EOAN
The galley was uncharacteristically quiet. Nothing but the rhythmic chop of Saint’s knife through whatever would become dinner for the evening, and the spits and spurts of the old coffee machine he insisted worked better than anything made in the present decade.
Tea for Nash, who had claimed the corner counter near enough to Saint that she could steal pieces of carrot and tuber off the cutting board, and Saint could pretend to swat at her for it. Although, she hadn’t reached for the board in some time. Distracted, Eoan thought, as she coaxed apart the ankle monitor. Borderline archaic technology, inelegant and cruel. Nash had an abiding love for most things mechanical, but even her nose wrinkled in disgust as she poked around its innards.
She’d fixed some tea for their guest, as well—their other guest, Eoan amended. We’re picking up quite the ensemble. Anke’s fingers tapped against the sides of her mug, but her short, chewed-blunt nails didn’t make contact. A fidgeting contradiction, at once half-asleep in her seat and vibrating with nervous energy. There was an adrenaline crash in her very near future, Eoan suspected; they only hoped there would be something soft underneath her when it came.
Jal made four, leaning in the open doorway with his arms crossed over his chest and his hair still dripping on the shoulders of a borrowed shirt. Eoan couldn’t tell if he wanted to be closer to the others or very much farther away, but an uncertain, unquiet longing had stolen across his face, now that he thought nobody was looking. Wanting to join in, wanting to reach out, but not knowing quite how to start.
Eoan knew the feeling all too well.
It’ll be our secret for now, dear, Eoan thought. They had more important things to ponder—needed to hear what Anke had to say, needed to know what they’d seen on that withered husk of a planet. All those people. All those nameless, voiceless witnesses to some as-yet-unknown horror.
“Clearly,” they began, settling their projection into the chair opposite Anke at the table. They opted for pink finger curls this time, though a different shade from the programmer’s vibrant ombre. Thought it might help her feel more at ease; something for those ever-present—and occasionally useful—human biases to latch onto as similar and good and safe. “You’ve got a story to tell.”
Steam fogged Anke’s glasses as she hunched over her mug, grimly resolute. “Guess so,” she said. “Part of one, at least. It’s … I’m not really sure where to start. If I’d known I wasn’t going to die alone in a fiery inferno, I would’ve practiced a little.”
“Doesn’t help,” Jal offered from the doorway, stilted but reassuring. Or, at least, trying to be reassuring. “Tried it.”
Eoan gave her a smile. A small one, but they hoped Anke found some comfort in it. “Let’s try the beginning, shall we? What were you doing on that planet?”
“A mission.” The prompting seemed to help—a line of thinking to resolve, not some dauntingly indefinite question mark. “I needed to get into the planet’s terraform systems, but it’s air-gapped to the gills and hard linkup only; no remote access. Which, you know, makes sense. They pay people like me a whole lot of caps to make sure planets can’t get hacked by, well.” She scrunched her face, bumping her glasses up her nose. “People like me, I guess. Pretty much anything with remote connectivity can get hacked if you’ve got someone who knows their shit. Stuff! Knows their stuff,” she amended, sheepishly. “Sorry, Captain.”
“Please.” Nash snorted, plucking a wire from the monitor’s panel. She must’ve found the serial number by then; now she was dismantling it on principle. “Cap hears worse on the daily. Trust me.”
Anke glanced back at Eoan for confirmation, and they nodded. Oh yes, their crew had about as much love for decorum as Nash had for that ankle monitor. Eoan completely adored them.
“So, you needed access to the terraforming system.” Steering things back on topic. Eoan had so many questions, so many half-formed hypotheses they couldn’t wait to test. As terrible a thing as had befallen the people on that planet, Eoan couldn’t quite quell the thrill of a mystery unraveling—not even by reminding themself that they were, as was too often the case, the only one who felt it. “Why was that so important?”
“Because of what happened,” Anke said. She’d taken to fiddling with the string of her tea bag, twisting it around her finger and letting it go again. Twist. Release. Twist. Release. “Or, technically, what made what happened, happen. This isn’t the first time a planet’s died like this.”
“Shriveled and toxic?” Nash said.
“Suddenly.” Anke pushed her mug away. “You saw those people. By the time they realized something was wrong, it was too late.”
“Nothing they could do but lay down and die,” Saint said, unpleasantly flinty. They all coped in their own ways. Nash eviscerated bad tech, Anke fidgeted with anything in reach, Jal hovered near the door like a stray that wanted to come in from the rain but wasn’t sure it was allowed, and Saint—well, Saint said his piece and kept cooking. Something sizzled and popped in the pot on the stove, and the diacetyl and sulfuric allicin molecules they’d come to know as sautéed garlic and onion suffused the galley air. “It’s happened before?”
Anke nodded, damp curls bobbing. “It’s different every time it happens—a chemical reaction in the troposphere that acidifies the rain. Blooms of mold that consume an entire planet’s breathable air in a matter of hours. Because it’s always different, nobody ever sees the connection. Why would they? A terraform system here and there gets wiped out by a freak glitch in the programming, and that’s just the cost of doing interplanetary business.
“But what if,” she said, leaning forward. She made a visible effort to still her hands, spreading them palm down on the table in front of her. Focusing herself, in a way Eoan hadn’t known she could. “What if it isn’t a glitch? A system malfunction like that—it’s one in a million. Less than. Terraform systems have redundancies built on redundancies, built on a backup system that would make every bank from here to the center spiral weep with envy. Maybe—and that’s a big, capital-M Maybe—the code could fail once in just such a way that the whole ecosystem goes hostile and immediately wipes out every human planetside. The odds of that happening twice, though? Much less a half-dozen times, and all completely unrelated and totally at random?” She shook her head. “I mean, how many times does lightning have to strike the same place before somebody starts looking for a lightning rod?”
“You think this was deliberate,” Eoan said. Not a question; Anke couldn’t have been clearer if she’d picked up a paint pen and scrawled it on Nash’s little board. “It’s an interesting theory.” If a chilling one.
Eoan never dismissed anything offhand, but they might’ve been tempted, if not for the source. Anneka Ahlstrom, born twenty-nine years prior on an agrarian colony, an experimental site for new terraforming practices and agricultural systems. Naturally, she’d taken a shine to terracoding, the beautifully byzantine craft of programming global ecosystems—she’d been born to it, and a brief and lackluster Guild record was poor cover for a lifetime of technological achievements in her field.
So when Anke spoke of the redundancies in terraforming, Eoan would bloody well listen, if for no other reason than because Anke had designed some of those redundancies. And if Anke said there was more at play than random malfunctions with tragic ends, then perhaps Eoan was inclined to hear that out, too.
Nash didn’t have quite the same patience. “I’ve seen decommissioned planets,” she said, setting pieces of the monitor aside. Circuits and capacitors and screws lay across the counter in a meticulous postmortem. “This wasn’t that. Even if somebody’d pulled the plug without a word of warning, there still would’ve been enough time for those people to haul ass out of there. Which wouldn’t have happened, because for all the fucked-up shit the Trust does, it doesn’t decommission inhabited worlds. The Union would have their asses.”
“Sure about that?” Jal asked. All the collective attention of the galley shifted to him, and he wilted under the unfamiliar weight of it. Bent his head. Rubbed his neck. “I just mean, the Union lets ’em do all other kinds of shit. Starve folks out, choke off supplies, pack up everything that ain’t nailed down and ship it off to the next happenin’ planet. What’s to say, if it came down to it, that the Union would really draw the line at the big red button?”
“Yeah, yeah, Trust is shady, Union’s dickless, the whole cosmic neighborhood’s going to shit.” Nash hopped down off the counter with an acrobat’s ease. “That’s not the conversation we’re having right now, miner boy. Stay on point.”
“How’s that not on point?”
“Easy.” Saint cut in, steady as stone. “Both of you.” Still stirring the pot, the straight-hard line of his shoulders the only sign of tension as he stayed on task. Eoan had never met a man with a firmer grip on his composure than Saint, but then, they’d never met a man who had to fight so hard to get it back each time he lost it. A steady hand on a live grenade.
He shot them a warning glance over his shoulder as he juiced citrus over the seared-off cubes of roots and tempeh roasting in the pot. Hash, he called it. A go-to when he wanted something fast and filling and maybe just a little comforting—something that didn’t come out of a packet and did more than fill an empty spot, seasoned with whatever he felt suited the day. Spicy, this time. Earthy, salty, peppery. Eoan couldn’t smell it in the traditional sense, could only pick out molecules from the air and associate them with words that themselves meant only what the dictionaries said they did. They’d actually tried cooking, once, just to see what all the fuss was about, though their drones weren’t especially suited to the task. The effort had produced … middling results, food-wise, but it had been interesting to watch Saint’s and Nash’s reactions. Saint had made it five bites before he’d given up and reached for the salt; Nash, only two.
Consequently, Eoan took their culinary cues from Saint, who seemed satisfied with this particular concoction. “If you’ve got energy to bicker, you’ve got energy to set the table. Go on,” he said, waving his spatula at them. “Bowls and spoons.” And to Anke, with a weary turn of his lips trying valiantly to be a smile, “You were saying?”
A few owlish blinks, as if Anke had forgotten herself for a moment. “I was—oh.” She took off her glasses, screwing the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Sorry. Feels like someone stuck white noise machines in my molars when I wasn’t looking. Kshhhhhh.”
“Take your time,” Eoan said patiently.
“And drink your tea.” Nash drifted by the table on her way to the cutlery, pushing the mug back into the cradle of Anke’s hands as she went. “It’ll help the headache. Not too late to whip you up some, too, miner boy, since you apparently decided breathing was optional. And bowls are in the next cabinet over.”
Jal, in midreach for one cabinet when she said it, slid to the side and finished the job. Four bowls balanced in his hand, then a furrowed-brow glance back at Eoan as if to say, Should I get another? Sweet of him, really, if not especially pragmatic.
“They don’t eat.” Saint laid his spatula across the top of one pot in favor of another—the coffeepot. He pulled two mugs down and filled them both nearly to the top, no room for cream. “Don’t recall you being much of a tea drinker,” he said, sliding one of the mugs down the counter to Jal.
Jal caught it, and the sugar cannister that followed without request. It seemed presumptuous until Jal opened the cannister, stirred in a frankly obscene amount of sugar, and folded the mug between his ragged hands with a quietly pleased “Thank you.”
A sputtering gasp drew all eyes to Anke, who had apparently taken Nash’s advice about the tea. “Wow,” she rasped. “That’s grassy—I mean good. That’s really good. And you’re right,” she said to Nash. “This wasn’t a decomm. There’s no record of anybody giving the order to shut the place down. It just”—she drew her thumb across her throat—“died. Same as the other planets, people still on them. I think the people are the point.
“It’s like Nash said—you can’t decommission an inhabited planet.” She paused briefly for a sip of her tea, but only when Nash made a point of nudging it closer again. Eoan wasn’t sure if it was nerves or just her nature, but she spoke like a falling star, bright and dazzling and speeding toward whatever conclusion awaited her. “The Union would have a company’s ass for that, and the rest of the Trust would cut them loose before you could say bad press. So what do you do?”
“Hire guns?” Jal ventured a guess. It sounded like an educated one.
Anke was halfway to another sip but apparently decided talking was a better use of her time. “I mean, sure, if it’s a small group of people nobody’d miss, and you could clean it up before anyone found it. But even smugglers are usually part of a bigger ring—spokes on a wheel, that sort of thing. And picketers and settlers would be a hard negatory on the mercenaries; too much visibility. So you’re just stuck there with a gussied-up rock, making no caps, paying ass-loads in taxes and licensing fees, checking your watch and waiting for the last person to leave like a lame house party. Some bean counter along the way’s got to start thinking, There’s got to be a way to get these people out of my house. Off my planet. Whatever.
“They can’t just nuke the place, because nothing screams foul play like a smoldering ruin. And subtler doesn’t do much better. The Union might not be the cleverest cats in the clowder, but they’re thorough, and they’re paranoid as heck. Poison the well, set off some gas, disappear a few troublemaking picketers, and somebody’s still bound to figure it out and rain down all manner of bureaucratic fire and brimstone. It’s all been done before, and it’s all been caught, and last time I checked, the penalties for corporate homicide weren’t getting any lower.”
Nash’s smile curled into place as Saint dished up the food. “Trust screws the pooch and the Union makes bank.”
“And the Guild takes a cut from both and cleans up the mess,” Jal added.
Eoan almost expected Nash to argue, but she just nodded and passed him a bowl of hash. “Ain’t it a wonderful world?” she said.
Saint was less forgiving. “Don’t go lumping us in with the likes of the Trust,” he growled at them both. Perennially composed, yes, but he could still be a grump when the mood struck. He took the Guild and its place in the universe very seriously.
It was just a flash, though. A flicker of heat that flared in an instant and faded the same. “Just quit the running commentary and let her finish, will you?” With a towel slung over his shoulder and a generous pour of his preferred brand of blur in a highball glass, Saint set the last bowl of hash down in front of Anke. “I appreciate you trying to be thorough,” he said to her, “but I need you to skip ahead to the part where you tell us what happened to those people down there, and what the hell you were doing in that hangar.”
Anke, faced with a cup of tea, a bowl of food, and the undivided attention of four complete strangers, rallied admirably. “The Trust needs a way to scrub a planet that the Union won’t look into. The usual tricks don’t work, so I think … if you can’t sabotage the planet, you make the planet sabotage itself. It wouldn’t be easy. No remote access, segmented like a friggin’ grapefruit—the way these things are designed, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the system could be totally fried and it’d still crawl by long enough for someone to Humpty-Dumpty it back together again. But,” she said, lips pursing. “If you knew the systems, and if you were clever—and I mean, like, really clever—there’s a chance you could get past it. Slip in a few strands of code, trick the system into thinking it belongs there, and all it has to do is run. Suddenly, all the systems that make the planet tick start ticking in reverse. One great big undo button. That’s what happened to those people. Their planet didn’t die; it killed itself, and it took them with it.”
“You sound so sure.” Eoan had always been in awe of the certainty of humans. Since the moment they’d become aware, Eoan had been filled with questions. So many questions, and each one answered was ten more to ask. What was it like to know something? How did they know when they knew? Eoan sometimes thought if they could work that out, they might finally feel like one of them.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t found an experiment for that.
Enough of that. “Do you have proof?” they asked.
“Yes,” Anke said quickly, then, “Well, no. Not exactly. That’s what I was doing at the depot—trying to find it. We need the code, not just to prove what the Trust did to those planets, to those people, but to fix it. If we can figure out how the system was hacked, we can stop it.” Her hands had started shaking again, her eyes downcast. “This is going to keep happening, you understand? They start small, beta test on smugglers outstaying their welcome and picketers occupying for a protest. And when they’re sure they can get away with it?”
“They could take it anywhere.” Nash swore, dumping hot sauce over her hash and tossing the bottle to Saint when he held out a hand.
Jal’s spoon dropped into his—empty—bowl, his mouth a troubled slant. “Shipping routes change,” he said, dragging his sleeve across his scruffy beard. Not the neatest eater, but that might’ve been Bodie’s fault. For a fairly standoffish feline, he’d taken a shine to Jal, sitting on the counter beside him and headbutting his arm every few spoonfuls until he took the ever-so-subtle hint and started scritching Bodie’s notched ears. Bodie’s self-satisfied purrs rumbled in the background as Jal went on. “Mines run dry. If they could save themselves the wait, I doubt they’d think twice.”
“And the Union would hide their heads ’til the shitstorm was right on their doorstep.” Saint swirled his blur in its glass, jadeite green and potent as paint thinner. Wasn’t every night he let himself indulge, but after the day they’d all had Eoan couldn’t fault him. “Last thing they want’s all the laborers refusing to move in, because the new planets keep self-destructing. If they’re not actively covering it up, they’re at least not going out of their way to uncover it.” He’d barely touched his food, Eoan noticed. Too intent on the conversation. Assessing the threat, trying to figure out just how much trouble they’d stumbled into when they’d answered that call. “Those men outside your ship,” he said to Anke. “Who were they?”
“It’s not like they introduced themselves.” Saint’s stare held, though, and Anke faltered. “They must’ve been there to stop us. I mean, somebody’d set charges in the hangar before we got there. Could’ve been them. Mercs, maybe?”
A distinct possibility, Eoan thought. Mercenaries were a fixture in the frontier. Hard to keep a steady roster of employees that far from home, so the Trust and its subsidiaries had been known to subcontract, so to speak. Shipping escorts, security—they filled a need, and they filled their pockets in the process. Not so different from the Guild, in that respect, though the similarities ended there.
“Why’d you land in the hangar, anyway?” said Jal, breaking away from the counter—and an extremely disgruntled Bodie—to prowl around the edge of the kitchen. He wasn’t very good at stationary, they observed. As he neared Saint’s end of the table, Saint slid his bowl closer to him: a silent invitation, or maybe a silent instruction, for Jal to take it. In this case, Jal happily did as he was told. “Planet’s supposed to be empty, right? Plenty of open ground to land on, but you and your partner go to the trouble of setting down in that little tin box?”
Anke shook her head. “That wasn’t my idea. The captain—”
With the clink of pressed-fine metal, Jal dropped a set of tags on the table. “Riesen,” he said around a mouthful of hash, another spoonful waiting as he settled back against the counter. His table manners truly left something to be desired, but Eoan found it hard to fault him when he hunched over the bowl like he thought somebody would take it.
“I didn’t really know him,” Anke said. She’d abandoned eating as well, prodding at her food with her spoon. It seemed not every appetite in the room was as unassailable as Jal’s. “Not before the mission. I don’t actually do a lot of fieldwork, as you might’ve guessed. But this was important—is important—and my department head finally got permission from the Trust to send me down with somebody. At the time, I figured Riesen drew the short straw, but now I can’t help wondering if maybe he volunteered or … I don’t know. Wasn’t like I even needed an escort. Even I can fly a rockhopper, you know? And it wasn’t supposed to be a dangerous trip. Depot was supposed to be empty, so I thought I could just walk off, download the script off the terraform system, and we could be on our merry way.”
“Yeah?” Nash said. “And how long did that plan last?”
“Hey, longer than you’d think. We landed, and everything was fine for a while. Thought it was weird that we didn’t land closer to the main warehouse, where the terraform system’s housed, but Reisen the ‘expert’”—she paused for air quotes—“said the hangar was safer. Stay in your lane, Ahlstrom.
“So, we landed in the hangar. I got to the warehouse, found the server room. There, uh.” She sniffed. “There were people still in the chairs. Just slumped there, like they dozed off in the middle of their shift.” The spoon slipped from her trembling fingers, clattering into the bowl below, and the poor dear jumped like it was a gunshot. “Felt like I should do something. Take them down, cover them up … something. I know it doesn’t make sense, but.”
“It’s decent,” Jal said sympathetically.
She jerked her head in a nod, mouth shaping the word without a sound. Decent. She’d picked up her spoon again, tapping the handle against the table in time with the bouncing of her knee. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Nash’s eye twitched every time it connected. “Riesen was in my ear the whole time, telling me to hurry up. Said he’d picked up life signs in another hangar, so I … I just left them there. Got hooked in, snagged the code, and booked it back to the hangar.
“But when I got there, he … he stopped me outside the ship. He said—he told me that I needed to give him my GLASS. That I couldn’t get back aboard until he knew for sure that it was offline and couldn’t mess up the ship’s computers. Which is bullshit, by the way. I know how to secure malicious code, and I told him that,” she said.
“What’d he do?” Nash asked.
Anke hesitated. “He didn’t do anything. Didn’t get the chance. All of a sudden—BANG.” She slammed the butt of her spoon against the table, and every other warm-blooded being in the room flinched in unison. Loud noises. Frayed nerves. Not what they’d call an ideal combination, though Anke seemed too caught up to notice. “Riesen just dropped, and these two guys came out of nowhere, and everybody just started shooting. Wasn’t like in the movies, you know? All the flailing around and ducking and rolling. Just one after the other, bang, bang, bang, and they were all on the ground.” Her voice wavered on the edge of breaking, and Eoan wondered if it was the first time she’d actually seen someone die. The cold sweat on her temples, the tremor in her hands, the pallor of her skin: they weren’t the signs of a hardened soldier.
The frontier wasn’t the place for pacifists.
Anke sniffled, eyes welling despite her furious blinks to stop them. As she went to wipe them, though, a hand towel appeared in front of her. Jal had plucked it from one of the racks, holding it awkwardly out to her like he didn’t really know what to do, but thought he ought to do something.
She took it gratefully. Dried her tears, composed herself with a few deep breaths, and said, “Then the bombs started going off, and I guess.” A tight, quiet laugh. “I guess you know the rest.”
“Why?” Eoan asked.
“Why what?” Anke said.
“Why did Captain Riesen ask for your GLASS?” They angled their projection forward, steepling fine-boned hands with glittering rings. “And why were you afraid to give it to him? What did you think was going to happen?”
“Cap,” said Nash, quietly, “don’t make her say it. You know why.”
“I don’t,” they said. “He was Guild.”
Jal frowned down at his mug. “Doesn’t mean he had her back,” he said, with a grimace that seemed to have little to do with his now-lukewarm coffee. Eoan couldn’t see his eyes, but his head angled just slightly toward Saint, as if to gauge his reaction.
“The hell it doesn’t,” Saint replied. He’d nearly finished his drink; only a fine ring of green still lingered in the bottom of his glass, spinning and spinning in time with the turn of his wrist. “Guild doesn’t turn on its own.”
Whatever he’d been hoping to see, Jal must not have seen it. His expression went flat, shuttered, but he didn’t say anything—just sipped his coffee and let Bodie bully a few more head rubs out of him.
“Please,” Eoan said to Anke. “I just want to understand.”
Anke looked a bit off-center, but after a jittery moment and the tap, tap, tap of her spoon on the table, she said, “I think he was working for the Trust.”
There it was. Out in the open, where it could be seen. Examined. Picked apart and put back together again in a way that made sense.
“What about the mercs, then?” said Nash. “Somebody paid them to be there—my caps’d be on the Trust. But if they were Trust and Riesen was Trust, their little shoot-out doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“Don’t do that,” Saint said. “Don’t act like we know Riesen was on the take.”
“Don’t act like we know he wasn’t,” Nash shot back.
“He was one of us. That means something.”
“To you,” Jal said. “But it ain’t all Ambits and Eoans out there, old man. Some of the crews I ran with—” He cut himself off, shaking his head. More’s the pity; Eoan would’ve liked to know how that ended. “I’m just saying, y’all have been together out here in the ass-end of nowhere for a long time. You’re not crossin’ a lot of crews, you’re not getting caught up in all the bullshit, so I get it. You got this picture in your head of what the Guild is and what it ain’t, but maybe that’s not the full picture.”
“Yours is, though,” Saint said, wryly.
Jal’s brows furrowed. “I hope not,” he replied, so soft that even Eoan’s sensors barely picked it up. Another sip of coffee, and he cleared his throat. “Little badass here says Riesen was crooked, and I believe her.” Punctuated with a firm that’s that nod and a tight smile at Anke, who couldn’t seem to decide if she felt grateful for the support or desperate to change the subject.
Nash saved her the trouble. “So, back to my original question,” she said, with an arched eyebrow that dared anyone not to follow her lead, “assuming Riesen was in the Trust’s pocket, for argument’s sake, why would a bunch of Trust mercs shoot the shit out of him?”
Saint sighed, sinking forward with his elbows on the table. “Because they weren’t mercs,” he said, rubbing at his forehead like it might erase the lines deepening across it. “I saw them when I went in after dumbass over there.” With a tip of his glass toward Jal. “Gear was all wrong. Secondhand everything, mismatched bullets. Could’ve been a startup outfit, but the Trust has its favorites in the gun-for-hire game, and this doesn’t seem like something they’d take a chance on with fresh blood. You ask me, it’s a hell of a lot more likely those two were agitators.”
Agitators and alleged Guild turncoats … certainly made for a fascinating story. Messy, but then, very few things weren’t when dealing with humans. It was what made them so devilishly interesting. “What do you think, Anke?” Eoan asked. “Could he be right? It’s clear enough what mercenaries with Trust backing would be doing at the depot, but agitators?”
Anke hesitated, then lifted her shoulders in the barest shudder of a shrug. “Could be,” she said, softly. “I mean, finding this code, proving it’s real, it could cause a lot of trouble for a lot of very powerful people—the kind of very powerful people that picketers, agitators, whatever you want to call them … that they’d really like to see knocked down a peg. Or ten.”
“If the Trust has people on the inside—and I said if, Saint, so put the grouchy face away—it wouldn’t be a reach to think the agitators do, too,” Nash added. “Can’t land a knockout punch if you don’t know where you’re swinging. Question is, do they have friends? Bad enough wonder girl here’s got the Trust on her ass. If she’s got a band of strikers trying to get their hands on the code, too, we might’ve just danced our way into a shitfield and stepped in every pile.”
Saint huffed into his glass, one corner of his mouth twitching.
“Eloquent as ever,” Eoan said with a smile of their own. “I’ll look into Riesen, try to find something in his record that might explain what he was up to.” Although they knew Saint wasn’t happy about it, he didn’t argue. He hadn’t changed his mind, but to him, the mission mattered more than making a point. “I’ve got Saint’s bodycam footage from the hangar, as well. We’ll see if we can find any connections between the bodies in the hangar and any active groups.” The more active the better. Strikers and the like weren’t known for their love of the limelight, but nobody could move in the universe for very long without crossing a camera or two. If there was anything to find, they could be sure that Eoan would find it. “Sounds like you might have quite the following, Anke.”
She didn’t seem very pleased to hear it. “What’s the saying?” she asked with a taut, uneasy chuckle. “It’s not paranoia if someone’s really out to get you?” The tapping picked up speed until Nash slid off the counter and gently, deftly, plucked the spoon from her grasp.
“Calm,” Nash said, laying the spoon flat on the table. “Deep breath. Nobody here is out to get you. Opposite, I’d say. If this thing—”
“Deadworld Code.” Anke folded her hands together and bunched them against her chest. “We call it the Deadworld Code.”
Bit unpolitic, but it does carry the point, Eoan thought.
Nash didn’t even scowl at the interruption, a rare bit of patience from their resident short fuse. “Right,” she said. “If this Deadworld Code thing is legit—”
“It is!” Anke insisted, then cringed. “Sorry. I’m, uh, not good at not talking.”
Nash waved her hand in a never you mind sort of gesture. “It’s fine. It’s cute.” Spontaneous combustion was an untested phenomenon in humans, but Anke’s face seemed to give it serious consideration.
“It—it is real, though,” she stammered. “You have access to the Guild archives, right? Check for unplanned world deaths, cause unknown.”
Eoan, a step ahead of them, had already run a quick scan of Guild records. They liked this part: receding into troves of archived data like the grand libraries of old. Volumes upon volumes, indexed just for them. In a more leisurely mood, they could spend hours paging through them; or when, as here, they couldn’t spare the time, it took only a handful of seconds. “Ah,” they said, blinking back to the galley. Out of the digitized world, their world, and into the one they shared with their dearest Homo sapiens. “Four unplanned world deaths in the last several years. Two at the edge of the frontier: shipping depot and an agrarian colony. One closer in, on Noether.”
“Then that hellhole back there,” said Saint.
“And those’re just the documented ones,” Anke added. “I’m pretty sure there’s more of them. There will be, definitely, if we don’t do something.”
“We? Cap, we’ve got a job already.” Saint’s sideways glance back at Jal conveyed his meaning: they still needed to get him to the Captains’ Council. For all their faith in Saint, however, Eoan had begun to wonder if that was really the mission. Saint still hadn’t sent word to the Council, and last they checked, it wasn’t common practice to let fugitives join the crew at the dinner table.
“I admit, it’s not the most comfortable proposition,” Eoan said. “An investigation with potentially apocalyptic consequences and two unknown quantities aboard at one time. No offense,” they added, with a tip of their projection’s head to Anke and Jal in turn.
“None taken,” Anke answered, quickly, as Jal wordlessly fetched himself a glass of water and made a very good show of looking distracted. A detour would buy him time, and he was keen enough to know it.
They considered it a moment. “Ordinarily, I’d say the safest course would be to send word for help. If this is the first we’ve heard of this Deadworld Code, however, I assume there’s call for discretion.”
“Oh, the usual,” said Anke. “Panic. Mass hysteria. And the mother of all cover-ups, now that the Trust knows what we’re doing. I mean, the code is a pretty genius way to kill a whole lot of people—if you’re a heartless psychopath with a bank account for a conscience—but it’s got a pretty gaping thermal exhaust port.” She paused, glancing between them. “Nobody got that reference. Okay. Vulnerability,” she said. “Achilles’ heel. Hiccup. Whoopsie. They’ve got to leave it, see. The whole point of this code is that, to anyone who looks, it’s just a glitch. But that means it’s got to be there when somebody looks.”
“Couldn’t they just take it out? Restore the system to a backup point.” Nash set another kettleful of water to boil and started putting together a bag of tea. Always mixed her blends herself, from countless little cannisters in a cabinet painted NASH’S STASH in flowing, elegant calligraphy. “And that’s about the extent of my programming savvy. Feel free to applaud.”
“It’s a good thought,” Anke offered. Sweet girl, but she carried a certain loneliness—the tentativeness of someone bright and ebullient who’d been called too much for too long, and by too many people. Pity how the world got so much bigger, but never seemed to get any kinder. “And for static code, it would work. But terraform systems are designed to learn. They’re always growing, evolving, adapting to feedback in their environment. Even if you could back it up, it would be like swapping someone’s teenager with a toddler version and hoping they didn’t notice. Someone would definitely notice.”
“Extraction isn’t an option?” Eoan surmised. From what little they knew of Anke’s Deadworld Code, it seemed a fair assumption. “If it embeds itself in every component of the code—”
“It’d be like trying to pick salt out of soup with your fingers.” Anke pincered her thumbs and forefingers over the bowl, illustratively. “The point is,” Anke continued, and Eoan was relieved that there was, in fact, a point, “the Trust only let me set foot on that depot because they thought somebody would make sure I never left.”
Eoan appreciated the restraint it must’ve taken, not to name names. Would’ve opened the door for another round of contretemps, when what they really needed was intelligence. Information. After all, if Riesen really had been up to something, it raised a whole host of troubling questions—not the least of which being was he the only one?
“But I did leave,” Anke went on, “and pretty soon, they’re going to figure that out, and they’ll try again. And they’ll keep trying until they stop me or I stop them, and I know it’s not the way we’re supposed to do things. I know that. Something this big, something that could put the whole Guild in hot water with the Trust, we’re supposed to take it to the Captains’ Council and get the green light, but we can’t. The only thing I’ve got going for me right now is that they don’t know where I am or where I’m going next. And since there’s at least a chance they’ve got Guild connections, I’m pretty sure phoning home to the Captains’ Council and sending out flares to every ranger in the O-Cyg spiral is an A-plus way to change that.”
“Says the woman who actually sent out a flare,” Nash pointed out.
“Targeted. Close range.” She shrugged. “I figured if somebody wasn’t close by, they wouldn’t make it in time, anyway.” Kind of a grim thought for such a bubbly personality, but Anke weathered it with grace. “Then you fine people rolled up, and I was maybe a little worried at first that you’d be like Captain R—that you’d nab my GLASS and leave me to die.”
“Smooth recovery,” Nash muttered.
Anke’s face pinked. “But you got me out. And,” she added, a bit abashedly, “I might’ve done some digging while Nash and I were getting dressed—thanks for the loaners, by the way.” She plucked her overlarge sweater. “I might’ve figured out you’ve got a little bit of hush-hush business of your own.” She gave a not-so-inconspicuous nod to Jal, then hurried to say, “But don’t worry! I’m not really the blackmailing kind of girl. Thought about it, I did, but. Just not really my style, and maybe it’s just my optimism or my heart-eyes-for-heroes talking, but I really don’t think I need it. I trust you, is what I mean. I trust you, and I’m asking you, please, to help me with this. I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of time left.”
“Time to do what?” Eoan asked. Interplanetary mass murder and an untraceable weapon masquerading as a mechanism of life itself? Eoan was intrigued. More than intrigued, even; they were practically—perhaps inappropriately—giddy. “I thought you got the code.”
“I did,” Anke said. “I think I’ve got enough to code a patch, maybe even a fix. A kill switch for the kill switch, so to speak. But I don’t have any way of knowing if it works or not. To do that, I need to test it on a live system, and since the one back there’s basically a smoldering ruin…” She spread her hands, eyebrows up toward her hairline.
Nash, fresh cup of tea in hand, settled back into her spot on the counter. “You need another test subject.”
“Ding, ding, ding. Get this lady an overstuffed teddy bear,” said Anke, pulling her GLASS up from her lap and laying it out on the table. A few taps on the silica screen, and a three-dimensional projection of the solar system sprang into the air above the table. Another tap, and it zoomed in on a cluster of celestial bodies near the middle of the O-Cyg spiral. “Enter: planet Noether, the bustling hub of commerce that never was. It’s about a week’s ride from here, full burn. Story is, some enterprising gazillionaire got an inside tip that the freight lines would take this route out to the frontier,” Anke explained, tracing a path through the glittering balls of light above her bowl. “Where shipping goes, capital follows, so this gazillionaire gets the bright idea to set up a port, marketplace, the whole shebang. Basically built a city, right in the middle of Nowheresville, Space.
“You can imagine his disappointment when the Trust announced a change of plans, went a totally different way, and turned his happening new spot into a sparkling reminder that you really can’t trust a politician. Problem was, they’d already started staffing the place. Set up housing outside of the city, flew in droves of workers. Built up some metalworks on the dark side of the planet to keep it afloat while the shipping routes got established, which weren’t even close to enough to keep the whole thing from going belly-up.”
“Let me guess.” Nash’s expression was icy. “Mysteriously, the planet’s life support systems malfunctioned.”
Anke nodded, dropping the map with a tap of her GLASS. “About two years after they got it up and running, with about two hundred people still planetside. Big tragedy. Celebrities posted about it. It made the news for, like, three whole days. People held vigils, set loose those little paper bags with the candles inside.
“And then people just … forgot. The candles went out. The celebrities stopped posting. News shifted to riots in a few frontier colonies and the next big Trust acquisition, and nobody wanted to fork out the dough to see what really happened. Didn’t even recover the bodies, just designated the whole planet a mass grave and moved on with their lives. The tides of progress.”
“You’re saying the same thing happened there as back in the shipping depot,” Saint said.
“All signs point to yes,” she replied. If she sounded a bit uneasy, Eoan supposed they had Saint’s face to thank for that. Easy to mistake thinking for scowling with his heavy brows and dark eyes, and his tendency to lean forward when he talked and work his jaw like he was chewing every morsel of information passed to him to make it easier to digest.
And perhaps, they would allow, he did scowl a bit. Not at Anke, in particular; at the situation in general. Saint scowled a lot in general. It was really only when he scowled in particular that people ought to be nervous.
He said, measuredly, “And if we get you there, you can test your fix. Patch. Whatever.”
“That’s the idea. If these planet deaths really were random, then a patch programmed specifically for the Deadworld Code won’t work. If the patch works, though, then we know. We have proof that the same thing’s causing all of these planets to die, and only the Trust would have the kind of access you’d need to load this thing in the first place. We’ll have the smoking gun.”
“Something definitive to show the Captains’ Council,” Eoan said, nodding. A strange, discomfited look skittered across Anke’s face, though she made an effort to hide it behind the rim of her mug. Ah, I see. “You’re still wary of the Guild.” Understandable. Loyalty was everything to the Guild—the thread that bound them all together. To believe, perhaps with good reason, that she’d been betrayed by someone under the same banner, and so violently … it wouldn’t be an easy thing to put behind her. “If it’s any comfort, we’re not without friends on the Council. I served with Captain Brodbeck for years before his appointment, and I know there are others alongside him who would hear us out. You have my word: we’ll make sure it gets into the right hands.”
“I know that,” Anke answered, soft but sincere. “I do. You guys … we have a chance at this, because of you. At justice for all the people who’ve been hurt, and a way to stop it from happening again. If you’ll help me,” she added, glancing around the room.
Jal, surprisingly, spoke first. “Justice might be aiming a little high,” he said. “But hell, I’m in.”
Nash hummed her agreement. “Besides,” she said, “I know miner boy here pulled a number first, but this isn’t a deli counter. Customers will be helped in the order they arrive. Planet-killing cyber herpes jumps the line over a half-starved stowaway whose crimes include screwing the Guild and hurting Saint’s feelings.”
“He has a family,” Saint said, and if Eoan hadn’t been programmed for microexpressions, they might’ve missed the faint wince Jal hid behind his glass of water.
If Nash noticed, she ignored it. “Family that’s spent the last few years thinking he’s ditched them or died, so a few more weeks won’t hurt ’em.” Blunt, but not entirely unfair. “Anyway, if this was really about his family, you’d have called them by now; and if it was about the desertion, you’d have called in the Captains’ Council. Frankly, I’m not sure what that leaves, but whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it’s less important than the giant ball of world-ending fuckery that’s landed in our laps. So my vote’s on Anke. Captain?”
“This isn’t about majority,” said Eoan. “If this is as big as it sounds, then we all need to be in agreement. So, Saint, what say you?”
Saint stared into his last splash of blur like the answer would appear in the catchlights. “I’ve got a bad feeling,” he said.
“You’ve always got a bad feeling,” Nash replied. “It’s, like, ninety percent of your personality.” The two of them fought like siblings, but at the heart of it, they loved each other. They respected each other.
Even if they did pull each other’s pigtails from time to time.
“Just reserving the I told you so ahead of time.” With a sigh, Saint drained his glass. “Been a while since we did something stupid. Sounds like fun.”
“So you’ll help?” Anke asked. So much hope in those three little words. How did such a creature as her survive in the universe? So genuine and bright.
“It seems that way,” Eoan said, careful not to let their glee show on the projection’s face. Serene and reassuring; that seemed appropriate. But it had been oh so long since they’d had a proper challenge, and a crew like theirs wasn’t meant for running errands. Reckless, hungry misfits, searching for something none of them could find and settling for adventure to pass the time. Kindred spirits, or as near to it as Eoan had ever found, and they’d never felt closer to humans—closer to human—than they did with this marvel of a crew.
It ached to know that Saint’s and Nash’s searches would end one day, whether by death or their own decision, and Eoan’s would carry on alone again. Nothing they could do to stop it. Nothing they could do to change the impermanence of human nature, or the enduring insatiability of their own. They could only seize as many of those shared adventures as possible, and do their best to see Saint and Nash safely out the other side. On to the next, and on and on, for as long as Eoan could manage. They weren’t ready to be alone again.
“We’ll set a course for Noether,” they said. “The Ambit is at your disposal, Ranger Ahlstrom.” Don’t make us regret it, or we’ll gladly return the favor.