30—An Unexpected Opportunity

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The minute we were through the door, I tried to contact the doggie sub-net. I must have stopped to do so, because the rest of them stepped out of the airlock, and stopped beside me.

“What is it?” Delight asked, jolting me out of my silent computer communication.

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to contact the dogs,” I said, and watched her mouth twist.

“We killed them,” she said, and shock rippled through me.

I’d been hoping it wasn’t true, that, somehow, they’d missed one.

“All of them?”

“As many as we found.”

“Damn.”

“Why do you need them?”

“Because the dogs went after Bastien and Bendigo; their implants would have recorded what happened.”

“Then the record should still be there, even if they are not.”

Had to admit, she had a point there. I remembered to send them the link to the internal net I was on, and then sank back into the virtual landscape I had to navigate. To my surprise, it was just the same as before—except that Tens materialized beside me, his curiosity as clearly read as the coding around us. It was comforting to know there were some things that could still impress him.

“This way,” I said, and led him through the myriad of code to where the doggie sub-net still stood, rising out of the plateau of code like the fortress it was.

Last time I’d been here, a mammoth spider had pulled itself out of the walls and snared me in the fine-spun fibers of a mind-trap. This time, nothing happened. The walls rose before us, and then opened when I asked. I’d made myself a part of the sub-net, when I last visited; I was very glad that my status here hadn’t changed.

“Come on,” I said, leading Tens through the wall.

He hesitated, but I passed him the code that let the matrix recognize me, and he came forward. It was funny to see him so cautious.

“Yeah. Laugh it up,” he murmured. “I’m sure I’m real amusing.”

Whatever.

I walked forward, looking for the network I knew should be hidden beneath the castle formed by the dogs’ communications routine.

“There,” I said, pointing it out to Tens when I saw it. “That one governs the swarm.”

“Swarm? I thought we were just after the dogs.”

“Nope. The swarm is the security measure activated by the dogs. Anything they saw as hostile, would have had to face a nanite swarm.”

“Oh.” Delight. And well might she have said it. If her teams had attacked the dogs or the nanites, then the security system would have designated them enemies.

“You know how to change your uniform?” I asked, realizing she’d be targeted by any of the system’s remnants, if she couldn’t.

“Done.”

“And locked in,” Tens added, just as I’d registered that his digital presence had disappeared from my side, and then returned an eye-blink later. “She should be safe, now.”

“Tell me she doesn’t look like us,” I said, and Tens sniggered.

“I heard that.” Delight did not sound impressed.

“Nothing like us,” Tens said. “I wouldn’t want us targeted because someone went off the reservation without thinking of the team.”

I didn’t need to come out of the virtual landscape to know Delight was glaring fit to kill—and I didn’t care. As far as leaving the reservation went, she was the most likely to do so, and damn the consequences for the rest of us. I figured Tens had made a pretty good call. Ignoring Delight for the moment, I searched for the memory feed I was sure the nanite swarm had saved.

I knew which code I’d inserted, in order to set the dogs back onto Bastien and Bendigo. Between us losing him in the server room, and making for the inner airlock, Bastien had managed to reprogram the dogs so that they recognized me and Bendigo as enemies—and then he’d reprogrammed them to recognize us as friends, just as fast.

That information would have passed on to the nanite swarm, meaning that Bendigo would have been fine, but anything attacking him would have been in trouble—the kind of trouble Delight’s incursion team had been in, when they started taking out Bastien and his clones. I ran a program to pull any footage the nanites had taken of either Bastien or Bendigo in the lab, and couldn’t stifle a sense of deep satisfaction when I saw the swarm had changed Bastien’s standing from friend to foe.

“That’ll teach you to stick me with a needle full of sedative,” I said, and felt Tens’ curiosity.

I turned to him.

“Guess who made himself an enemy of the nans?”

Delight was intrigued.

“Bendigo?” and I sensed her anticipation. “What happened?”

“Not Bendigo,” I told her. “Bastien.”

And her anticipation did not lessen, not one little bit.

“Did they get him?” she asked.

“Give me a minute,” I told her.

“Not sure we’ve got a minute,” Mack’s voice intruded.

“Why?”

“There’s grey shit rolling down the walls toward us.”

“Gotit,” I heard my voice in chorus with Tens, and ran a quick check through the doggie sub-net, not at all happy to discover there was now more than one swarm.

“Crap.”

“Can you link it?” Tens.

“Only if there’s a dog.”

His virtual form gestured to the node around us.

“Would this still be here if there wasn’t?”

Man had a point. Theoretically, the sub-net was a conglomeration of the dogs’ minds all hooked together, and the space we were standing in was its connection to the net. If there was no dog mind to connect to, there shouldn’t have been any way to link to the nanite swarm—and I was clearly able to do that. Therefore...

I dug a little deeper, and found a mind. One. Singular. Very young, and very alone little mind.

“Hey there, fella,” I said, hoping it wasn’t a girl. “Want someone else to be a part of your pack?”

Well, Hell, yes, it did. It was alone, and it was frightened, and it needed... it needed. The pup hesitated, and then decided I was better than nothing. It wanted me to find it, to curl around it, to protect it. It wanted my company.

“I’m coming,” I promised, but it wasn’t satisfied. It wanted more. It needed more. Where was the rest of its pack? What about the rest of mine?

I didn’t think. I reached out and introduced it to Tens, and Mack, and even Delight, although the puppy mind was wary of her. More? And I grabbed Rohan through the link, and introduced them.

Man, you’da think the two were made for each other, and, given they were both pretty young, maybe they were.

Tens was not impressed.

“We are going to talk, when we get back.”

I had to dig back into some old Terran lore for a response for that one.

“Yeah? Well, every boy needs a dog.”

Tens lips tightened.

“If we didn’t need you, I’d put you on your ass.”

I wanted to ask him whose army he’d use to help with that, but the swarm was talking, and it was talking to me... or rather it wasn’t talking, but it was paying mighty close attention to what I was saying—and it seemed conflicted, because it was also paying close attention to Tens.

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” Mack broke in. “Now, we’re all pack, and we can all designate who is friend and who is foe, so watch who you’re choosin’ not to like, and go find me Bendigo and Bastien.”

I asked the swarm, and we all got the answer at once. It wasn’t quite what I’d hoped, but it would do. The ‘designated prey’—the swarm’s terms, not mine—the designated prey had fled through a hole beneath the desk in the corner of the lab. I heard Mack and Delight move away, heard Tens go, too, even though he was right there in the doggy node, with me.

It took him a second to register I hadn’t physically followed along behind him, and then he stopped and came back, laying a hand on my arm.

“You can’t do both at once?” he asked, and I knew he meant do things in the real, while I was playing in the virtual.

“Not real well,” I said, and he sighed.

“Girl, you sure have got your limitations.”

Well, that was downright condescending!

“Someone has to have them,” I snapped, returning to my study of what the swarm was doing with Bendigo and Bastien’s trail.

It had tracked them into yet another complex beneath the lab, but separate to the one beneath the servers—and wasn’t that just a surprise—and it had sent a copy of its progress to the server room, where Bastien had stashed the rest of his files. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket, but it made for a handy reference point the next time we wanted to see what it was up to. Even as the data was being exfiltrated in case we lost access to the networks down here, again.

Not likely. Delight’s muttered reply was echoed throughout the net, and not just by Mack and Tens, but by whoever had been assigned to monitor and maintain the nets as Delight sent my links through. I was guessing some serious coding had been carried out to ensure vision wasn’t lost a second time, which was good, because I had other things to worry about: Bastien was still showing as a hostile in the doggie sub-net, and Bendigo was still showing as a friend, and that had to change.

I went into the selection that allowed me to designate friend or foe from amongst those whose DNA had been logged into the doggie database. It didn’t take me long to find the files belonging to Bendigo and Bastien the Ghoul; both had pictures attached that made the search a whole lot easier, and the search string had what I wanted in seconds.

All I had to do was tweak the code so that the nanite swarm wouldn’t kill or defend either of them when it found them. I reset it to neutral, which, judging from the actions I could see, would lead to the swarm containing, or incapacitating them, until the pack had them in custody.

There was just one little flaw to my plan—if the neutrals were unaccompanied, and harmed the swarm, then they were to be considered hostile, and redesignated as foe. I stared at the settings and tried to figure a way out around it, but there was no alternative to the presence of pack...unless it was the presence of the person possessing the master override.

I groaned, inwardly. I suppose the Ghoul had found the whole play on words hilarious. Whatever. I’d changed the master override designation from the Ghoul to myself, and that meant I had to get to where the nanites were swarming outside a locked and sealed door somewhere in the complex below us.

So far, they hadn’t found a way in, but they were trying. The designated prey was not contained, and it was not in the presence of any pack. Fortunately, the prey had not harmed the swarm, since I’d changed the switches, so we had until either Bendigo or Bastien pulled something that did, or tried to leave the room.

Once that happened, the nanites would try and kill them. Strangely enough, neither blip was even trying to take the other exit I could see.

I wondered why, and then decided it didn’t matter. I still had my link to Bendigo’s implant, and that meant I could warn him.

“Are you completely out of your—” was all Tens got out, before I initiated the contact, and entered a world of blood and pain.

The inside of his implant was a pool of agonized quiet, until we both screamed, and Bendigo threw me out of his head.

“What is it?” Mack was at my side, in an instant, one hand on my shoulder, the other cupping my chin as he lifted my head so he could look into my eyes.

I drew in two ragged breaths, trying to keep him out of my head, but Tens had already shared what we’d seen, and both men were wishing they hadn’t looked. Delight’s presence was cool curiosity in my mind, and even she withdrew with a sense of disgust.

“We’d better hurry,” she said, “or there isn’t going to be very much of him left to interrogate.”

“And I’m guessing the files you want on his operations are inside that implant,” I told her, “given that’s what Bastien’s trying to convince him to open.”

“Well, duh,” muttered Delight as she dog-trotted into the lab, and opened up the hatch beneath the desk closest the rear door.

“Well, duh, yourself,” I muttered back, and I scrambled to my feet to hurry after Mack and Tens, who’d already left me so they could catch up to Delight.

“And I mighta thought they cared...” I didn’t need to hear Rohan’s voice in my head.

“Uh, Cutter, you’ve got a problem.”

“No shit. Really?”

“Yeah, really, and I don’t mean trying to catch up with Tens, Delight and Mack.”

“Spill it.”

“Those nanites. I know you guys are pack and all, but they’re not going to recognize a single one of you, unless there’s an actual dog there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you need to find the pup and take it downstairs with you, or the nanites are going to kill Bendigo and Bastien the minute you open the door.”

“And you know this how?”

“Here,” and Rohan fed me the offending lines of code.

“Can you change it?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t have a hope in all the stars of getting that bit of coding done while I walked.

“Sure, but it would be quicker if I found the dog.”

“Don’t you dare,” I told him, doing my best to sound forbidding. “Don’t you dare come down here. It’s not safe.”

“Sure it is. You’ve chased the nanites down to the lower levels, and destroyed the ones up top. We shouldn’t come across anything bad.”

My mind tracked back to the security outpost Delight had set up opposite the first airlock.

“Just watch out for zombies.”

“What?”

“Where the old outposts used to be, the people there might be zombies, or taken over by nanites, or something, and you need to take them down.”

Rohan was silent for a moment, and I got the distinct impression that something was wrong.

“What is it, Rohan?”

“Um... That wasn’t public knowledge, was it?” he said, and my heart sank.

“What did you do?”

“I was in the ops center, and you were on speaker for some of the techs. They knew people.”

“Goddammit, Rohan! Delight is going to have your butt.”

Tens voice in my ear, made me jump.

“No, she won’t, but I might. What’s the little rat up to, now?”

I filled him in, and we were both quiet for a minute, then Tens said, “And tell them to watch out for individual swarms that will attack anyone who attacks the zombies,” and I had an idea.

“If you can locate the zombies in the network, you might be able to cut them loose from the network and the nans—and then they can see if they’re friends are still alive, or just animated corpses. You just got to take them alive.”

“Cutter, your head is needed here,” Tens interrupted. “Get moving.”

I got moving, but Tens hadn’t finished, and he was not amused—especially now he knew Rohan was coming into the complex.”

“You had to tell him we needed the dog.”

“No, I told him to re-code it from where he was, and not to come down here.”

“He’s not stupid; he’ll know we need the dog. He’ll be down here with a team just as soon as he thinks we’ve cleared the area.”

“Well, you’re his boss.”

“I’m his instructor, and we’re going to need some mat time, before he gets it through his pre-pubescent head that I’m in charge.”

“I could always put him and his mother off the ship.”

Great. Now Mack had joined the conversation, which we so weren’t having while we stood still in the safety of the upper corridors. Oh, no. That would have been far too smart for either of these two bozos. No. We had to be having this conversation while we dog-trotted down the corridors of Bastien the Ghoul’s second hideaway.

“No,” Mack said, seeming completely oblivious to the turmoil in my head, “although the threat to split them up, might be just enough to keep them both in line.”

“You mean the brig wasn’t enough?”

The brig? Mack had put the poor woman in the brig?

“Yes. Not your business. Shut up,” and Mack’s hand clipped me upside the back of the head.

I swore I was going to purge the implant when I got back.

“You can try,” and Tens sounded very smug.

Fine. Whatever. I changed the subject.

“Do you think he’s made it down, okay?”

“I sent a team to keep him safe, and a second team to play advance scout. He’ll be fine.” That was Delight, and she was about as impressed with Rohan as the rest of us, except she wasn’t blaming me... well, not directly, anyway.

“They’ve cut through,” Tens said, and I knew he meant the nanite swarm had cut through the door that had been stopping them from getting to Bastien and Bendigo. Mack swore and upped the pace.

“Did they leave a gap wide enough for us to follow them?” I asked, as the good captain cupped his arm around my bicep, and dragged me along with him.

“They did. They’re not much for closing apertures...”

Ahead of us there was a flare of light, and the sound of a blaster going off.

“Damn,” Mack said.

“Damn?”

“Bastien just fired on the swarm...using Bendigo as cover.”

Even as Mack spoke, I watched as Bendigo’s designation changed from neutral to hostile, but that wasn’t what Mack had just alerted me to. He was showing me the open link between Bendigo and Bastien’s implants—and the data flowing out through it.

Tens cut in before I could respond.

“Looks like the Ghoul got into Bendigo’s head, and I don’t blame the guy for letting him. He’s a mess.”

Given we were still in the corridor, I wasn’t going to ask Tens just how he was seeing it. My guess is he was using nanite vision. I could try to do the same, but there was no point. If I managed it, I’d have to stand perfectly still in the corridor, and that would mean I couldn’t get to where I was needed. Since I was the person holding the override switch, that wasn’t an option. We rounded the next corner in the corridor, and the other three started to sprint.

Tens got there first, and patched through an audio-visual I really didn’t need to hear or see. I shoved it aside, and kept running, glad, for a change, to find Mack had grabbed me, again. It was just a pity I couldn’t block the imagery completely.

Bendigo was lying on another gurney, completely bare-ass naked, and the nanite swarm was disappearing beneath his skin. I figured he was screaming, except he was gagged, something Bastien must have done since I last looked in on his prisoner, and Bastien himself glanced up at the door, obviously seeing Tens charging toward him.

I watched the Ghoul smile, and then pull the jack out of Bendigo’s head, and run for the exit at the back of the room. It had been standing open, and it was closing as the Ghoul ran toward it. Tens dodged around the end of the gurney and bolted after him, but he was seconds too slow, and the door clicked shut just as he laid a hand on its surface.

He dropped the transmission, as he set to work, trying to override the lock.

Mack let go of me as we made it into the room, and went to stand at the end of the Gurney.

“You got that pup, yet?” he shouted, and I knew he was talking direct to Rohan.

“No? Well, damn!” and I watched him pull a broad-muzzled weapon from out of a sling that had held it across his chest.

Tens looked up and saw it, and then bolted back across the room toward us. Delight didn’t need to be told twice, either. I just wondered what in Hell the other two were so excited about. Neither of them gave me time to ponder, with Tens grabbing one arm, and Delight grabbing the other, as they came alongside, and then they both ran, half carrying-half-dragging me out of the room and back down the corridor.

When we hit the corner, I heard Tens voice a very soft ‘Now,’ and light flared behind us. Neither of them stopped moving, though, and they carried me with them. Far enough that the blast Mack set off in the room with Bendigo, didn’t affect my implant, but not far enough that I didn’t experience a momentary wave of disorientation.

“Mack?” Tens sounded anxious, and I realized I couldn’t feel him inside my head.

I echoed Tens.

“Mack?”

Delight gave an inelegant snort, and marched back down the corridor.

“Come on. We’re losing time.”

Well, so much for being part of a team, I thought, but I followed her.

“What was that?” I asked, passing Tens.

“EMP blaster,” he said. “Mack’s shielded, but he’s gonna have a headache.”

“And Bendigo?”

“Delight’s gonna be pissed.”

“She is?”

But Delight must have reached the room, and had time to see the results of Mack’s blast.

“For fuck’s sake, Mack!”

“He was being eaten alive!”

“Joss was supposed to fix that!”

“Your people killed all the dogs.”

“Just get me through this fucking door.”

“Tens can do that. You need to call in your recovery team. Bendigo’s implant was shielded.”

“You what?”

“I did check it before I blasted him. It’s the same as mine.”

“I ought to wring your motherfucking neck.”

“It’s not my neck I use.”

By that stage, Tens and I had reached the room. I followed the comms tech round the gurney, making sure to give Delight a wide berth. She looked plenty pissed, and I don’t think Mack’s attempt at humor had made her feel any better. Given she saw the whole situation as my fault, I figured I’d best be seen doing something useful, rather than not.

Between us, Tens and I got the door open, and chased after Bastien. From the way Delight was hovering, the stuff in Bendigo’s head was more important than running down its creator... or, perhaps it was that the stuff in Bendigo’s head was something she wanted to keep well away from Mack. Whatever it was, it was too far above my paygrade to bother about. Better the big dogs duked it out, and I just did my best to keep them happy.

Both of us! Delight snapped in my head, but I ignored her. Stuff to do, and all that.

Mack’s voice followed me through the door, as I followed Tens.

“Ghoul was downloading his implant,” he said to Delight. “He jacked in, and then fixed himself a wireless link. You can thank me later.”

“Why don’t you go see to your team?

“Why don’t I stay right here and make sure we both get the same copy of the download.”

“Won’t you need Tens for that?”

“Good point. Tens!”

“Busy boss.”

“Get your ass back here!”

Tens shot me an apologetic look.

“I’ll send someone,” he said, and I shrugged.

If whatever was in Bendigo’s head was that important, what was a bit of Ghoul between friends? The little bastard was probably so busy running, he hadn’t stopped to let me catch up. Just goes to show how wrong a gal can be.

Ghoul might have kept on running, but Mack had just blasted his pay day, so he had no money left to run on, what with Odyssey seizing his computer, and me and Bendigo getting to his assets before he could spirit them away. Yeah. Ghoul wasn’t going anywhere, except back to collect what was his, before the cavalry arrived.

I was just lucky he’d spent all that time in computing, and developing advanced techniques for making people scream for their mothers. He was good at that, just not so good in the guns department. His first shot clipped the wall next to me, and I didn’t give him time to line up a second.

As Tens had noted, I was a little impaired when it came to working in the real and the virtual at the same time, but that was because I’d boned up on my other skills in Odyssey’s trainee program.

Computing dated back to school, and had had a little dust-off, but I’d discovered I really enjoyed shooting the shit out of stuff, and doing it faster and more accurately than anyone else. I’d never make a sniper, but popping shots off on the fly in a combat range. Yeah, I got good at that.

It was the only way I could bring down Ax before he got close enough to take me out—and it gave him such a case of the shits, that I made sure I could do it every time the opportunity came round. Bastien didn’t stand a chance.

I caught the blur of him coming around the corner and took out the biggest part of him. It wasn’t my fault he hadn’t stopped to put on body armor, or the base deflection shit I should have grabbed on my way out the shuttle door. Gut shots can stop most folk in their tracks. I walked my fire up his torso, even as he was doubling over from the first hit. Took the top of his head clean off.

Delight was sure as shit going to have something to say about that.

I kept firing until Bastien hit the floor. When he didn’t get up again, I figured I’d done my job. The only question was why the little shit had run down this corridor in the first place. There weren’t any labs that I could see. I pulled the map up on the net, and scanned it, but this was a corridor, plain and simple, a few corners, but no twists and turns—and certainly no doors.

So, where did it go?

I figured that was a question Mack would ask, and maybe I needed to find out the answer before he got around to asking it. I figured I didn’t need to call in Bastien’s demise, just yet, particularly as I didn’t want to get lumbered with the duty of standing by his corpse until the clean-up crew arrived. I didn’t want to spend any time waiting around the mess I’d just made. I wanted to find out for myself what lay at the end of this tunnel.

And, seeing as this was probably the last bit of freedom I’d get out from under Mack and Odyssey’s ever-watchful eyes, that was exactly what I was going to do. It didn’t take me very long. The tunnel led to where Bastien had stashed a small escape craft. It was warming its engines on a launch pad, reaching out an AI touch when I arrived.

“You are not Master Bastien.”

Trust the Ghoul to have chosen those alluring female tones.

“No. He’s dead.”

I felt it reach into my head.

“You killed him.”

“Yes.”

The engines started to cool.

“Does that mean my services are not required?”

“Ye... Services?”

“I was contracted to Master Bastien. If he is dead, then my contract is terminated, and I must look for another. I will do that from here.”

“What sort of services do you offer?”

“Transport,” the ship said. “There are three of us, and Master Bastien pays handsomely for one of us to be on stand-by here, at all times.”

“And are you discreet?” I asked, feeling the start of a plan uncoiling in my skull.

The door to the ship’s hangar slid closed behind me, and my head felt suddenly quieter.

“We should have privacy, if you wish to negotiate a contract,” it said. “I’m afraid you had eavesdroppers. They will find that more difficult until I turn off the shielding to this compartment.”

Its... her? Her. Her words reminded me of the links inside my implant, and I sank inside myself to deal with them. I found that I was, for the moment, alone.

“They cannot access the link while you are inside the hangar. They will come, but they are busy.”

I knew they were busy. It would take a little while for Delight’s people to have their teams in place, and Mack would have to send for his own teams, if he wanted to come after me. Given that he needed Tens to monitor Delight and her people, I figured I had a little time.

“So, I can lock them out?”

“Certainly. Are you doing this for privacy, or security reasons?” the AI inquired.

“Security,” I said, although the privacy benefits would be welcome.

“May I check your work when you are done?”

I baulked at that, but the ship continued.

“Your security affects my security,” she said. “I would like to know your head is secured against hacking attempts. I can ensure your head remains your own for the duration of the journey, but am obliged to remove any extra precautions which are not paid for, at journey’s end.”

Oh. Well, that sounded fair to me.

“Okay,” I said. “Give me a minute, and then you can check the links.”

I thought about what I was about to do. I really did. I weighed the relative security of working for Odyssey for the rest of my life, against finding my own path, and working out what that life should look like for myself, and knew I might not have another chance. Even knowing that I’d spend the next few years running from the likes of Agent Delight and Mack, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take that chance.

I ran a diagnostic through my implant, seeking out the links that had been put there by Mack, Delight, Bendigo, Tens, and Bastien, and I shut each one down. Now that Bastien and Bendigo were dead, I was able to remove their links. I tried it with the others, but found they’d be quicker to lock than remove. I even found the tracker Odyssey had planted the last time I’d been in their hands.

Goddamnit! That was the final straw. I knew I’d have to replace the implant, but I figured there was nothing in this one I was going to miss—except maybe Rohan. As dumb as it sounds, I didn’t want to kill his link, but Tens knew it was there, and so did Mack, and neither would hesitate to use it to come after me.

I shut the link off, feeling the echo of sadness at having to walk away from the first real friend I’d made since running away from home—and then I choked down a laugh. Rohan had learned a lot from Tens, and his was another link that would take more time to remove than I had. Little rat.

When I was sure I had found and locked down, or removed, all the links, I turned to the AI.

“Ready.”

She found three more, and locked them tight.

“Now, you will be secure for the journey. We should discuss price and payment.”

I named a price that was half of what I’d accrued in the two years of extra missions and Odyssey recruitment pay.

“That depends on your destination.”

“How far will it take me?”

Two moons over was not enough.

“I need a world to disappear on.”

I figured I could find an employer when I got there, that this was one thing the ship didn’t need to know.

“The closest is Depredides,” and she named a figure that took two thirds of what I had—and didn’t leave enough to get the compromised implant out of my skull.

“You will also be able to spend time in the regen tank we have on board.”

I would? I did? Did I need to?

“The nanites were not shielded,” she said, and I realized just how much I was starting to hurt. So, no new implant, but I’d have healed up by the time we made landfall?

“Yes.”

It took me seconds to decide I could live with that.

“I need to access my accounts and transfer my funds.”

“You can do that from on board. We can verify you have sufficient prior to breaking orbit.”

I didn’t want to ask what she would do if I did not, figured I could cross that bridge if I got to it. She popped the hatch, and I climbed on board. The minute the ship dropped the shields to the hangar, though, every link in my head went live... or they tried to.

I chuckled as neither Rohan, Mack, Tens, nor Delight broke through the locks the ship had put down. Nor did any of them think to wall off my accounts, before I’d accessed them. Maybe they still thought I was coming back.

I cleared my accounts, transferring the amount my transporter required to the account she designated. As we broke atmosphere, another thought occurred to me.

“You never told me how discreet you were.”

“There are levels.”

Of course, there were.

“Any I can afford?”

“The basic level is included in the fee you have paid.”

Great.

“How much time do I have?”

“Three days before the drop-off point can be bought, are standard.”

“It will do.”

“You are running from Odyssey, are you not?”

“Yes,” and I didn’t want to know how she’d worked that out.

“You let me into your implant. You have had an interesting couple of years. The identity of your location will be of some value, and bidding will take at least a week to resolve. Where you go after I drop you off, is entirely up to you.”

“Fantastic.”

“Welcome to life on the run.”

I had no way of answering that, but I didn’t have to. The ship’s comms board lit up like a Terran Christmas tree.

“We are being hailed by two ships, and the complex we just left, on the world below. All calls have the same point of origin.”

I sighed.

“Put Tens through.”

He was not impressed... or maybe he was. Either way the vid showed him smirking.

“You leaving us, girl?”

“Running just as far and fast as I can get.”

“You cleared your account.”

“Yup.”

“Delight is not amused.”

“She never is.”

“And Mack is pissed.”

“That hasn’t changed.”

The smirk curled upwards, and then vanished.

“Rohan says thank you for the puppy.”

And it was my turn to smile, right up until Tens added, “Anything I can say?”

“To get me to come back?”

“Your bonus for the last job is getting smaller by the second.”

“What do you want, Tens?”

The ship cut in, before he could respond.

“Warp in twenty,” and I was glad someone wasn’t taking chances.

“Mack says get your ass back on board.”

“That’s sweet of him.”

“Delight says she’s going to kick your ass.”

“She has to catch me first.”

Tens sighed, and all amusement went from his face.

“He will come for you,” and the only person he could ever mean was Mack.

I felt my heart do a happy skip, even as sadness crashed through it. I hadn’t been banking on feeling this way about leaving Mack behind. I felt my throat constrict, and swallowed against the urge to cry.

“I know.”

“And I promised Rohan I’d help Mack bring you back.”

Now, that was sweet. I cleared my throat.

“You’ll have to beat Delight,” I said, and felt the first frisson of fear.

Maybe I hadn’t thought this through... but the thought of continuing to work under Delight’s shadow was unbearable, so I knew I had no choice. The ship spoke, again.

“Warp in five, four...”

“We will find you, Cutter.”

I smiled, as the pressures of warp closed around me, and I said goodbye the only way I knew how.

“Yeah? Good fucking luck!”

Because they were going to need it. I was going to make damned sure of that!