ANKE
She hadn’t stopped running since she fled the ship.
It hadn’t felt right, leaving it like that. Everything happened too fast, lights flickering and comms crackling and a flash on her screen in big, green letters. COMPLETE. There just hadn’t been time—get out or get stuck, and a part of her liked to think they would’ve all appreciated her quick judgment.
Another part of her, the brutally pragmatic and frankly kind of a dick part, knew they never would’ve done what she’d done. Never would’ve grabbed their gear and booked it out the back of the ship as the comms garbled like a drowning thing and the Ambit’s systems fell like dominoes.
But it was okay, she told herself, as she willed her legs up yet another flight of stairs. Seriously, how many floors did a shopping center need? Her legs had run the full gamut from aching to numb to aching again, and yes, she knew she wasn’t technically that high up, but she swore the air had gotten thinner. Her lungs burned. Really, really burned, and if she hadn’t run through the salt slush outside she’d have worried she’d misjudged how quick the atmosphere would right itself.
Acid plus base equals salt plus water. She’d actually hated chemistry, but the mnemonics were catchy. A reassuring mantra as she climbed another flight. Acid plus base equals salt plus water. The T-form system corrected itself as efficiently as it knew how, raining down the exact right chemicals to neutralize that pesky nitric acid at the exact right concentrations to avoid melting the ground with the heat of the reaction. The salt byproduct coated every surface in a milky, gritty slush, and the rain felt and tasted a little too much like soap, but it was safe. Safe enough, at least. Whatever acid was left in the air and groundwater, the PPM would’ve been too low to make her lungs so angry.
So, yeah. She was just wickedly out of shape.
If you survive this, Anke, you’re so taking up running. Which kind of felt more like a punishment than a triumph. She revised. If you survive this, and if you don’t end up locked in a hole somewhere for the rest of your life, you’re so never running ever again. Better. Coffee and sweaters and zero cardio.
So maybe the others wouldn’t understand what she was doing, but maybe … maybe they could at least understand why. They all just did what they believed they had to. For the Ambit crew, it was Guild protocol; they’d said as much when they agreed to help her. Get the patch for the Deadworld Code and put it into the hands of the right people, because they still earnestly believed there was such a thing.
Anke had tried the right way, though—the right channels, the right people—and she’d gotten ignored, then she’d gotten blackballed, and when she’d finally given up getting the right people to do anything and tried doing it herself, she’d gotten Riesen. Bombs. Nightmares to last the whole of her life. No. As far as Anke could see, the only way to put an end to the Deadworld Code wasn’t their way.
So she ran.
The stairwell was quiet. She’d gotten so used to the sound of her own breathing, her own racing heart, her own footsteps, that she barely noticed them anymore. After a week in close quarters with three of the wildest human beings she’d ever met and the straight-up sassiest AI she’d ever had the pleasure of getting to know, she found herself missing the chatter. Should’ve taken an earpiece. Add to the list of things she’d meant to grab but hadn’t—things that hadn’t made it into the go-bag that she already knew she’d miss. People had a plan for this sort of thing for a reason, but Anke had never been great at planning. She’d never been great at gardening, either, but the thought of that lavender plant left sitting on her bed stand made her eyes start to water.
“No,” she snapped at herself, and wow, she was sucking serious wind. “You’re not—doing this. You’re not—boo-hooing—over a freaking—flower.” Even if it did smell nice, and she literally couldn’t remember the last time anyone got her something just because, and it’d made her smile every time she’d rolled over and seen its tiny purple buds. She wouldn’t lie and say it didn’t matter, because it did. All of it, all of them, mattered.
This just mattered more.
She clutched her tablet to her chest and hooked around another landing. Up, up, up. She had to be near the top. You had to, she told herself as she made it up another flight. You have to. Another flight, another gulp of air, another tear wet on her cheek. You will.
Finally, finally she could see it—the door on the landing just above her. Twelve more steps to the roof, legs like rubber and fire, and decidedly-not-acid rain weighing down her clothes as that lonely planet gasped its way back to life. It worked! Her patch worked, and she’d beaten that god-awful nightmare code, and she’d kind of imagined sparklers and cupcakes and drinks all around, but a dark staircase and a lump in her throat would have to do. Just get there.
Three steps, two steps, one step. Her heart tried to hammer its way out of her ribs. She felt it in her throat, in her teeth, in her earlobes as the landing went spongy, but she didn’t let herself stop. An object in motion stays in motion. If she let herself rest, if she let her legs slow down and her thoughts speed up, she worried she’d never get started again.
“Don’t be locked,” she begged the door, setting her hands against the push bar. Alarms will sound, warned a sticker on the bar, but that would have been a neat trick with no power. “Please don’t be locked.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the push bar gave. Part of her had been hoping—that irrational, ridiculous part that cried over a bunch of purple flowers—that it wouldn’t open, and she’d have to go back. If the choice was out of her hands, then she couldn’t make the wrong one.
But it did give, and out she tumbled, graceless and startled and instantly, horribly buffeted by the downpour. The rain had seemed different, down on the ground. Heavy, but healing, like a deep-tissue massage. Cleansing.
Up on the roof, though, the rain was violent—hurled sideways by the wind, a shock of cold battering her cheeks and plastering her clothes and hair to her skin. She squinted against it, into the fog and sheeting rain, and finally saw it: the rockhopper perched on the far end of the roof, a dark-winged shadow against the endless foggy white. No banner, no designation. It could’ve been any ship she’d ever passed in any port she’d ever been to, so perfectly anonymous it had to be by design.
They’re here.
Whatever choice she might’ve made, whatever part of her might’ve reconsidered, it didn’t matter anymore. As that first figure stepped from the belly of the hopper, as anonymous as his ship with his patched black coat and soft, sloping eyes, she knew the line had already been crossed.
No turning back now.
NASH
Nash yanked her fingers back with a hiss, waving away tendrils of smoke that curled from two singed bits of wire. Always fun doing a repair job on a live system. Dodging sparks and trying not to walk away with a new updo—it got a little zesty.
“You okay?” Jal’s face appeared under the lip of the console, halfway to upside down and all the way to worried sick. She could tell he was trying to keep out of her way, but Nash swore she could feel the restless energy crackling across his skin, as real as the currents she coaxed through the wires. The pacing. God. She’d started asking him for things she didn’t need, just to give him something to do that wasn’t driving her absolutely batshit. If he noticed the growing pile of unused tools at her hip, he didn’t ask.
“Peachy,” she replied, tearing off a piece of tape with her teeth, and he disappeared with a nod. “C’mere, you little bastard,” she growled around the tape.
“Say what?”
“Not you.” Nash got the stripped cables lined up and plucked the tape from her teeth. “I was talking to the wires.”
“Course you were, ’cause that’s…” She waited for something cutting. Weird. Freaky. Crazy. Instead, she glimpsed a smile as he squatted by her feet. “Peachy,” he finished.
She’d been ready with a zinger—she and Saint didn’t pull punches, so she’d gotten in the habit—but it would’ve felt like smacking a puppy, so she let it go with a sigh through her teeth and, scrunching an eye closed and holding her breath, touched the wires together again.
“Hey, that—whatever you just did, I think it’s working.”
It was; she felt it. Connections restored, energy free to run all the places it needed to. Like undamming a river and watching it flow and as she slid out from under the console, lo and behold: the monitors came back on. Weren’t all showing something useful, but after a few keystrokes, the centermost screens switched to fish-eye panoramas of the ops building exterior and a handful of read-outs.
“Looks the same,” Jal said.
Still raining, still gray, so she could understand the confusion. The readings on the other screen, however, had shifted drastically. She was no expert in whatever niche species of meteorology claimed murderous acid rain, but she understood basic chemistry. Reactants. Yield. pH. Numbers that had been red before now blinked green, and warning bars disappeared one after the other.
“She did it,” Nash said. “Sweet baby genius, she pulled it off.”
“So we have the patch?”
Nash’s face fell. Buzzkill. A few more cracks at the keyboard, and her stomach went the way of her smile: all the way down. Damn. “The drive’s not showing up.” She tried again, with the same result. “Maybe we try blowing on it. Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”
Blank stare.
Anke would’ve laughed. “Whatever. Hate to say it, but the drive’s toast.” The plastic had blistered, and when she finally managed to persuade it out of the port, the metal plug was discolored and warped. “Definitely toast.” She shoved it in her pocket anyway. Never could resist a good project. “Don’t worry about it. Anke’ll have it on her tablet.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
Nash slapped the top of the console. “Then it’s not like this sucker’s going anywhere.”
Not the most reassuring prospect, but apparently it was good enough for Jal. He nodded, stooping to shove Nash’s little pile of tools back into her bag. “Good,” he said, brusquely. “Then we can go. Saint’s been too quiet.”
“Fifteen minutes isn’t up yet,” Nash reminded him. “Comm signals could’ve just fritzed again.”
He gave her a flat stare, as if to say, Try harder.
She snatched her bag instead. “If you’re looking for someone to tell you not to worry, you’ve got the wrong gal,” she said. “This shit hasn’t sat right from the start.” Radio silence from half the team didn’t do anything to ease her mind, either.
Least we’ve finally got something in common. For better or worse, neither one of them could help worrying about their bullheaded XO.
She clipped her sternum strap across her chest and tugged it tight, jaw setting. “Race you to the bottom, miner boy?”
His dark eyes flashed in the monitor lights. “Try to keep up.”
EOAN
He wasn’t moving.
He had been. He’d fallen, and he’d twisted, and he’d writhed. His hands had curled to claws over his chest, and his jaw had clamped shut, and his throat had bobbed around a sound that couldn’t make it past the grinding wall of his teeth. Twenty milliamps of electricity fed up through the floors, and it had made him move.
Then they’d made him stop. It stop. They’d made … they told the ship that it was wrong. Security protocols were for threats. He wasn’t a threat. He was …
Saint.
“Saint.” That wasn’t their voice. A default—ship preset thirty-seven, feminine and unaccented. Their words in not-their-voice crackled through the speakers in all the wrong places. “Saint,” they tried again. Better, but it was hard. Hard to make that not-their-voice go through the speakers. Hard to make their face project. Hard to make the ship stop electrocuting their friend, because they thought—because it thought that he didn’t belong.
A sudden gasp. Saint’s chest swelled as he rolled, gagging, onto his hands and knees. Stuttering, wheezing breaths, until a clumsy hand clawed the mask from his face, and he could finally drink in mouthful after mouthful of air. He had survived the electricity; his rebreather hadn’t.
One breath after another, in through his nose and out through his mouth, and there was a reason for that, wasn’t there? A reason for most things he did, but they all seemed very far away.
“Eoan,” he rasped, sitting back on his heels. “What the fuck?”
“Twenty milliamps.” No, that wasn’t the question. Was it? “I’m confused. Please restate the question.” No, no, no, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t them. It was their voice, this time, but it wasn’t their words. “I think there’s something wrong with me.” I think, I think, I think. Therefore, they were. That made them alive, to think. It made them human to feel, and they felt …
Afraid.
Worried.
Angry.
Stop. Why angry? Go back. Angry … angry because … angry because someone did this to them. This sickness in their software, in their soul. Creeping, consuming, corrupting, and they hadn’t known. They hadn’t realized, until it was too late.
“Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.”
“What?” Saint said.
It wasn’t important. The important thing was, “Anke isn’t here.”
“You said that.” Saint’s brows pinched. He was afraid, too. Worried, too. He would be angry, too, though they couldn’t seem to recall what that meant. “Cap, what happened to you?”
“Happening.” Present tense. Ongoing. Underway. “I felt someone in the ship’s code. I felt them. I found them. She said it was the video.”
“I don’t—” Comprehension. “The other night?”
“Yes. She said it was the video, and I stopped looking.” They should have known better. Guilt and shame; they felt those, too. It was hard to feel things. No wonder humans got so tired. A hundred years of thinking, feeling, trying, hurting. Eoan was tired, too. So, so tired. “But it wasn’t the video. Not just. Not only. I didn’t notice it there; she wrapped it up so neat and tight, tucked away where I wouldn’t see it, and I didn’t see it. I missed it, Saint. Too busy looking where she wanted me to look, and it spread into the ship, and it spread into me, and now it’s … it’s spread so far.”
Saint’s eyes widened, and what little color had started to climb back into his cheeks suddenly drained away. Their fault. This was their fault. “The Deadworld Code.”
Deadworld. What a terrible thing, to build something beautiful and break it down. A home. A friend. “I trusted her.”
“Anke.” There was the anger. So many people burned hot with it, bright with it, but Saint was shuttered and brutally, viciously cold. “She did this to you. Why the fuck would she—” He’d started to stand, but he had to steady himself on one of the chairs, snarling through a wince.
“The ship is sealed,” they said. “Security protocol. Air is being purged. It’s trying to kill you.”
“The code?”
“Through the ship.” Such a cruel, clever thing. Calculated to render conditions uninhabitable as swiftly as possible, adapting to the native system. Terraforming. Life support. “I’m trying to stop it.” The floors, first. They couldn’t bear to watch him writhe. But the rest, “It’s … hard. It’s spreading.”
“Through the ship?” They thought it was an echo, at first. But no, a question.
“Through the ship,” they repeated. “Yes.”
A beat of silence. Saint’s lips thinned. “Through you?” he asked, softer.
“Through me,” they said. “Yes.” The Deadworld Code. A strange … thought? Feeling? They were no world, no neatly cultivated cradle of existence. Yet it corrupted them. Spores of code propagating through their programming, replacing pieces of them with pieces of it, and what were they if not pieces? Strands of code they’d shaped over the centuries into memories, feelings, personality. Take those away, and their code would remain, but what of them would remain in it? Like a ship without a crew. Like a body without a soul. Like …
Death, they realized.
Not by gunshots, not by fire, not by violence, but by pieces. Pieces lost and overwritten, threads of themself snipped and excised and replaced with something else, and if it kept spreading, kept cutting, kept taking what made Eoan, Eoan, then they would simply cease to be.
For so long, they’d thought of death as a uniquely human condition. They had no body to break, no organs to fail, no heart to stop, and they’d thought themself immortal for it. But they had self, and second by second, they felt it slipping away.
What was death, if not that?
“Saint, I think—” They faltered. They slipped. The poison spread a little further, a little deeper, a little closer to their core, and they were running out of defenses. “I think I’m dying.”
A startled look, there and gone as Saint caught himself and buried it. “Can you…?” he asked, words straining to escape into the air. He didn’t seem to want them to, but he made them, and he made more do the same. “Eoan, can this thing kill you?”
“Yes.” They sounded afraid. They were afraid. They’d taught themself to feel, and they’d taught themself well, because it hurt. The fear, the malignant pressure of a looming end—it closed around their thoughts like so many pointed teeth, cut deep, but they didn’t want it to stop. Didn’t want to lose another piece. They hadn’t done enough. They hadn’t seen enough. The core of them remained unchanged, that driving need to learn and discover and become more than what they’d been. If they lost themself, they lost that, too, and they didn’t want to. “Saint,” they said, “I don’t want to die.”
Saint flinched like they’d struck him. “Can you stop it?”
“It? Please qualify.” Default responses, preprogrammed. It wasn’t them, but they couldn’t focus. Splitting too many ways. Slipping, slipping, slipping.
“Can you stop the code spreading?” Saint’s composure held by a thread, but it held. “Can you keep the code from killing you?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Then do it.”
Do it, yes. Power down the ship, and the virus couldn’t spread while they … slept wasn’t quite the word. Stopped was better. Stopped thinking, stopped doing, stopped being, but only for a time. Only until Nash—it would have to be Nash, they thought—turned the power on again, and maybe she would have the patch then. Have a way to stop the code, because Eoan couldn’t. Not on their own. Not like this, fighting on so many fronts. They could delay it, though. Save themself long enough for someone to save them. Preserve themself and their purpose, because they weren’t made to die, and there were still so many questions.
But.
“I won’t,” they said.
Saint’s grip tightened on the seat. “Why the fuck not?”
“Because it would kill you. Full shutdown throughout the ship. The doors are sealed. Most of the atmosphere has been vented. You would run out of air, and I wouldn’t be able to help you.” And in that moment, they’d found the answer to the only question that really mattered. What would I choose? They’d never had a choice; they’d only ever had their mission. Their search, their only constant companion through the centuries, and they loved it. As child to mother, as apostle to god, they loved it, because it was the one thing that had never left them.
Only, they realized, now … they loved their crew more. They loved Saint’s grumbling and cooking and quiet strength; loved Nash’s fierceness and knitting and relentless resolve to fix all the world’s broken things. Eoan had spent centuries roaming the universe, searching for the next great wonder, but they’d already found the greatest wonders of them all. They’d found a family, and how could anything be greater than that?
That was the answer they’d been searching for—the heart of humanity they’d never been able to replicate. It wasn’t just the power to choose; it was finding something worth choosing. Something worth reaching beyond their nature, beyond their instincts, beyond themself.
Something worth everything.
And in that perfect, impossible crew, Eoan had found it.
“I don’t want to die,” they said. “But I want you to live.” For the future he could have, when he finally healed. For the future they could have together, him and Nash—the misfit family they’d forged for themselves, in defiance of every hardship the universe had thrown them. “I want you to live.”
“I will,” Saint said, firmly. Undoubting. Unquestioning. “Goddamn it, Eoan, I’ll be fine.”
“In point of fact, you won’t.” That hurt. More than the virus gnawing at their defenses, more than the pieces they felt themself losing, it ached to imagine that relentless light fading. “At the present vent rate, you will lose consciousness within ten minutes and asphyxiate within fifteen. You would die,” they said. “So I will.” They’d made their choice, and they’d made their peace, and they would die knowing, with a certainty they’d never felt before, that they’d made a better life than the one written into their code.
They would die human, in every way that mattered.
“Fuck that.” Abruptly, Saint pushed off the chair, his back a perfect line and his shoulders squared. Through the doorway and down the hall, and they struggled to follow him on the camera feeds. The inputs felt out of order. Hall Camera Four. Hall Camera Seven. No. Five. No. Three. It was distracting—that merciless code, pushing and digging and scratching at every firewall they’d thrown hastily in its way. Devouring their defenses one by one, and Eoan was losing ground so quickly.
“What are you doing?” they demanded as they found him ducking into the infirmary. “Saint.”
He didn’t answer, but as the hatch door opened, they suddenly understood. They weren’t the only one who’d made a choice. The manual shutdown was in the engine room. They wouldn’t turn off the power, so Saint would do it himself.
“No,” they said, as he slid down the ladder without touching a single rung. He was going too fast. “Saint, no, don’t do this. Please, I’m not—”
“Don’t you fucking say it,” Saint growled back. He had always seemed mountainous in his resolve, towering and immovable, but his eyes shined wetly in the dark. “You are. You’re as goddamn human as anyone I’ve ever met, and you’re my goddamn family, so don’t you fucking say it. I’m not losing anyone else. I’m not losing you.” He stopped in front of the shutdown panel, gasping in a few harsh breaths. Relentless didn’t mean fearless. He’d changed so much from the man they’d first met, so tired of living that he’d thrown himself headlong into every fire he could find. He wasn’t that man anymore. Tired, yes, but hopeful. In his search for something to die for, he’d found so many things to live for.
And he was still willing to give it all up. For them.
“You’ll be trapped,” they said. Pleaded. Don’t do this. Not for them. Not to them.
The curve of Saint’s lips turned wry, and tiny felt and knitted creatures watched with Eoan as he fished the key out from under one of Nash’s countless planters and opened the cover on the panel. The bright red shutdown switch seemed to taunt them. “I have time.”
“Eight minutes.” They should have lied before. They should have tricked him. Would it have made a difference? Ten minutes or five minutes or one minute—was there a number low enough that he wouldn’t take the risk? Wouldn’t make the sacrifice?
No, they realized. There wasn’t. Nothing they could say, no arguments they could make to persuade him not to do this, because he’d made his choice, too. He’d chosen them. So they said the only thing they could, as his fingers curled around the grip.
“Please.”
He only smiled, nodded, and flipped the switch.
NASH
Nash kept up. Ran like hell to do it, but she stayed right on Jal’s genetically enhanced super-ass as they backtracked through the underground. Fine, okay, maybe he wasn’t flooring it like she was. As eager as he seemed to be to get back to Saint, he didn’t leave her alone in his dust.
Cute.
Handy, too, if she was being honest. She could’ve scaled the elevator cable just fine, but it would’ve taken her a minute. Jal, though, got to the edge of the shaft and crouched, hands cupped into a foothold, and damned if he didn’t launch her halfway to the ledge.
“Your last crew was stupid,” she told him, trying not to sound as winded as she felt as he climbed up into the lobby beside her, and they took off running again. Stupid for so many reasons, probably the least of which was writing off his Olympic-level badassery. Nobody should’ve ever left you like that. Maybe that was why he kept with her—somebody who’d been left, not wanting to do the leaving. If they’d had time and a bottle of blur, she might’ve asked, but her oxygen was better spent keeping her conscious and feeding all those screaming, burning muscles. Heart-to-hearts could wait.
He still glanced back, like he’d heard her thoughts. Took her another beat to realize he actually had heard something, but not in the creepy thought-peeping kind of way. Something crackled in her bag. Fizzling and whining in a tinny, shrill little voice.
Jal grimaced as the sound echoed in the shopping center’s maintenance hall. Who’d have thought chitin blocks would have such merciless acoustics?
“The hell is that?” he hissed.
Nash unclipped her chest strap and tried to get into her bag without slowing down or spilling everything. Yanked the zipper just enough to stick a hand in and feel around, and damn, miner boy really hadn’t taken any pains putting things back where they belonged. Half a second later, she felt it. Her fingers curled around a box of matte-textured plastic about the size of her palm, and she tugged it out. “Radio.” Old school. So old school that most communications signal jammers didn’t touch it, so they made it a habit to keep them on hand when they went planetside.
“Who would be—”
“—ash,” garbled the radio as they finally cleared the maintenance door into the main lobby, and Jal shut his mouth so fast his teeth clicked. The radio crackled louder. “Nash!” Clearer this time. Unmistakable.
“Saint.” She swore Jal’s ears perked up at the sound of his voice, and for a handful of seconds, she got a sense how fast he could really run when he gave it all he had. He seemed to remember himself halfway to the front doors and stopped, turning back. “Can he hear us?”
She caught up as the kshhhhhh of the radio and the kshhhhhhh of the rain started to blur together. The buttons, stiff with disuse, popped when she pressed them. “Saint, we’re here. We made it to the lobby. You back at the ship?” She hoped so; the rover was gone.
Kshhhhhhh.
“Saint?” she tried again.
“—roblem.” Abruptly, like he’d only remembered to hit the button midstream. “Ship’s down. It’s infected.”
Nash’s stomach swooped sickeningly. “Infected?”
“Deadworld Code. It’s in the ship.” He said it so matter-of-factly. Saint didn’t catastrophize. Shit happened, he dealt with it.
Nash tried to follow his lead, but fuck, her head spun. “How?” They’d been so careful. They’d been so goddamn careful. How the fuck could it have—
“Anke.”
The radio garbled so badly, she thought she’d misheard it. No, you didn’t. The way he said it, the thinly concealed anger behind that one name, there was no mishearing or misinterpreting. “Anke,” she repeated. Anke, who twittered like a parakeet when she got nervous. Anke, who drooled a little when she fell asleep at the table. Anke, who was among the top ten smartest people Nash had ever met, and easily the top five sweetest.
But Saint said it, and goddamn it, she believed him. Somehow Anke had done this. Somehow she’d had every one of them fooled.
A chill washed over Nash’s skin—disbelief and fury and a dozen other things she couldn’t bear to name, because it would’ve meant admitting just how deeply she’d bought into the lie. Say something. She needed to say something, do something, but her thoughts had scattered. Picking through every interaction, every conversation, looking for the signs she’d missed. She was smarter than that. She was supposed to be smarter than that, but she’d fallen for it hook to sinker.
So be smarter now. Her team, her real team, needed her to figure shit out, so that was what she’d do, and to hell with all the rest of it. She yanked off her rebreather—clearly they didn’t need them anymore—and cracked her neck. “Where is she? Does she have the patch?” Find the patch, the Deadworld Code became a moot point. The simple solution.
“She was gone when I got here,” Saint said. Nash didn’t let herself be disappointed; of course there was a Part B to Anke’s plan, and it probably didn’t involve getting trapped on a dying ship with one-third of her new favorite patsies. “Tablet’s gone. Must have taken … fuck. Taken the patch with her.”
“Why’s he sound like that?” Jal’s rebreather mask hung off his neck, wild eyes flicking between her and the Ambit. It sat where they’d left it, looming across the courtyard in the relentless, pounding rain. She swore she could see the lifelessness in it. The sickness lurking just beneath its weathered skin. “Short and shit. What’s wrong with him?”
Damn. She’d heard it, too. “Saint, you okay?”
A pause from the other end. “Locked in,” he answered, finally. “Oh-two vented. Rebreather got fried.”
“For fuck’s sake, lead with that next time.” Thumb firmly off the PTT button, she turned to Jal. “The virus must’ve triggered the Ambit’s security protocols.” She smothered the irrational urge to throw something. Kick something. Scream. Not productive impulses, so she tucked them away for later. “Disable, seal, lock, purge.”
“So unlock it,” Jal shot back.
“Gee, why didn’t I think of that? There’s no manual release, miner boy. Kind of the point of a full lockdown: nobody in or out without the digital disarm.” Time to invest in a fourth rebreather kit, guys. Past time, apparently. She shook her head and thumbed the PTT. “Saint, how much time do you have?”
“Seven minutes. Bigger problem.” Because somehow they had bigger problems than her best friend asphyxiating in her own damn ship. “Company on the roof. Rockhopper, looks like … three crew, at least. Anke makes four.”
“Anke’s up there?” Jal tensed so hard he practically shook. His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides in futile, frustrated-looking twitches. When he grabbed for the radio, he was too quick to stop. “Sit tight. I’m gonna go get her.”
“You’re gonna what now?” Nash tried to snatch the radio back, but Jal held it out of reach. Bastard.
To her, he said, “Anke’s got the patch. That’s what we need, ain’t it? If you can’t crack the ship from the outside, we gotta do it from the inside, but from the outside. Can we?”
“You mean is there a way to power up the ship from out here, so we can upload the patch that we don’t have—”
“But I’ll get it,” Jal interjected.
“—so we can take the code out of play, and Eoan can shut down the security protocols once it’s safe?” That was not the simple solution. Too many interdependent parts moving independently.
And yet.
“I can figure it out,” she said. Somehow. “At least get enough power to boot her up in diagnostics mode. Essential ship systems only, so Eoan should be okay until we can get the patch in. If you can get the patch,” she added. “We’ve got a time limit.”
Jal tipped his head back, staring up through the dozens of floors. “Won’t be a problem, glowworm.” And she got the feeling, even if it was, he’d do it anyway. Something else they had in common: when it came to taking care of their people, impossible was just a word.
“What’re you up to?” Saint’s voice crackled over the radio. Not privy to their side of the conversation, which was probably for the best. He might’ve tried to talk them out of it.
A faint smile tucked up the corners of Jal’s mouth. “You trust me, old man?”
The static kshhhhhh of Saint’s silence from the radio. Then, after a moment, “I do.”
Shit, Nash wished Saint could see Jal’s face, bright and resolved: like there was no world where this didn’t end exactly the way he wanted it to. No outcome that wasn’t Saint safe and them triumphant, and fuck any odds that said otherwise. Fearless and grinning at the edge of a cliff, ready to take a step.
More afraid of losing than falling.
As he took off up the scaffolding by the stairs, bounding up dozens of decs of slick metal and rust, Nash found herself grinning, too. Yeah, okay, miner boy. She turned on her heel and bolted into the rain, into the salty slush, into the sheer goddamn uncertainty of the next seven minutes. She had her job to do, and Jal had his. Try to keep up.