EOAN
Eoan didn’t relax until they had everyone aboard the ship again, sweaty and winded but all in one piece. So different from last time, when they’d trudged up the cargo ramp with sulfur on their skin and quiet horrors in their eyes. As Eoan steered them clear of Sooner’s Weald, they heard laughter. Saint and Nash picking at each other as they counted and catalogued and stowed the new supplies. Anke beaming as Jal handed over the bags of clothes he’d carried from the market. The air sang with a relief so palpable even Eoan felt themself settling into it. Nothing troubling on the sensors, no unwanted company as the Ambit plunged deeper into the black. They’d gotten what they came for and escaped unharmed. Even if it could’ve gone better, that it hadn’t gone worse was cause for celebration.
So they did.
The crew celebrated, in their own uncomplicated way. With long, lazy showers and changes of clothes and all the quirky little things humans did to make themselves feel a little more human again. With a thrown-together meal too early to be dinner, too late to be lunch, and too brimming with chatter and bickering and food-muffled laughs to really end, even with picked-clean plates and only a couple scraps of flatbread left on the table. With the soft pluck of guitar strings, Saint wandered aimlessly through a melody as they one-upped each other with stories from the Weald.
“And this old soldier type,” Saint said, fingers moving gracefully along the neck of his guitar as he leaned back in his chair. “Mean-looking son of a bitch, gravel in his craw—”
“Wait, are we talking about you or the freelancer?” Nash cut in.
The melody paused just long enough for Saint to flick a crumb of flatbread at her, and it resumed at the same time he did. “He looks Jal up and down and says, Unless there’s something wrong with your gun, boy.”
Anke made a face. “I thought you said nobody would notice.”
“A man can’t be right all the time,” Saint said.
“Or even some of the time, apparently.” Nash flashed him a grin, knitting needles clicking neatly from her ordained place on the countertop. Some sort of cephalopod took shape between them, knitted in cheerful, unrealistic shades of orange and pink. Eoan liked the eyes the most. Hugely disproportionate and entirely joyful.
Saint struck a few bad notes, just to be spiteful. “You gonna let me tell the story or not?” He had a crook to his lips, though, and Nash winked and waved one of the cephalopod’s stubby little legs. Tentacles? They were probably past the point of technical correctness. “So this loon here”—with a wave to Jal, who’d kicked back on two legs of his chair, picking at a piece of flatbread—“looks at him like butter wouldn’t melt on his tongue. No, sir, he says. Then he rears back and throws the whole damn gun at his head. Smack.” He thumped the heel of his palm against the side of the guitar. “Don’t know who was more surprised when it hit—him or the kid.”
“Now, see,” Jal drawled, chewing slowly on a piece of bread, as if to make it last. Never mind the pinches he kept slipping to Bodie, who had curled up proprietarily on Jal’s lap. Hard to say if it was the food scraps or ear rubs that had won Bodie’s heart, but either way, Jal had earned himself quite the furry devotee. “You were right on the edge of being nice to me. Don’t go spoiling it, there, Florence.”
Saint’s eyes narrowed in a half-earnest glare. “Watch yourself.”
“What? I think it’s a pretty name,” said Anke. “Florence Toussaint. Sounds regal. Super pretty.”
“Super,” Nash agreed, smothering a laugh behind her hand.
Anke blinked. “Oh! I mean. Not pretty like, you know, butterflies. Or rainbows. Or—”
“Flowers?” Saint suggested with a quirked eyebrow, aimed Nash’s direction. He managed to get himself—and his guitar—out of the way of the sailing saltshaker, but only just.
“Speaking of flowers,” Nash said, pointedly. Her grin showed teeth as she delicately cast off a stitch on the cephalopod’s blush-pink belly. “Gun-flinger might get honorable mention, but hands down, Merc Drop of the Day goes to this killer.” With a nod to Anke. “Or did you miss the part where she brained somebody with a plant? Nonlethally,” she added, as Anke flinched. “A light braining. More like a bonking, really.”
“And on that note,” Anke said, pushing her now-empty mug away from her on the table, “I should get to work. That patch isn’t going to code itself.”
Nash’s smile fell. “The patch has a whole week to get written,” she said. “You need a night off, friend. Doctor’s orders.”
As if they’d coordinated in advance, Jal had already rolled to his feet, much to Bodie’s dismay. “Sorry, buddy,” he said, settling Bodie on the floor with one last head rub and the rest of his flatbread. Bodie’s rumbling purrs as he trotted away said he’d take the olive branch under consideration, and possibly not de-string Jal’s boots while he slept.
Possibly.
Jal didn’t seem too worried. Humming a countermelody to Saint’s guitar, he nudged the table out of the middle of the galley and up against the counter, then turned around to Anke. “You heard the lady.” He offered her his hand. “Better idea: how ’bout a dance?”
Anke’s face turned a shade not far off Nash’s yarn ball. “Not really much of a dancer,” she said.
“Is that a no?” There didn’t seem to be anything hiding in the question. No challenge, no disappointment, just genuine curiosity and a lopsided smile.
Guileless, they thought—or playing the part well. They really hadn’t decided which. They’d tried not to watch him too closely since he came back aboard. Tried not to doubt him, not to blame him for the spectacular blooms of color across their XO’s face. Self-deception was a uniquely human talent, however, and they couldn’t help thinking: If Jal’s plan had always been to go back for Saint, then why hadn’t he just told them? They knew they hadn’t exactly endeared themself to him, and he clearly had conflicting feelings about Saint, but how could they trust someone so determined not to trust them?
No harm in keeping an eye on things, they decided. Hope and doubt could exist in the same space, and as they watched Anke rise with an emboldened grin, they did hope. For her, for Jal, for all of them—for a future in the hands of these clever, curious, confusing creatures.
“I’m warning you,” Anke told Jal, taking his hand, “I’ll step on your toes.”
“Maybe I’ll step on yours, too, then,” he replied. “Keep things square.” But as they twirled around the galley to the tune of Saint’s guitar and Nash’s hands drumming the counter, there wasn’t a mashed toe or a stumble between them. A dip, and Anke’s laugh brightened the whole ship; a spin out toward the counter, and it was hard to say if Anke lured or hauled Nash into the fray, but she’d found her feet and her place in the dance by the time the song changed. A familiar tune, something jaunty and bouncing and irreverent that Eoan hadn’t realized had lyrics until Jal picked them up at the tail end of the verse:
“—mansion up on a hill,
Man inside said, see this life I built.
I’m a rich man, I’m a king,
Got everything I need.
I got nice suits, nice shiny rings,
I got all the good things.”
The atmosphere was so impossibly warm in the galley. Eoan basked in it, soaking in the joy and the energy like red starlight bathing every sense as Jal spun Nash and Anke round the galley, one on each hand, and Saint strummed those well-loved strings through another verse.
“Come on, wallflower,” Nash called to him, swatting his knee as she passed. “Get off your ass and dance with us.”
“Not a chance,” he shot back.
By then, though, he had everyone’s attention.
“Ain’t nobody died from a little skippin’ and dippin’, old man,” Jal said.
Saint raised an eyebrow. “When you say it like that, it kinda sounds like something else.”
It took Jal a second, but he laughed. “Well, ain’t nobody died from that, either.”
“Please?” Anke’s hair had gone wild with all the moving, falling in her eyes as she batted them at Saint, and her bright, cherry-red cheeks dimpled. “It’s fun!”
“Fun,” Jal echoed, grinning so wide the light caught the points of his canines. “I know you know what that is, old man. Up!”
“Oh, one of you primas want to play the music, then?”
Eoan never could resist the chance to make an entrance. “As a matter of fact,” they said, projecting into the chair beside Saint’s with a shiny green guitar. Didn’t seem right to try to copy the look of Saint’s. Like an extension of his hands—too many stories there. But theirs played the same notes, indistinguishable from Saint’s but for the fact that they came from the galley’s speakers. “I’d love to try a song or two. Go.” Because as much as they enjoyed hearing him play, this was better. This was novel. They’d never seen him dance.
That settled it, apparently. Saint barely had a chance to set aside his guitar before Nash snatched him onto his feet, and for all his grumbling, he took to it like a glove to a hand.
“Look at you go!” Eoan laughed as the mismatched foursome romped and spun and bumped shoulders in their cramped makeshift dance hall. No room for grace, just silly, unapologetic fun. And oh, how they’d earned it. All the troubles that lay behind them, and the worse ones that lay ahead—they spent so long struggling under the weight of the universe, and they deserved a night to dance and sing and breathe.
Eoan wanted so badly to breathe with them. To celebrate as they celebrated, gasping and laughing and so deeply glad to be alive, but for all Eoan could share with them—the music, the joy, the relief—they couldn’t share that. They couldn’t empathize with the fear of facing their own demise or the thrill of coming out the other side hale and hearty. They’d never been at risk the way their crew had been at the Weald; and they’d never been protected the way their crew had protected each other. How could they have been? How could anyone possibly risk their life to save Eoan? To save an intangible intelligence incapable of death, at least in any way they could understand? And how could Eoan do the same for them?
They didn’t know the answers to those questions. Didn’t even know how to go about finding them, and until they did, they couldn’t get any closer than this—than playing through that feel-good melody, catching the eyes of their crew and smiling when they smiled. Laughing when they laughed. Feeling their joy, their relief, even if they felt it separately. Differently.
Sometimes it felt like enough.
Sometimes it felt like it never could be.
Tonight, they told themself it was. It was enough, because it was beautiful. It had been just the three of them for so long—Eoan and Saint and Nash—and it had never felt incomplete. Never felt wanting. But watching them shine together, the four of them, stirred such a profound sense of satisfaction in Eoan. Like finding pieces to a beloved puzzle they thought they’d already finished, seeing how the picture grew. All the new colors, and the way they brought all the old ones to life. Of course it was enough, because how could they possibly ask for more?
The music quickened like a heartbeat fluttering. Faster and faster, Jal breathless and chuckling around the words of the song as he spun Anke around and ducked low so she could return the favor.
“Man in a shack said come inside,
Ain’t much but it’s home,
For me, my kids, my wife.”
They traded partners, and Eoan delighted in Anke’s pink-cheeked smile as she took Nash’s hands. Jal nearly tripped over a chair when he turned around to his new partner, but Saint just caught him and kept going without missing a beat, and Jal kept the song alive.
“I’m a rich man, I’m a king.
Got everything I need.
If all I got’s my family,
Then I got all the good things.”
So much fondness between Saint and Jal, buried beneath all the scar tissue, and Eoan had never seen it so close to the surface. Just another piece of the puzzle fitting into place with that quiet, carefree refrain.
“I got all the good things.”
It couldn’t last, of course. Another song, and the poor dears slumped on the floor in an exhausted pile. Nash’s legs across Saint’s lap, Anke’s head on Nash’s stomach, Jal wedged into the corner of the cabinets but managing somehow to stay touching all three—it was a Gordian knot of tired limbs and winded breaths, and as loathe as Eoan was to disturb them, what they needed was rest.
So they finished the last song and let their guitar fade. “I know at least two of you won’t thank me if I let you sleep where you fell,” they said, ignoring the chorus of groans that went up. “Yes, yes, I’m terrible. I’m the worst. Now go to bed before I electrify the floor.”
“What is it with you people and electricity?” Jal grumbled, but it had the desired effect. Slowly, a bit begrudgingly, they all untangled themselves and found their feet again. After a few bleary goodnights, they all turned in for what Eoan hoped would be a quiet, restful night. They’d certainly earned that, too.
In the morning, their work could continue.
Eoan’s, of course, didn’t stop. They didn’t require sleep—not in the Homo sapiens sense of the word. Reduced sensory activity. Inhibited responses. Dreams. Sometimes, they let themself drift. Consciousness for them meant chasing one line of reasoning to another, always with their eyes toward an answer; when they rested, though, they could wander. From music to dancing to countless recordings of foxtrots and waltzes and line dances. Then to the disputed origins of line dancing, to the historic city of Kolkata, to the tomb of Mother Teresa and a brief but informative tangent into the animus of humans toward burial and entombment.
Tonight, there would be no drifting. With the madness of the Weald behind them and their crew safe aboard, they could finally turn their attention to the leads from the depot. Nash’s serial number was simple: a bit of proverbial thumbing through manufacturing records and shipping manifests, and they tracked down a mislaid goods report filed with the Union a couple of years ago. A Trust subsidiary claiming it lost an entire shipment en route to a debtors’ colony, and that was the end of that. Thefts meant investigations, inquiries, but a bit of good old-fashioned negligence? Not so much as a second glance.
Somehow they suspected the Trust had taken advantage of that particular operating procedure more than once.
Sorry, Nash. While Eoan could fill in the gaps from mislaid goods to an under-the-table deal with smugglers in the frontier—lost goods conveniently found, an extra influx of caps some clever accountant would deftly explain away in the quarterly earnings—they didn’t have the paperwork to back it up. The Union did love its paperwork. Not quite a dead end; any brush of color they could add to the picture taking shape was good to have. They knew Nash would’ve hoped for more, though, and they would’ve liked to give it to her.
That still left the agitators outside the rockhopper. Unlikely it was just the pair of them; they tended to travel in groups. Cells. Safety and power in numbers, and if the havoc on Sooner’s Weald had shown Eoan anything, it was that they needed to know exactly what kind of numbers they were dealing with.
Let’s see who your friends are, gentlemen. Eoan pulled facial scans from the bodycam footage, but the trick would be matching those faces to anything useful. It wasn’t as if they kept some kind of compendium. The Rioters’ Roll Book. Agitators A to Z. Theirs was more of a … fluid association.
Ah, well. They did love a good challenge.
They mapped it out like one of Nash’s concept boards, spooling bits of yarn between push-pinned pictures and pieces of the soon-to-be whole—a handful of arrest records from Trust security, branching out to known associates; a dozen known associates, branching out to thousands of hours of surveillance and news and shaky GLASS footage of protests across the spiral. Threads laid, Eoan only had to search for the point where they all intersected. The patterns. Everything connected to something; it was one of the few unerring truths of the universe.
They saw it, then. The point where the two agitators’ strings first crossed—a cluster of riots in the frontier. Trust colonies, mostly mines and shipping, ripe for labor protests. The more they tugged, the more those strings tangled, and the more certain Eoan grew that this went beyond those two agitators in the right place at the right time. Colony after colony, protest after protest, video after video, the same faces appearing in every chanting crowd, until they could feel the end of the thread just within their grasp.
Then, an itch.
Not an actual itch. They’d never actually had an itch, more’s the pity, but they imagined this was what it would be like. A nagging blip in their awareness, negligible until the moment they noticed it, and unbearable thereafter. Demanding their attention, so they gave it, abandoning their string board for a moment to trace that peculiar sensation into the Ambit’s onboard computer.
They hit a wall. That’s not right. Eoan existed independent of the ship’s systems, but there was no part of that system they didn’t know, no process or function or line of code they couldn’t access. But there it was—a barrier thrown around a cluster of applications, insulating them from Eoan’s meticulous security protocols.
They inspected it carefully. Permeable—not meant to keep Eoan out, then, but to shroud whatever was going on behind it. Like a line of empty cans strung around a campsite, ready to warn whoever had laid it that they’d been found. Savvy little thing, aren’t you?
Isolated, though, which had its goods and bads. Good, because it gave them room to move around without tripping over another piece of foreign programming; bad, because it meant whoever had put it there knew exactly what they were after, and they’d most likely found it.
“Saint.” Only their voice over his in-quarter comms. No time to bother with projections. “Wake up. There’s an intrusion in the ship’s systems.”
Saint—such a light sleeper, bless him—jolted upright before they even finished speaking. “More mercs?” he said.
“Unlikely.” Possible, they supposed; they couldn’t prove a negative. Nevertheless, “The firewalls are intact. No outside interference, so unless we’ve got one smuggled aboard the ship—again, unlikely—then it’s something or someone we brought on ourselves.”
Boots on, eyes bright and aware despite the bruising spreading beneath them, Saint headed for the door. “You think…?” The rest of the question was lost to the gnashing of his teeth, but Eoan could extrapolate.
“It could be more like Riesen’s tag.” It would’ve taken something more complex than a simple satellite tracker to get into the Ambit’s systems unnoticed, but they lacked the ego to say it couldn’t be done. “I’m trying to find a back door, see if I can figure out exactly what they’re doing before we sound the alarm. If I can’t manage in the next thirty-four seconds, however.…” Wouldn’t take them any longer; as they said, they knew every part of the ship’s systems. It was just a question of drawing the right set of lines through the maze. “Then could you be a dear and go knock on some doors?”
It seemed more polite than go downstairs and drag our guests out by their ears. They abhorred unnecessary violence.
“Cameras are clear, so don’t bother sneaking about,” they added as he ducked out of his room. “I’ve narrowed the affected systems to a handful of applications. Nothing essential.” Steering, life support, and security protocols remained intact and excluded; they seemed to be looking at the Ambit’s communications systems. Programming interfaces, integrations with outside databases—nothing that could do any immediate harm, unless Eoan had missed something.
But Eoan didn’t miss things. They observed, noticed, analyzed. Attention split between the intrusion, their back door, monitoring Saint’s progress down the halls, and it hardly took a nibble out of their processing capacity. No, they didn’t miss things.
As they finally slipped behind the curtain, though, and saw what it hid, they had to grant this: they did, occasionally, miscalculate.
“Wait,” they told Saint as he hit the bottom of the ladder to the crew quarters. Nineteen seconds—not bad time for either of them. “I’ve got it.”
“Well?” Irritation crept into his voice. No man wanted to go to war in his pajamas, least of all against anyone he’d called friend.
They understood the feeling—less the pajamas, of course. Yet, as they traced the intrusion to a GLASS in the lower decks, they wouldn’t hesitate to do what was needed.
“Anneka.”
The programmer jolted so hard she nearly dropped her GLASS. Surveillance in private quarters was generally prohibited, except under the worst of exigent circumstances. Through the fish-eye lens in the corner, Eoan watched as Anke paled in the dark of her room, bumping her glasses up her nose with the heel of a hand.
“Eoan?” Anke said it steady enough, but the timbre sounded wrong. Too tight. Too measured for someone who flustered so easily. “Is everything okay?”
A full sentence. Another strike.
“We could banter,” said Eoan, calmly. Theirs was a true calm, unlike Anke’s, smoothed over feelings waiting to take shape. Anger. Betrayal. Worry. Confusion. “You could play the fool, and I could talk you into a corner until you break down and tell me everything. But there is a very unsettled ranger outside your door with a firearm and roughly a decade of largely untreated trauma, so for all our sakes, let’s cut to the chase. Why the fuck are you hacking my ship?”
Eoan considered themself a patient creature, but the handful of seconds they spent watching Anke’s face shift—forced composure to a strained mix of mortification and guilt—seemed to stretch on forever.
“Please,” Anke said, at last. “I promised.”
“Who did you promise, and what did you promise them?” Answers. Eoan needed answers, and they needed not to wait for them.
Anke swallowed audibly, and perhaps involuntarily, her eyes flickered sideways, toward the shelf with its vase of little purple flowers. Toward the guest quarters, they amended.
“Jalsen?” The faint thinning of Anke’s lips was answer enough. Not a very good liar; Eoan supposed they should’ve been pleased, but then, they’d thought the same of Jalsen. Guileless. Fool me once. “What did he ask you to do?”
“It wasn’t—he just wanted me to help him into something. A drive. He was trying to open it back on the rockhopper and didn’t get the chance, but I got a copy of it before the hangar blew.”
“What’s on the drive?”
“Cap, you want to tell me what the fuck’s going on?” Saint hissed under his breath. Eoan had never been more acutely aware of Jalsen’s mutations—heightened senses made for a spectacularly inconvenient enemy, particularly one they didn’t want to tip off. The less unpleasant they could keep this, the better, if only because Saint cared for him. Whether he wanted to or not, Saint cared, and they knew him too well not to see it.
“Hold,” they told him firmly. Then, to Anke, “What is on the drive?”
“He didn’t say.” Tears welled in her eyes. Guilt, again, but Eoan couldn’t say if it was for betraying them, or for betraying whatever promise she’d made to Jal. “All he told me was that the drive was his way back to his family, and we couldn’t tell you guys, because he was in some kind of trouble. I’m sorry,” she said. Maybe a bit of both: guilt for them and for Jal. “He saved my life, and I—I was being careful. The cypher was a little older than I expected, so I just needed to borrow your access to the Guild encryption key silo. If it was something bad, I would have told you, I swear!”
“If it was something harmless, he wouldn’t have needed to hide it.” It all kept circling back to that, didn’t it? If he’d planned to help Saint in the Weald, he should’ve shared his plan. If he’d had nothing to hide on that drive, he should’ve asked them for help decrypting it. If his intentions were good, his actions should have been different. There was too much at stake to keep rationalizing the behavior of a half-feral deserter for the sake of sentiment. “So let’s find out.”
Anke flinched. “What?”
“Saint, get Jal, bring him to Anke’s room. Now.” In the meantime, they pinged Nash in the engine room and told her to join. If things went badly, it would be better to have all hands on deck. “You said you have the file, Anke?”
Her head jerked, stiffly. Couldn’t properly be called a nod, but Eoan took it for one. “It’s all there,” she said. “I think I managed to salvage it.”
“We’ll have a look, then.” If it really was Guild-encrypted, it wouldn’t be any trouble at all to get into it. Simple as finding the key and turning it, and then they’d have this all sorted one way or the other.
Saint, arguably, had the harder job. “What’s wrong?” they heard Jal ask as Saint called him out into the hall. Awake with his boots on—a habit he’d picked up as a ranger, or one he’d picked up from his time on the run, they’d likely never know—and mercifully unresisting as he ducked out the door.
“Cap wants us in Anke’s room.”
“She all right?” Under different circumstances, it might’ve been endearing how readily Jal followed Saint down the hall. Didn’t even wait for an explanation.
That changed when he stepped through the door. His specs sought out Anke first, then the GLASS, and then found Eoan’s projection as it coalesced in the corner of the room. “Anke?” he asked, backing up a step.
He backed straight into Saint, who’d hung back to block the doorway. “Cap, think it’s time you told us what this is about,” their XO said, as Nash jogged up behind him from the hall. He pushed Jal forward enough that Nash could get through, but Jal knocked his hands away like they burned him.
Eoan kept their expression stern. “Anke, tell them what you told me.”
Poor Anke looked like she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her whole. GLASS set aside on the mattress, hands wringing the life out of one corner of her shawl. “I’m sorry, Jal,” she said, though her eyes never made it anywhere near him. And then she told them. Almost to the letter, so exact that Eoan thought halfway they might’ve just played it all back and spared her the grief. So far as Eoan could tell, her only misdeed was trying to help the wrong person, and kindness was a terribly hard flaw to fault.
Jal’s faults, on the other hand.
Anke had no sooner finished her explanation than Saint had Jal by the collar, shoving him back against the wall so hard his head bounced off it. “Son of a bitch,” he spat. “In the hangar—this is what you stayed back for? Risked our fucking lives for?” Rage rippled through every overtaut muscle as he pinned Jal in place. “What’s on the drive?”
“I don’t know,” Jal answered through his teeth.
Saint hauled him off the wall and slammed him back again, harder. “Cut the shit, Jalsen. What is it?”
“I don’t know!” he shouted. His voice, ragged and rough-edged, stretched so thin over panic that for a second Eoan almost believed him. The way he sank against the wall, shaking his head … it painted an awfully convincing picture. “I swear on my life, I don’t know.”
If any part of it was real, they thought, then maybe what they were doing was a mercy. “Then you will,” they said. We all will.
With every eye in the room on them, they shifted the projectors into a screen on the wall, and they showed them all what he’d been hiding.