NASH
Nash had just about had her fill of elevator shafts. They were kind of cool, sure—the engineer in her got a kick out of the pulleys and counterweights. People had played around with magnets and suction over the years, but some kinds of tech just worked, so there wasn’t much reason to mess with it. Between Noether’s underground, though, and floors twenty-eight through fifty of the Lewaro Administrative Building, even Nash’s inner engineering geek had gotten more than its fill.
They were liminal spaces, elevator shafts. Dusty little pocket dimensions, near identical from one to the next. Hoistways and buffers, cables and rails. Every sound echoing endlessly up and down, and the musty bitterness of old grease and ever-present damp.
Also? Her arms were fucking tired.
“Don’t know why you bitched about the plan, Saint,” she panted over the comms as her boots and gloves clang, clang, clanged on the maintenance ladder rungs. “Pretty sure I’m the one getting shafted on this one.”
Saint let out a bark of laughter that, coming from anyone else, probably would’ve sounded out of place amid the gunfire and shouting. But that was his element: a steady presence in the chaos. It’d only taken him a few shots to get the security officers coming, and after that, the fire fueled itself. Drestyn’s people shooting down at the Trust officers, the officers shooting up at Drestyn’s people, and neither hitting the other because the stair angles were a marksman’s nightmare.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle, Saint methodically picked his way up the stairs, all single-minded focus and a knack for dodging crossfire. “Puns are the lowest form of wit,” he said.
“I thought it was funny,” Eoan chimed in.
“Thank you.” Cap had her back.
“Of course, dear,” said Eoan. “Status report?”
“Considering other employment.” Saint swore, and Nash couldn’t tell if she heard a body dropping, or just Saint ducking for cover. “Strongly considering.”
“Shooty McBlastinshit complaining about an old-fashioned shoot-out? Say it ain’t so.” Nash hooked an arm around the ladder vertical and turned, surveying the gap between her and the elevator doors. I’m just a girl, standing in front of a bone-shattering drop, wishing I’d skipped fewer arm days. “I’m here,” she said. “You got eyes on Drestyn’s people?”
A pause, and what sounded like the fizzle of a piezoelectric round dangerously close to Saint’s earpiece. “I’ve got two on the top landing,” he said. “No sign of Anke or Drestyn, though, and they’ve still got all the cameras. Don’t take any chances.”
“Right, because historically I’m the risky one.” Nobody doctored the doctor; she preferred to know what she was walking into, and she packed the tech to make it happen. This time, it was a little square of opaque polymer. No bigger than a tab of gum, but Nash pitied any dumbass who made that mistake; a quick squeeze, and eight thin filament legs unspooled around the edges. Same material as her augments—high tensile, full range of sensory feedback. “Okay, Chiclet, show me what we’re working with.” Off it went, skittering from her palm around the edge of the shaft. An incident ray sensor and light-emitting polymer meant she lost sight of it, camouflaged against the grease- and dust-caked metal, but she could feel it. All those sensory inputs, fed directly into her augments, and it wasn’t that she could see what the microdrone saw when it wriggled between the doors; she just knew it. As if it’d just skipped her eyes completely and encoded itself directly into her brain. A déjà vu sort of feeling—took a while to get used to, but handy.
“Coast is clear,” she said, and with a quick shake of each limb to get the blood pumping again, she rocked back and launched herself across the open shaft. It wasn’t a very forgiving leap, with barely a half-dec ledge under the door and a thin beam on either side to grab onto, but she made it. Suck it, gravity. “Nearly there.”
“Hurry,” Saint said. “Rent-a-guns’re starting to fall back. Don’t think they’re digging the shooting gallery.”
“Yeah, well, some days you’re the bottle, some days you’re the BB.” She reached back and slid her baton from her bag, flicking it to full extension and wedging the tip in the gap of the doors. “Just another minute. Step up your decoy game over there.”
Saint snorted down the line. “Sure, why not? Highly decorated sniper playing clay pigeon. Really feel like I’m living up to my full potential here.”
“Your mother would be so—” She shoved the baton and managed to pry the doors open far enough to dive through and book it for the stairwell. “—proud,” she grunted as she slammed the open door shut. Dead bolt, check, but she slapped a charge grenade on the handle for good measure. Door was too light to be solid metal, probably layered fiber and some kind of thermosetting resin. Not conductive. That handle, though, was a different story.
The grenade beeped a warning, but it was a few seconds too late for whoever shouted on the other side. That thump sounded awfully person-shaped. “I get one?”
“Sounds like,” Saint said. “Forgot to say clear, Doc. Hippocratic something something, do no harm.”
She snorted, jogging back down the elevator bay toward the hall. Chiclet mapped out the floor ahead of her, but it felt like she’d mapped it out herself. Knew the hall before she turned the corner, knew the conference room behind the translucent doors before she passed them. “That’s patients. I don’t have patients.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“With a T, you dick,” she growled.
Eoan didn’t have a throat to clear, but as always, they made do. “One down, four security officers and an agitator with the high ground to go.” Their voice sounded weird. False-cheery, and yeah, all their tones and timbres were, by definition, artificial, but this one sounded forced. Made Nash wonder if they’d heard something on Jal, or if it was something else. That indescribable shift she’d noticed earlier … Eoan had never liked putting Saint and Nash in danger, but it’d never tripped them up before.
What the hell happened to you on Noether? she wanted to ask, but no; better to focus. Better to let Saint focus, too, on keeping Drestyn’s other friend occupied, because as soon as they figured out the rest of the door wasn’t zappy, it wouldn’t hold them long. “Saint, be ready. As soon as Nash gets cover and a visual on Drestyn, we’ll need you up here. I’ll disable the charge grenade when you’re close.”
“Do you have to?” Nash teased, a little breathlessly, and Saint’s snort nearly disappeared into the fizzle and pop of gunfire behind the door, echoing louder and louder through his comms. He was gaining ground. Getting ready. Good, but maybe not good enough. “Gonna put a rush on that, McBlastinshit,” she said. “I found Drestyn. Anke too. Got them in the office, at Yarden’s console, but they definitely know I’m here.” If by some miracle they hadn’t heard the door slam or their person get zapped, they were still bound to see her on the cameras. “Think Drestyn’s headed this way.” Silent as the grave, and still out of sight around the corner, but her little fly on the wall was hard to fool. He probably figured he’d corner Nash in the lobby. Stairwell was covered, and the elevator shaft was a death sentence. Straight line all the way down—somebody like Dresytn could make that shot with his eyes closed.
“Cover?” Eoan asked. Fretting was usually more Saint’s gig, but it sounded like he had his hands full.
“Working on it,” she said, crossing to the other side of the lobby. She had the whole floor etched in her head, every corner and cranny imprinted in her mind’s eye like something from a dream. Perception without sense. Without sight, sound, feel, just feedback filtered straight through her augments. Wasn’t practical for big spaces or quick jobs, but with a bit of a head start and only three rooms to scope, couldn’t beat it. “Should be right about…” She trailed her fingers along the wall until her fingertips caught the barest trace of a seam in the mock-wood panels. “Here.” She pushed, and something clicked soft and satisfying in the wall behind her fingers. Which, as she’d guessed, wasn’t a wall at all.
The panel swung open into the conference room beyond, and Nash wasted no time ducking in and toppling the wet bar beside it for a makeshift barricade. “Hospitality entrance.” For all the staff comings and goings they didn’t want popping up in a vid conference. Aftermarket, so it wasn’t on the floor plans, and camouflaged to keep from disrupting the carefully manicured design of the room, but like she said: her augments were a lot harder to fool than her other five senses. Chiclet caught the shifting airflow, and she made an educated guess.
Shiny crystal decanters shattered, slicking the floor with blur, as she scrambled over to the conference table. No time, no time. She threw her full weight into it, and after the first lurch from object at rest to object in motion, it slid across the conference room to wedge neatly against the hallway doors.
Made it.
The way Drestyn moved reminded her of Saint. No trace of Saint’s military background, but he had the same efficiency. Fluid, from the heel-toe roll of his boots to the steady sweep of his gunsight over the hall. So completely in control of his body that she’d barely registered his eyes on her through the translucent hologlass before his gun sighted straight at her. Two shots, head and chest—or they would’ve been, if they hadn’t pinged off the hologlass with the rainbow ripple of a layered screen.
“You knew it was bulletproof, right?” Eoan said, though they didn’t sound sure.
Nash smiled.
Drestyn’s jaw twitched.
The race was on.
The hospitality entrance had a twin on the other side of the conference room, straight into Yarden’s office. Coffee, food delivery … she tried not to think of the other uses for a secret door into a sleazeball’s penthouse office as she shouldered it open. And the hacker makes two, she thought, because there she was. Anke had claimed Yarden’s desk, hunched over the controls like they belonged to her. Nash wasn’t even sure she heard Nash come in; there was something on the screen, someone talking over the speakers. Male, unaccented, unless private school legacy counted as an accent. Nash’s chest squeezed at the sight of her, but she shook it off hard as the sound of fast-approaching footsteps reached from the other side of the office. Still no time, but she’d come prepared.
“Cap, how about some rain?” Because Anke had the building’s security on lock, and much as Nash would’ve paid to see a cyber smackdown between her and Cap, playtime was over. Fight the enemy where they aren’t.
She’d patched Cap into the life support systems instead.
With a hiss of pressured pipes, a half-dozen fire suppression sprinklers dropped from the ceiling, spewing cascades of water across the office. Shelves, desk, floors, people—a half second, and everything was drenched.
Drestyn’s boots splashed across the threshold. “Stop.” Nash didn’t need to look at him to know that Drestyn had her in his sights. That was definitely a locked, loaded, and fully pissed-off stop. “Drop the weapon.”
“Don’t think you want me to do that,” Nash said. “It’s a shock baton, smiley. Society might’ve moved past the days of water-soluble electronics, but there’s enough amps in this thing to short the whole system, and we’re standing in a giant conductor.” She held her baton out over the shimmering surface of the tile. A threat and a promise. “I drop it, you drop me—either way, you’ll have a damn hard time with your hostage situation when all your tech’s fried to a—”
“Wait!” Anke stood so fast from her chair that she sent it rolling backward into the bookshelves. Eyes wide behind water-spotted glasses, chest heaving, face pale … she looked stricken. Scared. “Both of you, wait! Nash.” She hissed Nash’s name so urgently that Nash had to listen. In spite of everything, in spite of the hurt and the betrayal and the gnarled tangle of briars squeezing between her ribs, she couldn’t have possibly done otherwise. “You can’t fry the systems.”
“All evidence to the contrary.”
“No,” Anke said, but it sounded like a plea. “You don’t understand. We missed something. All of us, we—”
Even Drestyn looked confused, though his aim never wavered. “What are you talking about?”
“Yarden.” The sprinklers plastered Anke’s hair to her face, rivulets of water streaming like tears down her cheeks. She looked so small, there at that console. So small, but so goddamn sure. “He said—you can’t fry the computers, all right? If you do … Nash, if you do,” she said on a shuddering breath, “the whole station’s going to die.”
ANKE
Nash didn’t believe her. Anke could tell, could see the doubt clouding those clear eyes, and she couldn’t blame her. I wouldn’t believe me, either. Not after what she’d done.
She didn’t have time for disbelief, though. None of them did.
“I know,” she said. “I know, and I’m not asking you to trust me. Just listen.” She had Yarden muted, figured he didn’t need to be privy to the topside drama, but it was the work of a couple of keystrokes to get his mics live again. “Say it again,” she told him, dragging her chair back under her and sliding back up to the console. She had work to do.
“What?”
“What you told me just now. Say it again.” Where they can hear you. Leave it to Drestyn to be halfway down the hall when shit hit the fan. Nash was a problem, yeah, but this … this changed everything. “Now!”
Any other time, she might’ve enjoyed the way Yarden’s composure had slipped. Hair a mess, shirt collar unbuttoned and dark with sweat. Sure, he puffed his chest and kept his chin up high, but fear had a funny way of bleeding through.
If only they weren’t as boned as he was.
Yarden cleared his throat. “I said we could help each other. We—”
“No!” Anke snapped. “Cut the shit and tell them what you told me! The fire.”
“The what?” Nash said. Skepticism aside, it seemed she at least had Nash’s attention. A good start.
“Fire,” said Yarden tightly. He had the same ticking clock in his head that Anke did, but the timing wouldn’t matter if Anke couldn’t get everyone on board. She couldn’t do this without them. “Officially, it’s a demolition system, in the event the station is ever decommissioned or condemned. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to scrap and ship an entire station to a waste processor? Prohibitively. But the Union penalties for abandoning large spacecrafts is absurd. Just a blatant grab for capital, if you ask—”
“We didn’t.” A faint line drew itself between Drestyn’s eyebrows. Nothing else in his expression changed, not his grip on his gun or the set of his jaw, but those eyebrows always gave him away. “You’re wasting time. Anke, plug in the drive.”
“No, no, wait!” There it was—that fear she’d seen in Yarden, bubbling to the surface. “You do that, you’re killing yourselves, too. The demolition device feeds into the station’s life support, floods the entire station with a highly combustible gas. One spark, and poof. Enough heat and pressure that Lewaro will be nothing but calx and ash. And,” he added, “this panic pod. When the demolition protocol triggers, this pod will automatically eject from the station. Separate life support system, enough supplies to sustain a ten-soul crew.”
“The Trust is going to detonate the station?” Nash shook her head. “Of course they are. Couldn’t let you shitbags have all the fun.”
“Have all the—wait.” Anke paused to bump her glasses back up her nose. All the better to gape at you with, my dear. Because seriously, no way. “You thought we were gonna nuke the whole station?” Something in her shriveled at the thought, repulsed. “We weren’t—we were never—” Full sentences would probably help. “We knew Yarden had a panic room. Practically threw rocks at his window and shouted, Go hide, Mister Rich Evil Dude. The copy of the Deadworld Code is for him—preprogrammed the console and everything. You plug that drive in, the virus goes straight down to Yarden. Full stop.” She could hardly believe she had to ask, but, “You really think I would do something like that?”
“I don’t know what you would do,” Nash said. “I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you.” And it was fair. Anke deserved so much worse than a few barbed words, but God, that didn’t make them hurt any less. Especially coming from her.
She took a breath. “I’m not asking you to trust me. Or to trust Yarden,” because she wasn’t where she ranked against him, but it didn’t seem smart to assume. “I’ve opened up the security network; Eoan’s free to check it out themself. But they’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you: the countdown’s already started. If we don’t stop the demo, this whole station’s going to blow.”
“Cap?” Nash asked, quieter; meant for her earpiece, Anke thought, and not the room proper. Anke had only been on the Ambit a couple of weeks, but she still half-expected to hear Eoan’s answer floating from the room’s speakers. Instead, silence, until the sprinklers suddenly halted and Nash’s shoulders fell. Forced calm and Nash’s usual aplomb—getting her game face on. “All right,” she said, so Anke assumed that meant it all checked out. For better or for worse, they’d decided she wasn’t lying. “So how do we stop it?”
“You can’t stop it,” Yarden snapped. “You really think the Trust wouldn’t build in fail-safes? You kill it at the console, it’ll trigger manually at the life support pumps. Even I don’t have the key to abort. Your best chance is this pod, which stops being a chance the second it becomes nonviable. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Anke opened her mouth, but Drestyn spoke first. “How much time do we have?” Even-keel and a level head; if Anke didn’t know better, she’d wonder if he even understood what was happening. The Trust was gonna atomize the station with them inside, and the only safe space was the panic room they planned to infect with the Deadworld Code.
But she did know better. Drestyn understood perfectly. He knew better than most what the Trust was capable of, the kind of damage they could inflict. They’d already blown up his world once. He just wasn’t afraid of the fire anymore.
“It triggered as soon as we picked you up on facial rec. There’s a programmed half hour to make arrangements for evac.”
“Half an hour for you to get your ass in the clear.” Nash shook her head, though Anke had already killed the camera feeds from the office. Somehow Anke didn’t think it was for Yarden’s benefit. “Just when you think you company pricks can’t get any worse.”
“Say what you like. This panic room is the only thing that can save you from a no-doubt promising future as star dust, and that virus—”
“The Trust’s virus,” said Drestyn. “Say it, Yarden. Own it or die with it. I won’t tell you which I’d rather.”
Clearly, Yarden knew which he’d rather. “The Trust’s virus,” he ground out. His chin quivered as he spoke, as if it took every muscle in his body to say the words, mouth pursed as if the taste of them soured his tongue. He’d held the company line this long and made out like a king. Probably hard to break the habit, even to save his own skin. “The Deadworld Code. Call it whatever the fuck you want. If you sic it on the life support systems of this pod, you’re not just killing me; you’re killing yourselves. And then what’s the point of this whole intrepid scheme of yours? No proof. No one left to tell the story. A terrible accident to be sure, reparations to be paid to grieving families, and the Union will get its piece of the payout, of course. But the tide of progress rolls on, as it always has. As it always will.”
It was a hell of a speech, Anke would give him that, but Drestyn was unmoved. He was mercury, liquid and cool. “Did you get all that?” he asked Anke.
She managed a stiff, confused nod. “Backed up to my GLASS.” For whatever good it would do them. Somehow she suspected her replacement tablet wouldn’t survive a thorough immolation any better than she would.
“A confession. That’s what you’re worried about?” Nash started toward the console, but the sharp crack of gunfire stopped her short. A vase on the shelf behind her exploded in a shower of painted clay, but a breath to the right and that bullet would’ve hit meat. “What the fuck is your problem?” Nash snapped.
Drestyn’s finger lay steady on the trigger. “Yarden’s right about one thing. We die here without a word to the rest of the spiral, the truth dies with us. Nothing changes. But by my count, we have twelve minutes to ignition.”
“Eleven minutes, forty-three seconds,” Anke said, uneasily.
He acknowledged her with a nod. “We may not be able to stop the demo, but Anke, if you can crack the signal jammer, we can still get the word out. A comm packet with the Deadworld Code script, Yarden’s confession, coordinates for the other planets—whatever you can put together and ship out. If we die, we don’t die for nothing.”
“Nobody has to die!” Nash said. “Any time she’d spend cracking the jammer is time she could spend hacking the demolition protocol.”
“And then what? The fail-safes kick in, and the station burns anyway,” Drestyn said, gun still leveled at the center of Nash’s chest.
Nash didn’t even blink. “So we stop the fail-safes, too.”
“You try. Maybe you pull it off, but far more likely, you waste the only chance we have to save millions just to make yourselves feel better,” Drestyn said, not without sympathy. He gestured broadly to the window. “I know those people out there don’t deserve to die, Anke. You don’t deserve it. Your friends and mine, none of them deserve it.” Anke couldn’t help noticing he didn’t put himself on that list. “Neither did those people on Noether, or the trading depot, or the countless other planets that have or will fall prey to this monster they’ve created, and I wish it were simpler. I wish we could save everyone, I do.” She knew he meant it. The way his eyes shined, the fervor in his voice—he wasn’t an evil man, or a cruel man. Just a practical one. “But there’s a reason they call it sacrifice.”
Anke didn’t know what to say to that. How could she make that kind of choice? To weigh all the lives on the station with all the lives they could save by taking the Deadworld Code off the board.
Fortunately, Nash found her voice just fine. “Fuck you.” Brisk and razor-edged, completely uncaring of Drestyn’s gun sighted down her sternum. “You want to let a hundred thousand people burn because you think it’s for the greater good. That ain’t sacrifice, sunshine; that’s playing god.” The words were sharp, meant to cut; but underneath, Anke felt like Nash was the one bleeding. “We know better. All of us—we’ve seen sacrifice, real sacrifice. It’s personal, and it’s messy, and it’s painful. It’s cutting out your own heart to keep someone else’s beating. Giving up the one thing that means more to you than anything else, because you can’t bear to watch someone else lose what matters to them. It’s throwing yourself off a goddamn ledge”—her fists clenched, baton trembling faintly with the force of her grip—“not knowing if you’ll survive the fall, not knowing if it’ll help, not knowing if it’ll be worth it, and doing it anyway, because it’s the right fucking thing to do.
“So if we’re talking sacrifice here, Anke,” and for a handful of seconds, Anke and Nash were the only ones in the room. The gravity of Nash’s stare, the intensity, gripped Anke’s core and held tight, and she wasn’t even sure she breathed as Nash finished, “Then you know what we have to do.”
We. Maybe it was just a slip of the tongue, but Nash chose her words with the same brutal precision she did everything else. It meant something to her.
It meant something for Anke, too.
It’s not too late to do the right thing. A ferocious oversimplification. The right thing was like Schrödinger’s cat; you really only knew what was what when the lid came off. Truth was, she didn’t know the right thing to do.
But she knew the wrong thing. It lived in that horrible, sinking pit in her stomach when she’d watched Jal disappear over the roof’s edge, and she felt it now, with her fingers poised over the keys, ready to either hack the jammers or take a crack at the station’s self-destruct.
Right or wrong. Alive or dead. Time to open that box.
“I’m in.”
Drestyn already seemed to know the choice she’d make. Perceptive, decisive—good traits in a partner, not so good in a partner-turned-nemesis. Did people even have nemesises anymore? Nemeses? Bloody hell, he was fast. He’d crossed half the distance to the desk by her first keystroke and closed it completely by the second, and she didn’t even have time to wonder what he was gonna do before he’d already done it.
The GLASS disappeared from her hands, the Deadworld drive was in the port, and Drestyn—
“Holy shit,” she gasped as Drestyn dove through the open doorway behind the bookshelf. The doorway to the panic room shaft. The plummet to your death doorway. There he went, leaping through it like he was about to tuck in for the most badass double-somersault cannonball. For a heart-stopping second, Anke was certain she’d hear the meaty, vaguely squishy thwap of body meeting floor at terminal velocity. Again. She started to brace, but a beat later a click echoed up from the shaft, trailed by the friction-y zrrrrpt of a zip line clip on a woven cable.
So, not a picketer pancake.
Nash stared at her flatly when she turned back around. “No, you’re right,” Anke said, though Nash hadn’t actually said anything. Hadn’t really needed to. Her expression, as the saying went, contained volumes. Anke bit her lip, dragging the console keyboard into the space her GLASS used to be and picking up the superspeed scripting right where she’d left off. “Totally see my mistake. Should’ve been, like, three hundred percent subtler on the double cross. Triple cross? Honestly, I’m having a really hard time keeping up here.”
“Whose fault is that?”
Anke glanced up over the rims of her glasses. “Ouch.” Nash’s very determined, very drippy face held no sympathy, though. “I deserve that. I deserve way worse, but at the risk of sounding like I’m trying to avoid the conversation, would now be a good time to point out that Drestyn loosed the Deadworld Code in Yarden’s hidey-hole and we have”—a quick glance at the screen—“less than nine minutes now to stop the station from going boom?”
“So un-loose it,” Nash said. “Yarden can’t die. He knows more about the Trust’s movements in the frontier, and he’s not allowed to croak ’til we wring every bit of it out of him.”
“In that case, you’re gonna want to get to him pronto, ’cause the patch is a no-go. Even if you had it preloaded on a drive in that very fashionable boiler suit, it’d take me at least five minutes to get it up and running, and that’s five minutes I desperately need to be spending keeping the entire station from exploding.” Yarden didn’t get to jump the line ahead of everyone on that station, and she needed every second she could get.
“No, the only way to get him out of that box is to unlock it,” she said, decisively. “Which I wouldn’t recommend even if I could do it. Pretty sure the only thing that’d kill him faster than some quality time in a locked room with the Deadworld Code is some quality time in an unlocked room with Drestyn. Man’s serious about his rebel ways, but he’s got an itch that only hard-core vengeance can scratch.”
“Should we tell Yarden that?” Nash asked.
Anke shook her head. “Can’t. I’ve got cameras in the safe room, but zero comms.” Score one for her Deadworld kills the comms theory. “Not sure he needs the warning, though. Yarden’s a gelatinous glob of garbage juice, but he’s not stupid; keeping a locked door between him and Drestyn for as long as possible seems like pretty solid survival strategy. Long as we can get to him before his clock runs out, I wouldn’t worry about it.” Pause for gasps: Anneka Ahlstrom, not worrying about something.
She just didn’t have the bandwidth. Too much to do, no time to do it. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a secret twin somewhere,” she said. “’Cause somebody’s got to get Yarden before he bites the big one, somebody’s got to get the blow-shit-up tanks, and I can’t leave this console.” Too busy firing off command lines like bullets from a semi-auto assault rifle. The fail-safe wouldn’t matter if she couldn’t kill the executable code. She hadn’t stopped typing the whole time she was talking. “We need to be in at least three places at once, and unless I’m way behind on my technological advances, we’re still a few decades shy of spontaneous human cloning!” All said in a single breath, no pauses, and there probably would’ve been more, if it weren’t for the smirk twitching at the corner of Nash’s mouth.
“We don’t need clones,” she said, stowing her shock baton in her bag. Her smirk inched higher, pride and purpose and a dash of pluck. Nash was always something else, but with a fire in her eyes, she was kind of breathtaking. “We’ve got a crew.”
A series of sure-footed splashes, and Nash moved into the space behind Anke’s chair to eye the screens. “Patch Eoan the rest of the way in. Full system access.” Nash gave orders like they were facts. Foregone conclusions, because only stupid people wouldn’t obey, and for all Anke’s faults and mistakes, she’d somehow made the short list of not stupid people.
By golly, in the time it took the words to register, Anke had already thrown open the proverbial back door for Eoan. “Mi space station administrator access es su space station administrator access, Cap,” she said, and got a polite, airless hum over the systemwide comms in response. How long would it take them to map the station’s entire infrastructure? A second? Maybe two, just to make Anke feel better about herself. She could hack with the best of them, but her human brain had limitations; Eoan had no such restrictions.
It felt good to be on their side again, even if there’d be hell to pay at the end of it. Or we’ll all die in a fiery explosion. No consequences if we all die in a fiery explosion. Embrace the positive mental attitude.
“Cap, you in?” Nash said.
“Thoroughly,” Eoan replied. “Between the two of us, we should have things sorted here. Anneka will direct you to the life support tanks.”
The sound of echoing gunshots cracked across the speakers. “Yeah, great,” Saint grunted. Anke guessed there wasn’t much point in keeping her out of their comm lines, now that they were all on Team No Go Boom. “I’ll just stay here with my thumb up my ass!”
“Think Saint’s done playing decoy, Cap,” Nash said. “Hey McBlastinshit, Drestyn’s making a run for Yarden’s panic room. Up for a game of fetch?” A game, she said, with such quiet viciousness that it sent a chill up Anke’s spine.
Saint’s answering growl was worse. Savage, almost subvocal, rumbling across the comms. “I’m on my way.”
His comms went quiet, and Anke swore she heard her own throat click as she swallowed. “He’s just going to catch him.” Right?
Nash only leaned forward over the back of Anke’s chair, grip white-knuckled on the desk’s edge. “There’s no neutral ground, here, Ahlstrom,” Nash said in her ear, voice as cold as the sprinkler water dripping down Anke’s neck. “We’ve picked our sides. Which one are you on?”
The one that saves lives. She knew it wasn’t the answer to the question Nash had asked; maybe it wasn’t an answer to anything at all. Just a hope. Just a choice.
“Eight minutes and counting,” she said instead, cracking her knuckles and bumping her glasses back up her nose. “Let’s do this.”