“I think the storm is finally dying down,” Meiko said, peering around the tarp’s edge towards the cave opening.
“About fucking time,” Okereke muttered from her seat near the fire.
Zheng had found the cave along the bluff in which the bedraggled party now huddled. It was thankfully free of creatures, or at least free of anything that felt like contesting their presence. The hike down the canyon had been hellish despite being short. Meiko and Okereke had supported Fari as she hobbled one-legged, while Teng had carried the pilot slung over his shoulders.
“I haven’t been this tired since I birthed my daughter,” Okereke said.
“Was it a hard labor?” Meiko asked.
Okereke grunted. “She massed nearly five kilos, and the doctor took his time before giving me an epidural.”
Meiko made sympathetic noises. Childless, she could only imagine that level of pain. She’d give a lot for a few painkiller tablets right that moment herself.
The cave ran back into the bluff some unknown distance, but they’d found a space to the right of the entrance that they’d partly closed off with the tarp—well, a stout emergency blanket anyway—that Zheng had scavenged from the aircar’s emergency supplies. It was the kind of thing first responders carried to cover accident victims. They tacked it to the walls with strips from a roll of Everseal tape Meiko had scrounged from the pilot’s compartment.
She chuckled softly, recalling the relief she’d felt at seeing the face of Grippy, the cartoon seal-in-a-spacesuit mascot of the brand. You could find Everseal tape everywhere in the Cluster, manufactured under license on just about every world. Sure, there were reverse-engineered knock-offs anywhere people had fabbers; but every spacer Meiko had ever met swore by the ‘real’ stuff. She’d used it herself to do everything from securing pieces of survey equipment to rover bodies to patching leaky habitats to tying up prisoners. When Zheng’s eyes lit up on seeing Meiko produce the roll, she knew she’d found a kindred spirit.
Their teeth were chattering nearly nonstop by the time they constructed their dubious shelter. Meiko was about to start explaining how one treated hypothermia when Zheng produced another miracle from the emergency kit, a thermal bar. Zheng snapped off a portion of the bar along a pre-scored line, placed it in the center of the pile of wood scrounged from outside the cave mouth, and stroked the igniter wand across it after warning them to avert their eyes.
Even through firmly shut eyes the initial flare was impressive. When she dared to open them, she found the wood steaming and beginning to burn. Zheng put her in charge of arranging additional wood around the fire to dry and keeping it fed while the constable and Teng tended to the injured. Okereke, wiped out from her efforts with the cable, slumped nearby.
They split a pair of protein bars Zheng produced from one of her many pockets between the five of them before Fari dozed off, followed by Teng and then Zheng. The storm continued to lash the world beyond their little haven.
Meiko settled in beside Okereke, stretching her hands out to warm them by the fire. “I could use a spa visit after this,” she said, and they shared a quiet chuckle. Their companions, all in something that passed for sleep, were silent but for their breathing.
“When we’re back on the station I’ll take you to my favorite,” Okereke said. “We’ll bill it to Toiwa.” Meiko smiled.
“You don’t get along with the Commissioner, I take it?” she asked.
Okereke shook her head. “Woman’s got a stick up her ass,” she said. “She’s a crusader. Came up the cable eight months ago after supposedly cleaning up Kochi.” She smacked her teeth. “Well, the Fingers are still there all right, at least according to my contacts. But she did go through the Constabulary like a fucking avenging angel, sacking department heads and career constables who’d been on the dash for so long they’d forgotten they weren’t supposed to be.”
“And she’s doing the same on the station?”
Okereke nodded. “Got started, anyway. Old Ketti’s stooges are dug in pretty deep.”
“Like ticks,” Meiko said. Okereke looked at her questioningly. “That’s right, you don’t have them here,” Meiko said. “Parasitic insects that burrow their heads into their targets.”
“Ewww.”
“Yes, not my favorite creatures either,” Meiko said.
“Well, something like that, maybe,” Okereke said. “Ketti was rotten, that’s damn certain. Fathya, my business partner, hated dealing with him. I think she had something to do with getting Toiwa assigned to the station, but she denies it.”
Meiko scrunched her butt around, trying to find a more comfortable position. “Does your firm work with the Constabulary often, then?”
Okereke laughed at this. “Before Toiwa? Not directly. Not often, anyway. Hell, half our business came to us because people on the station couldn’t trust most of the Constabulary. At least we quote our prices up front and you have recourse to a contract court if we fuck up, instead of a sergeant making vague hints about donations.”
“But there are some you can trust?” Meiko said with a nod towards Zheng, who dozed a few meters away.
Okereke nodded again. “I didn’t know her before the trip down, but someone I do trust vouched for her.”
“That Detective Sergeant?” Meiko asked, remembering the tall, slim man who’d pulled both Okereke and Fari aside before they’d all boarded the shuttle down.
“Daniel is good people,” Okereke said with a smile. “We’ve known each other for more than thirty years.”
“I see,” Meiko said. She thought she caught a wistful note in the other woman’s voice and called up the sergeant’s image. “He’s certainly fit for his age.”
“He is.” The conversation lagged for several moments, finally broken when Okereke stirred the fire, causing a brief eruption of sparks. Okereke looked around. The others were all still asleep or otherwise unconscious. “Can I ask you a question?” she said, softly.
Meiko shrugged, studying the other woman. She was curious. “You can certainly ask,” she said. “I might not answer.”
“Fair enough.” Okereke chewed on her lip a moment, as if choosing her words carefully. “We’re in deep shit here. Not here,” she said, waving one hand to indicate the cave. “Though this isn’t exactly a resort. At least as long as they pick us up soon. But this whole situation. Assassinations, riots, fucking spies with bombs and super-hackers. My partner getting a piece of fucking rock through her leg,” she said with a nod in Fari’s direction. “So we’re stuck together, working together, for a while longer. Until this is over, anyway.”
Meiko smiled wryly. “Assuming my boss doesn’t stuff me into a closet in the embassy to keep me out of further trouble.”
Okereke snorted. “OK, sure, that might happen. Until then, though, you’re part of this team.” She looked the other woman in the eye. “And we’re going to need to trust each other.”
Meiko cocked her head. “You don’t trust me now?”
“Not entirely, no.”
That bothered Meiko and she sat up straight, her shoulders squared back. “I think I’ve proved my worth any number of times.”
“I’m not talking about your abilities.” Okereke tapped her chest. “I’m talking about what’s in here.”
What the hell? She was tired and sore and her left arm still hurt. She’d fought rioters off this woman and helped carry her partner to safety, and she still wasn’t trusted? She forced herself to speak calmly. “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
Okereke blew out a breath, frustrated. “What makes you do what you do, woman? Why are you here? Are you really in this to the end?”
The intensity of her words rocked Meiko back, and she looked away for a moment. Understanding crept in, slowly. “Your motive is personal, clear-cut. But this isn’t my world, my fight, so you don’t know why I care? Is that what you mean?”
“Something like that,” Okereke said. “And whether you want the real answers about what’s going on, or just an answer,” she added. “Are you just here to make sure the vote comes off and Ileri joins the Commonwealth?”
“Ah. I see. I think.” Meiko thought for a moment. “For myself, I want the real answer. Not just because I abhor untruths.”
“That’s a strange sentiment for a spy.”
“Most of my job is really about finding the truth.” Meiko poked the fire herself, but no sparks burst forth. “These people are trying to break the peace. Keeping that peace has been my life’s work. What’s happening here is the kind of situation that could spark a conflict like we haven’t seen since the Second Colonial War.”
“Why are the Saljuans spun up so hard? Because they think that if Ileri joins the Commonwealth, the power shifts too far in your favor?”
Meiko shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. But we’ve tried space wars. They’re hard and expensive, and the example of Goa and Shenzen wrecking themselves for several generations ought to be pretty fresh in people’s minds.”
Okereke snorted. “Not everyone’s minds. There’s seventy million people on this planet, and nearly a quarter of them are under the age of thirty. They’re too young to remember the war. I bet it’s the same elsewhere.”
“Huh.” Meiko thought about that. She remembered background briefings mentioning the burgeoning demographic changes as the population-growth curve on the Cluster’s established worlds shot ever-higher. There were a lot of young people, and despite the best efforts of educators—and the free press, where it existed—she knew first-hand that people often forgot the lessons of the past.
But none of that got to Okereke’s question. And if she wanted to succeed, to clear her reputation and make whatever happened next in her career her own choice, and not that of Kumar or the legion of bureaucrats back home, she needed to work with this woman. And Zheng, and Fari, and even Teng.
How much do I need to tell her before she believes me?
“My last mission,” she said at last. “The Fenghuang recovery.” Okereke nodded but kept quiet. “It was a mess. I have—well, I had—a good bit of freedom to pursue opportunistic leads. A colleague let me know someone was hunting for a war wreck out in the wild space between Novo Brasilia and Shenzen. I signed on, and, well.” She paused as memories of desperate hours on the ice came to the fore, memories of blood and burning and of watching a young man twitching on the floor as hostile signals fired along his synapses and nerves.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, and the tension flowed out of her. She could see the future after this affair clearly now. Even if she pulled it all off and Kumar gave her a glowing report, she knew this was her last hurrah.
She turned to face Okereke, and her eyes burned into the other woman’s.
“For the first time in forty years, people died because I didn’t trust them, and because they didn’t trust me,” she said. “I was running solo, and we were twelve light years from the nearest settled system. Our ship had left for repairs after encountering a leftover munition from Fenghuang’s last battle, the one in which it was supposedly destroyed. If I’d only been dealing with the prick who wanted… who wanted something the Fenghuang was carrying, I might have been able to work with the allies I made after he showed his hand.” She swallowed again. “But there was someone else along who wanted to keep secrets buried forever, and they damn near killed us all to make that happen. If I’d trusted some of my companions earlier, we might have figured things out, and some of the innocent might not have died. And yes, we rescued those survivors in the stasis capsules, people who everyone had thought dead for more than twenty years, but only just. It was a bloody mess in every way, and I fucked up, badly, for the first time in my career.
“You asked why I’m doing this. I need you to trust me, trust my motives.” She took a deep breath. “I’m done after this mission, I know that now. They’ll never let me operate in the field again. But I can still do good here. We can find the killer, save lives, and keep the peace. And if this is my last chance to do that work, then I don’t mean to fail. And I need your help.”
For a moment, the only sounds within the cave were the crackling of the fire. Meiko thought about the career of forty years that she knew was over, turned to ashes like the wood burning beside them.
But even as it burned, it gave light, and warmth, and saved lives.
Okereke reached out with her right hand. Meiko stared at it for a few seconds, then reached out to clasp it.
“Call me Noo.”