat. That made perfect sense. He was betraying someone. She just didn’t know who.
Grytt was pleasantly surprised when she arrived at the R-dock without having encountered Tadeshi security. She was delighted when, upon her entering the pass-string, the door marked Restricted slid open with a pneumatic sigh and no further protest. She had expected klaxons at least.
She couldn’t tell if the ’bots were awake and aware and merely ignoring her, or if they were napping; but the continued absence of security lent credence to Jaed’s claim.
The third option—that security was already waiting in the dock—seemed much more in line with her customary expectations of Moss trustworthiness.
Whatever Jaed’s ultimate intention, he had directed her to an entrance at the high-numbered end of the R-wing. It was a long walk to R-5. She checked, for the third time, her regulation (and thus underpowered) ’slinger, and kept to the edges of the corridor, to maximize her own angles should the ambush arrive sooner than the shuttle bay. The doors, pocked at uneven intervals along the bulkhead, accreted in her wake, each one a potential source for the enemy. She resisted the urge to keep checking back over her shoulder, and relied upon her senses, both mecha and meat, to warn her.
It was a little funny, how fast she fell back into wartime thinking. She had been Rory’s age when she had fought her first skirmishes against pirates, and it had been nearly that many years since her last real combat. Her opportunities for action in the Tadeshi War as body-maid to a child-Princess had been limited to particularly rough games of hide-and-go-seek in which Rory, at Grytt’s encouragement, learned to set traps.
It felt a little like that now, creeping along these passages, caught in the strange certainty that she would, in fact, be surprised. She could only hope that she had enough warning to act, rather than react. On her side were the hyper-awareness of adrenaline and the HUD in her eye scrolling a litany of sit-reps. The ancestors, too, maybe, if they hadn’t washed their hands of her years ago.
On the opposition’s side—well. Everything else.
R-5 arrived, finally, a lone door in a wide expanse of naked bulkhead, offering a hint to the size of the space on the other side. A shuttle bay or a storage vault. Or perhaps, Grytt thought, a room of Tadeshi security, all set and aimed at the door.
She tilted the mecha half of her head toward the metal. The audio reported nothing unusual: the faint echoes of ventilation, the hiss of Grytt’s own breath through carefully reconstructed nasal passages, the nostrils of which flared wide in an old human reflex, held over from days in which danger carried a recognizable scent. Now she smelled the deliberate nothing of station aether, scrubbed clean by ventilators and alchemical hexes.
Grytt hesitated, turning the datastick over and over. Then she pushed it into the keypad, and flattened against the bulkhead, and was grateful her mecha hand did not sweat on the butt of the ’slinger. The door opened promptly into a small, metal room, with an identical set of doors on the other side. A tesla blinked expectantly on the interior door.
An aetherlock. This was, indeed, a shuttle bay. And past the second set of inner doors, which opened just as easily, sat the shuttle.
It was a medium-small craft, perhaps ten meters long, and a third that high. Wedge-nosed, angular, unlovely, its belly swollen with subcutaneous shafts terminating in neat, angled holes. And there, on the top: a bristling nest of sensors, like cat whiskers. Grytt was not familiar with the model, but the type, oh, she knew that very well. A troop transport, designed for a single pilot, who would guide the craft from an aether-sealed, armored forward compartment, unreachable from the interior cabin during flight. The shuttle’s otherwise smooth lines were marred by raised metal ridges, where internal irises could, and would, cinch shut in case of hull breach.
The whole thing looked a little bit like an insect. A mecha insect. Probably a wasp, Grytt thought sourly, or some other stinging, biting representative of the genus. There, at the rear, if one wished to press the visual metaphor, if not the functional, was the stinger: the ramp extended, the rear iris open and withdrawn into the frame of the shuttle.
Grytt stepped into the bay. The inner hatch closed behind her. Nothing happened, for long enough that she became convinced that she was, indeed, alone. She raised the ’slinger anyway, and linked the HUD in her eye to its targeting system. Then she took a five-minute approach to the rear of the shuttle.
It was empty. It was also not entirely a troop transport, any longer. The interior furnishings had been changed. There was an apparatus which looked like a coffin, clamped to the deck and tilted upright, with a transparent plate across what would be the upper third of a resident’s torso, with a complicated array of gauges, pads, and teslas studding its exterior. It was currently open, its interior teslas dim. A set of cables, each as thick as Grytt’s forearm, ran from strategic points on the not-really-coffin into what appeared to be a generator grafted onto the shuttle’s bulkhead. Its teslas glowed a serene, steady blue and emitted a faint electromagnetic hum. It was, to Grytt’s reckoning, an entirely separate power unit, independent of the shuttle’s own systems. Interesting. A substantial power source meant for a device that would, when activated, require constant, uninterrupted current. Upon closer examination of the hardware, she discovered not one, but four distinct temperature gauges, three of which concerned themselves with ranges more suited to preserving ice than flesh.
Had Grytt been an alchemist or an arithmancer or some other learned expert in the associated fields, she would have concluded that this could not in fact be a cryostasis unit: everyone knew it was impossible to make one this compact. Fortunately, however, Grytt was less concerned with possible than right here in front of me. She recalled that Moss had commandeered and relocated to Beo a cryostasis project, and that this shuttle was a refitted military unit based in that very place. And finally, Jaed had insisted that Rupert would have a standard escort, which was far better explained by a cryostasis unit than a belief in the Vizier’s capacity (or lack thereof) for personal violence. A frozen arithmancer was no threat at all.
Grytt harbored a suspicion of any technology which appeared magical in its deployment, and which had not been tested by seven wars and seven hundred years, or at least someone whose opinion she trusted. This contraption might well be Rupert’s new prison, if it did not kill him on freezing. Or thawing, assuming Moss bothered with it. It might be simpler to keep the Vizier in stasis indefinitely.
Grytt distrusted assumptions only slightly less than she distrusted embryonic technology. And still, she recalled Rory’s own hunch, that Ivar’s location and disposition were Beo and in cryostasis, respectively. It looked more likely, now. She was still not inclined to visit the place and confirm the suspicion.
Rupert, of course, would find it all fascinating. He would probably want to examine the unit. He’d be trying to figure out how it worked right up until it did work and arrested his wonderings altogether.
Grytt resolved that wouldn’t happen. Not if she had to sabotage the unit herself, which—
The aetherlock clicked. The door whispered to itself, sliding along its track, held its breath, then whispered itself closed again.
—would wait until she’d dispatched the new arrivals.
Grytt settled her own silhouette in the deep shadow cast by the cryotube. The remaining seats, by virtue of their military shape and utility, included ample storage capacity underneath. Grytt was slightly larger than a duffel, but she was infinitely more flexible, and it did not matter if her bottom third blocked the aisles or not. She flattened onto her chest, belly, and hips, cocked a knee sideways, and sighted down the length of her ’slinger. The mecha eye attempted to acquire a target in what it identified as an empty expanse of hangar. A crate, an oddly-shaped shadow, the bright line between deckplate and bulkhead—
And there: a pair of boots, accompanied by legs and pelvis and, yes, finally a torso. The point man. Like all Tadeshi in Grytt’s immediate experience—which is to say, those serving as station security, rather than as infantry—he wore a black uniform composed of a light anti-ballistic weave, but no real body armor, and no helmet. He was armed with the standard issue Tadeshi ’slinger, larger than her own, but still a sidearm model. And of course, he had two partners.
Thus she was outnumbered and outgunned, but not significantly so. She engaged that most useful of skills, patience, and waited. Number One crossed fully into her sights before the second appeared, and then the third, holding between them a tall, narrow figure in a shapeless coverall the color of four-day-old porridge.
Grytt’s human heart—surprisingly sturdy, having survived the blast that killed Rory’s father, almost unique among her organs to have done so—flopped against her composite ribcage. She had known very well Rupert was alive and unharmed; but the visual confirmation made her very glad of the mecha hand’s immunity to foolish, unnecessary physiological responses. It stayed steady, while her wits recovered (it did not take long) sufficiently to observe Rupert’s condition more thoroughly.
His face was obscured by a holographic static veil, projecting from the collar around his neck. Grytt could hear the sonics from across the hangar. Buzzing, crackling, whining at a pitch that seemed to get between her teeth and her jaw and vibrate.
Anti-arithmantic measures, she surmised, and noted that his lateral escorts each had a hand on him, though not tightly. For partial guidance, rather than support, which meant he must have limited audio and visual capacity.
She hoped it would be enough, coupled with his native wits, to get him on the ground when the firing started, before a bolt achieved the same effect. Both guards wore their sidearms on their free side, which suggested that, should a firefight occur, neither would be hindered in participating, except by Rupert’s physical presence. How much that mattered to them was not something Grytt wished to discover.
She adjusted her HUD to a smaller target, entirely unarmored, let all her breath go, and fired the split instant she got lock.
The first bolt planted itself in a strategically vulnerable area of the point man’s cranium, producing a brilliant spray of fluid that hissed as it passed through the Vizier’s veil. That sufficed more than any shout might have to warn him to reduce his own silhouette. He dropped, nearly as fast as the stricken point man, to a prudently prone position. His security were unconcerned with his sudden movement, having their own attention occupied by this change to their reality. That they had been attacked was fairly obvious; but such a realization, while easy to make, is harder to resolve, particularly when the mind attempting that resolution is stuck on what is believed impossible versus what is actually happening.
The nearer Tadeshi resolved his situation rather more quickly than Grytt would have wished, and, having dived for cover behind his deceased comrade, proceeded to sling a pair of bolts at the open back of the shuttle. One of them bored through the seatback above her. The other ricocheted off the bulkhead twice before exhausting its momentum and clattering to the decking. Grytt, herself occupied with sudden adjustments, fired at the far security and took his leg out from under him, clipping his calf and spinning him back and away from Rupert. Not the target she’d intended, but the result was sufficient.
Grytt fired again, this time for cover, and scrabbled into the wedge of shadow beside the cryostasis unit. She wormed herself flat against the bulkhead’s curve. Another brace of bolts gouged the decking where Grytt’s face and torso had been.
That made four. Two more, and the shooter would need to reload, unless the man she’d dropped was also firing, in which case—
Two more bolts entered the shuttle in rapid succession, from different vectors.
To hell with counting. Grytt held her breath, and primed her ’slinger, and very carefully walked her right fingers blind up the cryotube until she felt the panel’s smooth polyplate. Memory told her there were three buttons. She felt her way across them. One. Two. Three. She had no idea in what order they should be pressed to activate the unit, or in fact what their purpose was.
She pressed them all.
The unit beeped, loudly, and Grytt dove across the shuttle, behind the already perforated seats, as two sets of ’slingers unloaded again, this time punching holes into the cryotube, which promptly commenced wailing and flashing two colors of light and spraying crystalline plumes of coolant across the shuttle’s interior. The ambient temperature plunged into a credible imitation of Midwinter at the Thorne palace, complete with spitting precipitation and treachery underfoot.
Grytt’s human eye prudently closed. Her mecha eye, unblinking, adjusted its perception from the now obscured, conventionally visible spectrum into the longer bands. The two Tadeshi—and Rupert—were bright and hot through the cloud. She knelt and shot at the nearest, one-two-three, into his chest. The resulting spray from his body cooled to rapid invisibility.
The far security, the one she’d only winged, steadied himself on his knee and aimed at her, clued in by muzzle-flash. She launched herself for the far front corner, where the angle of door and bulkhead might offer her some cover.
Her foot stepped squarely into a smear of coolant and crystallized water vapor. She had a moment to register I’m slipping and employed it to turn her shoulder and retain her grip on the ’slinger, in contravention of reflexes which would have dropped the ’slinger to prevent the subsequent teeth-rattling impact with the deckplate. She spun mid-air, landing meat-side down on shoulder and elbow, and skidded gracelessly across the open deck before her hip came down and friction stopped her, fortunately short of a cranial impact with the wall, and unfortunately far short of the any cover, and most unfortunately, on her side facing away from the shuttle hatch.
The coolant chose that moment to exhaust itself. The last traces of it drifted down, riding aether gone suddenly still. Grytt had a clear view of the emergency kit bolted to the shuttle bulkhead, and the placard with pictographic instructions for what to do in case of rapid depressurization.
At least I won’t have to deal with that, she thought. Her back was exposed, the coolant’s foggy shield was gone, and—
There came a single, decisive shot. Then a second and third, in rapid succession. A man shouted, or tried to: the utterance turned rapidly soggy, ending on a gurgle.
Grytt blinked at the emergency kit. Her body registered no damage. She wasn’t bleeding. Interesting. She rolled over, driving her mecha knee into the decking for leverage, and came up ready to fire.
The Tadeshi were all down. Rupert was picking himself up, two knees and one hand for balance. In the other, he held a ’slinger. The collar, unfastened, dangled from his neck. He peered at the shuttle.
“Grytt! For the love of—Grytt, are you all right?”
“I just started a war,” Grytt said, standing up. “I hope you’re happy.” She picked her way down the ramp, careful of the glassy smears of liquid.
“Horrified. Thank you.” He looked at the ’slinger, and at his hands, and then at his coveralls. Then he put the weapon down, very slowly. “You’re not hurt?”
“No. Thanks to you.” She holstered her ’slinger and, with both hands, twisted the collar the rest of the way off Rupert’s neck. She turned it in her hands.
“You got this off?”
Rupert touched the raw patches on his neck where the collar had been. “Evidently.”
“Mm.” She dropped it to the deck and stomped on it with the mecha foot, hard enough to rattle her own teeth. “There.”
Rupert stared at her, blinking rapidly. His eyes were red-rimmed and a little swollen. “I may have killed someone.”
“You did.”
“Oh,” he said, faintly.
Grytt grabbed a fistful of coverall at his shoulder and hauled him upright. Then she shoved him, gently, toward the shuttle.
“We’ve got to go.”
She jogged across the hangar to the aetherlock, jammed the pass-string into it, and keyed it to sealed. Turned back and saw Rupert standing there, eyes closed, chin raised, as if he were looking up at the inside of his own skull. He was an arithmancer. He might be doing just that.
“The lock won’t hold,” she said. “Not forever. There’re probably eleven alarms going off right now. Move, Rupert.”
He opened his eyes. “And go where?”
“Into the shuttle. Come on.” She paused only long enough to scoop up the Tadeshi ’slingers. She shoved two of them into her waistband, which exhausted the fabric’s ability to accommodate stolen weapons, and held the third loosely in her left hand. Her right, she used to take Rupert’s elbow and half-steer, half-drag him up the ramp. He had never been a bulky man, but his bones felt sharp under her hands. “Didn’t they feed you?”
“I wasn’t especially hungry. Grytt. I repeat: where are we going?”
“Off Urse. Shuttle’s set for Beo. We’re not going there.” She waved the datastick at him. “Moss’s pass-string. It will get us past Control. Make sure they don’t shoot us down. We get to the system’s edge, we can signal one of our ships. Might take it awhile to get the message and come through the gate, but I don’t see much choice.”
“And how will we do any of that?”
“There’s a smart turing in the cockpit. You can hack it. Can’t you?”
“Let us hope so.” He squeezed his eyes closed, as if against a particularly bright light. “We can’t come back here. To Urse.”
“No.”
His eyes opened. His gaze this time was clear and sharp, like razor glass. “And what about Rory?”
Grytt hesitated. Then she peeled out a layer of truth, and said, “She’d’ve come herself, if I would’ve told her. Which I didn’t.”
He drew a breath, held it, hissed it through his nose. Anger and anguish fought for supremacy across his features, twisting lips and pinching nostrils and sending his brows crashing together and retreating again.
Grytt offered a sympathetic grimace. Then she got on with the business of making their escape. She cycled the door seal. The ramp rose slowly, eclipsing the carnage in the hangar, reminding her of closing jaws. Not a comforting thought. Not one she would share with Rupert.
The shuttle shuddered. The interior lights dimmed and shifted, lighting along the creases of bulkhead and deck, bulkhead and ceiling, casting the whole space into muted greens and yellows.
The engines. The pilot.
She bolted for the cockpit hatch, splattering puddles of fully liquid coolant underfoot, and, upon arrival (a coolant-assisted skid-slam into the bulkhead) stabbed the datastick into the pad. She had grown accustomed to the immediate, compliant green. The pad remained stubbornly red. The iris remained closed, squeezed tight like an eye against bright light.
Or a fist. Grytt punched the hatch, mecha to metal. The impact sent warning twinges along every hex-point that anchored alchemy to flesh. The door sported knuckle-shaped gouges. Her metal knuckles sported door-colored scuffs.
“That won’t help,” murmured Rupert.
“There’s no one in there. I checked.”
“Of course there is. The turing.” He shouldered her aside; or rather, he inserted himself beside her and waited. He could no more move her than a sheet of paper could defeat a rock. But he could probably finesse the locks if she moved aside, which she did, swearing a steady stream of paint-blistering invective that would have delighted Rory.
Rupert pursed his lips, unimpressed, and leaned down to peer at the lockpad. Then he closed his eyes and did whatever it was arithmancers did while normal people contemplated further violence against inanimate objects.
The shuttle shivered. The teslas on the external door panel turned red, indicating depressurization underway as the aetherlocks cycled.
“Rupert, it’s taking off.”
“Yes, Grytt, I know.”
Grytt’s heart, still perfectly human, rattled between synthetic lungs which, despite the tightness in her chest, continued to inflate and contract steadily, refusing to allow the luxury of panic. She hated void-travel. She hated it when there was a pilot, and a dozen redundancies in case of disaster. This was the worst-case scenario she could conceive other than being flushed out the aetherlock without a hardsuit.
And if Rupert couldn’t outwit the turing, they would go to Beo, which would end much the same way, except with a fight beforehand, for which she was woefully underarmed. Her ’slinger, carrying half a load, the three partial loads in the Tadeshi weapons, and an arithmancer, to land on a hostile base of marines.
The aetherlock option seemed suddenly a little more appealing, until she examined the shuttle’s interior and discovered that both of the emergency hardsuits had taken damage in the firefight. She fingered the splintered poly-ceramic. She might be able to get a whole suit out of the two. Might.
“Rupert.”
The shuttle rocked and wobbled aetherborne, stabilizing after a moment. Then it lurched forward, threatening Grytt’s balance and tipping Rupert away from the lock for a slipping, scrabbling moment.
“You did that on purpose,” he murmured. “Bad turing.”
Grytt fingered one of her stolen ’slingers. If they landed on Beo, one bolt more or less would not matter. But here:
“Rupert. Will you have better luck in the cockpit?”
“Likely.”
“Then move aside.”
He looked at the ’slinger in her hand, and his eyes saucered. He turned sideways, covering his head, as if mere flesh and bone were proof against bolts. As if she would miss, at this range. The larger Tadeshi bolt punched easily through the lockpad, throwing sparks and little shavings of plastic and polycarbonate amalgam. Grytt stuck her mecha hand into the hole. The bolt had gone most of the way through the pad on the other side. A small matter to push it clear. A slightly larger matter to wedge her fist, and then her forearm, into the hole. The angle was unhelpful, but the mecha wrist did not suffer the same motile restrictions as its human analog. Its fingers were not as sensitive for feeling blind, either, but her target was a lever, not a button, and there it was.
She grunted and pulled. The hatch irised open to reveal an empty pilot’s seat and a front console occupied by a turing with a small screen and a rudimentary input pad, attached by a web of cables and bolts. A bank of teslas blinked in a pattern discernible to the turing itself, and probably to Rupert.
“It’s annoyed,” Rupert said.
Grytt hefted the ’slinger thoughtfully. The box did not look particularly shielded. “So am I.”
“Patience. That’s our pilot.” Rupert eeled into the single chair, propping his legs up on either side of the turing in a most indecorous fashion.
About time, Grytt thought, and wished his lapses in propriety coincided with less desperate situations.
The shuttle changed direction slightly. Acceleration pushed Grytt partway back into the main cabin.
Rupert merely grunted. He did something to the console’s remaining controls, and the turing’s small screen blinked awake. Grytt frowned at the orange grid and the tiny readout scrolling down the far right edge.
“Central Control just cleared us,” said Rupert. “Evidently this is a regular run to Beo. See? Those four digits there indicate—”
“Rupert.”
He sighed. She marked again the new sharpness to his shoulders, tenting through the coverall and settling over the knobs of his spine.
“I have no live communications. Grytt. Does Rory actually know what’s happened?”
“No,” said Grytt. “There wasn’t time to tell her. We can send a message once we’re clear. Assuming we get clear. If we have to land on Beo. . . .” She grimaced. “I’ll try and do something with the hardsuits, in case we need them.”
“Of course.” He offered her a smile both crooked and sympathetic. Rupert knew as well as she what would happen if they landed, and what could happen, and what must not.
Whatever happened now—Rory was on her own.