SAINT
“You’re sure that’s it?” Saint asked, lowering his monocular from the rockhopper perched some fifteen stories higher than the hospital roof. After they’d passed Jal into the hands of the station’s sawbones, it’d been the work of minutes to sneak up the maintenance stairs all the way to the roof.
Nash hovered at the edge, boots balanced so precariously on the ledge that Saint half-expected the howling wind to carry her clear off her feet to the street below—and her staring into it, unflinching, like she’d love to see it try. “As sure as I was the last time you asked,” she said, more exasperated than annoyed. “And as sure as I am that I’ll suplex you off this fucking roof if you ask me one more time.” Maybe a little annoyed. She glanced back at him. “You ready?”
Saint had, until that point, resisted the urge to look down. Figured nothing good would come of it, that it’d only give him that much more heartburn about flinging himself off the roof on a jetpack and a prayer.
Instead, as he finally risked a gander, the only thing he could seem to think about was how much higher the shopping center had been and how much farther Jal’d had to fall. Wondering if he’d been afraid before he took the leap, or if there’d been no room for fear in that big heart of his.
“Still thinking about miner boy?” A question in inflection only. Nash turned to him. “Not telling you how to cope here, but we can’t do this if half your head’s down there on a gurney.”
“My head’s fine,” Saint said gruffly, and he meant it. Jal was out of his hands; this wasn’t. “Aim for the rockhopper, huh?”
“And try not to wet yourself,” Nash agreed with a nod and a flinty shadow of a grin. Anger, real anger, wasn’t a look Nash wore often. Saint knew exactly who it belonged to, and he wasn’t sure who he felt worse for: Nash or Anke. No way it ended pretty, regardless. “It’d wreck that whole cultured badass thing you’ve got going. You’d never live it down.”
“You’d never let me live it down.”
“Tomato, potato.”
He opened his mouth and snapped it closed again. Plenty of time for ribbing later. And if there’s not, we probably won’t be alive to miss it. Success or death was actually a pretty freeing way to work; it was living with his mistakes that Saint hadn’t quite mastered. No mistakes this time, he thought firmly. One last tug on his pack harness. One last shared look with Nash, grim and grateful, because there wasn’t a soul he’d rather be on that roof with. One last breath, one last thought spared for a man who’d taken a much bigger leap just to save one sorry life, and with Nash at his side, he stepped off the ledge.
The jets punched on like a kick from a horse, defying all that would-be downward momentum and launching him suddenly, rapidly up. Wind roared in his ears with Nash’s wild whoop—enjoying the ride or the success of her last-minute mods on the packs, who knew—as the landing pad and the rockhopper hurtled closer.
“Pull up!” Nash shouted. “Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!”
Took the second or third repeat before Saint remembered which fucking direction on the control pad was up, just in time to clear the edge of the landing pad. Folding his very breakable body over the very not-breakable joists would’ve cut their rescue mission embarrassingly short.
He shut off the jet and landed in a forward stumble as Nash eased gracefully to her feet a few paces ahead of him, already shrugging out of the straps of her pack. The bag underneath it was much less clunky, conforming to the shape of her back and nearly the same barn red as her jacket. This wasn’t a stealth mission; this was a speed run.
“Don’t look now,” she said. “We’ve got company. Building security?” Uniforms and handbook-perfect posture seemed to corroborate.
“I’ve got a heat signature on the rockhopper as well,” Eoan added over comms. “No rad-signature, though, so I expect you’ll have to look farther to find Miss Ahlstrom.”
Saint asked with an arched eyebrow how Nash wanted to play it, and she ticked her head toward the security guards with a smile that promised very bad days for them. Much as he’d have liked to spectate, that left the seat-warmer in the rockhopper to him. Never let it be said he didn’t pull his weight.
“Stand down,” Nash called to the security officers as Saint turned back to the rockhopper, unbuckling his harness to get at his own pack. The hatch started to open. Whoever was inside probably thought they’d wait out the security officers, but Saint and Nash changed things.
Your lucky day. He had half a mind to let that hatch drop, see if it was one of the fuckers from the roof and show ’em what a fair fight looked like, but it wasn’t part of the plan. Unless it was Drestyn himself holding down the fort, Saint had bigger fish to fry.
So. Lucky day.
Jogging toward the ship, he shoved a hand in one of the side pockets of his pack. No feeling around necessary; he kept everything in the same damn place every damn time, because he was a stubborn man set in his ways. This pocket just happened to be where he kept the charge grenades. Always something satisfying about pulling the pin, and fucking up his shoulder hadn’t wrecked his throwing arm. An overhand splitter, and the magnetized disc of the grenade stuck itself neatly to the shell of the hatch.
Three.
Two.
One.
With a flash of blue-white light, arcs of electricity ripped across the ship’s hull. Surreal to think a grenade that small packed a punch that big, but even over the wind, Saint could hear the popcorn pops and sizzling cracks of frying circuits. He liked to think he heard a yelp somewhere in there, too, but it was probably just wishful thinking. Charge that high, fucker probably didn’t have time to breathe before the lights went out.
Lucky was … relative.
He turned around to see Nash giving the last guard standing a poke with the end of her shock baton. Those things could be nasty, but Nash never went further than she had to. “You kill them?” he asked as she backed off, stowing her baton. The guards moved, but only with the spasming twitches of the recently electrified.
She shook her head. “You?”
“Tempted.”
“I’ll bet. Half-expected you to O.K. Corral it back there. Mind, I wouldn’t have stopped you.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, big guy. Plenty of catharsis inside.”
Catharsis was probably asking too much. The grenade only had a thirty-minute charge, though, so if nothing else, seat-warmer would be waiting on him when they wrapped up. “Then let’s get it done.”
First stop: the security panel waiting just inside the door. Saint kept watch while Nash took her plasma torch to the wall. Not that a few dozen offices needed much watching—and not that the weak-ass lock on the panel needed a plasma torch—but it felt good getting back to old habits.
With Nash in her element wrists-deep in wiring, that left Saint on sentry. He smiled at a well-dressed passerby ambling down the hall with a cup of coffee, angling himself with his holster, hopefully, just out of sight. “Maintenance,” he said. While they weren’t going for stealth, he figured they should aim for a sweet spot between that and armed intruders inciting a panic.
The prim brunette passerby didn’t look like she believed him, which was fair; he wasn’t trying especially hard, and acting was a weak spot in his professional repertoire. She also didn’t look like she cared enough to question it, though. Worked for him.
Seemed to work for Nash, too. Or would’ve, if she’d deigned to notice anything but her plasma torch. “There we are,” Nash said as the panel, predictably, popped open without much effort. A few twists of her multitool and she nudged the control pad out of the way to expose the tangle of circuits underneath with an aggrieved “Cable management, people. Slobs.” She made quick work of it anyway, stripping away pieces of insulation with quick flicks of her wrist until she could patch Eoan’s remote access fob into the circuits. “Best security in the frontier my fine tattooed ass.”
“Wait, you have an ass tat?” Ah, partnership: always learning and growing.
She flashed him a devilish grin. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Then she flipped on the fob and rolled back on her heels. “You’re patched in on this end, Cap.”
“Good to go on this one as well,” Eoan replied down the line. Good. If anybody could sneak around a building’s systems with a hacker like Anke running interference, it’d be Eoan. See how clever she really was, when Eoan was on their guard and on their game. Eoan had a little squaring of their own to do. “No word yet on Ranger Jalsen, but I’ll keep you apprised where I can.” Where it won’t distract you and get one of you killed was what they meant, so Saint didn’t expect an update anytime soon. Probably for the best.
He rolled his shoulders. Stay on mission. “Where’s our heading, then?”
“Reviewing the floor plans now,” said Eoan, and with any other captain, Saint would’ve settled himself in for a wait. With Eoan, though, Nash barely had her multitool back in her pocket before they said, “The administrator access terminal is on the fifty-third floor of the building, in Otho Yarden’s office. If I were attempting to infect the station with the Deadworld Code, that would be my entry point.”
And if I were attempting to murder the shit out of Yarden, that’d be my first stop, Saint added to himself. “Floor fifty-three it is. And we’re where?”
“Floor twenty-eight,” Eoan reported, matter-of-factly.
Nash groaned and rocked herself to her feet. “I was just thinking I wanted to do five hundred stairs today. What about elevators?”
“All stopped at the subbasement level. I expect that’s Miss Ahlstrom’s doing. Which means an override could be … risky.”
“Still think we should’ve taken our chances with the windows,” Nash said. Liar. She’d seen the same specs on the silica panes as he had. Even if she could’ve rigged the jets to get them up that high, Anke and Drestyn would’ve finished whatever they’d come to do before they even got a breathing hole in that glass. A sigh, and she tightened her ponytail and started resolutely down the hall. “Fine, then I vote shaft. With the elevators down, they’ll be watching the stairs, and I can get us up the cables in a few minutes, tops.”
Saint trailed behind her, trying not to look as out of place as he felt. Give him a battlefield. Give him an abandoned Trust installation crawling with armed-to-the-teeth scavs. Give him anything but a fuck-load of oblivious office workers and a ticking time bomb. “Drestyn’s got at least one more guy, though,” he said. “If I’m him, I’m covering the stairs and the elevators and taking potshots at anybody I see. All they have to do is hold position long enough for Anke to do her thing.”
“So how do we get ’em not to see us?” Nash said.
A thoughtful pause down the line, and then Eoan offered, “By giving them something else to look at.” And nope, he didn’t like that tone at all. “Saint, dear, don’t suppose you’re up for some cardio?”
Something told him the cardio wouldn’t be the objectionable part of whatever plan Eoan had cooked up in that processor of theirs. “I’m gonna hate this, aren’t I?”
“Probably,” they said. “Are you in?”
Ah, hell. Wasn’t like he kept in shape ’cause he liked working out. “All right, Cap,” he said, bracing. “What’d you have in mind?”
ANKE
“What’s the holdup?” Rigby called from the other side of the lift bay. He’d posted up on the stairs, Marei was covering the lifts, and Drestyn kept watch by Anke.
The tap, tap, tap of her fingers against her tablet keyboard was the only sound on the whole floor, and Anke really wished she could throw on some music or something. Ease the tension. Disguise the occasional anxious stomach gurgles she kept passing off as a squeaky chair. Every time she thought of music, though, her mind drifted to guitar refrains floating through a packed galley, dancing between the tables and laughing between verses of some half-forgotten miners’ song.
So, music was out.
“The terminal security’s like a seven-layer bean dip,” she shot back. “Biometrics, guacamole, password—which, shockingly, isn’t password.”
“You tried password?” Rigby said.
“You always try password. It’s, like, the cardinal rule of hacking.” Duh. “And you always try turning it off and turning it on again, and if all else fails, you take it out and blow on it.” Definitely babbling again, but she was so close to cracking that last layer—would that be the cheese or the olives?—that she could taste it.
Somehow, after everything she’d already done, she still wasn’t a hundred percent sure she could handle what came next.
“Well, whatever the fuck you’re doing, do it quick,” Rigby said sharply.
“Thanks, because I was totally dragging my feet before you said something.” She’d have rolled her eyes, but it would’ve meant taking them off her screen, and she was so close. Everything they needed waited right at the end of the next string of—“Hah!” She whipped her chair around. Victory spin! Only she realized halfway through that sudden movements with three heavily armed, increasingly agitated agitators probably wasn’t the best idea. Rein it in. She pulled herself back to the console and bumped her glasses up her nose. “We’re in.”
Under different circumstances, she might’ve been offended by Drestyn’s skeptical eyebrow tick. Ye of little faith. Now, though, she was too busy watching every system in the station unfold across the screen. Every thread of that massive web, hers for the plucking.
The triumph was short-lived.
It sounded like something heavy dropping in the stairwell—a dense, muffled bang echoing its way up to them, and another, and another. Like a bowling ball, she thought absurdly. Bouncing down the stairs, bang, bang, bang. Except they didn’t get farther away each time; they got closer. Louder. Crisper.
“Gunshots,” Rigby barked. “Fuck, they’re gonna bring every uniform in the building.”
Yeah, gun makes more sense. “Pulling up the camera now—”
“No,” Drestyn said.
“No?” She glanced over and almost did a double take when she saw him standing right beside her. Seriously, how did people do that?
Drestyn shook his head, eyes dark and granite-hard as they studied the monitors. “We’re here for Yarden. He’s the priority.”
“Right. One fat cat coming up,” she said. “But, uh, the gunshots.”
Of course, Drestyn had an answer for that, too. “Marei, double up Rigby on the stairs. You see something—”
“Shoot something,” Marei finished for him, nodding and disappearing deeper into the lift lobby, presumably to join Rigby at the stairwell door. “Still clear up here, Dres,” she called.
He acknowledged her with a hum, but ninety-something percent of his attention stayed focused on the screens over Anke’s shoulders. He’d made it clear from the start that he was after Yarden. In fact, she’d banked on the whole corporate malfeasance killed my brother thing when she’d reached out to him in the first place; in case he thought, like her supervisors had, that saving the universe was too soft a sales pitch. She hadn’t really grasped how much he meant it until then, though. That gentlemanly veneer had vanished, and something honed—something ruthless—had taken its place.
Ruthless is good, she told herself. Fight fire with fire. She just had to figure out where to point it. “If I were technical security for a panic room, where would I be? That wasn’t an actual question, by the way. Just talking aloud, you know—thinking. Thinking aloud.” Please, stop talking. Although, she was pretty sure she could’ve been reciting Shakespearean soliloquies, for how much Drestyn seemed to care. Either he’d tuned her out, or he’d accepted the rambling as the cost of doing business with Anke.
For the record, she was totally worth it.
“Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” she muttered, as Rigby or Marei fired their first shot from the stairwell. Tick tock, tick tock. With an unfamiliar system, it wasn’t like she could prep beforehand. Not a lot of how to hack a space station manuals out there. But she charged ahead anyway, barreling feverishly through system after system until she pressed somewhere it hurt. There you are. “Me-ow.” She shook her head. “Wow, nope. That was weird. Don’t like that. Let’s rewind that back and pretend—”
“Anke.” Drestyn didn’t yell, but he didn’t really have to. Intensity, not volume.
“Drestyn,” she retorted, as the noise down the hall picked up. Sounded like things were getting zesty out there, and a harsh curse from Rigby made her fingers trip over the keyboard a little before she got back on target, hammering through one last internal firewall and viola! “Behold.” She smacked the last key harder than she had to, and Drestyn flinched as the bookshelf on the back wall started to slide sideways. Behind it, a doorway opened on a narrow, plunging shaft. “Oh, my God,” she said. “An actual secret entrance behind an actual moving bookshelf.”
Drestyn jogged over to it, bracing a hand on either side of the doorway to peer down. Long, long drop. By the schematics she’d pulled up, that shaft went all the way down to the subbasements. “He’s down there?”
“The panic room is, for sure,” she said. “Which is kind of genius, if you think about it. Somebody’s coming, you just pop downstairs and leave them standing at the tippy-top like a bunch of morons. Not that we’re morons. Here.” Best way to make sure they had Yarden was to get eyes inside. Fortunately, a control freak like Yarden couldn’t have a panic room without a full communications system. Eyes, ears. “Say hello to Big Brother.” With a few more taps, she had a video feed up on the monitor closest to Drestyn.
There he sat: Otho Yarden, in the flat-screen flesh. Was that a drink in his hand? And a half-empty bottle on the arm of his chair, like he just knew something bad was coming and didn’t care to remember the finer details. “You know, that stuff’ll rot your liver.” Anke was totally petty enough to enjoy the way Yarden startled, sloshing blur—which probably cost more than she made in a year in her Guild programming gig—over his hand and narrowly missing the crisp lilac of his band-collar shirt.
He looked so … normal. It wasn’t like Anke had never seen his face, but somehow she remembered him rattier. His features more severe, his salt-and-pepper hair blacker and oilier. She’d seen millions of men just like this one, though: five-o’clock shadow, eye bags, and nascent wrinkles across his forehead and around his mouth. Fit like he went to the gym but half-assed it, and a little bunny-toothed, and she hated it. Hated that it made her wonder how many of those millions of others could commit the kinds of atrocities this man had done. It didn’t seem right, that some wolves could fit so easily in sheep’s clothing.
This time, she was acutely aware of Drestyn coming closer. He closed the gap in a few quick strides, hand closing over the back of her chair with a creak of complaining pleather. “You look surprised, Yarden.” If he felt anything other than resolve like the grinding bones of a clenched fist, she couldn’t hear it in his voice. “It’s over now. We found you.”
“We?” Yarden’s lip twisted into what could almost be called a smile—and a friendly one, at that. Like he’d all but invited them, and would they please wipe their feet before they made themselves too comfortable?
The chair creaked again, as Drestyn’s grip tightened. “You know who we are.”
Yarden’s narrow mouth shaped an ah, like a revelation. As if he hadn’t scurried underground the second he’d seen them coming. “Of course,” he said. “Our friends from Noether.” He had a voice made for conference comms and press releases, crisp and conversational. “The shipping depot as well, if I’m not mistaken. You’ve been busy.” He raised his glass to his lips, downing the rest of the blur.
He promptly poured another.
“If you know who we are, then you know why we’re here,” Drestyn pressed. Straight to the point. Small talk was for people who had time, not an active shoot-out in the stairwell and more trouble on the way. Every second counted. “You know what we have, you know what we want, and you know what we’ll do to get it. So cut the shit and admit what you’ve done, and nobody else has to die.”
That was the upside to a clever bad guy: saved a lot of time on exposition.
Downside? They were all arrogant dicks.
“No,” said Yarden.
“No? What do you mean, no?” Anke snapped. She knew she wasn’t supposed to let him rile her up. The guy killed Drestyn’s brother, and Drestyn stood there beside her stone-faced and stoic, like losing his shit never even crossed his mind.
She wasn’t like Drestyn, though. She couldn’t look into that smiling, normal, blur-blotched face and pretend she wasn’t thinking about dead, decaying worlds. About buildings, warehouses, planets full of people withered or rotted or shot dead because some bigwig executive in a lilac shirt decided lives were less important than the bottom line. She looked at him, and she saw them.
When she pulled the drive from her pocket, the Trust’s perfect killer in its prison of circuits and steel … when she held it up to the camera in her cold, unsteady hands, she wanted him to see them, too. She wanted him to imagine walking through a warehouse of ghosts, through a half-finished mausoleum, through a mass grave stretching endlessly across the horizon, as far as the eye could see.
She wanted him to be afraid.
“It works on life support systems, you know,” she said, softly. “I’ve seen it.” Poor Eoan. Poor Saint. They were victims, too; she just couldn’t decide whose. “It vented all the oxygen in the ship. Electrified the floors. I’ve never actually been electrocuted, but I have checked suffocation off my bucket list. Not fun.” Choking in the captain’s chair of that rockhopper, pinned down and wondering if the bombs would take her before her brain starved. She’d come so far, survived so much, to reach this moment. It didn’t matter that her hand shook, or that her chest felt tight, or that the gunshots in the stairs got louder by the second; one way or another, she’d do what she came to do. “I know you think the Trust is worth killing for, but is it really worth dying for?”
For a beat, Yarden said nothing. He set his glass aside and leaned forward, elbows on his knees and hands steepled thoughtfully under his chin. Calculating, considering, until finally: “Is that what you think?” he asked. “You plug that in, and I die?”
“That’s the idea,” she said, unflinching. She was out of her depth on a lot of things. The violence, the politics, the big pictures. Not this, though. “Unless you tell us everything you know about the Deadworld Code—who designed it, who ordered it made, where it’s been used, where it’s going to be used—everything you know, and everything you think you know.” A confession. Intel like that would be enough that even the Union couldn’t look the other way, and more importantly, it’d give them a chance to get out ahead of it. No more geocides. No more mass graves. “You tell us that, this drive goes back in my pocket, you keep breathing happy, nonmurderous air, and—and I’m sorry, why are we still smiling? Did I miss something?” She glanced back at Drestyn. “Does he think I missed something?”
“I think he does,” Drestyn replied, and his expression might not have changed, but something happened in his eyes. Kind of vicious. Kind of satisfying.
Anke spun back around in her chair. “You know, I think I see what’s happening here,” she said, like duh. “See, Otho here—can I call you Otho? Otho thinks we’re threatening to infect the station. Which, gasp, he’s fine with. I mean, yeah. Shit-ton of people would die, but this guy, he gets to ride it out in his cozy little hidey-hole. Can you imagine the corporate kudos when he phones home and tells ’em the good news? Like, wow. Can you say merit bonus? Bet they’d even throw in a promotion, get him back home to the fam in the center spiral. You know,” she said over her shoulder to Drestyn, “if you can get past the mass homicide and the butt-puckering heinousness of it all, it’s a pretty sweet gig.” The more she talked, the tighter Yarden’s smile got. The paler his face. The straighter his back.
“Yeah,” she said. “We know about the panic room’s life support systems. Whole station could flatline and you’d still be totally hunky-dory. But you know,” she added, leaning forward with the drive wiggling between her index finger and thumb. “Works the other way, too, pumpkin. So let me rephrase: you talk, or I bypass all the station’s systems and ram this virus straight up your panic room’s ass. You die ugly on candid camera, and maybe that makes our jobs a little harder trying to pin all this back on your bosses, but”—she shrugged—“it’ll be a labor of love.”
In the faint reflection on the screen, she saw Drestyn’s eyebrows twitch. Yeah, she’d surprised herself, too. A month ago, Anke couldn’t even swing a convincing glare; and now, she threatened a man’s life like it was nothing, because countless more were on the line.
She’d changed in ways she hadn’t even believed she could. She’d met a girl who could take on the universe with a plasma torch and a grin and sipped coffee with a soldier whose only cause was the people he loved. She’d cracked killer code with an AI more human than most people she’d met, and watched a lost man find himself, even if he never got to make it home. Each one taught her something. Gave her something.
At the end of it all, she hoped it was worth what it’d cost them.
“So,” she said, staring at the man on the screen and all the graves that stood behind him, and wondering how many would stand behind her when all was said and done, “what’s it gonna be?”