JAL
The thing about screams was, they weren’t really about loud or piercing or shrill. A scream could be a scream without making a sound, and sometimes those were the biggest screams of all.
And that … was an awful big scream.
Ragged as hell, cut up on gnashed teeth and cracked lips. So quiet, but so goddamn full of anger and frustration and choked-up disbelief that you almost couldn’t hear the desperation buried underneath it. It was there, though, hiding in the frayed edges of the breaths that followed. Wheezing, gasping, fading.
“Jal.” Stern, uncompromising—the start of a warning from Saint, or it was the warning. Either way, Jal was already halfway out of the hangar, and he didn’t plan on stopping.
“She can’t breathe,” he shouted, shouldering through the door. It hit the wall behind it with a bang, and it sounded like it might’ve fallen clean off the hinges, but checking would’ve meant looking back, slowing down, and he wouldn’t. Not when he had a chance.
“Eoan, stop him,” he heard Saint growl over the comms.
Jal braced for the jolt, flattened his tongue to the roof of his mouth so he wouldn’t bite through the sides when it came. He’d learned that lesson the hard way.
The jolt didn’t come.
“She’s in the other warehouse,” said Eoan, silky-calm and steady again. Empathetic, but quick to get it under wraps and focus on the mission—they would’ve been a bang-up captain to fly under, in another lifetime. Just one more thing Saint had taken from him, leaving like he had. Hadn’t been enough to ditch Jal for greener pastures; he’d made damn sure Jal couldn’t follow, and Jal’d lucked out with a few captains after that, but never anybody like Eoan, and never long enough to get used to it. Neck-nanites aside, when they talked, he had a good mind to listen.
They said, “I’ve got a partial visual on a Guild ship; it’s been caught in a roof collapse. I can’t get the drone inside, but that’s the source of the signal and the voice.”
The screams, Jal corrected to himself. His boots slid as he banked hard toward the main warehouse. The hangar sat on the other side of it, crumpled like a stomped can under a bootheel. Whatever’d happened to it, it wasn’t time or wear or a faulty T-form system. That shit looked explosive. “Got it,” he said. “What’s my way in?”
“The doors are blocked by the collapse,” Eoan replied. “The structure has been compromised, so let’s skip the brute-force breach, dear. Rather not have a hangar fall on your head.”
“Uh, thanks.” Brute force wasn’t really his style anyway. “Roof?” he asked, eyes catching on a fire escape zigzagging up the side of the warehouse.
“Wildly unstable, but there’s an opening. Can you get to it?”
The fire escape was in shambles, steps busted out and platforms bowing and buckling suspiciously. The Trust only built places like that to last until they’d gotten what they came for, and nobody could pick a planet clean faster than a bunch of company men. Locusts with suits and shareholders. “I’ll think of something.”
“Something boneheaded and reckless,” Saint grumbled in his ear. Footsteps trailed behind him—Saint’s, Jal reckoned. Quick for a normie, but he’d never been able to catch Jal on the straightaway, and as long as it’d been since he’d really let loose, he hadn’t gotten that rusty.
Jal’s lip twitched, and he sped full tilt at the wall. “Missed you—” He grunted as he leapt, catching the rusty railing of the fire escape and hauling himself up. “—sweet-talkin’ me—” He got his feet on the walkway and jumped again, catching the next level of railing. “—while I work.” With one last leap, he got his hands on the edge of the warehouse roof and kicked his legs over the side.
“Great, you’re on the roof,” Saint said dryly. He sounded vaguely winded. “Now what?”
Jal stopped at the other edge of the roof, staring out at the gantry crane stretching over to the hangar. About a thirty-dec jump to the cage ladder running up the side, if he had to guess. I can make it. He had to. It was the fastest way in, and he needed every second. “Might want to look away, old man,” he said, walking back two, four, six steps from the barrier wall around the roof. He was made for this. Deep breath in, deep breath out, and with a wild grin and a whooping cry, he launched himself over the edge of the roof.
Open air yawned beneath his feet for what felt like an eternity as the ladder crawled toward him. Slow, so slow, but then—like a rubber band, everything snapped into place. He slammed into the ladder, fingers scraping for and missing one rail after the next, before he finally managed to catch himself. His shoulders wrenched, one side of his head banging off the rails with a starburst flash of pain, but he’d made it. He’d made it, and he couldn’t stop.
“Are you fucking insane?” Saint shouted from somewhere below him; with it broadcast through the earpiece, he couldn’t hazard a guess as to where.
Jal laughed, or maybe coughed—it probably didn’t matter; his ribs could take a hell of a lot more punishment than a hard landing—as he scampered up to the crossbeam of the crane. Next to the floating mines of Brigham Four, a three-story crane was nothing.
He told himself that anyway, sprinting along the crossbeam as quick as he could force his feet to move. Beam was only a few decs wide, and it didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, it’d get your heart going like a jackhammer.
Not just his heart, apparently. “Saint?” Nash asked, soft and a little distracted. “You all right? I’m picking up a spike in your pulse.”
Saint cursed a blue streak in Jal’s ear. “Stupid goddamn howler monkey, thinks a few tweaked genes means he can fucking fly—” Jal couldn’t quite make out the middle bit, but then, “Jal, don’t you fucking dare.”
It was too late, though. He’d already reached the end of the crane, and one flying leap dropped him onto the caved-in gambrel roof of the collapsed hangar. Silica tiles cracked underneath his shoulder and hip as he landed side-first, and he couldn’t have stopped moving after that if he’d wanted to. The roof sloped steeply, a sinkhole plunging into the guts of the hangar, and the best he could manage was a controlled slide into the piles of rubble at the bottom.
From the inside, he couldn’t recognize the hangar for what it was—or maybe what it used to be. Veins of cables and wires hung from what remained of the bowing ceiling, pillars and rafters mangled beyond recognition. No, it wasn’t time that’d broken that hangar down. Time didn’t bubble paint and blacken insulation; it didn’t bend I beams thick as his thigh like twigs. “Looks like a bomb went off,” he said. Brought half the hangar down around it, too, dead on top of what looked to be an old rockhopper. Hard to tell much about a ship with just its wing jutting out from under a mountain of fallen roof and toppled industrial shelving.
“There are traces of explosives,” Eoan reported, helpfully. “And I’m picking up several short-range signals. Could be remote detonators.”
“Could be.” A chuckle bubbled in his throat. To himself, vaulting over an I beam propped on the crunched remains of a forklift, he muttered, “Could be bombs, could be nothing—spin the wheel, test your luck.”
“Is he joking?” Nash said. “This isn’t joking time; this is don’t get blown to chunks time. Your ass gets blown to pieces, I’m not jigsawing you back together.”
“If we’re not laughing, we’re crying, glowworm,” he replied, easily. He’d nearly reached the wing; had to push a couple of crates out of the way, willing each one not to knock something else loose and set off a bone-crushing game of dominoes. A lone shaft of light squeezed in from the hole in the roof, leaving the rest of the hangar dusty, foggy, and indistinct, but he could still make out a little space under the wing. Almost too little. He grimaced. “Think I’ve got my way in.” Shards of glass and splinters crunched under him as he went to his knees, then to his belly. That close, he could make out the creases in the metal of the wing. Wasn’t made to support that kind of weight for long, and he swore he heard it groaning as he wriggled his way underneath. At the shallowest point, his chest lay damn near flat to the ground, and the wing still scraped the top of his backpack. He kept pushing, though, dust clinging to the sweat beading on his skin, hair snagging on cracked shielding tiles, debris pricking his arms and elbows.
“All right, Jal?” Saint said, and Jal tried to key in on his voice, not the too-quick sound of his own breathing.
“Oh yeah, nice and cozy.” He could feel air again, at least. A breeze on his hands and wrists, as he pushed a couple of loose pallets out of the way. Thank fuck. He elbow-crawled the rest of the way out from under the wing, getting his hands under him, then his feet. Up to his full height, and he knew his rebreather fed him the same damn air, but he swore it tasted sweeter on the other side of the wing. Made it easier to fill his lungs. Tight spaces had never agreed with him. “Good news: still not dead,” he reported, cheerfully, dusting his hands on his jeans and looking around. Reminded him of a house of cards, the way the walls leaned in on each other. One strong breeze’d dislodge whatever paper-thin edge held them together, bring the whole thing down on their heads. “Know what I haven’t played in a minute? Poker. How many cards does that take again?”
“Focus.” Saint’s voice held an edge that hadn’t been there before. Once upon a time, Jal would’ve called it worry; he wasn’t too sure what it was now. “Can you see a way into the ship?”
He turned his gaze from the card stock–flimsy walls, toward the back end of the ship. “Shi-it.” Two syllables. “Got three more bodies by the cargo door.” Guild tags on one of them, blood pooled under the holes in his leg and chest. Other two weren’t in uniform, with no designations in sight, but they had their own tells. Patched, mismatched clothes, and their guns looked to be black-market bronze standard—good, but not gold. Spent shells on the floor weren’t the cheap-ass reloads you’d catch scavs packing, but they were a few rungs short of the best caps could buy. Narrowed things down. “It’s recent,” he said. “Whatever happened here, it didn’t happen long ago.”
“Hours?” Nash said. “Days?”
“I don’t know. Blood’s still wet.” Whatever that meant; he only knew that those bodies sure as shit came after the ones in the last hangar. What were y’all getting up to, huh? he thought, stooping to snatch the Guild tags off the nearest one. Cpt. Michael Riesen. Maybe they’d mean something to somebody, maybe they wouldn’t. He stuffed them in his pocket just the same and set his sights on the cargo door. Looked closed, but when he watched for a second, he could see the dust motes drifting around the seal. Gotta be a gap. Not much to work with, but it had a shallow lip across the top edge, where the ramp would’ve hit the ground.
Worth a shot.
He only had room for a couple of steps, but he’d take every bit of a running start he could get. Please no spring traps, he thought in a rush as he ran, jumped, caught the lip of the cargo bay door, and—
CRASH!
“What the hell was that?” Saint barked over the ringing in Jal’s ears. The air’d gone black for a second with all the kicked-up dust and debris, and Jal couldn’t tell if the ground rattled, or just his anklebones. Jawbones. Molars.
“Jammed door,” Jal said, struggling to gauge the volume of his own voice. “Not so jammed.” He’d thought the hinges were seized, but the hinges turned out to be a couple of ratchet straps and carabiners. Under his full weight and a little momentum, they’d snapped like plastic and dropped the whole damn door. Whoever might’ve been in there, it seemed they weren’t looking to get back into the sky; they just didn’t want company. “I’m—”
He stopped short, head twisting toward a sound from inside. A voice. So weak, it nearly faded into the rattles and groans of a building a few bumps away from dropping itself on his head. Our heads, he amended, taking that first wary step onto the ramp. Slow got quicker, quicker got fast, and he was jogging by the time he got to the top of the ramp. “Somebody in here?” No answer, but a sound stood out against the creaky-whiny warnings of the hangar. Breathy and wheezing, but alive. “Hey, if you’re there, call out!”
There wasn’t much to the rockhopper. Cargo bay ran up to the throat of the ship, a cramped crossroads left or right to bunks or labs or some other loadout, then straight ahead to the bridge. More of a cockpit, really. Only time he’d ridden in one, his knees were in the console, and his head brushed the top.
Upshot of it was, once he’d narrowed the source of the sound to someplace forward, there wasn’t a lot of guesswork left. He stepped over a fallen vent, ducking wires hanging down from the crawl space like spilled guts. Fair to say the ship hadn’t escaped whatever explosion wrecked the hangar. The whole thing skewed sideways, not so much he couldn’t keep his feet on the floor, but enough so he kept a hand out to steady him.
Or, he did, ’til he came up on the business end of a gun barrel; then it seemed the better place for that hand was raised, palm-out, between him and that gun. A gesture, he hoped, that universally stood for please don’t fucking shoot me.
“Easy!” he yelped, voice a half octave higher than he last recalled. It’d be his luck, to survive the things he’d survived, make it as far as he’d made it, and get put down by a hypoxic ranger with an old Earth-style revolver. And that, it seemed, was what he was dealing with—pink-fade hair pinned back, face mask so fogged he could barely make out the stark whites of her eyes and the sickly, taupe tint to her skin. Her hands shook, and the pistol sagged every couple of seconds, until she jerked it back up to train it on him, as if to say, I might be dying, but try something funny, and you can be my plus-one. He usually kind of liked being a big guy, but at the moment he couldn’t help thinking it just made him a bigger target.
“Who … are you?” Couldn’t even rightly be called panting, the sound she made. Panting took air; her voice was the rustle of dry reeds with barely a breeze to move them.
“Ranger Jalsen.” Yes, a lie, technically, but a lie for the very moral purpose of not getting shot in the goddamn chest. “We be the cavalry, ma’am.” He decided to take a chance and move closer. Just a step. The gun, which had flagged a bit, twitched back up toward his sternum, but he just gritted his teeth and forged ahead.
The cockpit he remembered seemed downright roomy compared to what he ducked into. The overhead consoles had fallen out of their casing, spewing buttons and knobs like broken teeth across the floor, and as he finally got a good look inside, he realized they weren’t the only things that’d fallen from the ceiling.
“That part of your air system?” he asked, dropping all but the pointer finger on his don’t shoot hand and giving a little flick toward the long metal block dropped across the captain’s chair. Heavy son of a bitch; it had crunched through the arms of the chair, knocked it sideways off its brackets and into the chair beside it—the stranger’s chair.
She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Shit. Her face had gone pale, lips blue, and her gun hand fell to rest on the block. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’m gonna—” But in the time it would’ve taken him to actually put the words together, he’d already popped the hose from her oxygen tank and stuck it on the secondary spout of his. A flip of the switch to get the air flowing, and just as the woman’s head started to list against her seat, she gasped. One breath. Another. A relieved laugh bubbled up in his chest as she gulped them down, each one a little less desperate than the last. Slowly, the fog on her mask cleared, and her gun lay forgotten on the console as she grasped his arm. “That’s it,” he said. “Breathe. You’re all right.”
“No,” she whispered as he twisted his arm from her grip.
“I ain’t going anywhere,” he told her. “Just gonna try to get this thing off you.” It had pinned her legs against the seat, and it didn’t look like it was going anywhere without a little persuasion. Lucky lady, though; she didn’t look hurt, just stuck. No blood, no swelling, so probably no crush injuries. Under the circumstances, probably would have to be enough.
“That’s not—I wasn’t—” He really couldn’t tell if she was still addled from oxygen starvation, or if she was just bad at putting sentences together. Not that he could judge. “Okay. Stop. Reset,” she said. Mostly to herself, he suspected, so he ignored her and cut the belt from the crushed captain’s seat. Not many places to grip on the block except a hole drilled through the top, and the belt looped through it just swell. “First, that’s not a thing. It’s an air-mixing plenum to regulate oxygen levels in the cockpit, and it’s—” She choked on a groan as he wrapped the other end of the seat belt around his hand and pulled. The not-a-thing didn’t want to budge at first, the heavy bastard, but with a foot kicked up against the wall and every bit of his body weight pulling against it, Jal managed to lift the other end off of her.
He meant to ease it back down, but turned out, he really didn’t have that in him. The whole block dropped, and with a yelp of her own, the woman yanked her feet into the seat just in time to get them clear of the falling, uh, plenum.
“Heavy,” she finished in a squeak, taking the hand he offered to pull her out of the chair. She had to step over the chair’s crushed arm, and her knees nearly went out from under her when she landed, but she steadied herself. “I’m okay,” she said, before he could ask. “I’m okay. Just got a little case of the cee-oh-two woo-woos. It’s not the lack of oxygen that gets you, you know. The carbon dioxide starts to build up in an enclosed system, and then come the jelly legs and the headaches, and next thing you know you’re drifting off to sleep, and—and I’m rambling. I know. I do that when I’m nervous. Or excited. Or, I mean, breathing, which I am, thanks to you.
“And oh my God, you came for me. I mean, you didn’t know it was me, but.” She reached up and squeezed one of his biceps. “You’re real—” Her eyes went wide behind square-rimmed glasses, and she grabbed his other arm. “—ly in trouble. Oh man, we’re in trouble.” She whipped around, stumbling back to the console. “Bombs,” she said, fingers flying across a mostly intact keyboard. “Several bombs. Hacked them before they blew—okay, hacked most of them before they blew, jammed the trigger signals. Not that I’m a hacker,” she insisted. “I’m a programmer. With the Guild. Anneka Ahlstrom, but people who rescue me from certain, fiery death can call me Anke. I’m—” She stopped, scrunched her face, unscrunched it. “I’m rambling again. Sorry. Nerves.”
“Bombs have that effect.”
“Not the bombs,” she said. “The battery. We’re at one percent.”
Jal blinked. “Okay.” But she was pulling a GLASS pad from some sort of dock on the console and tucking her gun in her waistband. “What does that mean, exactly?” he finally prompted.
She faltered in the middle of the cockpit, scanning for something. “Ah!” A duffel hung out of one of the storage bins. Jal knew a go-bag when he saw one, and she was ready to go. Practically tugging him by the shared oxygen tank toward the cockpit door. “Since the life support systems were boned—one day, I’m going to circle back to the irony of almost getting crushed by life support—I funneled the rest of the power from those cells into our console to keep the beacon alive and my no-go-boom program running. The power dies—”
“We die.” Fuck.
A jerk of a nod. “Unless we’re outside, which is where we should be going. Now-ish, preferably.”
Couldn’t be easy, could it? “How long does it have left?”
“I don’t know. It’s been at one percent for, like, half an hour.”
“So?”
“I just told you, I don’t know. Power consumption isn’t constant. It’s a variable over time, and I’m a programmer, not an electrician. Could be another thirty minutes. Could be three seconds from now.” She tugged his arm. “So can we please get the friggle-frack out of—wait. Wait, no, what are you doing?”
He unclipped his backpack with his oxygen tank, looping it over her arm. “Down the ramp, under the wing. Roof’s kind of steep, but you ought to be able to make it back up if you watch your footing. There’s people outside waiting.”
“Come on, kid, what’s the holdup?” Saint growled over the comms. He’d gotten a little breath back; must’ve reached the hangar. Because Jal really needed another ticking clock. “You heard her. Move your asses.”
Jal had other plans. “Go,” he told Anke. “I’ll be right behind you.” Soon as I do what I came for. Time alone with an unsecured Guild computer was too precious an opportunity to pass up, bombs be damned. Before she could argue—sweet of her to bother—he flashed her a smile, unhooked his rebreather from the tank, and shoved her toward the cockpit door. “Go!”
Plan or no plan, a sick, gut-clench kind of feeling came with watching his only source of breathable air disappear down the rockhopper’s short hall, but he shoved it down. His mutations and years of high-altitude hard labor growing up meant he could manage without the tank for a while, and from the sounds of things, he’d run out of time long before he ran out of air.
Make it quick. Wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to draw out, anyway.
With a different kind of clench in his gut—anxious, bracing, hopeful—he tugged his knife from his belt and rolled up his sleeve to his elbow. A ragged scar, long as his thumb and stark pale against his tan skin, ran up the middle of his inner arm. Ugly-looking thing.
It was fixing to get uglier.
Teeth gritted, fingers clenched tight around the grip of the knife, he set the edge to his skin. Get it over with. Hurt’s just hurt. And it did hurt. Dragging the knife over the scar, not too deep, but deep enough. The first flash of silver sent a bizarre wave of relief through him, like some part of him had been afraid it wouldn’t still be there. He’d picked the kind of hiding place that’d be awful hard to mislay, but God, the thought of losing that—
A bit of pressure, and the small silver tube slid from the wound like a splinter working its way out. Please, he thought, queasy-dizzy, as he uncapped the tube on his way to the console and turned out the drive inside. Tiny thing, for what it meant to him, barely as big around as a pen. It took two tries to plug it into the console port as the screen flickered dangerously, dimming and brightening in turns. DECRYPTING, it read, and he could’ve fucking cried. This was the closest he’d gotten; closer than he’d started thinking he could get, to hell with the one-percent warning still glowing damningly in the corner. Could be another thirty minutes. Could be three seconds from now. As the drive registered, though, and lines of code started to scroll across the screen, he couldn’t bring himself to care.
If it didn’t work, he was probably dead anyway.