SAINT
A man like Saint didn’t get satisfaction. Doing what he’d done for as long as he’d done it, he knew there wasn’t a damn thing that could bring him peace for what he’d lost. What he still stood to lose. Taking down Drestyn, that wasn’t going to undo what’d happened on Noether. It wouldn’t put Jal’s broken body back together or wash the memory of his blood, slick and searing, off Saint’s hands. All that was wrong, it wasn’t gonna right.
But it would square it. Eye for an eye, and folks could philosophize all they wanted, but the world was already blind. Had to be, because the good ones got hurt and the bad ones, the bent ones, the busted-up old broken ones like Saint, got to keep going. A simple man’s justice—it wasn’t all he wanted, but it was the very least he’d settle for.
Drestyn’s man in the stairwell made a decent start.
It didn’t take much. He’d seen it before: some men just didn’t have the patience for the bird’s nest. Got so caught up in shooting that they forgot there might be shots coming the other way, and after what felt like a fistful of eternity playing target practice in the stairwell, that head of his got awfully high over the railing. Squeeze. Bang. Drop.
See, Saint could be patient, when he had to be. From the sounds of things, though, his wait was nearly up.
“Drestyn’s man’s down,” he reported over comms as he jogged his way up the last few flights two, three stairs at a time.
“Down or down?” Saint’s molars still ground together when he heard Anke’s voice over their comms. She hadn’t fired a single shot, but every time he heard her, it set off a whisper in the back of his head. Her fault. Her fault. Her fault.
“Riot round.” In case he had to deal with any Trust security officers, not because he felt charitable. Drestyn’s man was out of the way. That was what mattered.
“What about the other one?” Nash, this time. She hit the elevator lobby right as he came through the door, soaked to the skin and ready to raise some hell.
He glanced back into the stairwell. “The other one?”
“Lady in a Trust security kit,” said Nash. “Zapped the shit out of her.”
“Marei.” Anke again, from down the hall this time. “Hang on, I can find her on the cams.”
“Not a priority,” said Eoan, crisply. “Nash, the elevator that’s just opened—you’ll take it down to the subbasement. Anneka will take it from there.”
Nash jerked her head in a nod, but Saint caught her arm before she ducked through the elevator doors.
“Careful,” he told her, voice low. He knew she could handle her shit; wasn’t anybody better than her at keeping themself out of trouble. But she was taking her cues from rosy-haired Judas, and Saint wasn’t losing anybody else. “Just watch your six.” Don’t trust her to do it for you. Even the smart crews made mistakes from time to time, but they sure as shit didn’t make them twice.
Nash’s eyes met his. Not a word of acknowledgment, but the swift jab she gave his shoulder was as good as one. Don’t forget, it said. I’m the brains of this operation. With a leveler head on her shoulders than Saint’d ever had.
She’d be fine.
“Into the office,” Eoan told him, and he left the lobby as the elevator doors slid closed. Pretty intuitive floor plan—straight down the hall into the office, and his eyes skimmed over Anke only in passing on the way to the hole in the wall behind her.
“Let me guess,” he said, crossing over to it. “Drestyn’s down there.” Through the hole, another goddamn elevator shaft plunged straight down into a coal-smudge dark. Didn’t even seem to have a bottom, just a pair of cables dangling an arm’s length from his nose. Taunting him. “Sure, why not? Starting to like heights.”
Nash snorted. “Bullshit.”
He clipped his carabiner to the nearest cable with a tight-lipped grin. “Bullshit,” he agreed, and down into the dark he went. His carabiner screamed against the braided metal cables, and stale air bit at his clothes, his skin, and everything else it could reach as he plummeted. Wasn’t so much a descent as a controlled fall, and not so controlled that his knees and ankles didn’t holler when his boots hit bottom. Too damn old for this. But his feet were on solid ground again—the roof of an elevator car, from the looks of it—and his stomach only took another second or two to catch up to the rest of him, so he shook it off and lowered himself into the car through the still-open hatch.
“All right?” Eoan asked as he wedged himself against the front panel. Somebody’d already pushed open the doors, and not too long ago judging from the boot prints still shining wetly on the rubberized floors.
“Peachy.” No sign of Drestyn outside. Not yet. Just … filing cabinets. A fuck-ton of filing cabinets, each nearly a full dec taller than Saint and arranged in rows across a room not much bigger than the Ambit’s galley. “What am I looking at here, Cap?”
“There’s nothing on the building schematics,” they replied. “Given the lack of cameras, the single secured entrance, and the archival décor, I expect it’s a hard copy record repository.”
“Hard copy as in paper?” The rapid-fire tap of keystrokes beat a busy tattoo in the background of Anke’s feed. “Who uses paper records anymore?”
“Can’t hack a Redweld,” Saint said, not all the way through his teeth but close enough that Nash would’ve hit him with a side-eye, if she’d been standing close enough.
As it was, she had to settle for a whistle. “Gotta be some damn ugly skeletons hiding in that closet. Anybody else wanna fuck around and find out?”
“Busy trying not to be one of those skeletons,” Saint murmured, darting out across the first aisleway. No security cameras meant Eoan couldn’t keep him out of trouble, and with a deadeye like Drestyn lurking somewhere close by, he wasn’t too keen to poke his head out around any corners. “Time check?”
“Seven minutes, twenty—”
“For Yarden,” Saint clarified. Anke and Nash would handle the self-destruct; nothing he could do about that. Yarden was his problem.
Eoan didn’t keep him waiting. “The atmo pumps in the panic room are drawing air from the fuel stores,” they said. “Hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, water.” White damp. He’d never had the pleasure, but he’d heard stories. So many ways a ship could kill a man. Suddenly the Ambit’s electrified floors didn’t seem so bad. “More variables than your average suffocation, but at the present asphyxiant saturation, I estimate he’ll be unconscious in six minutes or less.”
Or less. “Not very precise, Cap,” Saint said.
“Human physiology isn’t very precise.” Accusatory, like what they really wanted to say was, It’s you ridiculous man-apes screwing with my math. “Another minute or two, and you can expect significant brain damage or death.” Eoan spoke quickly and clearly, but in their I’m multitasking voice. They weren’t just running numbers; they were running whole scenarios. Open the door now, what happens? One minute? Five minutes? Weighing the variables, the outcomes. If they didn’t open the door eventually, Yarden would choke. If they opened it too early and Drestyn got in, he’d eat a bullet. Either way, Drestyn got something he wanted. Either way, he’d fucking win.
Saint couldn’t let that fly.
“Fuck it.” He dove across the rest of the aisles in a madman’s dash, sliding into place against the very last row of cabinets as the first bullets pinged against the other side. Music to his ears. Meant he was close. There you are. Drestyn had hunkered down somewhere at the other end of the row. Two crack shots with an open aisle between them. It happened to every sniper at some point—staring out across a valley, a bustling street, a sprawling roofline, and you feel it: that unmistakable prickle between your shoulders that means you’re in somebody else’s scope. Only one way that ended. May the best man win.
He dropped his back against the cabinets and grinned into the dark. “Found Drestyn, Cap,” he said. They’d done their job. They’d gotten him where he needed to be. “I’ll take it from here.”
NASH
Nash’s foot bounced impatiently on the mock-wood floor, wildly out of time with the music crooning through the elevator speakers. What kind of bland-ass bossa nova bullshit is this? Hell wasn’t a place; it was fifty stories of relentlessly upbeat elevator music. “You found Drestyn?” Bang, ba-bang, bang, bang, right in her earhole. She’d worked with Saint long enough to know he wasn’t the one shooting; didn’t have the right rhythm. Saint didn’t syncopate. “Sounds more like he found you.”
“That too.” Calm, cool, collected. Not adjectives that usually belonged to men under heavy suppressive fire from an ace marksman, but she had her comfort zones and Saint had his.
For the record, waiting in an elevator while shit went down for everybody else? Not her comfort zone. “Can’t this thing go any faster?”
“Sure, if you want to break it and fall to your death in a glorified shoebox,” said Anke, fingers tapping feverishly in the background. The sound made Nash’s eye twitch. “You’re almost there, just sit tight.”
“Should’ve just rappelled,” she muttered.
The line switched again, back to Saint and his gunshots. “Overrated.” Bang, ba-bang, bang, bang.
First item on her to-do list after all this: better noise cancellation for the comms. She was starting to get whiplash.
Starting to get goddamn impatient, too. “Anke—”
“There!” Anke exclaimed.
Nash stood up straighter. “There? You stopped the self-destruct?”
“What? No. There. You’re there.” Ding went the elevator, almost on cue. “Lift should let out in the support systems bay. It’s, like, seriously the biggest room I’ve seen in my entire life, but be not afraid—looks like it’s arranged on a grid system. Sections numbered and lettered. Think reference section at a library.”
“You balk at paper records, but you frequent library reference sections?”
“Print books are a totally different vibe. Don’t judge.” As if there weren’t a thousand other things she’d judge Anke for before she judged her taste in reading material. “You’re looking for section C-Eleven. Should be a pair of tanks. Not very big, compared to some of the others in there, but you know—size isn’t everything. Wait.”
Nash had a feeling she already knew what Anke was going to say. A dozen decs away, a pair of security officers had apparently noticed her arrival. They started toward her, guns on hips and frowns on faces.
She matched their frowns with one of her own—one that said, I’m meant to be here, but I’m not fucking happy about it. Good news was, Anke was right about the layout. Each column had a painted sign at eye level, A-5, A-6, A-7, and more signs hung between the many-colored pipes bending and stretching their way across the high ceiling. Made it a hell of a lot easier to look like somebody with clearance when she knew where she was going.
“Fancrapstic,” she heard Anke whisper. “Just stall them for a second and I can gen up an ID for your GLASS—”
“I got it. Keep working on the override.” Let Nash handle the see something, say something boys; Anke had more important work.
Up ahead, one of the security officers’ hands fell to his holster. “You’re not supposed to be down here.”
Nash made a show of looking around. Gunmetal-gray walls with splashes of bright yellows and reds for signage. Caution. Danger. Her personal favorite, DO NOT CLIMB IN THE TANK, on the nose of a gargantuan rig labeled BIOGAS DIGESTER. Basically, don’t climb in the shit tank. Had to be a story behind a sign like that. She kinda wanted to know it.
Something told her the S4 boys wouldn’t be up for story time. Shame. “I don’t know,” she told them. “This looks like the right place. Got a ping about a leaky pipe. Hope it’s not that one,” she added, jabbing a thumb at the digester.
She could almost hear the whistle as it soared over their heads.
“You got ID?” said the officer who’d already spoken. Apparently he was the talker of the duo. She dubbed him Number One.
One out of two ain’t bad, big guy. “Sure hope so,” she said, grabbing her GLASS out of her armband holder and holding it out to them. Little closer. Little closer. As soon as Number One reached out to take it, she had him. Grabbed his wrist and yanked him into her thrust-up knee, and when the groin shot doubled him over, she slammed his head sideways into one of those columns. A-6. With a pivot on her back foot, she rode the momentum a full 360 and hooked a spin kick into the back of Number Two’s head.
The metal of the column rang dully as the officers crumpled at her feet. “C-Eleven, you said?” she asked, stepping over them and jogging on her way. “Status check?”
“Typing my little fingers off and trying not to hyperventilate,” Anke replied.
“I meant on the self-destruct.”
Anke made a noise that could’ve been a hiccup or a giggle. “Right, I mean, I’m close to wrapping up here. If you’d asked me a few weeks ago, I’d have said this is some nasty code, but after a week of Deadworld diving, this is basically eight-bit. Gonna Frogger this bitch like it’s 1981. I’m the car in this analogy, so we’re clear.” It was like she didn’t even need to breathe. Like those hard-core musicians who learned to inhale through their nose at the same time they exhaled through their mouths, so they never had to stop making noise. “And hey—you’re downstairs and ready to make shit happen, which is great. Only a little over seven minutes ’til blow time, which is less great. Also, blow time sounds super weird, so I’m sorry I even said it. Where are you?”
“A-Ten, I think.” While the section system was easy enough to follow, each section was about a hundred decs across, so it was gonna take a goddamn second. She ran as fast as her legs would carry her, whipping past tanks and fans and clusters of tubing as big around as she was. The place was a monument to engineering. Under different circumstances, she could’ve spent whole days nerding out over every section, admiring the clever machinations that kept such a massive station up and running.
Under the present circumstances, she barely had time to check she’d hit row eleven before she ducked between a couple of humming hydropumps on her way to the Cs. The floor vibrated with the force of so many moving parts. Steam and smoke made the air heavy, brought to life with the roar of a whole station’s insides. Each pump and fan and filter was an organ—heart, lungs, liver, beating and pulsing and sustaining, and the Trust had buried its bomb right at the center of it. Anybody asked, they’d say it was a requirement. Gotta have it. Rules are rules. And if it just happened to malfunction, well, whose fault was it really? The Trust was just doing what they were told. Brought a whole new meaning to malicious compliance.
“Okay,” Nash panted as she slid to a stop in one of the narrow walkways. A sign overhead read C-11, but this machine had no label. No title. It didn’t hum or rattle or hiss. It sat there, waiting. An aneurism. Biding its time. “I’m here.”
“Give me a second,” said Anke.
“We don’t have a whole lot of those.” This was a wicked beastie. Dozens of cylindrical tanks feeding into a pair of drums—mixers, to get the right chemicals in the right proportions for the right effect, before it flushed it through the dozens of innocuous gray pipes rising from the machine. Must’ve fed into every system on the station. Every structure, every room. At the front of it all, a control panel teased a big red SHUTDOWN switch, but when she went to pull it, “Ah, shit.”
“Shit what? What shit?”
“There’s a fucking key,” Nash said. Not a password, not a bio reader. An actual hole for an actual key that she didn’t have. “Okay.” She would make it okay. “Plan B. Control panel’s locked down, so I’m gonna have to open her up. Just tell me when I’m good to work,” she said, dropping her bag off her shoulder and shimmying in between the gaps in the tanks. “Might have to rearrange some shit in here, don’t want to step on your toes.”
“Please be careful,” said Anke.
“I said I’d wait.”
“No, I meant you.” Taptaptaptaptap. “You’re sitting in the middle of a metric ass-load of toxic gas and an igniter. You clip the wrong thing and—okay!”
“Okay as in—?”
“Done! Donezo. The code is my bitch and I am its queen and you’re up to bat so swing, batter, batter. And do it fast, because you’ve got incoming. Major incoming.”
Nash swore under her breath and kneeled behind the console. “I need a number.”
“Five, no. Six. Seven?”
“You asking or telling?”
“I don’t know. They’re, like, popping out of the ground or something. Do you have any idea how big the subbasement is? Probably been down there the whole time.”
Of course they have. If Nash had built a space station, she’d want her life support systems buttoned up tight, too. Definitely practical. Fucking inconvenient, though. “I need you to hold them off.”
“Sure.” Anke inhaled, exhaled, inhaled again. “Sure, yeah, I can do that. How long?”
“Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds until immolation,” Eoan offered helpfully.
Nash rapped a knuckle against the back of the control panel. Low-pitched ring, thick metal. Hello, plasma torch. “Less than four minutes and twenty-seven seconds, then,” she said. Four and a half minutes to disarm a bomb the size of the Ambit’s whole-ass engine with seven—question mark—bogeys incoming. The casing of the panel fell out in a neat-cut square, exposing a belly full of wires and switches.
Just not the ones she needed.
“Wrinkle,” she said. “I’m seeing some flow control circuits for the drums and maybe the igniter, but I’ve got fuck-all for the chem tanks. Meaning,” she added before Anke could ask, because even her inhale sounded confused, “when the clock hits zero, the gas is coming out of those tanks. Period.” Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
No.
Don’t freak out.
Think, Nash.
Eoan said, “I’ve got your bodycam feeds, dear. Is there something I can do?”
Was there? Nash closed her eyes, tried to remember the front of the machine. What did you see? Gauges. Pipes. No valve handles on the gas tanks, but maybe on the intake for the drum? And if she could manually adjust the flow …
She sat up like a bolt and nearly brained herself on a row of pipes. “Cap, I need burn rates on the chems,” she said quickly. Eoan could keep up. “And max pressure on those pipes. How low can those valves go before something pops?”
“Oh, I see,” said Eoan. Of course they did. “Controlled burn?”
“Exactly.” Like gas flaring, but with something a whole lot meaner than methane. “Torch it before it torches us.” So buckle up, buttercups. She had a hell of a lot of work to do.
SAINT
Drestyn was a son of a bitch, but man, he could shoot.
He’d turned the filing cabinet into a target at the gun range, dented and shot-through and chewed to hell. Just a few shots at a time, enough to keep Saint pinned down at the end of the row. Low. High. Shallow. Deep. No way to guess exactly where the shots came from, or where the next ones would go, and Saint swore the echoes of one round hardly faded before the next one came. No time to stick so much as a toe out past the cabinet, unless he wanted to lose it.
He kind of liked his toes. Maybe not a top ten body part, if he had to rank ’em, but what could he say? He was still kind of attached.
“Saint?” Unexpected—a voice from the other end of the aisle, instead of another spattering of bullets. Drestyn. “You’re Saint, right? The one inside the ship. I heard the blond one say your name before—”
“Shouldn’t finish that sentence,” Saint interrupted gruffly. No good way to end it. Before I shot him. Before he fell. Another few rounds nipped the side of the filing cabinet. Don’t get any ideas, those bullets said, and just for now, Saint listened.
“Understood,” Drestyn said through the echo. Not over, but through—he didn’t have to raise his voice to make it carry; he just spoke, and every other sound seemed to make room. Hush up now, the preacher’s talking. “Just wondering how long you think Yarden has left.”
“Not very,” Eoan offered helpfully in Saint’s ear. “Two minutes at the most, but I’d expect less. He’s altered. Agitated. I think he can hear you through the door.”
Drestyn probably planned it that way, or he wouldn’t have kept talking. Risky move, making noise like that. The bullets might not’ve given him away, but if Saint listened close enough to the sound of his voice, the shape of it among the dim-lit shelves, he could start to make out whereabouts Drestyn stood. Not on the other end of the filing cabinets, like he’d thought, but closer to the middle of the aisle. A doorway, maybe. Probably some kind of antechamber between the archive and Yarden’s safe room.
Hell of a risk, but Drestyn must’ve thought it was worth it. “I’ve got it down to seconds.” He said it to Saint, but for Yarden. Dripping poison in his ear. “Can’t say it’s more than an educated guess, but I’ve seen what this thing does. How it works. Never the same way twice, but always fast. It’s the air, isn’t it?” he asked. That one might’ve been aimed at Yarden outright. “Bad way to go, suffocation. Feels like your lungs are peeling themselves from the inside out. Like your eyes are going to burst in their sockets. The panic sets in … I’ve seen men claw their own throats bloody before their hearts finally gave out. So, by all means, stay in there. Stay and fucking rot.” It hit Saint’s ears off-key, the profanity in his crisp, cool tone. His creek-water voice, a baptism of words, hot with brimstone. “My brother was a good man; he’d have wanted it over quick, even for someone like you. But he’s not here, and I’m not him. So if you want to make it last, Yarden?” Drestyn called from the end of the aisle. “If you want to make it hurt? Well, that’d be just fine.”
You didn’t hurt a man like Yarden with a gun, or even with the code. Fear was the weapon you used against a man like Yarden—a man who’d never met a responsibility he couldn’t shirk, a consequence he couldn’t avoid. Fear was how you got at a man who’d never been brave a day in his life, and Drestyn knew it.
“Saint, you’re out of time.” Eoan’s warning was whip-quick in his ear. “He’s going for the door.” If Saint was right about Drestyn’s roost, no way he’d miss that shot.
Saint couldn’t let him take it.
“Just say when,” he ground through his teeth, pushing up from his crouch. Getting ready to move. “Don’t do it, Drestyn!” he shouted, and it carried not because the air parted or his voice was clear, but because he was a big fucking man with a big fucking mouth, and he wanted to make a big fucking racket. “He’ll get his.”
“How? Prison?” Drestyn’s laugh was airy, full of cordite and bitterness. “You think they send someone like him to the labor crews? Think a man like that does time? You’re not that naïve.”
No, he wasn’t. “So you kill him, and he’s a victim. A martyr. You think that sends a better message?”
“I’m not here to send a message. That’s an idealist’s game. You and I, we’re something else.”
Saint ducked as Drestyn loosed a few more bullets. High this time. The sparks off the cabinets fizzled at the corners of Saint’s eyes. “Killers?” he said.
“Pragmatists. Which.” Another gun-smoke laugh. “I suppose ends the same way, when you get right down to it. Some people just need killing. Surely we can agree on that much, at least.”
“He’s at the door,” Eoan said. “Hand’s on the handle. He’s hesitating.”
Come on, you spineless shit. Just a little longer. “You think I want to kill you?”
“I think it’d be mightily unwise of me to stick my head out past this doorway.” Drestyn sent three more shots into the filing cabinet by Saint’s shoulder. Damn near clipped his ear. “I don’t want to kill you, Saint, but I’m going to do what I have to do.” One more thing they could agree on. They were more mission than man, the two of them, and what mattered was seeing it through. “Yarden’s done too much damage. He’s hurt too many people, with the Deadworld Code and without it. You’re worried about a virus, but that man is a plague. So whatever else happens, he has to die.”
That was Drestyn’s mission. Not the confession, not the code—Yarden cold and rotting. Tough shit, Saint thought, curling his fingers in the handle of a drawer. They were well made, those cabinets. Deep and wide, dense metal in layers that didn’t always manage to stop Drestyn’s bullets, but at least seemed to slow them down. Saint had his own mission; he just needed the word. One word.
Interference fizzled faintly over Eoan’s comm line. Waiting. Not yet. Nearly. And as the next burst of bullets struck high against the cabinet’s corner, Eoan’s voice came crisp and even down the line.
“Now.”
Saint came out low, fired one shot. Squeeze. Bang. Drop. Just like Drestyn’s man in the stairs. He lingered just long enough to see Yarden and his lilac shirt crumple in the doorway of the panic room. Gravity and the force of a well-aimed riot round to the chest took him down fast—fast enough that Drestyn’s shots went high, over his head. He’d heard the door open and turned around expecting a running target, not a falling one, and Drestyn’s half second of furious confusion gave Saint all the opening he needed.
A hard yank, and he ripped the drawer clean out of the cabinet. Files scattered like playing cards at his moving feet, and an easy, familiar drawl echoed over the ringing in Saint’s ears. How many for poker again? That drawl, that ready smile, that warm-bright man from that cold-dark world who’d climbed too high and fallen too far, shot and bleeding and trapped out of reach because of Drestyn.
Saint hurled himself forward with a roar in his throat and the drawer raised like a shield, and the ping of bullets against metal was the pop, pop, pop of palm berries in his ear on a hot rooftop. A graze on the arm, a clean hit in the meat of his thigh, but they were the easy kind of pain. They bled; they healed; they scarred. What the hell was another scar to someone like him, when each step took him closer, and closer, and—
He slammed into Drestyn with a thundercrack of bending metal and rattling bones. No grace, no strategy. Just mass and speed hurled violently, artlessly into a half-braced rail of a man. Just an impact so fierce it carried them both off their feet, as the blinding white of the panic room reached out to swallow them whole.
Just the beginning of an end.
NASH
“Saint?” Nash called over the comms. She’d heard his shout, heard some kind of collision, then deafening silence. “Saint, are you—”
“He’s exactly where he needs to be, doing exactly what he needs to be doing,” Eoan interrupted quickly, stonily. They’d split the comms, Nash realized. Eyes on your own papers, dears. They cared; they did, and Nash never doubted it. They were also the captain, and part of that meant keeping all the parts moving, even if they had to move independently. “And right now, we all need you to do the same. You have ninety seconds before the fail-safe triggers.”
Nash gritted her teeth and yanked another wire. Quick and dirty. They didn’t have time for anything else. “I know, I know. Got a date with the mother of all hair spray cans and a lit match.” And a security officer, from the looks of things. Through the cage of tanks around her, she saw him approaching, dark uniform against the pale gray of the life support bay.
“You’re not authorized to be back there!” the officer called.
“No shit,” she called back. “FYI, everything in these tanks is hilariously explosive, so for both our sakes, I’d keep that pistol in your pocket, pal.” Lower, she said, “Anke, where the hell’s my backup?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Work faster.”
“When people tell you to work faster, does it actually help you work faster?” Anke shot back.
Nash paused with her multitool between her teeth and a pair of wires pinched between her fingers. “Good point.” Still, a little bit of double time would be real damn helpful. The officer moved closer, although with a reluctance that said he’d maybe taken the hilariously explosive thing to heart.
“Step out from the tanks with your hands raised.”
“I’d love to. Really.” She still had to get the flow rates into those drum tanks adjusted manually, and that wasn’t gonna happen from behind the control panel. “But I get the feeling you’re gonna make a run at me, and I’m not feeling a love tap from that Taser of yours.”
“Ma’am—”
“Seriously, Terry, I’m doing you a favor!” Spoken around the grip of her multitool, which at present played the role of laser solder on the wires she rearranged. Who needed a third hand when you had a very dexterous mandible? “Cap, I really need those numbers.”
“Sending them to your GLASS now.” Because it might’ve taken mere mortals hours to run those kinds of numbers but not Cap. Cap was a badass.
Terry—whose real name Nash neither knew nor cared to know—was categorically not. “This is your last warning,” he said.
Nash had a pithy reply, but she got beat out by a sharp yelp and the sack-of-potatoes thump of a falling body as Terry dropped abruptly out of sight. Confused, she wriggled out from behind the tanks with her GLASS in hand. “What was that?”
“You said Terry had a Taser,” Anke said simply. “Now I have a Taser. Several Tasers, actually.”
“Seven?” Nash guessed.
Anke hummed. “Seven.” Begrudgingly, Nash thought she was a little bit badass, too.
“And you have forty-one seconds,” Eoan said. “You should get on with that plan of yours.”
“Aye aye.” Nash squatted by the drum tanks’ intake valves, turning a few handles until the gauges dipped and settled at the right levels. Manual solutions to complex problems—Nash’s very own take on the law of parsimony. One last item on the to-do list: couldn’t have a furnace without a flue.
“Is that a good idea?” Anke asked as Nash switched on the plasma torch and took it to the cluster of outflow pipes.
“Meh.” It was the only idea she had, though, so she carried on lopping the pipes off a couple hand heights above the tanks, until they jutted up like chimneys. “If it doesn’t work, let’s just say I don’t expect complaints.”
“Twenty-five. Twenty-four. Twenty-three.”
“Just need a pilot light,” Nash said, rooting around in her bag until she found what she was looking for.
“Unless that’s some really special tape, I don’t think it’s going to—oh.” Anke fell quiet as Nash lashed her plasma torch to the side of the pipes, burner tube aimed over the hole. Might not hold for long, but it didn’t have to. Once the fire started, the gas would keep it alive.
Unfortunately, her torch wouldn’t survive the encounter.
You’ve been good, girl. She didn’t stop taping until the roll ran out. All told, it was a hack job: the wires, the valves, the makeshift pilot light. Dozens of ways it could all go wrong, only one way it’d go right.
“Nash,” Eoan said softly, “are you sure?”
Sure. Yeah, she was sure. Sure that if Eoan’s math was off by even half a psi, the pipes would explode when the gasses started flowing. Sure that if she’d pulled the wrong wires, the valves would fly wide open when the count hit zero and flood the station with a raging inferno.
Sure that if she didn’t try, they were dead anyway.
“Trust me,” Nash said, willing her hands steady as she switched on the torch and stepped back. Like you always have. Cap and Saint both—they’d found a stowaway, a thief with a smart mouth and smarter hands, and they’d let her stay. Let her help. Let her into their weird little family on their ramshackle little ship, and she’d gladly keep reminding them they’d made the right choice. “I’ve got this.”
Ten seconds.
“Damn right.” Saint’s gruff agreement crackled over the comms, and it was such a relief to hear his voice, even with the clamor of pained grunts and brutality behind it. Fist fight? Knife fight? No way of knowing, but he hadn’t doubted her, so she wasn’t about to start doubting him.
Eight.
“I’m not sorry!” Anke said in a choked-off rush. “I mean—for lying to you, I am. And for hurting you, and—but I’m not sorry it was you guys that found me. I’m not sorry I’m here with you. You guys are the first crew I’ve ever been part of, and I know it was a trainwreck, but it was an epic trainwreck. You guys are an epic, epic trainwreck.”
Three.
“Showtime, dears.” Nash pictured Eoan’s soft, brilliant smile so clearly they could’ve been right there beside her. Surrounded by the makings of death, with all their lives in her hands. Alone, but feeling for all the world like she wasn’t, because from the moment she’d stepped aboard that beat-up old gyreskimmer, she’d never really felt alone.
Two.
She grinned in the flickering light of her plasma torch. “One.”