NASH
It wasn’t that Nash lost track of time when she worked, so much as she just never bothered to keep it in the first place. Kind of a moot point, off-world. Day and night were just settings on the light switch to keep everyone functioning at all the right hours, and Nash preferred a more flexible schedule. Sleep when she was tired, eat when she was hungry—or when Saint came knocking with dinner and a muttered Not your waiter, Doc—and work when she had work to do and the itch to set her hands to something crafty.
The Ambit always had some kind of work for her to do. Old and creaky, chock full of parts nobody made anymore and more soldered-over scars than Nash could count. Keeping it space-worthy was a full-time job all on its own, but damn, did Nash love it. The engine room was her temple, with the wordless prayer of the Ambit’s beating heart thrumming beneath her feet; each new project, her own brand of meditation. Neatly managed cables crisscrossed the ceiling, spotted with string lights and coffee-can lanterns. Little crocheted figures kept watch from the tops of control panels and switches and breakers set into the walls. Live feedback from the ship’s systems scrolled across dozens of screens, Nash’s own little window into the captain’s world of signal and code. She’d always been more of a hardware girl herself.
She could lose herself in it. Minutes. Hours. Time sort of stopped mattering, once she got her hands on a socket wrench and a piece of gear that needed tending. So she really couldn’t have said whether it was very late or very early when the alarms started to sound. Just that it was very, very loud.
She felt it before she heard it, jolting across her synapses like a pinched nerve. Loud, hot, bright, sharp—all of those things and none of them, not exactly. Her augments were a sense all their own, hardwired directly into her nervous system and tuned in to all those clever little systems around her, with all their moving parts. To all the energy that flowed, warm and tonic, through countless circuits and cables and the very air itself.
“Eoan?” she called as the comms sounded off, pushing to her feet and unearthing her boots from the tangle of wires she’d been sorting. “Something better be on fire!”
The alarms cut out as quickly as they’d started. Not a warning, then; more to grab their attention. Before the captain, Nash had never known a program to have such a flair for the dramatic. “Only if you set something on fire.” Eoan sounded a little put out.
“I’ve never—” She stopped herself, made a thoughtful face. Okay, not outside the realm of possibility. “Not this time,” she said, cutting across the catwalk and trying not to trip over the actual cat that came hopping down from Nash’s daybed hanging in the corner. Bodie the bodega cat, a rosette-spotted, stub-tailed beast of a feline, took his sweet time leading her up the ladder, pausing expectantly at the top to let the automated hatch finish rising.
“Hey, little buddy,” said an unfamiliar voice as she poked her head out of the hatch. It took her two more rungs to realize it wasn’t aimed at her, but at the cat weaving his way between the hitchhiker’s socked feet.
“Bodega,” she said, climbing the rest of the way out of the hatch and into the infirmary. Not a standard installation in the Ambit’s model, but after a few months of backtracking through the hall whenever she wanted to get between her two most frequented spots, she’d taken a plasma torch to the floor and built herself a nice little bypass. Way more efficient, and the energy flowed so much better between the spaces. One part pragmatism, two parts vibes. “Bodie for short. Keeps the rodents out of the wires.”
Jal’s mouth quirked in a small smile. “I think we’ve met before,” he said. “Gave me a nice, uh, welcome when I came onboard. He doesn’t seem like much of an asshole.” And then, by way of explanation, he added, “The note on the board. Fed bodie this morning.” Jal bent to pet him, but the cuffs pulled taut and stopped him.
Nash flashed him an apologetic, please don’t break my table smile as the hatch eased shut. “Don’t let the fluff fool you. He’s seven kilos of killer instinct and dickishness.” He played at domesticated when it suited him—will purr for food—but he was as much a stray as everyone else on their ship.
She clicked her fingers for Bodie on her way toward the door, and he followed solely because he knew she knew where the food container was.
“Wait,” Jal said, pulling away from the table. Nash only wished she’d missed his anxious frown when the cuffs caught him again, but the poor bastard had zero poker face. Wouldn’t have mattered, she guessed; she’d seen the scars under those cuffs. Maybe he really was a deserter, but if that was the whole story, then Nash was a people person. “The alarms,” he continued, voice rough with what might’ve been disuse. “Something wrong?”
Nash opened her mouth to answer, but a certain chatty captain beat her to it. “Not to worry,” they said. “We picked up an SOS.”
“Civvy?” Jal asked. Definitely a ranger boy; still had the lingo.
“Guild,” Eoan replied. “Guild coded, at any rate.” They knew, same as Nash, that it wouldn’t have been the first time somebody got hold of a Guild transmitter and played a little bait and switch, and out in no-man’s-land, they had to be cautious. The only people out there were the ones who had a reason to be, and those reasons weren’t usually philanthropic. Scavengers picking the last bits of meat from the carcasses of old Trust installations, agitators too extreme for the Union lying low after the latest riot, strike, protest, or whatever else they’d orchestrated to put a bee in the Trust’s bonnet. Not the kind of people Nash cared to run into.
The table creaked as Jal straightened. “You planning to check it out?” If he was trying to sound disinterested, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Miner boy’d perked up pretty quick when he heard it was a Guild ship out there.
Little bit of loyalty left for your sibs in arms? Or maybe his reasons were all his own. “Why?” Nash said. “You in some kind of hurry to get back to the center spiral?” And face the Captains’ Council for his cut-and-run? Nash doubted it.
Jal shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said, guilelessly. “I want to help.”
“Help?” Eoan replied, more curious than skeptical, but the captain had always been the inquisitive type. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Better than sitting here, doing nothing. Please.” He gave the cuffs another half-hearted tug. “I won’t make any trouble. I’m good in a fight.”
“Nobody said there would be a fight,” Eoan replied.
“Nobody said there wouldn’t.”
Point, Jal. A distress beacon in no-man’s-land generally did not end in a relaxing day out.
He didn’t look all that triumphant, though. Fidgety and listing on his feet, and shadows so dark and deep beneath his eyes they edged out from under his specs; Nash knew a sleep debt when she saw one. Wherever he’d been, whatever he’d been doing, he’d been through some shit. She didn’t need a sixth sense to tell her that much. Like knew like.
“You don’t need a fight,” she said, not unkindly. “You need a nap and a meal. And I need to get to the bridge.” Saint would come looking if she didn’t get a move on, and she had an inkling that the less he and Jal saw of each other, the better. For both of them.
The clank of handcuffs pulling taut made her pause in the doorway.
“At least take the cuffs off,” Jal said. “I’m not gonna hurt anybody.” Not that he couldn’t, just that he wouldn’t. A distinction worth making, with spiffy mutations like his. Nash had seen his Guild medical records, and it wasn’t just the eyes; he’d gotten the full loadout. Enhanced aerobic capacity and muscle development, and fucking surreal skeletal microarchitecture … it was like somebody’d put him together from a menu. Picked and chose what suited them, without much care for how it all worked together. Fast? Check. Strong? Check. Sturdy as a fucking bomb shelter? Yes, please. And so what if his body burned itself out by the ripe old age of forty? Mutations like that were made for utility, not longevity.
The kicker of it was, that shit was prenatal. Nobody’d ever even asked him.
“Please,” Jal pressed, with one last tug at the cuffs. “I won’t be any trouble, I swear.”
She thought about it. Not a lot of places he could go on the ship that Eoan couldn’t stop him, and that look on his face every time the cuffs snagged.… But she wasn’t going to be the one taking responsibility if he did decide to start some shit. So, tough nuggets. “You’ll be fine,” she said, but because she wasn’t a complete dick, she didn’t leave yet. Instead, she opened the nearest of the floor-to-ceiling cabinets lining the wall, nudged an oil can and a roll of plumbing tape out of the way, and came up with a foil-wrapped bar. She tossed it at the table, but he caught it midair. Pretty bang-on reflexes for the living embodiment of a yawn. “Hope you like strawberries and cream. Eat it even if you don’t.”
He might not’ve looked happy about it, but she swore she heard foil tearing on her way out the door. You’re just another stray, aren’t you? Like she’d been, when she’d first found her way aboard the Ambit. Like they’d all been, at one point or another. Damn it. She wished he were an asshole. It would’ve been so much easier if he were just an asshole.
Saint had beaten her to the bridge, leaning against the console with his hands wrapped around a mug that seemed comically small in his grip. Steam rose from inside, and the strong scent of almost-but-not-quite burnt coffee wafted up to greet her. “You get lost?” he said. Over the years, she’d learned to tell the difference between weary grumble and grumpy grumble; this one was probably a combination of both.
“Morning, McBlastinshit,” she said. She guessed on the morning-or-night thing, but he didn’t correct her, so she supposed she was right. Or he was too over it to correct her, one or the other.
Saint’s jaw clenched. “It was a riot round. He’s fine.”
“And we have somewhat more pressing matters,” Eoan cut in, gracefully. They’d projected themself at the head of the bridge, in the middle of the four-seat arc up front. If Nash squinted, she could almost make out the lights of the console through Eoan’s dark umber cheeks. “I’ve tracked the beacon to the second planet in this cluster.”
“Twenty caps on shipping depot,” Nash said. “Extra five for derelict and depressing.” In the wide expanse of absolute fuck-all between the frontier and civilized space, there wasn’t much else it could be. Unsurprisingly, neither of them took her bet. “Cowards,” she muttered. “It’s probably just a false alarm.”
“Then it should be a quick stop,” said Eoan.
Saint lowered his mug. “We can’t stop. We’ve got to—”
“Get Ranger Jalsen to the Captains’ Council, yes. And we will. After we answer the distress beacon,” Eoan told him, reasonably. “I’m sure you’ll agree a Guild-coded SOS has a shade more urgency than a fugitive transport. It’s not as if the Council is going anywhere.”
“That’s not the point,” said Saint. “He’s got people in the center spiral. They deserve to know we’ve found him.”
Nash snorted, leaning against the back wall of the bridge. “Yeah, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled. Hey, good news! We found your runaway loved one. I mean, he’s rotting on a prison planet in the bum-fuck quadrant of the spiral, but. Alive. Whoo.” She waved her hands theatrically, fingers wiggling.
Saint gave a low warning. “Nash.”
Like Nash gave a shit. “I’m sorry,” she said, “exactly how long are we planning to pretend you don’t have a bug up your ass about this guy? You shot him.”
“With a riot round.”
“In the back.”
“He was running.”
“He was unarmed.”
“He would’ve gotten away,” Saint pressed through his teeth.
Nash spread her arms. “And what fucking business is that of ours? You knew the guy back in the yonder years, I get it. But seems to me some pretty serious shit’s gone down since then, and even if he is a deserter, if he’s not hurting anybody, why do we care?”
“We don’t know what he’s doing.”
“Be that as it may,” Eoan said, patient but stern. “We’re the closest Guild ship by a day’s flight, and we have an obligation under the oath to answer the call. So yes, Saint, we will get Ranger Jalsen back to the center spiral, on that you have my word. But first, we’re responding to the SOS. Are we in agreement?”
Agreement maybe wasn’t the right word for it. Unconventional as their crew could be, when the captain made up their mind, Nash and Saint didn’t argue. Begrudgingly resigned was closer.
Saint buried a sour scowl behind the rim of his mug, draining the rest of his coffee like he had a bad taste to wash away. As if that burnt-ass coffee wasn’t a bad taste on its own. “How long?” he said.
“We’ll be planetside within the hour,” Eoan said. “Get yourselves ready.”
And that, as they said, was that.
Nash didn’t see Saint again until they met back up in the cargo bay to suit up, and he didn’t actually look at her until they’d started down the gangway. Behind the clear mask of her rebreather—nothing like a decommissioned terraforming system to put a damper on a bomb-ass hair day—she stuck out her tongue.
He caught the look and flipped her off, and she practically floated the rest of the way to solid ground. Because apologies were for boring people.
“Air’s definitely bad,” she confirmed, checking the readings on her GLASS. They’d sent a drone down ahead of their landing, but Nash always checked. Trust, but verify. “Not our skin’s gonna dissolve into a blistery red ick bad, but definitely don’t want it chilling in your mucus membranes bad. No oxygen.”
Saint checked his gun, holstered at his hip, and tightened the straps of the duraweave brace on his bad shoulder until it sat snug and pauldron-like over his jacket. He probably didn’t realize he was doing it; just going through his checklist, like always. Habit. “Water?” he asked.
“Dry as a bone.” It didn’t look it, at first glance. The dense, grayish fog that hung in the air made the place seem damp and dreary, but it was gas, not water. Same as the clouds blotting out the sky—ammonia and swirls of dust. “They didn’t just kill the AC; they shut off the pipes, too.” It wasn’t Nash’s first decomm’d planet, but they never got any less eerie. The miserable decrepitude of them. All the crumbling reminders of the life that used to be there, the we were heres and the what used to bes. Through the haze, a sea of dead trees stretched out across the valley around them. Dead and blackened and withered, thin trunks and spindly branches so brittle that the wind picked pieces from them. Wore them down, eroded them, until you couldn’t believe they’d ever been alive at all—just crooked, dried-up relics rising through the fog like hairs prickling on the back of a neck.
Saint’s lips thinned. “We’ll make this quick.”
“I’ve always admired your optimism.” They had too much ground to cover. “Drone shows the compound’s just over the hill. Abandoned shipping depot, so pay up, assholes. Main warehouse, a few hangars.”
“Occupied?” Saint asked.
“Heat shielded,” Nash replied. “Can’t tell.”
“Always did love surprises.” Call it a trick of the light, but Nash swore she saw a hint of a smile through the silica screen of Saint’s mask. At least, she did before it fell. “Son of a bitch.”
Nash followed his narrow-eyed stare back toward the ship, and the mood swing suddenly made a lot more sense. “Huh,” she said, as Jal came jogging down the gangway. “A latecomer joins the race.”
“Jal.” If the clipped, stern tone of Saint’s voice wasn’t a warning, the hand on his gun definitely was.
For someone downrange of an accomplished—and enthusiastic—marksman, Jal seemed awfully lackadaisical about putting his hands up. “Not a jailbreak” was the first thing out of his mouth. Probably smart, because it slowed Saint down enough to keep his gun in the holster. “Your captain let me go.”
He looked like he’d dressed in a hurry, backpack straps askew and one leg of his patched-up moto jeans half-stuck in his boots. He’d cinched an empty gun belt around his hips and snagged some spare equipment from the cargo bay. Rooted out his coat, too, from where Nash had stashed it in one of the sick bay cabinets. Probably followed the smell, she thought. Much longer without a washing, and those clothes could peel themselves off him and stroll away on their own.
Saint’s lips pressed together in a frown. “That’s—”
“Quite true,” Eoan interrupted through their earpieces. “Two people, four buildings, unknown hostiles—it’s mathematics, dear. Besides, if you worked together before, you can find your way to do it again.”
“Or he could kill us,” Nash offered, helpfully. “Or get us killed. Or just generally fuck shit up and wreck the party. No offense,” she added, to Jal.
He scrunched his face, like he wasn’t really sure how to answer her.
“Focus, please,” Eoan said patiently. “Ranger Jalsen has assured me he’ll be the perfect gentleman.”
“And you believed him?” Nash recognized Saint’s I’m trying not to yell at people voice. “For Christ’s sake, Cap, he’s already bailed on one crew. You’re gonna let him go for the brace?”
“Please, I deserve more credit than that. I’ve made it perfectly clear to our new friend that it’s in his best interests to play nice.”
“Was that a threat?” Nash asked. “That kind of sounded like a threat.”
“Not a threat, exactly,” Eoan replied. “Just insurance. Ranger Jalsen, if you please.”
At Eoan’s prompting, though he didn’t look especially thrilled about it, Jal turned and raised his hair up off his neck. “Not a ranger,” Nash thought she heard him mumble, before she got distracted by the little silver patch above his jacket collar. Transdermal tracer—injected a small dose of nanites that could transmit a signal back to Eoan. The real insurance, though? The signal those nanites could receive. Quick burst of electricity, straight to the motor cortex. Nash didn’t care how fast he was; if he tried to run, he wouldn’t get very far when his legs forgot how to leg.
“You just slapped one of those on yourself?” Forgive Nash’s skepticism, but those things stung like a bitch.
Jal dropped his hair and shrugged. “Better than getting shot in the back again.” Nash couldn’t help but look over at Saint, just to see his reaction.
Not even a wrinkled brow. Tough crowd. But Saint wasn’t the kind of man who second-guessed himself, for better or for worse. Save the retrospecting for the drunkards and the retirees, he’d told her once. The man was a poet, truly.
“This isn’t one of your experiments, Eoan,” he said. Not really a protest; more of a preemptive I told you so. After half a decade working together, Eoan and Saint both seemed to know which battles to fight, and which they’d already lost. Nash wouldn’t call it a graceful surrender—his jaw clenched and unclenched like he was chewing bad meat; the ol’ Mad Masseter, she liked to call it—but at least he hadn’t frog-marched Jal right back onto the ship again. She’d call that progress. “Whatever question you’re looking to have answered here, it’s going to cause more problems than it solves.”
Said with all the certainty of a man who’d seen a few of those experiments go awry. Nothing piqued Eoan more than an untested hypothesis; they couldn’t help themself. And since Jal was basically just a big, walking question mark, Nash could kind of see where Saint was coming from.
On the other hand, “You’re not exactly as quick as you used to be,” she said to Saint, ignoring his sour stare and the quiet huff of a laugh from Jal. “If Eoan can keep an eye on him, then he can keep an eye out for us.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jal said, nodding. He tried to adjust his rebreather mask—would’ve been a better fit if he’d left off the specs, but she doubted he could’ve managed without them. The gray daylight trickled through gaseous clouds and swirls of particulate debris, but it was still too bright for those eyes of his. Lazy gen-coding at its finest: give somebody pupils like black holes and never stop to think, Gee, maybe let’s make these suckers shrink when it gets sunny. Finger painting with nucleotides.
Wisely, Jal didn’t give Saint time to reconsider; he set off into the trees at a middling pace, though his long-ass legs made it seem a lot faster.
Nash glanced back at Saint, but he’d already started after Jal. His hand hadn’t left his gun, and if he stared any harder at Jal’s back, he’d burn holes through the guy’s jacket. “Right,” Nash said, more to herself than anything. “This should be buckets of fun.”
It was not, in fact, buckets of fun. Wasn’t even a spoonful of fun. The soft ground crumbled in layers, giving way under her boots like dry sand. Made the steep climb to the top of the hill feel all the steeper, as the fog and spider-leg trees pressed in around her. Strange, how a place could feel endless and claustrophobic all at once: like she could walk for hours and see only this, and like she could barely move at all.
“Loving the scenery,” she said, wryly, if only to hear a sound. Of all the things she didn’t like about this planet—she’d started a list, itemized—the quiet bothered her the most. Born on a space station, raised on one ship or another, she just wasn’t used to it. Always running engines, humming atmo and life support systems, chattering people. Space may have been silent, but spaceships rarely were.
This place, though … it had the ambiance of a mortuary. Not a bated breath, anticipatory, but the silence that followed the very last exhale from a corpse. It felt morbid and hollow and mournful, haunted by the ghosts of things that had been, but weren’t anymore, and hadn’t been for a very long time.
She didn’t notice Jal slowing down ahead until she heard a branch snap. He’d been holding it up for her, she realized, but the brittle, desiccated wood broke off from the trunk and crumbled in his hand. The sound nearly made her jump, but she was grateful for it, just the same.
“Too quiet,” Jal said as she reached him. “I don’t like it, either.” And with a tip of his head and a soft “ma’am,” he walked on.
She’d nearly resigned herself to the silence again, when she heard his voice drifting back through the fog. Not talking, not quite; more like a melody, simple and rhythmic, like the songs the younger stationborns used to sing when they did their chores.
“Johnny was a miner,
They told him he could fly,
So they stuck a pickaxe to his back,
And sent him to the sky…”
Nash glanced over, meaning to catch Saint’s eye—already had her what’s this guy’s deal face locked and loaded—but he was still watching Jal. Closely, and with an expression she lacked both the emotional intuitiveness and the psychology degree to decipher beyond it’s complicated.
The soft rumble of Jal’s voice trailed off as he reached the top of the hill, broken by an appreciative whistle. “That,” he said, staring down into the valley below, “is a hell of a fence.”
The climb had winded Nash by the time she caught up, but she tried hard not to show it. Gulping down a couple of quick breaths on the down-low, Nash checked her GLASS. “Still no heat signatures.” Just a fence that ran the edge of the valley, and a handful of shapes inside, distorted by the sickly gray haze. Couple of hangars, one half-collapsed—or half-standing, depending on your philosophical bent—with gantry cranes stretched like great mustard-yellow beasts from the hangars to the main warehouse. “If there’s anybody down there, they’re holed up inside.”
“Can’t say I blame them.” Saint waved a hand through the stifling fog, even thicker at the top of the hill than it’d been in the clearing. The low concentrations of gas weren’t dangerous, short-term, but when they got back to the Ambit, Nash wasn’t letting anyone past the cargo bay without a decon shower and a fresh change of clothes. The smell. If she wanted the whole ship to reek like cat piss, she wouldn’t have spent three weeks teaching Bodie to use the can. “Let’s just hope they’re friendly.”
“And if they’re unfriendly?” Even with their extra man, it was the three of them against unknown numbers with a Guild distress beacon still blipping away. Not her favorite odds.
But Saint, in typical seen it all, done it all fashion, just tucked his thumb in his gun belt and set off down the hill. “Then we’ll be unfriendly back.”
Nash traded looks with Jal and rolled her eyes. “Welcome to Team Ambit,” she told him, taking that first unsteady step into the valley. “Mind the gap, and try not to die.”