NASH
Nash had never been more exhausted than when she rejoined Saint in the sick bay. The shower hadn’t done anything but wear her down, washing away layers of her resolve with all the mud and blood and soapy rain, and the walk back to that room felt like a goddamn march.
Jal hadn’t moved from where she’d left him, lying on the sickbed with bruises blooming red-purple and vicious around his eyes. Would’ve been quite the miracle if he had. Would be quite the miracle if he ever did, but that didn’t stop the fresh flood of disappointment in her chest. He’d survived the impossible before. She’d sort of hoped he had an encore in him.
Not dead. Saint’s voice in her head, stern and brimming with conviction. Odd how thoughts could sound like people. He’s not dead. Just still and silent and—well, she’d called it sleeping, when she’d explained it to Saint. Imprecision made her skin itch, but Saint was barely keeping his composure without throwing around words like brain bleed and cryo coma.
So, sleeping. Stasis would’ve worked, too. A great big pause button on those broken bones and battered organs, because she was good, but good wouldn’t stop him hemorrhaging in a dozen different places while she triaged what would kill him first.
Her teeth buzzed as she moved closer to him: the static of hundreds of severed connections, discordant resonances across her mods. Bad wiring. That was all a body was in the end, just pipes and cables and currents. They broke, and she fixed them. Was supposed to. Tried to.
“No change,” Saint reported in his quiet, strained way. Trying to be calm, but those still waters hid a hell of a riptide.
She didn’t really need the update—the bedside monitor read out every stat she cared about—but Saint needed to give it. To do something. He’d already cleaned away every speck of mud on Jal he could get to without moving him. Straightened the edges of his blanket, disposed of all the dirty gauze, washed the tools and mopped the blood and a dozen other little tasks around the sick bay. He must’ve been as exhausted as Nash was, but he couldn’t seem to stop moving. As she settled on the arm of the chair he’d dragged closer to the bed—not to sit in, apparently, just for something else to do—he started fussing with the blankets again.
“Saint.”
He didn’t answer her.
“Saint.” She hooked her fingers in the back of his shirt. The passing hours had dried it, but the fabric was stiff and tacky with dried sweat and rain. Dirt and salt flaked off the knees of his jeans as she tugged him back from the bed. “Sit down before you fall down. I mean it.” He looked a fucking mess, and that was being polite. Face painted with fading bruises from Sooner’s, eyes bloodshot and shocked wide. She hadn’t seen him shed a tear, but that would’ve meant acknowledging it all. They weren’t there yet.
So he sat. Dropped, really, like all that steel in his spine just melted out of him. His hands shook as he scrubbed his face. “He should’ve been okay,” he said at last. “He’s supposed to be…” He made a helpless sound in the back of his throat, and if she’d thought her heart couldn’t hurt any harder, he proved her horribly wrong.
“Sturdier?” she offered. “Saint, most people don’t even survive a ten-story fall. Nobody survives twenty-five.” Even though Jal was holding on, she was afraid even he wouldn’t prove the exception. “By all rights, he shouldn’t be breathing right now. And I know,” she pressed on, before Saint could say whatever he inhaled to say. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but even a body like his can only take so much punishment. He’s not stable, and I’m not a goddamn neurosurgeon. The leg, the lung—I can handle those. But we’re barely keeping the swelling down, and—” Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Saint’s expression shutter. Walling himself in, brick by careful brick. You’re fucking this up, Nash. “And you know all of this, and my repeating it isn’t going to make us feel any better.” She sighed and curled an arm around his shoulders. “I’m sorry. I’m doing everything I can, I swear.”
“I know that.” It came out steady, but only by the skin of Saint’s teeth. Trying to keep from screaming or sobbing or whatever the fuck someone did when someone they cared for was slipping away, heartbeat by heartbeat. “I know.”
“I can keep him comfortable.” A poor consolation, but it was the best she had. “And if everything holds like it is, I’m pretty sure I can get him back to the center spiral. Give his family a chance to get to him, and maybe they’ll have time, you know? To say their goodbyes.” Was that cruel? She was never a very good judge of that sort of thing. Keeping her word, giving them closure, but maybe they’d just have to mourn him again.
Doesn’t matter, she decided. She’d made a promise. Whatever happened, she’d get him home.
Saint didn’t say anything for a long while, just yielded the floor to the blip of the monitor and the soft hum of the engine room beneath their feet. The air felt heavy, like all the gravity had somehow folded in on itself. Bearing down on Saint, until he sagged under the weight of it, slumping forward over his knees and digging the heels of his palms into his eyes.
“He’s stubborn,” Saint sighed.
Stubbornness doesn’t heal subdural hematomas. She bit her tongue, though. He didn’t want a reality check; he wanted something to hold on to. Hope, or whatever passed for it these days. “I hadn’t noticed,” she said instead.
Saint let out a rasp of a laugh. “Don’t know the half of it,” he told her. “I remember … I remember the day I met him. Sitting on the Guild shuttle fresh off my army discharge, getting shipped out to recruit training. Still hungover and not keen on company, but this lanky son of a bitch drops into the seat right next to me and starts dealing me a hand of cards. How many for poker again? First recruit that’d so much as talked to me since I signed on.”
“You hadn’t charmed them all with your sunny disposition?” She flashed him a smile and got a weak one in return.
“May shock you to learn I wasn’t the most enjoyable person to be around, back then,” he said wryly. “Drank too much, cared too little, but he stuck it out. Said he was my battle buddy.” He shook his head. “Nobody does battle buddies anymore, and definitely nobody in the Guild, but I think he heard it somewhere and decided he liked it. Couldn’t shake him after that.” The softness in his expression said that maybe he hadn’t tried as hard as he let on. “Shit card player, though. No poker face.”
Nash shrugged. “The universe could use more bad liars.” Honest and stubborn and shit at cards—she would’ve liked to know him better, she thought. She would’ve liked the chance.
“He shouldn’t have done it,” Saint said quietly. His smile had bled away, leaving something haggard in its wake.
“You would’ve died if he hadn’t.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe.” It wasn’t a question of probability; it was fact. If Jal hadn’t gotten that tablet down as fast as he had, her best friend would be dead, Eoan would be in pieces for letting it happen, and Anke would still be in the wind.
“But he would be fine.”
Nash would’ve scoffed, if she’d had the energy. She’d poured it all into keeping Jal breathing, and even that didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment. “If you think that lug could’ve listened to you die slow over the radio and been fine, you haven’t been paying attention.” Maybe Saint hadn’t heard all of what he’d said on the rooftop, but she had. He’d known exactly what he was doing when he took that dive, and exactly why he was doing it, and she was so goddamn grateful for it and for him that she could barely breathe. Saint and Eoan were all she had, and she could’ve lost them both. A loss like that had nearly destroyed her once; Jal had spared her that, and for all the grief hanging thick and somber in the air, she couldn’t bring herself to be sorry he’d taken the fall.
She was just sorry it was such a long way down.
Mercifully, Saint didn’t argue. He just sank a little deeper, scrubbing his hands over his face again with no regard for the cuts and bruises. “I’ve never seen him so still,” he said. “Always fidgeting and shit—couldn’t even quit in his sleep.” His shoulders lifted with a slow, deep breath. Meant to be bracing, she thought, but when he spoke, his voice sounded small—smaller than seemed possible, from the tower of a man she knew. “I can’t let him go again, Nash.”
It was all she could do to keep her balance as Saint tipped his head against her side, and probably all he could do to keep her steady on the arm of the chair. All their ironclad defenses crumbled, and they were both too goddamn tired to shore them back up again.
So they shored each other up instead. Saint leaned into her, and she leaned into him, and she lost count of the seconds they just sat there, breathing in the silence and watching the rise and fall of Jal’s chest beneath the blankets.
The comms chimed. Subtler than a cleared throat and less abrupt than jumping right in. “I have something.” Eoan’s voice was quiet, only playing through one or two speakers in the sick bay. Even they weren’t immune to it: that thick miasma of despair, that lingering shock. They’d all gotten their asses handed to them a time or two; it was the nature of the business. But they’d never taken a loss like this. “Would you like to talk here, or come to the bridge?”
Saint straightened, but Nash felt every bit of energy it took for him to do it. Felt it, because she matched him joule for joule. “Bridge,” he scraped out. “Let the kid get some rest.” He made no move to stand, though, and she realized after a beat that he wasn’t going to.
He wanted to. Somehow that made it worse. He wanted to be fine, because he was Saint, and that was what he did. He’d made a career of being fine with shit nobody else could take.
For all their years apart, though, and for all the buckets of bad history between them, Jal had been ready to die for him. Hadn’t even hesitated. And Saint stared at the bed like he wished he were the one lying in it. Whatever they’d been to each other, whatever they could’ve been to each other … as Nash watched him fold his hands over Jal’s on the sheets, it finally started to sink in:
Of all the wounds Saint had survived, this could be the one that broke him.
“Stay with him,” she said when she found her voice again. “I’ll go see what Eoan’s got for us.” She squeezed his shoulder as she slid off his chair, forcing her spongy legs steady and her burning eyes clear. It was fine if he couldn’t be fine, because she could be. Would be, for as long as they needed her to.
As she pulled away, Saint’s head dipped low over his and Jal’s clasped hands. Callused on callused, scarred on scarred, grasped like Saint could hold him there with nothing but the strength of his grip and the depths of his grief.
Praying, she thought. Or begging. Maybe there wasn’t a difference in the heart of a desperate man. And although she had no god of her own to pray to, as she left them behind in the sick bay, she prayed that Saint’s would answer him.
Her mods buzzed as she passed through the galley, stepping over half a rebreather kit and trying not to trip on the fuzzy little hobgoblin that sauntered between her feet with a disgruntled mrrph. She’d practically had to chase Bodie out of the sick bay with a broom earlier—no room for another mourner. He’d weathered the blackout okay, at least. Cashed in one of his nine lives, maybe, but visibly no worse for wear.
The same couldn’t be said of their radio assembly. Bits of it littered the doorway to the bridge like entrails from a felled beast, and she had to bat Bodie away before he could snatch any loose wires. “Mitts off, klepto.”
His bobtail twitched a fuck you, but he still curled against her knee as she dropped cross-legged to the floor. Seeking comfort or giving it, she wasn’t quite sure, but she appreciated it anyway. Out came the multitool from her overalls pocket, because the radio wasn’t going to fix itself.
It was good to have something she could fix.
“How is he?” Eoan asked, materializing at the head of the bridge. Their projection seemed wan, somehow. Colorless and washed out, and Nash knew that it made no sense, that they were just a collection of particles cast in light, but she could’ve sworn they looked heavy, too. Rattled. Maybe they hadn’t quite shaken off the effects of the Deadworld infection, but Nash couldn’t help feeling there was more to it than that. Some near-imperceptible shift in the captain’s whole demeanor. A strange disquiet in their usual calm. Whatever the cause, something had definitely changed.
Nash looked away. “Which one?”
“Does the answer change?”
Fair point. She sighed and dragged the radio into her lap, starting on the screws with twice the concentration they deserved. “He’s in bad shape,” she said, opening up the casing one wrist turn at a time. Sometimes you had to break a thing all the way down before you could build it back up. “Got our asses kicked.”
“That we did.” At least Eoan didn’t try to gild it.
No sugar in that shit sandwich. “So,” she said, “what’re we gonna do about it?” Because that was how it worked. They took one on the chin, and they licked their split lips, bared their bloody teeth, and got the fuck on with it.
“We find them,” said Eoan.
“No shit.” The rub was how. Picketers made an art form out of getting around undetected, and they hadn’t had the opportunity or the wherewithal to sneak a tracker onto Drestyn’s ship.
Unless one of them had.
Nash narrowed her eyes at Eoan, corners of her mouth nudging upward. “You did something, didn’t you?”
“No shit,” Eoan shot back, and just enough mirth fizzled in their voice to make Nash think maybe she wasn’t the only one bootstrapping herself back to rights. “There wasn’t time for anything elegant, I’m afraid. The code was … aggressive. I worried Anke would find anything with a signal,” they added. That was the problem with the clever ones—awesome to work with, but a pain in the ass to work against. “But I took a page from the late Ranger Riesen’s book.”
“Satellite FID?” Better than nothing, she guessed, but they wouldn’t get a hit until the picketers passed a receiver.
“Somewhat more … roentgenic,” Eoan replied.
It took her a second; long day, raging headache. When she got there, though, Nash could’ve kissed the captain. “You rad-tagged her.” Messy and low-tech, but on a ship as well traveled as the Ambit, a radiation signature was as distinct as a fingerprint. Anke’s week aboard wouldn’t have done it—had to be a high enough concentration to track long-distance—but if Eoan had managed to flood the vents before Anke bailed, it might’ve done the trick. Unnoticeable and maybe slightly carcinogenic, but karma was a bitch like that sometimes. “Have I mentioned lately that I love you?”
“I love you, too,” they replied, with a sudden seriousness that Nash didn’t have the bandwidth to process. Clearly Eoan had some baggage of their own to unpack from Noether; Nash wouldn’t push it. She was too damn tired. And chalk it up to that same unbelievable fatigue that Nash startled when the holotable in the center of the bridge blinked on. Stars and planets scattered through the air above it—a map of the O-Cyg spiral, in three dimensions. “To the extent a visual aid would help.”
Nash pushed to her knees as a bright red dot appeared at the center of the map. “Anke.” She hated the way she said it. Hated the way her breath caught, wedged behind a sticky-sour lump in her throat. Hated most of all that, of course, Saint choose that moment to walk in.
He hovered near the doorway, still in the same blood-smudged shirt. The heaviness hadn’t gone anywhere; he’d just drawn enough steel back into his spine to bear it. Those few minutes alone had fortified him—given him time, she thought, to say his goodbyes. Or to convince himself he didn’t need to.
Either way, it’d been a while since she’d seen him like that, standing only an arm’s length away, and somehow well beyond her grasp. Couldn’t begrudge him; they all coped in their own ways. But she wished he’d at least changed his fucking clothes.
“You really liked her,” he said. Not a question. No judgment, no pity. He knew better.
She sucked in a breath through her teeth. “I didn’t—not like her.” Even that felt like a confession, miserable and guilty, but Anke was smart, and driven, and so endearingly awkward that Nash’d started looking forward to every time she opened her mouth. She wished she could’ve said she’d had doubts, that she’d seen the signs and just ignored them, but the truth was Nash never would’ve called that double cross. She never would’ve known, until it was too late. “I got duped.”
“We all did.” Saint joined her at the table. “If you want dibs on the takedown when we catch them, though, she’s all yours. Long as I get Drestyn.” In the lights of all those stars and planets, something truly vicious lit his eyes. He’d heard the shot. He’d heard the horrible sounds Jal had strangled behind his teeth as the bullet ripped his leg apart. Drestyn might not’ve pushed him off the roof, but without a doubt, he was the reason Jal was dying.
Maybe that was what those minutes alone had given him, Nash thought. Not closure, not denial, but the cold, consuming certainty of rage.
Whatever it takes. She turned back to the holotable. “Your man’s a real piece of work.” She’d heard him on the rooftop, over Jal’s comm line. Save one life or save thousands. Millions. A man on a mission. “Doesn’t seem like the kind you talk down.”
“Wasn’t planning on talking,” Saint said.
Good. A kind face and a humanitarian cause didn’t take the hole out of Jal’s leg or the hemorrhage out of his brain. The Trust had taken someone dear from Drestyn, but he’d taken someone dear from Saint. A hurt that deep had no room for empathy. “So let’s just figure out where the hell they’re headed, and go do something about it.”
They were on the same page: no more reactionary bullshit, no more getting caught on their back foot. It was time to go hunting.
She twirled her multitool around her fingers, eyeing the map. “Well, if I were a pissed-off picketer packing a world-killing cyber bomb, I’d be looking for someplace to hit the Trust where it hurts. Bonus points if it’s someplace that scumbag Yarden might be holed up.” Otho Yarden, the morally repugnant ladder-climber behind the Kepler explosions that killed Drestyn’s brother, and probably the rubber stamp behind the Deadworld Code. Didn’t seem like much of a stretch to think he’d be part of Drestyn’s big plan. “Two birds and all.”
“Right,” Saint said. “So what’ve we got in terms of high-value targets nearby? Try for anything less than a day’s travel; there might be a reason Anke saved Noether for last. Could’ve been working her way back to something.”
The map shifted as Eoan ran the search, skimming through planets, focus darting from one orb of light to the next so quickly Nash started to get a little dizzy, before it finally snapped to a halt.
“Here,” Eoan said, expanding the speck on the map until it took shape: not a sphere, but a saucer, spinning near a cluster of moons like a children’s top. “Lewaro City, one of the Trust’s satellite hubs. Serves as the main port for their transit and shipping to and from the frontier, houses all the regional officers and administrators for the outer spiral. Average occupancy of one hundred twenty-three thousand one hundred seventy-seven. And,” they added, matter-of-factly, “home office of one Otho Yarden.”
“Ding, ding, ding. Sounds like we have a winner,” Nash said. “Hell of an ultimatum: fess up, or we drop the Deadworld Code in your life support.” They’d already proven the Deadworld Code wasn’t limited to T-form systems; if it fucked up the Lewaro station as fast and as hard as it had the Ambit, a lot of people would die badly. “How long do we have?”
“At their current speed, Lewaro is approximately four hours’ flight from Anke’s position. Four hours and thirty-five minutes from ours.”
“That’s too long. Any Guild ships closer?” Saint practically growled it. His gun mag held twenty rounds, and she’d bet Drestyn’s name was on every single one of them. Giving up the chance to get to him first had to fucking hurt.
So if he looked a little relieved when Eoan shook their head, Nash couldn’t fault him. “They chose their target well,” Eoan said. “Nothing but lunar clusters and asteroids for hours. The nearest Guild vessel is a transport freighter half a day’s flight out.”
“Guessing you’ve already tried to get word to the station?” Nash asked.
This time, when Eoan shook their head, nobody looked happy about it. “As far as I can tell, comm signals are jammed station-wide.”
“How the hell’d Drestyn pull that off already?” Saint asked.
“He didn’t,” Eoan replied. “The jammer seems to be coming from the station itself. No incoming communications, and I can’t confirm outgoing, but I’m not getting anything but the closed-zone message on repeat.”
“The Trust cut off their own station’s communications?” Nash didn’t like the sound of that. “Why would they do that? They gotta know something bad’s coming.” They’d had an eye on things since Riesen. Had mercs waiting for them on Sooner’s and on Noether; no way they wouldn’t have worked out where this was going. Before anybody could weigh in, though, Nash had her own aha. “Shit,” she said. “They know, but the station doesn’t. Not all of it, anyway.” A few C-suiters like Yarden, maybe, but the other hundred thousand and change? The workers and their families just trying to make a living? “They’re keeping them in the dark on purpose.”
Saint’s scowl could’ve melted tungsten. He’d never been able to stomach turning on his own. “Don’t trust their own people not to break rank, so they don’t give them the chance. Like a trapped rat gnawing off its own foot.”
“Except the rat would feel it,” Nash said. “I’m pretty sure whatever parts the Trust loses, it can grow back.”
“More like a starfish,” Eoan offered helpfully. “An insidious starfish.”
“Sounds like my next knitting project.” She had to joke about it, because if she didn’t, she’d start screaming. People had died. People were going to die, and those Janus-faced motherfuckers were just going to let a whole station la la la their way through annihilation. Continuing the proud human tradition of denying shit we don’t like until it kills us. Doctor or not, she kind of hated people sometimes. All the blood, sweat, and tears she put into keeping them alive, and they were damn determined to kill themselves and each other. Bet botanists don’t have these sorts of problems.
“As heartless as it is, it makes sense,” Eoan said. “No chance for the station’s occupants to panic. No chance of word getting out. And if it is a confession Anke’s looking for, it won’t do her very much good if she can’t broadcast it off the station before she’s caught.”
“That’s some expert-level ass-covering.”
“Makes you wonder, too,” Saint agreed, low and dour as he hunched over the holotable. “If they’re willing to shut the whole station down to keep this under control, what else’re they willing to do?”
Not a question Nash wanted to think on too hard. In a game of morally bankrupt chicken, the Trust would never blink first. “Real question is, what’re we gonna do? Drestyn’s not an idiot.” Begrudgingly, she added, “Anke, either,” and she could almost convince herself it didn’t sting as much to say her name this time. Like a granuloma closing in around a splinter. Or immurement. She liked that better—walling the pain off brick by brick, until it shriveled and died in the dark. “They’ll have a way in. We need one, too.”
“Then let’s find one.” Saint raised his hand to enlarge the projection above the holotable, and the sea of stars became hundreds of phosphor-blue buildings rising and falling across the Lewaro cityscape like beats of a racing heart. “Figure they’re probably heading to the Admin Building, here. It’s got life support, executive suites—”
“Everything a growing insurrection needs.” Nash snorted.
Saint flicked the air over the tallest building on the map. “Cap, can I get a list of anything near here? Bounty targets, dry docks—anything we can use to override their lockout.”
Now there was the start of a plan. Even a full station lockdown only barred nonessential access; no port could refuse access for an active warrant or a damaged ship. “Look at you, getting all underhanded and sneaky.” She socked his shoulder cheerfully. “I like it.”
The map scrolled through a cluster of buildings around the Admin Building, sweeping up from the middle of the domed city. Banking center, high-rise hotel—
“There.” Saint swiped his hand across the map, spinning the image until it centered on a shorter, rounded tower on the other side. “They’ve got a hospital.”
Ah, shit. Just when they’d started to get their groove back. “Saint—”
But he cut her off. “It’s perfect. Can’t refuse hospital access to a critical case, and it’s just a frog-hop away from the Admin Building. We claim right of entry for the hospital, and you and I can make the jump over there while Cap plays ambulance and hacks us in. It’s our cleanest ingress.”
“Right, and that’s all this is about,” she shot back. She wanted to smack him. Shake him. Don’t do this to yourself, you sad fucking masochist. It was all she could do to keep her hands at her sides and her voice steady as she explained, “Jal is stable right now, Saint. We finish up here, and we could still get him home in time for his family to say goodbye.” It wasn’t the happy ending that poor bastard deserved, but it was something. “But if he goes in that hospital, there’s a solid chance he doesn’t make it back out. Even if they do everything right, odds are he never makes it home, and that’s not what we promised him.”
“What you promised him!” She knew Saint had something volatile under all that carefully practiced temperance, but she rarely saw it. She flinched. “You promised,” he repeated, quieter. More carefully. “He didn’t ask me for anything, Nash. He just—” He faltered, jaw working around the words he couldn’t say until he found some he could. “You said there’s a chance he dies in that hospital, so that means there’s a chance that he doesn’t.”
Everything he said was true: her way, he had a chance of making it home to die; Saint’s way, he had a chance of living to make it home. Wasn’t something she’d run the probabilities on, and she could tell Eoan was biting their tongue.
“It’s risky,” she said. “If we claim right of entry, they’ll try to confine us to the hospital; and if the Deadworld Code hits the city, he’ll be as much at risk as everyone else.”
“I know.”
“And it’s selfish,” she added, quieter. “It’s not what he asked for.”
Saint’s head dipped, fractionally. “I know that, too.”
For all her reservations, Nash guessed that settled it. The hospital was their way in. She’d just have to find another way to keep her promise. Sorry, miner boy. You’re not done saving us yet. “Fuck it, I’m in.” All in, all the way to the end; they’d never given each other anything less, and she wouldn’t start now. “So, don’t suppose you’ve got any ideas how we swing it?”
“Only way we know how,” Saint said, lips turned in a wry grin. “Wit, grit, and crazy shit.”