NASH
Jal’s debrief the next morning was a bit like death by a thousand cuts. Eoan kept their questions gentle. Objective. It turned out, though, there wasn’t really an objective way to describe being plugged full of bullet holes and abandoned to the mercy of your enemy. Nash’s skin crawled, hearing that Jal spent years scrapping abandoned Trust sites for the scavs while life moved on without him.
Kind of made her think Anke hadn’t begged off just to get a head start on the patch.
“We could get in touch with them,” offered Eoan, and the way Jal flinched, Nash would’ve sworn that was the deepest cut of all. “Their information is on record. I could set up a secure comm, if you wanted to send a message.”
“No.”
“No?” Not the response Nash had expected. “The fuck do you mean, no?”
Jal, for his part, looked like he’d sooner fling himself into dead space than answer any more questions. Good job they were up in the bridge; closest air lock was the one by the galley, and Nash figured she and Saint could probably wrestle him back before he made it that far.
Wouldn’t take much, she thought, looking him over. Folded over like he had an anchor around his neck, and still somehow humming with nervous energy. It took a feat of patience bordering on superhuman not to reach over and force his bouncing knee still.
“Wouldn’t be right,” he said. “What would I say? Surprise, I’m back, but I can’t come home right now. How d’you figure that’d go? Not like I can tell them where I am or what I’m doing. Most I can say is it’s dangerous, and I ain’t about to spring this on them just so they can worry ’til I finally make it home. It’d be unkind.”
Fair point, she allowed, but also fucking moronic. “Kind or unkind,” she said, “if you were my brother, I’d want to know.”
“But he’s not.” Saint sighed from his post in the corner, leaning against the wall with his arms folded like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Or maybe, she thought with a glance toward Jal’s weary pile of limbs, like he knew exactly what to do with them, and just wasn’t sure if he should. “It’s his family. Should be his choice when and how they find out.”
Which might’ve been convincing, if his jaw muscles hadn’t knotted up as he said it. Nash half-expected to hear his molars crack. “Shove it,” she told him. “You think I’m right.”
“Doesn’t matter what I think.”
Even Eoan sniffed at that one. Nash hoped that meant they’d call shenanigans—tell Saint he was being a pushover, tell Jal he was being unreasonable. Eoan just sighed, though, in that tinny, airless way of theirs, and said, “If you change your mind, do let me know. I’m sure they would be very glad to hear from you.”
The captain had spoken. “Whatever,” Nash said, kicking her feet up on the edge of the projection table and picking at some imaginary dust on her pants. Don’t give a fuck and you can’t make me. “They’re your family, miner boy. You want to be stupid about it, that’s your hill to die on.” Stupid wasn’t the problem, though. Nash didn’t bat her eyes at stupid. The problem was, Nash was the gambling type. She knew a hedged bet when she saw one, and for all Jal’s bluster about making it home to his family, she couldn’t help thinking he was scared. Holding out in case he didn’t make it back, so they wouldn’t have to lose him for a second time.
Made her wonder if he felt it, too: the cold, creeping tightness of dread. It had wormed its way under her skin back at the depot and hadn’t stopped spreading since, and the closer they got to Noether, the harder it was to shake the feeling that something bad waited for them out in the black.
And there they were, running out to meet it.
“You said there was something else you wanted to talk about, Cap?” Saint cut in before she could change her mind and call Jal’s bluff. Just as well. She wasn’t good at pulling punches, and Jal still looked a little too fragile for her particular brand of tough love.
Eoan’s projection nodded. “Two somethings,” they said. “Before last night’s bit of excitement”—probably the nicest way to describe that debacle—“I looked into the leads from the shipping depot.”
“Let me guess, ankle monitor was a loser.” Nash hadn’t gotten her hopes up, so Eoan didn’t dash them when they nodded. Ah, well. At least she got to tear the horrible thing down to scrap metal. “Gotta hand it to them: the Trust knows their way around the underside of the table.” Under the table, behind the back—those bastards never met a shade of shady they didn’t like. “What about Riesen’s little buddies?” Eoan wouldn’t have brought it up if they didn’t have something. Process of elimination. “You got something on them?”
Another nod. “Frankly, though, it’s not the two from the depot we should be worried about. I did a bit of digging, and it appears they’re part of a larger cell.”
When it rains. Bad enough they had the Trust and its hired guns; now they had a bunch of agitators on their asses. “How large we talking, Cap?”
“More than two, less than an army?” they offered. “Oh, don’t make those faces at me. It’s not as if they post membership rosters. Ideally they’ll keep the circle small, try not to give anything away prematurely. They’ve got as much to fear from the Trust as we do.”
“That’s assuming they’ve got the sense to make the smart play,” said Saint. “Could’ve been sheer dumb luck they stumbled on the Deadworld Code. Intercepted a comm, found a pair of loose lips. Shit happens.”
“It does,” Eoan agreed. “But it didn’t. Not here.” A wave of their hand, and a facial scan appeared over the projection table. Wasn’t a face Nash recognized—earnest, downturned eyes, and deep marionette lines. Divots in his cheeks Nash might’ve mistaken for acne scars if she hadn’t spent some time helping in a pox ward during her unofficial apprenticeship with the doc. “I can’t give you a number, but I can give you a name. Isaiah Drestyn.”
Books and covers, et cetera, but he didn’t look like the kind of person who could mastermind a murder-kidnapping. He looked … friendly. Forgettable, so long as you caught the side without the scars.
Then Eoan pulled up his warrant.
“Damn.” Jal whistled.
For once, Nash agreed with him. Damn. That was a little more like it. “And I thought I had a banging résumé.” Dozens of counts of rioting and inciting riots, which were usually just Trust-speak for we don’t respond well to criticism, so she skipped them. Plenty of others told a more interesting story—arson, hijacking spacecraft, a few counts of murder. “Dude’s a fucking pirate.”
“A soldier,” Saint said, and he would know, wouldn’t he? Kindred spirits. Without the Guild banner on their shoulders, how much of the shit they’d done would’ve earned them rap sheets just like that? “Don’t need a flag if you’ve got a cause. Guessing his has something to do with the Trust?”
“Fair guess,” said Eoan. “Not exactly the celebrity type, but he’s made a name for himself in the frontier. Mostly opposing bonded labor in the prospect planets. Played a key role in the Kepler Riots in ’78.”
“Shit, I remember that.” Ten, eleven years ago. Nash had still been on-station, then, but it’d been all over the news broadcasts. “That refinery fire on Kepler 3814, with the busted wellhead.” Despite some serious PR damage control, the story eventually broke that the Trust had let maintenance lapse. Too expensive to send trained mechs all the way to the frontier, so they just kept piling in the bonders for cents on the cap. The wrong shit broke in the right way, and that far out from developed worlds, the rest of the spiral couldn’t do anything but watch hundreds of people burn.
The fires had barely finished dying when the first protesters rolled in. Families and friends of the laborers, Union representatives and folks who just couldn’t bear to see it happen again. Which one were you, Mister Friendly? she wanted to ask, because there were layers to activism. People doing the right thing, or people doing the only thing. The ones who chose, and the ones for whom it was never a choice at all.
Eoan beat her to it. “He was there,” they said. “Four years’ labor on a bad homesteader’s loan. His brother, too.”
Another face coalesced beside the first, and for a second Nash wondered if they’d gotten the scans mixed up. There was a fighter’s face. A killer’s face. Sharper eyes set deeper between furrowed brows and a crooked nose, and his mouth wore a roguish grin that would’ve looked more at home in a bar fight than a prison intake scan. A bright red DECEASED scrolled around his shoulders, and she supposed that settled a lot of questions.
“Unfortunately,” Eoan said, “only one of them made it out.”
That’d do it. A dead brother, and the Trust got away with a slap on the wrist; if that didn’t radicalize the shit out of someone, Nash didn’t know what would. And here the Trust was, doing it all over again. She wasn’t even sure if Drestyn saw the dead planets, or if he only saw Kepler, over and over. His brother, over and over. “I’d want to take a shot at the Trust, too. Code’s probably a pretty bang-up way to do it.” The Union could give lapsed maintenance a pass, but nobody rubber-stamped a planet-killing supervirus. Leak that to a few news outlets, some public forums, and heads would roll. He just needed proof, same as them.
“Wouldn’t just be the Trust, either. What do a scorched refinery, a mummified shipping depot, and an abandoned shopping center have in common?”
Saint leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. “Not feeling the riddles, Cap.”
“It’s not a riddle,” Eoan said. “It’s a motive. Kepler, Noether, and the depot—all Trust developments in the frontier. That means they’re all under the purview of one man: Otho Yarden. He personally oversaw the Kepler colony before the fire, and loathe as I am to imagine anything like that actually making a career, it seems he made quite the jump a few years later.” No face over the projection table this time, just a name and a title. Otho Yarden, Chief Executive of the Outer Spiral.
“Man kills hundreds, gets himself a promotion.” Jal’s lips curled.
“I imagine Drestyn wasn’t too pleased with it, either. More to the point,” Eoan added, “that promotion means every significant decision in the Trust’s frontier holdings crosses his desk. So if I were looking for the man who authorized the use of the Deadworld Code in those colonies?”
“Yarden would be your bet,” Nash said. It was an ugly kind of math, but it added up. “One stone, two very big birds—if Drestyn and his people weren’t after wonder girl in there, I’d have half a mind to let him have at it.” Even if they could let Drestyn have the code, though, which was a risk Nash wasn’t too keen on taking, they sure as hell couldn’t let him have her. Anke had been under their protection from the moment they answered her distress beacon, and anybody that wanted her? They’d have to go through Nash.
Beside her, Saint quirked his mouth wryly. “So, Trust mercs and strikers. Anybody in the spiral we’re not about to piss off?” Because it wasn’t a question of if they’d stick with it, see it through; it never was. The only question was how crazy shit would get along the way.
Hang on tight, kids. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
Of course, by the end of the five-day crawl to Noether, Nash sort of wished it’d hurry up and get a little bumpier.
She’d never been very good at sitting around. That bit never made it into the Guild’s welcome package. They hyped the missions, the principles, the blasty-shooty badassery, and conveniently failed to mention all the goddamn travel time. Tortoisean crawls across a too-big universe, killing time with piddly mission prep because the tedium was better than sitting around with their thumbs up their asses.
So Nash reoutfitted the rover. Seemed Noether had drawn acid rain in the Deadworld lottery, and good ol’ HNO3 didn’t play well with metals. Even if they didn’t end up needing it, it was good to be prepared, and it was better to be busy. If she got to have a few giggles with highly corrosive chemicals and a plasma torch, all the better.
In all fairness, having some time before they had to leap back into action was good. Gave Anke room to work—to throw herself wholeheartedly into trying to crack the nastiest virus in the spiral with nothing but her wits and ready access to the coffee machine. Too ready, Nash had decided. It was a toss-up which would crap out first, the coffee machine or Anke’s heart, but Nash stood by for repairs on either. Wasn’t much difference anyway, when it came right down to it. People were functionally just machines with squishier parts.
It gave the crew room for other things, too. Watching Anke and Jal try to avoid each other in an enclosed space had been kind of entertaining, at first—though, honestly, watching Jal try to do much of anything in an enclosed space was kind of entertaining—but by the second afternoon, Nash was over it.
Fortunately, so was Jal. Anke’d claimed the galley table for a makeshift workstation, so he caught her in there one morning with one of his lopsided grins and a “thank you.”
Anke blinked up at him and palmed her glasses back up her nose. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Thank you,” he repeated, slower, like pronunciation was the problem. On the other hand, it was a fair assumption; the man wasn’t exactly an orator. She’d rate his mumbling somewhere between quaint and grating, depending on the day. “You got me my video.”
“I told the captain about it.”
“Yeah, but you know what they say about the cat you shave and the cat you shear.” And Nash definitely didn’t imagine the sour look Bodie shot him from his perch on the counter. Treachery. As if the little chaos gremlin wouldn’t be back to begging for belly pets before the day was out. Bodie was usually kind of a loner, but he’d either pegged Jal for an easy mark or fallen deeply, deeply in coddled kitty love. Sociopath or sap: his mood changed by the hour. And by how much time he’d spent with the catmint plant on the table. Nash liked to say she put it there for the energy—helps improve the flow of the room, she’d announced, and she did enough genuine interior geomancy that Saint had gone along with it—but really, she just thought it was funny to watch the cat get absolutely baked.
Anke blinked again behind her glasses, eyes shining blue with the glow of her GLASS. Nash hadn’t seen her much without it, the last couple days. “I, um. I don’t think I’ve heard that one.”
“Well, they’re both naked.” It was pretty much the clueless leading the helpless, watching Jal try to steer a conversation, but he eventually made it around to explaining. “Don’t much matter how the footage got cracked, just that it did. Which never would’ve happened if you hadn’t saved it from the rockhopper before it blew. So.” He rounded it off, matter-of-factly. “Thank you.”
Somehow, that was the end of it.
Saint came around, too, in his own way. Spent the first few days with his head buried in schematics like an ostrich in sand, because apparently, gearing up for a fight scared him less than dealing with his new friends-to-enemies-to-what-the-fuck-now trope.
Every morning, though, Saint made breakfast in the galley. And every morning, when Nash went to get her tea, she found Jal in there keeping him company. In the doorway, the first day; at the table with Anke, the next; then at the sink, doing the washing up, though Nash was certain he’d never been asked.
So Nash wasn’t surprised when she walked into the galley on the eve of their landfall at Noether and saw Jal leaning against the counter by the stove, so close to Saint that their elbows bumped whenever Saint stirred his pot. Easy laughs and quiet conversation, and Nash could only see Saint’s face in profile, but he seemed to mirror Jal’s warm, satisfied smile.
Nice work, miner boy. Underneath the sleepless eyes and scar tissue, Nash decided, he was one of those people: the sunshine people. The ones so warm, everybody turned their faces to them and basked in it. Not so hot they burned, not so cold they chilled. The just right people.
Nash had never been one of those people. She burned, and she chilled, and she didn’t know any other way to be. She told herself it was better that way, because anybody left standing was too thick-skinned to mind the extremes.
Honeyed oats and spiced seitan gave the air a peppery sweetness as Nash crossed the galley. “That coffee machine’s going to go on strike,” she announced, shooting a stern look toward the table where Anke continued to hurl every bit of her techie savoir faire at their Deadworld problem. Clock’s ticking, wonder girl. They were nearly out of time. “You sleep?” She picked up the mug sitting near Anke’s elbow, frowning at the still-warm half pour of coffee in the bottom. “Do I even want to know how many cups this is?”
“Not that many,” Anke said, at the same time Eoan volunteered, “Five, since midnight.”
Anke pointed an accusatory finger at Saint without looking up from her screen. Which might’ve been why she actually pointed at the cat lounging on the other counter with his relocated happy-plant. “He keeps making a fresh pot.”
“Doesn’t mean you have to drink it,” Nash shot back, pausing by the sink to scrub the oil smudges off her hands.
“Seems rude not to.”
Jal laughed and cringed at the same time. “The Ambit special,” he said. “Burnin’ the candle at both ends and lighting it in the middle for good measure. Y’all need to sleep.”
“Kind of the grease calling the grifter slick, isn’t it?” Nash stopped just shy of asking how many times she’d caught him wandering the halls after hours. Must’ve taken a fair few sleepless nights to earn himself those nice, dark shadows under his specs. “Unless I’m supposed to believe that’s hot water you’re drinking.”
“You all need to sleep,” Eoan chimed in in their best you started it, but I’m finishing it voice. “Anke, the last sim—”
“Is taking forever,” Anke groaned, dropping her head into her arms. Nash barely managed to slide her mug clear before it fell victim to a stray elbow. Sure, half a cup of liquid insomnia probably wouldn’t kill a GLASS, but a perilously thin line existed between waterproof and water resistant, and that thing held the keys to the kingdom. The patch, still a work in progress, came to life keystroke by keystroke on Anke’s tablet. Days of marathon programming stored on a single silica square, and Nash would be damned if they all got undone by a cup of half-burnt bean water. Especially since they couldn’t back it up. They’d all agreed that the Deadworld Code should stay on the GLASS’s drive, off-network and stashed safely away from the Ambit’s systems and anything else it could sink its digital teeth into. Away from Eoan. No telling what the code would do to the captain if it took a ride on the API railroad and got into their programming. Would’ve been like a doctor playing fast and loose with live viral cultures—ill-advised.
So, the Deadworld Code stayed away from Eoan, and as long as Nash’s reflexes held, the coffee stayed away from Anke’s tablet.
Not that Anke seemed to notice, head buried in her folded arms and shoulders hunched miserably. Five days she’d been at it. Five days, staring at that screen, coding version after version, running simulation after simulation, weathering disappointment after disappointment. She didn’t need more coffee; she needed a break.
Instead, she got a chirp. A quiet little thing, but the way Anke sprang up, it might as well have been a siren.
“—is finished,” Eoan concluded, cheerfully.
“Please,” Anke chanted under her breath, flipping through screens and readings and lines of code so quickly it made Nash’s eyes hurt. She didn’t even bother to straighten her glasses. “Please, please, please. Mama needs some good news. Just give me some—” Abruptly, she paused. Squinted. Pursed her lips in a small, soft O and tilted her head. “Oh.”
“Oh?” Nash prompted. “Good oh, or bad oh?”
“It’s … good, I think?” A few more screens, and Anke nodded. “Great, actually. It’s—I mean.” The corners of her mouth started to lift, until she beamed so shiny and wide that Nash had to remind herself to blink. Sunshine people, she thought again. Didn’t make sense, how a pair of grease- and blood-stained shadows like her and Saint could wind up sharing space with people like that, but maybe that was the thing about shadows; maybe they needed the light most of all.
“I did it,” Anke whispered, then she didn’t whisper. “Holy shitsticks, I did it!” She rose so quickly she knocked her chair over, and Nash wasn’t sure who she startled more: Bodie, who yowled and corkscrewed off the counter like he was ducking enemy fire, or Nash, who suddenly found herself with an armful of delighted whiz kid and exactly zero idea what to do about it.
Anke pulled away before Nash could figure it out—sort of a shame and a relief, at the same time. Nash didn’t like surprise hugs, but … she didn’t not like that surprise hug. “Sorry,” Anke said, but her cheeks glowed pink above an incandescent smile. “I was just—”
“It’s okay.” Probably not the thing to say, but that was the thing Nash said. “You’re, uh. You’re sure?”
“Sure as I can be, without a live run. This is the second time I’ve run this sim, and it’s still coming out aces. On a scale of fingers crossed to bet your ass, I’d say have your keisters at the ready.” She made a face. “That sounded less weird in my head. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, it should work. Might have to make a few adjustments when we get to Noether, make sure there aren’t any surprise variations from one version of the code to the next. But that should take all of, like, five minutes.”
Five minutes. Incredible. Anke said it so casually, like everything she’d been doing wasn’t a tour de fucking force. She hadn’t just caught something everyone else missed; she’d found a way to do something about it. Nash wondered how many times she’d have to tell Anke she was amazing before it stuck.
Even if it took years, she couldn’t help thinking it’d be worth the effort.
“Of course,” Anke added, blissfully unaware, “that’s assuming we get in. Which is super out of my wheelhouse, in case that wasn’t one-hundred-ten percent clear to everyone.”
Eoan chuckled. “I believe we can manage that, dear,” they said. “It’s our specialty.”
“Breaking into abandoned Trust sites?” Anke, too wrapped up in her GLASS to notice her mug had moved, made a blind grab for it and got nothing but air. Same with the next grab, and the next, until Nash pushed the mug back toward her palm obligingly. Anke could have the caffeine battle for today; Nash would win the war.
“Inviting ourselves in,” Eoan replied. “Rude, I suppose, but our hosts don’t tend to be the hospitable sort.” Eoan was, as ever, the master of understatement. “Just get the patch ready for the ground team to upload—”
“As idiotproof as possible,” Saint interjected.
“—and we’ll see to the rest.”
Finally, Anke broke her staring match with her tablet. “I’m not coming?”
“Do you want to?” Saint asked.
Anke faltered. “I mean. No. Not really, I … my on-world record is pretty much zip-for-two, and I’m not a big believer in third time’s the charm. There’s not really anything I could do there that I can’t do here, anyway. Except, you know, get in the way.”
“You wouldn’t be in the way.” Did Nash say that too fast? It felt too fast. Huh. “You got that guy on Sooner’s for me. Great timing, creative use of a flowerpot. Top marks from me, slugger.”
Anke’s blush deepened. “I just didn’t want you to get hurt.”
Either the air was suddenly way less breathable, or Nash’s lungs forgot what to do with it for a second. She coughed and cleared her throat. “Uh.” Nope. “Thanks.” Better, ish. Move it along. “We’ve only got three rebreathers, though. Miner boy’s got the spare, so guess you’re overwatch.”
“Besides,” Eoan said, “if there’s an unfriendly welcome waiting on Noether, I expect they would be very interested in getting their hands on you. Better you stay on the ship, where it’s safer.”
On that point, Nash couldn’t argue. Even in the capable company of Saint and herself—begrudgingly, she’d also admit the miner boy wasn’t completely useless in a fight—Anke would be more exposed off the ship than on it. If they could get her access to Noether’s T-form systems and keep her safely aboard the Ambit at the same time, then that was the smart play.
It just didn’t feel right.
She couldn’t shake it, that niggling, malignant itch between her shoulders. A chilly foreboding, like chips of ice down her back as they talked strategy over the galley table. It sounded good: enter through the old shopping center, take the tunnels straight to Noether’s operations building. In and out in under an hour, give or take half that, depending on the kind of heat waiting for them.
“Tunnels.” Jal’s nose wrinkled. “Not big on tight squeezes.”
Nash glanced up at him through the three-dimensional schematics. “You’d rather go singing in the acid rain? Operations building is a no-fly zone; weather’s too gnarly. So either we take the tunnels, or we try the rover and cross our fingers and toes that all terrain isn’t an exaggeration.” Steep hills and sloppy mud—not exactly easy riding. “Relax. It’s not like we’re trekking through a drainpipe or something. Even Your Real-Damn-Highness should be fine.”
All of them would be. The feeling was just a feeling, insubstantial against the weight of fact. The fact was, they were prepared. The fact was, they had a job to do and the wherewithal to do it.
The fact was, they didn’t have a choice.
Noether was a miserable place.
Nash had seen mockups of the shopping center, the way it was meant to be. A gleaming monument of white-chitin stone and seemingly infinite windows, surrounded by dancing fountains and flourishing gardens and the sort of abstract sculptural art that made Nash’s brain hurt when she looked at it too long. They’d set it all against an idyllic blue-green sky, as much a lie as the stock-photo shoppers smiling their way across the rendering; clear skies didn’t exist on Noether. Strong updrafts and a high surface water percentage meant near-constant rain, even before the T-form system glitched. So either the mockup was wishful thinking, or they’d had designs for some kind of weatherproofing that they just hadn’t gotten around to realizing before construction shut down.
Add that to the list, Nash thought as Eoan set them down in the shadow of the mall. If the mall had been finished, there would’ve been gardens where they landed, lush and vibrant and carefully manicured; instead, they sank into a slurry of gravel and mud. Nash caught herself holding her breath as the cargo door dropped. Stupid. Pointless. They had their rebreathers on, so the acid in the air couldn’t have burned her lungs. Just another goddamn feeling, as if that decaying, forgotten sickness of Noether could squeeze past the mask and insinuate itself in her chest. Could dissolve her like it had been dissolved, from something proud and unassailable to bending, cracking—
“Bones,” Jal said beside her, squinting out into the bleak, cloudy gray. “Looks like bones, don’t it?”
Yes. White-chitin columns and archways curving together like ribs, tattered construction tarps hanging in the place of windows like bits of flesh left on the carcass. Nitric acid had eaten pores in the stone, so stark and clean that Nash couldn’t help but look for oozes of marrow in the places the stone was gouged the deepest.
“Does it?” she said, sliding into the rover. “I hadn’t noticed.”
The short hop across the would’ve-been gardens churned up mud as thin and runny as the rain sluicing down the windscreens. Even with the rover’s deep-welled wheels, it slid and skidded like a motherfucker, and Jal clung to the handles in the back like he thought he’d get thrown every time it fishtailed.
“Okay back there?” Saint took the turbulence in stride, even slanted half a smile in the rearview.
Jal just groaned and thumped his head against the back of Saint’s seat. “I’m gonna die here.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Nash said. They were nearly there anyway. Just a few more decs of slurry, and a brain-rattling bump as they hit the entryway pavilion, and it was smooth sailing through what would have, at some point, become a nice set of double doors.
It was disorienting, the way the rain suddenly stopped. She’d gotten used to hearing it pound against the hull of the Ambit as they entered the atmosphere, then the roof of the rover. Now, with dozens of floors between them and the sky, it went abruptly silent.
She probably should’ve been a little gentler on the brakes, but watching Jal tumble half over the center console was good for a laugh. “Fuck,” he wheezed as he sat back on his heels. No seats in the back, just some storage and a few well-placed straps.
Saint, halfway out of the rover, twisted around to raise an eyebrow at him. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“I think I broke a hip.”
“Please.” Nash snorted, climbing out and taking in the view. Bones was an apt description. Supports and studs and scaffolding, storefronts blocked out but never finished, the skeletal structure of escalators and stairwells suspended between the floors. From their makeshift parking space in the lobby, Nash could see past dozens of walkways layered one over the other like shelves in a bookcase, all the way up to a massive skylight. Other than the windows, it seemed like the only silica they’d put in before construction shut down—a web of geometric panes sloping so smoothly the rain didn’t even make a sound when it hit. Heptagons? Nonagons? So asymmetrical it seemed organic. As though, if Nash stared long enough, she might see it breathe.
“This place give anyone else the creeps?” Jal asked, drawing her eyes back to ground level. He’d managed to unfold himself from the back of the rover and stood at the edge of a multitiered fountain collecting nothing but dust and drippage.
Saint wandered off a little farther, near an open door to the right of the entryway. Tucked away, meant to be perceived only by the people who needed to use it. Staff only. “Schoolhouse after dark,” he said. “Abandoned theme parks.” It took Nash a nanosecond to catch the theme—places not meant to be without people. Haunted by a profound, unnatural emptiness. Saint wasn’t as obvious about it as Jal, kept his features square behind the visor of his rebreather, but Nash could read between the lines of his gruff “Let’s make this quick.”
She couldn’t agree more. “Cap? How’s it coming?” Eoan had sent a drone ahead to scout Noether’s underground. They’d pegged the path from the shopping center as the straightest shot to the operations building; everything else had collapsed or flooded or branched off in directions they had no interest in going. The plan was to hold back, drag their feet a little so Eoan could make sure everything was clear. Wouldn’t necessarily keep them out of a fight, but it would at least give them a heads-up if one came their way.
“Swimmingly,” Eoan reported, crisp and collected over the comms. They didn’t care about ghost town vibes, if they even picked up on them at all; they had an underground tunnel to explore. “You should get down here. It’s quite a sight.”
Saint aimed his IR scope down the hallway, probably to make himself feel better. The man would jump blind off a building if Eoan promised a soft landing, but he seemed hell-bent on going through the motions. “Any security?” he asked.
“Clear!”
Nash startled at the sudden, bright voice chirping over the comms, and she wasn’t the only one. Jal flinched like he was trying to escape his own ear, eyes screwing shut. Odd to actually see them, with no specs in the way; he wouldn’t need them down in the tunnels, and he seemed to be managing okay in the weak, trickling daylight aboveground.
“Sorry! Sorry, that was loud. I’m new at this,” Anke said, and Nash could practically hear her blushing. “But you are good to go. Nothing but clear skies ahead—figuratively, I mean.”
Saint opened his mouth, but Nash silenced him with a look. If you don’t have anything nice to say, and Saint clicked his teeth back together decisively. Smart man. He led the way through the door instead, flicking on his red-light headlamp.
“Awesome.” Jal grinned, teeth painted crimson and black eyes like smoldering bricks of coal behind his mask. It had taken a bit of tinkering on Eoan and Nash’s part—and a bit of good-natured cooperation on Jal’s—to find the right wavelength for Jal’s particular rod-cone combination, but judging by the general lack of squinting and swearing, she’d call it a success. She and Saint could see in the red light, and it didn’t aggravate Jal’s eyes the way anything on the other end of the spectrum did. No night blindness, no NVGs, no problem.
He gave her a thumbs-up as he passed, jogging up to flank Saint in the front. Right side; Saint’s weak side, and she wondered if he knew he kept doing it, or if it was just old habit.
Long as you’re keeping your eyes on the hall, miner boy, she thought with a touch of a smile. Not that there was much to see. Bland block walls, splashed red by their headlamps. Pipes on the ceiling and puddles gathering on the floors, no decoration but the odd doorway with the odd plaque leading off to the odd boiler room or breakroom or whatever else they felt the need to tuck away from public view. Which sounded more interesting than it was, she decided, nudging a half-open stairwell door with her toe. The slow, solemn creak of the hinges echoed all the way up the hall.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” Saint said.
“It’s quiet. I’m bored.”
“You’re bored.” He didn’t sound surprised, just exasperated. “You know there’s probably people here who want to kill us, right?”
Nash nudged another door. Broom closet. Thrilling. “In other breaking news, water is wet, and Jal is tall.”
“Thanks for noticing.” Jal shot her a wink over his shoulder. Really leaning into the whole people can see my eyes thing. Embracing the oculesics—good for him. “Careful, though,” he added, as she tested another door. SECURITY OFFICE, said the plaque on the wall. A persistent drip down the wall had smudged half the letters, but Nash was pretty good at that game. “Could be rats.”
“You hear that, Saint? Forget the baddies with guns. There could be rats.”
Jal sniffed. “I don’t like rats.”
“Well, you can relax. Not picking up any heat signatures behind the door, rodent or otherwise.” And just because she could, she gave the next door a little kick. Wasn’t expecting it to open, rust-eaten lock dropping out of the door like it had just been waiting for the excuse to break.
She also wasn’t expecting all the corpses.
Her stomach took a sharp dive into her knees. “Not again,” she rasped on an exhale too tight to be a sigh, counting three, four, five bodies. One collapsed on a table shoved up under an air vent, the others piled in the corner like they’d been put there. Dragged or thrown without much care, no order in the tangled pile of—
“Oh, God.” Anke must’ve been watching the bodycam feeds. “That’s not—they aren’t like the ones at the depot.”
High-moisture environment. Compared to the bone-dry atmo of the depot, they might as well have been swimming. Acid and toxins and bacteria had eaten away at their clothing, at their skin, but they hadn’t mummified; they’d rotted. Like wax models left too close to the fire, melting into the soapy, waxy sheen on the floor that shined when Nash’s light hit it. She counted heads, because the bodies weren’t composed enough to sort limb from limb.
If she hadn’t been counting the heads, she might not have noticed the bullet wounds. Only in two of them; the others must not have been as neat. Rusty-brown stains on the walls and floors, furniture upended and thrown aside. “Nope,” Nash agreed grimly. “Not like the ones at the depot.”
“They killed each other.” She hadn’t even heard Jal move, but his shadow stretched across the red-lit floor, distorted by the directions of the lamps, hers and Saint’s. “Why?”
Nash pointed up to the vent. “If I had to guess.”
“Clean air?” Saint was the last to join at the door, and he didn’t linger past a sweep inside, enough to register no threats and move on. He’d probably filled his repertoire of horrors ten times over; he didn’t need more nightmare fodder.
“Cleaner,” Nash said. “Filtration system might’ve helped dry out the air, but the PPM would’ve been too high. The concentration of the acid in the air,” she translated for Jal, who probably hadn’t had much use for chemistry. He hummed his thanks. “Sole Survivor up there was still a dead man; he just had a little more time to think on it.”
“Poor bastards.” Jal, she noticed, only looked at the bodies in the corner. The victims, not just of the Deadworld Code, but of man’s baser instincts. Self-preservation. Or maybe you thought you were being kind, she thought of the body on the table. Putting the rest out of their misery before the acid ate them from the inside.
They’d never know which, and maybe it was best they never did. Some stories were meant to die with their makers; some stories didn’t bear repeating.
Nash cleared her throat and closed the door. Garter stitches. Gerbera daisies. Gearboxes. Good things, calming and familiar, painstakingly layered over the picture in her mind’s eye of what lay behind that door. The sooner they got this over with, the sooner Nash could rest knowing it would never happen again. “Let’s get to the fucking tunnel.”
Anke fell uncharacteristically quiet, but Eoan took over. Guided them down a long hallway to a fork in the corridor. More staff rooms ahead—more doors hiding bodies, more plaques marking graves—but to the right, UNDERGROUND WALKWAY.
“The elevator shaft is just up ahead,” Eoan told them, and as they drew deeper down the walkway, Nash could finally make out the elevator bay stretched three lifts wide. Like a lobby all its own, with crooked, bowing benches and vending machines toppled and broken. In the depot, they hadn’t known what was happening; they’d closed their eyes and never opened them again, and that was the end of it.
On Noether, they would’ve had time. Not long—minutes, for the ones inside. Less, for those without shelter. They’d have had long enough to be terrified, though, with all the messiness that entailed. Sort of made her wonder. “Why didn’t they call for help?” They’d had time. Surely someone would have tried. “I know Noether’s out in the middle of nowhere, but there’s got to be a few satellites close enough to pick something up.”
Anke coughed. “I, uh. I had a theory about that, actually. I mean, they designed the Deadworld Code to be undetectable, right? But that doesn’t do them much good if somebody manages to shoot out an SOS before they die, and surely they wouldn’t leave something like that to chance. If I’m them—even saying that feels like I’m vomiting jellied eels—but if I’m them, I think I’d bake in some kind of jammer.”
“I’m not picking up any jamming signals,” Eoan said.
“And I haven’t found any communications-based code in the version of the virus I pulled from the depot,” Anke agreed. “Jammers aren’t like the base Deadworld Code, though. Like, the terraforming components of the Deadworld Code can’t be extracted. Once they’re there, they’re there, and they’re there to stay—see: salt from soup. That’s the trouble with really complex programming.
“Jammers, though, they’re dummy code. Easy peasy. Drop one of those suckers in on a timer, wrap it up in a self-deleting executable, and you’ve got a thirty-minute mute button that wipes itself out once it’s done. Which you’d want, right? Because if anybody picks up a signal jammer on a planet that just friggin’ eradicated itself, you gotta think they’d take a closer look.” She paused, probably to suck down her first breath since Eoan’d finished talking, then rounded it out with a meek “Just a theory, though.”
Nash wished she wouldn’t hedge like that. Even her theories had a fuck-ton of savvy and sheer common sense behind them. Own it, wonder girl, she wanted to say. Don’t you get how brilliant you are? She didn’t get the chance, though.
“We’ve got a problem, Cap,” said Saint. He’d moved ahead to the open shaft; the other two had been dented shut, surrounded by the twisted frames of broken chairs and bits of pipe and anything else close at hand, like people had been trying to get into the elevators. The danger came from the sky; it made sense they’d want to go down. “No elevator cars.”
At least, not one that they could use. Nash could just make out the bottom of it if she peeked up the shaft, hovering at the edge of where her lights could reach. A pair of metalweave cables trailed down into the dark.
“Anybody got a cap to drop?” Saint muttered wryly.
Jal leaned in to take a look, peering over Saint’s shoulder—still the bad one, always the bad one—into the gaping hollow below. “Think I can do you one better, old man,” he said. It wasn’t a warning, as such, but after more than a week with him, Nash really should’ve heard it as one.
He jumped.
Both feet off the edge of the platform, straight down. If she hadn’t been busy swallowing her heart back out of her throat, she might’ve even sworn she saw him smiling. Then came the thud at the bottom, echoing its way up.
“Jal?” she called down to him, after a few-second grace period for him to find his feet or cry for help. “You dead?”
A beat of silence, then he said, “Seems not.” Deep and drawling, no signs of distress. So, not hurt.
Yet, she added, taking in the look on Saint’s face. He blew a sigh through his nose in the place of any curses, which was somehow worse. Like even he wasn’t sure what would’ve come out if he’d opened his mouth, so he’d decided not to chance it.
“Only a couple stories,” Jal went on. “No fuss.” The cable gave a couple of sharp jerks, and miraculously the lift didn’t come screaming down on Jal’s head. “This ought to hold all right. Y’all coming?”
Nash wished she hadn’t seen the lines around Saint’s eyes as she rubbed her gloves together and grabbed the cable. Unflappable, unflinching Saint, but standing at the edge of that elevator shaft, he looked every bit as worried as she felt.
Passionflower. Plasma cutters. Pink hair. Good thoughts. Bad feeling.
“See you at the bottom.” With a flick of a wave and a kick off solid ground, down she went into the dark.