SAINT
They didn’t see a single soul on the way to the T-form servers. Not down the long, windowless hall cutting to the heart of the building, not up the dozen flights of stairs, and not tucked away in the security anteroom upstairs. Sometimes Saint thought he saw something. A flicker. A shudder of movement in the corner of his eye. Each time, though, it was just their headlamps making mirrors of every drip and puddle. Shadow puppets on the walls.
“Security is our priority,” Jal read off a sign on the wall, with its curled-up corners and water-blistered paint. A few more like it dotted the room: warnings on the guards’ desk, instructions on the walk-through scanner beside it. Jal stuck his arms up like the half-faded drawing and walked between the scanner beams.
With a snort, Nash hopped the gate beside it. “I didn’t know you could read.”
“Hah.” Jal kept his hands up but dropped a lot of fingers, and Saint wasn’t sure whether to smile or scold him. Couldn’t be acting like that when he got home to Bitsie; Regan would break those fingers off at the knuckle and shove them someplace southerly.
Saint shook his head, following Nash over the gate. “Nash, you’re up.” Behind the security checkpoint, things got simple: a door. No tech, no frills, just three decs of tungsten alloy and don’t even try it.
Of course, with her trusty plasma torch and a can-do attitude, Nash would do a hell of a lot more than try. “I got this door, you boys got that one?” she asked, flicking a thumb toward the entrance.
“Nah, thought you’d like the audience,” Jal said, but he’d claimed a spot by the guards’ desk with a view out to the stairwell. Only way to the T-form system was up those stairs; if somebody wanted to try something with Saint’s crew, they’d have a hell of a time doing it now.
Missed your chance, he thought, but it didn’t stop his teeth from grinding. He didn’t want to high-noon it with whatever deadeyes left that pile of bodies in the back office, but he’d thought for sure there would be something.
“What’s on your mind, old man?”
Saint looked over right as Jal looked away, as if he hadn’t wanted to get caught staring. “Nash, you sure nobody’s breached that door?”
A palm-sized square plate of tungsten dropped to the floor, edges still white-hot and glowing from Nash’s plasma torch, and Nash snaked a borescope through the hole. “Unless they brought a whole-ass spare door, pretty damn,” she said. “Nobody’s done anything to this door but me. Suppose they could’ve had a key, but the scope’s not picking up on anybody inside.” She left the borescope in the door and set her attention—and her torch—to the locking mechanism itself. “Why?”
“Six hours.”
“Not seeing how that answers my question.”
I’m getting there. “You said those bodies had been dead less than six hours.”
“Give or take,” she said. The plasma torch glowed so brightly in her gloved hand that it made Jal wince. “Well stop looking at me, dingbat! You keep touching a stove when you know it’s hot?” Then, to Saint, “Sure, six hours.”
“So where are they? Somebody rolled in, killed over a dozen mercs here on Trust orders, and then what? They’re not behind that door, we didn’t run into them in the tunnels, and their ship didn’t show up on any sensors.”
“It’s a pretty good chunk of time,” Nash said. “Could be enough time to get in, get out, and get clear of any atmo or orbital sensors.”
Jal sucked in a breath between his teeth. “Get out with what? You don’t think they came for the code, too, do you?”
“Sure as shit didn’t come for the sunshine.” At the sound of a metallic click, Nash’s shoulders did a victorious shimmy. Progress. “Anke, you hearing this? You got a way we could check to see if anybody else nabbed the code?”
The comms crackled, and for a second Saint thought they might’ve gotten too far away. As Nash started to repeat herself, though, Anke’s voice came through the ship’s comms. “—n’t need to,” she said. “Seriously? Is this thing on?” Tap, tap, tap. Loudly.
“It’s on,” Jal groaned, stretching his jaw like his ears suddenly needed to pop.
“Oh, okay. Yikes, my bad. No, I mean, nobody should be taking the code,” she said. “Only me and a couple of others would even know what to look for, and we’re not exactly the multiple homicide types.” It was less reassuring than he’d hoped it would be.
Jal glanced back over at Saint and frowned. “Shit, you got that face.”
“Bit too old to change it now. I’ve grown fond of it.”
It wasn’t always easy to tell when Jal rolled his eyes, but Saint definitely caught it this time. “The face,” Jal insisted. “With the, uh.” He squinted his eyes and scrunched his nose, and Saint just prayed it didn’t look half that endearing when he did it. He had an image to maintain. “You’re worried.”
“He’s thinking what I’m thinking,” Nash said. Another click, another shimmy, but Nash’s shoulders had started to look a lot stiffer. She was made of tougher stuff than most, but whether it was those implants of hers or just a keen sense of intuition, she always had a damn good nose for when things didn’t sit right. “If it’s not the code they were after, it’s something else. Maybe someone else.”
Anke made a sound somewhere between a hiccup and a laugh, then abruptly stopped. “Wait, you’re not kidding?”
“Makes sense,” Saint said. “Nothing else here but stripped cables and scrap metal. But if they’re the same crew of agitators that tracked you down at the depot, who’s to say they didn’t do the same thing here? Don’t need the code if they got you.”
“Well, that’s cheery,” Jal muttered.
“Just a thought.” Didn’t really matter, he guessed; if something happened, they’d deal with it, same as they always did. He just wasn’t as keen on unsolved mysteries as Eoan was. “Stay sharp out there.”
“Right, ’cause if you didn’t say anything, they’d both be chillin’.” With a huff through her nose, Nash killed her torch and stood. “All right, gents, moment of truth.” A hand on the handle of the door, a bit of pressure, and—
Click.
The door swung outward with a rusty groan and a rush of chilled air. “Good game,” she told it, nudging it the rest of the way open and gesturing them inside.
“It’s cold,” Jal said. “Why’s it cold?”
“All the T-form servers are on a separate heat-cool system,” Anke explained. Saint had his doubts about her field savvy, but he had to admit it was good having an inside woman. She’d probably forgotten more about T-form protocols than the rest of them had ever known, bar Eoan, and she seemed inclined to help out however she could. “Same generator powering the computers powers the climate systems.”
“Not the security?” Seemed like a doozy of a design flaw.
“No,” said Anke. “No, that’s … it’s supposed to be on the same system. They must’ve disabled it already.”
There it was again. They. “The mercs?”
“It’d have to be. The security’s MFA.”
Nash gave the doorjamb laser scanner a whistle and a lewd once-over. “Motherfucking awesome?”
“It’s not that awesome,” Anke muttered. “PIR motion detection, rheometric pressure plates, piezoelectric turrets—about as much nuance as a brick in a tube sock, but I guess if you’re into that sort of thing.”
“Is anyone not into that sort of thing?”
Jal raised a hand. “I’m not even sure what we’re talkin’ about,” he said. “Y’all lost me at motherfuckin’.”
Bless her, Anke threw him a rope. “Multi-factor auth. Short of nuking the whole facility to glowing green matchsticks, the only thing that would shut down the security systems in the T-form rooms is someone with the Trust codes plugging them in and flipping the switch.”
“In case anyone still had doubts about whether the Powers That Be have hands in this particular pie,” Nash said under her breath, wandering down the short hall beyond the door. Narrow walkway, walls some kind of layered plastic thin enough that Saint could feel a vibration when he put his glove against it, like a thousand tiny drones trying to take off behind it. Cooling fans.
The other side had a half-wall finished out in glass from waist-height to ceiling. Armored, no doubt. Smudged to high hell, but not enough to block the dozens of monitors inside spitting lines of code so fast it made Saint’s head spin. “You seeing this, Cap?”
“I am,” they said. It sounded like it came from somewhere far away, same weak signal as Anke’s, but he could still make it out. “It’s a bit splendid, isn’t it?”
Saint never could make much sense of code, but he could make good sense of Eoan—of the open, unabashed awe in their voice as they took it in. Just because he couldn’t see the beauty in something didn’t mean it wasn’t there. “Splendid,” he chuckled as Nash and Jal ducked into the monitor room. Nash at the desk, Jal breathing down her neck, the two of them trading hiss-whispered jabs like a well-practiced dance. For a second, it felt like he was looking through a window into a different life—a life where he hadn’t run. A life where Jal hadn’t gone through hell to find his way aboard the Ambit, and Saint had spent all those reclaimed years watching the pair of them pick at each other just like that. “I suppose it is.”
“Anything interesting happening out there, boss man, or you just afraid Big Brother’s watching?” Nash swatted Jal’s hand away and turned Anke’s drive over the other way. “Aha! Told you I’d get it.”
“Didn’t say you wouldn’t.”
“You thought it.”
“Oh, so I think now?”
Nash huffed a laugh shaped like something rude. “All right, wonder girl, pretty sure she’s all yours.” The diode at the end of the drive lit up blue, bright enough to give Nash’s eyes a gleam and Jal’s a good reason to look elsewhere.
Toward Saint, it turned out. “Didn’t answer the question, old man.”
“That wasn’t a question; it was an invitation to squabble,” Saint replied. “And it sounds like her dance card’s pretty full at the moment.”
Nash winked over her shoulder. “Never too busy for you,” she said. Not to fluff his ego, but to remind them all that her capacity for multitasking was outmatched only by her capacity to argue up, down and left, right. God forbid she ever used her skills for more than her own petty amusement.
Which, to be fair, could be said about a lot of Nash’s talents. Nobody that deft with a knitting needle should be fucked with lightly.
“Hey.” Jal pointed to the screens without quite looking at them. A little too bright, especially when he’d had time to get nice and cozy in the dark. “Should those be doing something?”
“Anke?” Nash said. No answer. “Anke?”
Over the comms, something tipped over and clattered. A bit of muffled rustling, and Anke finally chimed in, “Sorry, yeah, I’m—wait, what was the question?”
Nash tried valiantly to hide a smile, but one peeked at the corners. “The screens aren’t changing. Is that a problem?”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“Gonna need more than don’t worry about it,” Saint said. “We came a long damn way for this not to work.”
“No, no, it’s working,” Anke said in a rush. “It’s just on my screen. I could probably cast it over there, if you want to watch over my shoulder, but I’m not going to lie, I get kind of nervous when people watch me code. My typos go way up.”
“And we wouldn’t want typos, would we, Saint?” said Nash, mock serious.
“Or a nervous Anke,” Jal added. Coming from him, it was too good-natured to be sarcastic; if Saint had tried it, he would’ve wound up sounding like an ass. “We looking good?”
“I mean, the rebreathers look kind of silly no matter how hot you are, but otherwise I’d say you’re—oh. You meant, uh.”
“The Deadworld patch,” Saint supplied, helpfully.
“That.” She hit the T hard, letting out a puff of air between her teeth. “Sorry.”
Poor kid. She sounded freaked out, and more than her usual baseline jitters. High-pressure situation, time limit, and a lack of field experience, he reminded himself. All told, they were probably lucky she’d managed as well as she had.
Still. He’d seen her at the depot, jamming a handful of bombs while she stood not a stone’s throw away from them, and she’d kept her wits about her. He knew she could handle it. “Breathe,” he told her. “Do what you do. Tell us when you’ve got something.”
“Right.” A deep breath in, and a long exhale that sounded like it was being blown straight against his eardrum. “Right, okay. I’m okay. Just, you know, the fate of the universe. No biggie.” The sound of tapping fingers filtered in through the breaks in conversation, steady as rainfall and quick as a downpour. “Just a couple adjustments to take her live, and Bob’s your awkward uncle you only see on holid—”
Everything flashed blistering white. That was the only sense he could make of it at first. Just bright and heat and a popping sound like a fistful of bang snaps. Distantly he registered a yelp from Jal and a curse from Nash, and as the spots finally started to clear from his eyes, it hit him.
It’d all gone dark. The monitors, the console, even the LED on the end of Anke’s drive. Smoke rose from the gaps in the paneling, seeping out around the melted plastic of the drive. “Nash—” he started.
“I got it, I got it,” she snapped, already dropping to her knees in front of the console with a multitool she’d summoned from whatever pocket dimension that bag of hers linked up to. In a matter of seconds, the main panel under the console popped open, and a fresh wave of smoke rolled out like the back door of a cigar lounge. “Toasty.” Flippant word, uneasy tone. “Got cooked wires in here, Saint. It’s in bad shape.”
“What set it off?” Details, details, details. Enough to figure out what had happened and what needed to happen.
“Must’ve overloaded it. Wouldn’t have taken much; just something throwing a spark, and poof. It’s dry-rotted and dusty as hell in here. Because of course there’s dry rot on the wettest fucking planet in the spiral!” she spat, and Saint half-expected something to go flying, but it wouldn’t have been Nash’s style. Always calm when it counted. “Guessing whoever was watching this place wasn’t keeping up the maintenance. Or the housekeeping. Fucking slobs.”
Next question. “Can you fix it?”
“Maybe,” Nash said, frowning deeply as Jal shuffled closer to lend a hand. Kid hadn’t stopped squinting, pupils as small as they knew how to get—just enough to see the full ring of green all the way around. “Probably. If we’re lucky, those things are hermeticked out the ass, and it’s just the console that fried. Anke, you still tapped into the system?” The drive had been her lightning rod past the air gap, and Nash seemed as concerned as Saint that it’d gotten fried enough to disconnect her from the T-form systems. “Need you to make sure nothing else got roasted.”
Anke didn’t answer.
“Anke?” Nash tried again, and another handful of seconds passed without a sound down the line. “Anke, can you hear me?” She looked back at Saint, mouth a thin, worried slash.
Nothing.
Fuck. The comms had been spotty, but timing that bad couldn’t be coincidence. Surely the blown console hadn’t done something on Anke and Eoan’s end. “Cap, come in? We can’t get a hold of Anke. You there?”
The static was damn near deafening. If the comms were down, whether by the T-form fritz or that persistent interference, they had no way of knowing what was going on out there. No way of knowing whether the patch had worked, or if something was wrong back on the ship.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Saint.” Nash said it like a confession, face hidden in the underbelly of the console. Like an apology. It wasn’t something new, then, that bad feeling. She’d just finally decided to say something about it. “Something’s wrong here.”
“Starting to get that notion myself.” The dead mercs, the unknown executioners who’d disappeared without a trace, and now this. Closed comms. Cut off from the ship in a moment of distraction, and maybe he’d been right before.
Maybe there was trouble.
He gritted his teeth and set a course. “Stay here,” he told them. “Nash, try to get that up and running, see if things are clearing up out there.” If they couldn’t get confirmation from Anke, they’d make do; the planet was one giant-ass barometer for whether the Deadworld Code was still live. If Nash could get the monitors back up, check the read-outs, they’d know. He just couldn’t wait that long. “Jal, you cover her. Give it fifteen minutes, tops, then you two head straight to exfil, patch or no patch. Understood?”
“If we’re staying, why’re you makin’ for the door?” Jal said, trailing him out into the short corridor. “Can’t let you go out there on your own, old man.” Can’t, not won’t, like it didn’t even register in his world of possibilities.
“Have to,” Saint replied. “Somebody’s got to see what’s going on back at the ship.” Gun, ammo, guts. Check, check, check. All he was missing was a stiff drink and Eoan’s voice in his ear reminding him not to do anything uncharacteristically stupid. Dear. Because, of course, a certain level of foolishness was more or less a guarantee when Saint acted solo.
If Jal remembered anything about their time together, he probably remembered that, too. Saint wondered if that was the reason for the storm clouds rolling across his face. “Saint—”
Saint caught the back of Jal’s neck and squeezed, firm and familiar. Things were too damn messy between them. Too much history, too many things they still needed to sort out. But the way Jal looked at him in the red-hued dark, it was as clear as it’d ever been:
Jal cared. Whether he wanted to or not, whether Saint deserved it or not, he cared, and he did it the same way he did everything else: completely. With his whole heart and only half his head, and not a scrap of him held in reserve.
“I’ll be fine,” Saint told him. “But Nash is the only one of us who could make sense of that in there, so she’s got to stay, one of us has to go, and I’m not leaving either one of you alone in this place. So you stay, too. Watch her back, and she’ll watch yours.” He’d feel better knowing he’d left them both in the best possible hands. “Fifteen minutes, that’s all I’m asking for, and if it goes to shit, at least you can say you told me so.” Cold comfort, bad joke, but after a terse moment of static, Jal finally gave a nod.
“Watch your ass, old man,” he said.
“You too, kid. Both of you,” he added, louder, for Nash. One last squeeze—Jal wouldn’t have believed a smile, so he didn’t try for one—and Saint dropped his hand. Fifteen minutes. Better run fast, old man.
He did. He tore through the anteroom, back down the stairs and down the halls and down the elevator shaft into the tunnels below. Through those, too, so fast that he barely noticed the change from tunnel walls to windows with festering ghosts inside. Brace be damned, his shoulder made all its usual complaints as he climbed the cable at the other end, back up to the maintenance hall of the shopping center, and he’d say he wasn’t winded by the time he made it back out to the rover, but Jal and Nash could no doubt hear otherwise.
“Too fucking old for this,” he grunted as he slid into the rover. Between Nash and Eoan, he didn’t get to drive it often, but he knew his ass from his elbow and the gear shift from the emergency brake.
Nash’s laugh broke over the comm static. “You’ve been saying that for years.”
“Long as I’ve known him,” Jal agreed.
“Why’s it that the only time you two seem to get along is when you’re ganging up on me?”
“What can I say?” A sharp hiss and a clang, and Nash shot off a rapid-fire string of curses before continuing, “You have a way of uniting people.”
Banter was its own kind of static: the soothing white noise of a pointless back-and-forth, a raft to keep them from sinking into their own heads. He heard Nash fighting with the console from their end, and they probably heard the rover tires crunching over wet ground from his. It looked different than he remembered—pale and glittering across the surface, like frost, but the rain beating down was as liquid as it’d ever been. “You guys should see this,” he said.
“I’m working on it,” Nash said. “Hey, miner boy, hand me the—no, the other one. That one.”
Jal spoke quieter. “You okay out there?” Strained, but hell, maybe that came from working close quarters with Nash on a deadline.
Bullshit. Like they weren’t all twisted up with worry, just trying to cope. Just trying to get the job done. “I’m almost to the ship,” he said. “Don’t see anything amiss just yet.” He’d half-expected another ship, some sign of the merc-killers come back for round two. But only the Ambit sat there, hunched in the slurry and rain. “Eoan, you hear me? I’m at the ship, all right? Need you to drop the tail.” The answering silence didn’t surprise him, but it sure as shit didn’t reassure him.
“There’s a button on the dash for the cargo door,” Nash said. “Up by the—”
“I know.” It came out too sharp, and he mashed the button too hard, and he gripped the wheel too tight as he waited for the door to drop. He had that feeling again. Same one he got in Sooner’s Weald, that gnawing, itching feeling at the base of his skull, like he’d walked into an ambush without the sense to stop himself. No idea where it came from, just that it came, and he still had no choice but to keep fucking walking.
He could still hear Nash and Jal, though. In the end, that did it—pushed him over the edge from vague suspicion to bracing for the inevitable, because if it wasn’t the weather or the distance or all the buildings that had blown the comms, then what was it?
The cargo bay looked the same as they’d left it, equipment hooks empty and breakfast plates balanced precariously on the weight bench with the promise that somebody’d get to them later. Not a thing looked out of place as he pulled the rover up the ramp and slid out, but he found himself with a hand on his gun and a wary eye on the door ahead.
“Eoan?” he called, clearing the door into the hallway. “Anke?” He didn’t expect an answer, but the quiet still made his teeth buzz. Nothing happened on the ship without Eoan knowing. If he called their name, they should’ve answered. They should’ve answered.
The overheads in the hall flickered. Not all at once, but strip by strip, off and on. The hall seemed to morph with it, telescoping out into the dark and snapping back with the lights. Spots and blotches played tricks with his eyes, shadows in the doorways so clean-edged and distinct that he drew down on them, but they were gone with the changing light.
He shook his head and blinked, hard. Let the wave of adrenaline crest and pass and kept moving with Nash muttering in his ear. Talking to herself, trying to feel and fiddle and finagle her way to a solution to the problem in front of her. More white noise, but it helped. She had her problem, he had his, and the least he could do was keep his head on straight and solve it.
It didn’t make it any less strange, walking through his home like enemy territory. Checking every corner, every doorway, every shadow. Scanning every room for a shock of pink or one of Eoan’s flowing-robed projections, ignoring that sniper’s-bead feeling burning a hole between his shoulder blades.
“What’s going on in there?” It was shaped like a question, but Nash didn’t ask; she demanded. “Something’s ass-backward about this, McBlastinshit. Comms are reading you fine, but we still aren’t getting a peep out of Eoan or Anke, so unless you got a bogey actively on your ass, we need an update.”
He’d reached the galley without hide or hair of either of them. Not even a mug on the table, and the coffeepot was empty for the first time in days. “Headed up front,” he said, low and steady, as he pushed forward.
He’d barely set foot over the galley threshold when the lights died. No overheads, no lamps, just the greenish dark-glow strips along the edges of the floor. In case of emergency, mind the fucking walls. What emergency, though? Not a single damn reason he could think of that the lights would fail, but they had, and Saint was well past trying to downplay it. “We’ve got a problem in here, kids.”
“The fuck do you mean a problem, old man?” Jal snarled.
Saint had every intention of answering him. I’ve got it. Focus on the console, and watch your six. He didn’t want them to worry; he wanted them to be ready, and he was going to tell them as much.
But then he turned the corner into the bridge and saw the figure at the console. Back to him, standing between the chairs like they belonged there. Just a shadow in the dark, but unmistakably real, and every reassurance he’d meant to give slipped straight out of mind.
“Show me your hands.” Even-keel, authoritative. He had the drop on them and a clear shot, but startled people did stupid shit, and stupid shit didn’t mix with firearms. “Tell me where my programmer is.” She’d been there. She should’ve still been there, but that wasn’t her at the console. It barely looked human. The longer he looked at it, the more it seemed to distort: edges blurring, shape twisting, spindly and crooked and somehow, impossibly, translucent.
The lights flashed suddenly—a blip of bright that went straight back into black, and God, no wonder Jal guarded his specs like he did. The sting of light on dark-adjusted eyes made him flinch and squint, even if it wasn’t enough for him to drop his gun.
As his vision cleared, he saw nothing. Nothing near the console where the figure’d been standing, but there was nowhere to hide, and no way anything could’ve moved fast enough to get past him. “What the fuck—?”
“She’s not here.”
He whipped around, and his gun dipped almost reflexively. “You?”
Eoan’s projection hovered in the doorway, but it was … wrong. Features flat and ill-defined, like a mannequin. Flickering and stretched out, projectors misfiring in scatters of pixels, distorting the shape of them into something inhuman. The shadow—that was them.
“Something’s happening to you.” As if they didn’t know. As if they needed to be told, as the ship failed around them. “Cap, what’s wrong? Where’s Anke?”
“She’s not here,” they said. Their voice, as featureless as the rest of them, fizzled through the static. Hearing it made him think of every spiderweb he’d ever walked through, every blind alley he’d ever wandered down, every nightmare he’d ever woken from with sweat crawling down his back. As he stood, rooted to the spot, they frowned at him with their not-mouth, and said with their not-voice the very last thing he heard before a wave of blinding, breathtaking pain crashed over his bones and washed the world away.
“Saint, dear … d-ddd … dear, dear … I’m afraid we’ve made a terrible mistake.”