NASH
Nash swore she’d only been asleep a few minutes when the alarm went off.
Not the shit’s going down alarm—it had a uniquely ass-puckering cadence—but the one that said they’d be landing planetside shortly, so they really ought to get moving.
“All right, all right,” she grumbled, rolling off her hammock and feeling around in the open drawer beside it. Sweater. Nope. Too heavy. She tossed it over her shoulder and reached again. Sleeveless T-shirt. Better. Linen joggers, because it’d be humid as fuck. She dressed in a hurry and threw her hair in a rough bun, stuffing her feet in her shoes and her toothbrush in her mouth as she climbed up the ladder to the infirmary. “Time?” she called to Eoan around a mouthful of toothpaste.
“Less than fifteen minutes to landing.”
“Little more warning next time!”
“Then you’ll say to let you sleep longer.” There wasn’t a projection in sight, but Nash would’ve bet a month’s pay that Eoan had a smile.
Checkmate. She narrowed her eyes at the ceiling, because it was kind of hard to glare at the entire fucking ship, and spat her toothpaste in the sick bay sink as she passed. Bag from the shelf, a meal bar from the cabinet—and then a couple more, when she remembered a certain mutant miner and his bottomless stomach—and she was out the sick bay door in a rush.
Too much of one, it turned out, because she crashed into Anke just a couple steps into the hall. “Oh!” Anke yelped, with an endearing little flail backward. Nearly knocked a macramé plant hanger off the wall, but Nash caught it before it fell, carefully returning it to its hook. “Sorry! Sorry.” Anke pressed her hand to her chest and took a few quick breaths. In her defense, after what she’d been through, she’d earned some jumpiness. “I just—the alarm.”
“Just means we’re landing soon,” Nash said, giving Anke a quick once-over. She’d dressed, though she could probably lose the coat. Nash told her as much as she started down the hall toward the galley. Tight schedule be damned, she needed a cup of tea.
Anke, probably for lack of anything better to do, trailed along beside her. “Wait,” she said. “Why are we landing? How long was I asleep?”
“Hopefully longer than I was,” Nash sighed, a bit wistfully. Eoan already had some hot water waiting, about a minute off the boil. Didn’t quite make up for their shit timing, but it helped. “We’ve got to stop for supplies. Army marches on its stomach and all that.”
“What about all the crates in the hold?”
Nash opened her stash cabinet and riffled around the various cannisters of tea until she found the right blend for the morning. “We stocked up a couple of days back, but that was for two warm bodies on a two-week trip back out to frontier patrol. Now we’ve got three mouths to feed, and some as-yet-unknown subspecies of garbage disposal,” she added with a nod toward the hall. She actually had no idea where Jal had gotten off to, and the only signs of Saint’s presence were the stack of protein pancakes on the warmer and the half-full pot of coffee in the machine.
Anke shook her head when Nash offered her a cup, frowning. “It’s just one week to Noether. Surely we could make it, if we stretched a little.”
“And the trip home?” Sure, they could probably make it on emergency rations and their grow room crop, but that kind of defeated the point of emergency rations. They were there for the shit you couldn’t plan for. “Kind of important, that.”
“Oh. Right.” Anke looked flustered. Kind of reminded Nash of the times Bodie fell off the counter and was afraid somebody had noticed, like Anke couldn’t decide whether to be embarrassed or annoyed. Bodie usually skittered off to rally his pride, though; Anke just flushed red and rubbed her eyes under her glasses. “I’m sorry, I’m just—this has been my life for years, you know? Day in and day out, trying to get to the bottom of all those … terrible doesn’t even cut it, does it? Hundreds of people could die. Thousands. Millions.”
Nash nodded, stirring her tea and watching the colors bleed into the water. “It’s a lot of pressure.” Understatement. “But you don’t save people’s lives by sabotaging your own. So, we stop here, get what we need to keep ourselves alive and moving, and then we haul ass for Noether. Okay?” Not that Anke really had much choice.
“Yeah,” Anke said with a quiet sigh. “Yeah, you’re right. I know you’re right. I guess … I’m just tired, is all. Ready for it to be over.”
“I get it,” Nash said. It felt like a different lifetime, but she’d had a white whale of her own—a mission so important to her that she’d forgotten she still had to live afterward. “You know,” she began, blowing gently on her steaming mug, “there’s not a whole lot of options for kids growing up on a station. You take the job that’s open when you’re old enough to work, whether it’s what you want to do or not. And mine was not.” To put it lightly. “Sixteen years old, grumpy and awkward and staring down a lifetime as a resource dispensary technician. Basically a glorified pickup window, and I hated every second. Started ditching work, nicking cables and shit to scrape by, and I got good at it. Could strip an engine in five minutes flat and be gone before anybody even knew I was there. And for a couple of years, that worked for me.
“Then I got caught. I was in the station sick bay, going through some of their scrap machines for parts, and this old doc walks in and sees me. And she just … stared at me. Don’t know who was more surprised, her or me, but we must’ve stood there for a minute or two just gawking at each other.” She smiled faintly at the memory, shaking her head. It’d been a while since she’d told the story, but Anke … she was weirdly easy to talk to. All big eyes and rapt attention. Nash didn’t feel that way about a lot of people, but there she was. “I thought she was gonna call station security. Management didn’t take well to stealing, resources being so limited. But after a minute, this doc looks at the machines I’d picked to pieces, and she says, Well, you took it apart all right. How’d you like to learn how to put shit back together again?”
“She’s the one who taught you.” Anke smiled, too, in that with-her-whole-face way she did.
Nash nodded. “Maybe not everything I know, but everything that mattered.” Not just the whats, but the whys—why her skills and her work and her time and her attention, why all of that meant something. To someone who’d spent so much of her life without real meaning, as just another cog in the station’s grand machine, those lessons were everything. “I was with her for the better part of a decade. Picking up everything I could, following her around from station to station, colony to colony. She gave me these, you know?” She coiled a strand of her augments around her finger, letting the fine, shimmering filament slip across her skin. “It was the longest I’d ever known anyone, me and the doc. Even my parents were gone before I hit double digits, but she was always just there. Constant and patient, and probably kinder than she had any business being to a mouthy little punk like me, until—” She quenched the sudden dryness in her throat with a swig of tea. It didn’t help; nothing ever did. The years had made her good at pretending, though.
“When I found her body, I barely recognized it. Security said it was probably just thieves looking to score some meds, but it was … something else. Brutal. Personal. There’d been some noise from a group of anti-augmenters, didn’t like the doc setting up shop with her implant biz, but nobody’d ever told the doc who to help or how to help ’em, and she hadn’t taken their shit any different.” The warmth from the mug seeped into her hands, but they still felt cold. “Took a bit of doing to track them down, after. Fuckers fled the station right after they did it. Must’ve spent nine, ten months chasing after them.”
“Did you find them?” Anke’s smile faded. Good. This part of the story wasn’t for smiling. It wasn’t for gratification or satisfaction, for comfort or for pride. It was for the lesson, hard learned and harder forgotten.
“I did,” she said, and there was nothing more to say about that. What needed to be said was this: “And I didn’t care what came after. Didn’t even care if there was an after, and damned if a few months later, I wasn’t right back where I started. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just didn’t do anything. Nicked scrap to fence for food, wasted every goddamn thing that woman taught me, until I got caught again. Eoan, this time,” she said. “Kind of funny, isn’t it? Twice, getting caught mid-nick’s saved my life. I don’t know where I would’ve wound up, if the captain hadn’t nabbed me, but safe to say it would’ve been nowhere good.
“Which I guess is my long-ass way of telling you, be careful where you set your finish line,” she concluded, giving Anke’s arm a bump. She’d never been a pro at this whole socializing thing, but if anybody deserved the effort, she figured girl who’s saving the galaxy was pretty fucking high on the list.
Still. A little too much sharing for a single cup of tea. “Anyway.” She leaned into the word, an unspoken that’s enough of that, with a deep gulp of tea. “Our stop-off is more or less on the way. Place called Sooner’s Weald—it’s a trading-post planet right at the end of the shipping lane to the center spiral. We hit it, then fork off the beaten path all the way to Noether, and we’re still there inside a week,” she said, miming their flight path with a hand. “Cool place, too. Little muggy, but some real clever terraforming. You’ll love it.
“And if the Trust really comes for our asses, it’s probably the safest stop-off from here to the center spiral. Co-op market,” she explained. “Trust started it up, back in the big expansion, but they couldn’t hold it. Brought in too many workers to build it quick, didn’t see fit to pay them what they were worth. Wasn’t too hard for some agitators to blow in, rile them up, and suddenly you’ve got a planetwide labor strike. Builders, farmers. Even the merchants joined in—saw their chance to make some caps without the Trust scraping their customary twenty percent off the top. Saint actually used to be stationed here, during the worst of it. Back in his rookie ranger days.”
“Keeping the peace?”
“Keep the peace just means keep the status quo,” Nash said. “Pick a side. Not really the Guild’s bag—institutional neutrality, et cetera.” She shook her head. Anke really was new to the fold. “They just kept people from dying. Okay to block the ports, not okay to bomb them. Don’t care if you burn the shops, but you’d better be damn sure there’s nobody inside them first. We protect life and people’s right to live it. The rest is somebody else’s problem.”
“Still,” said Anke. “You ever think about who has it right?”
Nash shrugged. “I think they didn’t like the way shit was and decided to do something about it. Gotta respect them for that. And lucky for us, they came out on top.”
Maybe Nash wasn’t as rusty at this whole people thing as she thought, because Anke’s smile came back. “So will we,” she said, with a deep, rallying breath. “We’ll stock up, we’ll ship out, and we’ll save the effin’ universe.”
Inspirational and adorable.
“Sounds like we’ve got ourselves a plan,” said Jal as he rambled into the galley, not so much as a bootstep to herald his approach. He was quiet, for a big guy. Half-asleep and half-dressed, hovering near the doorway with one leg of his jeans tucked in his boots, jacket slung over his shoulder, hair damp like he’d tried to tame it back with a few fistfuls of water, failed, and summarily conceded. The only bit on right were his specs, but with ship lighting, they probably weren’t optional. “I smell pancakes?”
Nash waved to the warmer. “Think Saint made extras, if you’re hungry.”
“Still loves his pancakes,” he said, shaking his head. Jal seemed pretty keen himself, crossing the galley to pluck one, still steaming, out of the warmer.
“We have plates, you know,” Nash said, but Jal already had half the pancake in his mouth, and the other half rolled up in his fingers waiting to follow it down the hatch. “Or just cram it down. That’s good for you. And not disgusting at all.”
He grinned around a mouthful of pancake—a whole mother-loving pancake, good grief—and reached for another.
“You’ll have to take the rest to go, I’m afraid,” Eoan said, projecting themself just a few steps ahead in a flowing plaid-print dress. To their credit, neither Jal nor Anke flinched. After all the weirdness they’d seen in the last twenty-four hours, the captain’s spontaneous appearances probably didn’t even rank. “We’re landing in”—a pause—“well, now, actually. Saint’s waiting in the hold.”
“We really got to work on this whole advance notice thing, Cap,” Nash said, draining the last of her tea in a few quick gulps. Waste of a good chai. As they left, she saw Jal snatch the last three pancakes out of the warmer. Not one to leave food on the table. Or the counter. Or pretty much anywhere in arm’s reach. Though he did seem keen to share, especially with a certain forward feline, who darted out from fuck only knew where in the galley and started weaving through Jal’s legs until he got a pinch of pancake. They’d be thick as thieves by the end of this—literally and figuratively, in Bodie’s case.
True to Eoan’s word, Saint waited for them by the cargo bay door as they walked in. “They live,” he said, then to Jal, “Guess you found the pancakes.”
Jal gave a thumbs up and swallowed his last mouthful, wiping his hands on his jeans like he’d never heard of a napkin. “Where are we, anyway?”
“Sooner’s Weald,” Nash said. They needed to start sending out memos.
He surprised her with a broad, sunny grin. “Shit, really? Ain’t been here in a dog’s age.”
“Wait, you’ve been here, too?” Anke asked. Before Jal could answer, she seemed to put the pieces together for herself. “Oh. You were stationed together, weren’t you? That’s why you two are.…” She trailed off, gesturing vaguely.
Nash wasn’t sure how she would’ve finished that sentence, either.
Jal tipped his head, though. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Ma’am, ma’am, ma’am. His manners might’ve been atrocious with food, but he had the honorifics nailed. “Couple rotations. Not the worst place to post up, if you don’t mind the heat.” He did shrug out of his jacket, though, and twisted his hair up in a short, sloppy bun. As he tied it off, he nodded to Saint’s gun belt. “Extra clips. You expecting trouble, old man?”
“No more than the usual sort,” said Saint. “Unless you keep calling me old.”
With a huff of a laugh, Jal turned to Nash. “You armed, too?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
His forehead wrinkled. “You know, if we do run into trouble, three guns’d be better than two.”
“You learn math while you were playing hookie?” Which earned Saint a gesture that Nash didn’t recognize—an Earther thing Jal’d picked up from Saint, maybe; or a Brigham thing Saint had picked up from him—but suffice it to say it probably wasn’t very nice. Saint returned it, tartly, and grabbed a pistol off the gun rack on the wall. “Here. You want a gun, you can spook ’em with that. You do remember which way’s the scary end, right?”
Jal weighed the gun in his hand and checked the clip. “It’s empty.”
“They won’t know that,” Saint replied. “Don’t recall you being much of a crack shot anyway.” The clap he gave Jal’s shoulder as he called for Eoan to drop the ramp seemed almost friendly. “C’mon, kids. Daylight’s wasting.”
Sooner’s Weald, by Nash’s estimation, had plenty of daylight to spare. Even with the thick canopy of trees overhead, enough rays managed to eke through to paint the port in mottled shades of red and gold. It danced over the metal grate platforms sprawling five, maybe six slips in every direction, and nearly half of them were full. Rockhoppers, cargo ships, shuttles—all manner of vessels, full of all manner of people, all converging in one place to take advantage of one of the most diverse markets in the O-Cyg spiral.
Jal bounded out first, heading down the ramp with more pep in his step than Nash knew he was capable of. In the warm sunlight, he seemed to stand a little taller, face turned toward the sky like some kind of flower soaking up the shine.
“Someone woke up on the right side of the bed,” she said, shouldering her bag and following him down the gangway. Anke made a small hiccupping noise beside her, cheeks flushing an endearing shade of pink. Nash probably would’ve said something about it, if she thought it was any of her business. Unlike Eoan, Nash firmly believed some questions didn’t need an answer. “Or maybe you’re just itching for another chance to ditch us, huh?” She joked. Mostly. Although, she did give the back of Jal’s neck a quick peek to check for the patch. If he did try something, he wouldn’t get very far, and they’d have something to laugh about as they dragged his jelly-legged ass back to the ship.
Jal shook his head, all earnest and easy. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Just glad to stretch my legs.”
You could do that just getting out of the port. It wasn’t like the outpost, where everything had been crowded together. There must’ve been twice as many ships, twice as many people, but generous, sprawling walkways hung suspended less than a story over a rushing reservoir of milky-blue water. She didn’t even have to throw any elbows.
“Underground rivers,” said Anke, pausing to stare over a rail. “I’ve read about this. That color—it’s the silica and salt. The smell’s sulfur,” she added, scrunching her face. “They say you get used to it.”
“You don’t,” Saint and Jal said, almost in unison. “Trees like it, though,” Saint added, waving to the canopy above them. Thick, towering trees whose roots stretched above the surface of the water thirty, maybe forty decs. “Reminds me of the mangrove forests, back home.” Saint didn’t talk much about Earth, and when he did, he mostly griped about the bugs. Bugs, swamps, and soggy air—the man was a walking travel brochure, truly. “Bigger, I mean, but they’re damn hardy.”
Anke couldn’t seem to decide where to look. Down at the water, up at the canopy, out ahead where the walkways all converged in a cluster of carts and a grand, curving archway, layered with hand-painted badges and names and insignias of ships that’d passed through over the years. We were here, they said. We were part of this.
Nash saw the bump on the walkway just a beat before it caught Anke’s toe and managed to grab her elbow. Didn’t stop her tripping, but it did stop her getting a faceful of metal grating, and earned a sheepish laugh as Anke righted herself. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just—kind of nerding out, over here. I mean, look at it! The way it all works together. There’s no switch to flip. No plug to pull. You could shut down every bit of tech on the planet, and it’d stay alive. Stay livable.” She paused to smile up at the sky, and Nash stopped with her. Admiring her admiring the world around her—the joy, the inspiration, the open, unabashed awe. In a way, they were the same: they loved systems. They loved watching the way little things worked together to make big things thrive. For Nash, it was gears and wires and currents; for Anke, it was … life, and all its constituent parts. “This is the way it should be,” Anke said. “Takes a little longer. Even engineered trees like these need a few years to reach maturity, but.” She shook her head. “They last, you know? Things like this are supposed to last.”
The guys had gotten ahead of them, but Nash didn’t want to leave. Not yet. It felt important, somehow, what Anke had said. Like a glimpse behind the curtain. The currents beneath the bright, glittering surface of the reservoir, pushing and moving and driving. “Sometimes people would rather scrap what they have and move on to something new. Easier that way. Cheaper, too.”
“But not better,” Anke said.
Nash glanced back at the Ambit, with all her soldered scars and mottled paint. Would’ve been a far sight easier to surrender her to the scrap fields years ago, but she deserved more. Those people had deserved more, too, back at the shipping depot. Somewhere along the way, the universe had started attaching a price tag to survival—equating viability to profitability. In things, in places, and, worst of all, in people. That, Nash decided, was where it’d all gone wrong. “No,” she agreed. “Not better.”
Progress was such a dangerous word.
Though, on the subject of progress. “I think we’re getting left behind,” Nash said, glancing down the walkway. The back of Saint’s head had gotten awfully small in the distance, but they could still catch up before the arch, if Anke didn’t mind a jog. “Come on. We’ve probably only got an hour or two before most of the supplies are loaded.”
“What’ll we do with two hours?”
“What else do you do in the coolest trading post in the spiral?” Nash held out a hand with the best smile she could muster, only to smile all the wider when Anke took it. “Let’s go burn some paychecks.”
SAINT
There wasn’t another trading post like Sooner’s Weald. The variety alone kept most people coming back—most of the planet was wild-farmed jungle, packed to bursting with all sorts of roots, fruits, and vegetables. Chances were any produce you could pick up in the stalls grew just a ferry ride away, sold fresh or fermented, dried or fried. And that was just the stuff you could eat.
The atmosphere, though, that drew even more people than the food. The bazaar was the beating heart of the Weald, woven through the thick clusters of trees at the end of the port. The reservoir ran underground, but Saint swore you could still feel the rush of the water under the packed mulch walkways, and roots served as scaffolding for two-, even three-story shop fronts with walls in every color of clay imaginable. Spices and perfumes drowned out the stink of sulfur, and drumbeats and flutes and whistling reeds filled the air with a lively, fluttering pulse.
He’d hated it, the first time.
The trees reminded him too much of the swamps back home, of years with the Earth intercontinental army trudging through mud and moss and wondering if it’d be the bullets that killed him, or the goddamn bugs. The bustling streets put him on edge—too many people, too many ways in and out, and no way to keep track of it all. Above him, the rope bridges and rooftops had felt like hundreds of sniper nests waiting to put a bead on his crew.
But goddamn, the way Jal had smiled. Plodding down that street in his ill-fitting gear, still so fresh off the lightless rock of a moon he’d grown up on that all the sun and the green must’ve seemed like a fantasy. He didn’t see swamps or chokepoints or snipers; he saw new foods and smiling strangers and trinkets he could save up for to send home to Bitsie and Regan.
Through his eyes, Saint had learned to like it there. Then through Nash’s. Now he got to watch Anke’s eyes light up as all the stress and trauma of the last few days … it didn’t go away completely. Even Sooner’s Weald didn’t have that kind of magic. But enough of it slipped into the background for a while as they wandered the stalls. Still some things to pick up—clothes for her and Jal, and as Saint hovered by a stall hawking nuts and dried fruit, Nash emerged from a nearby shop with a cannister about the size of a bottle of blur.
“Rough day?”
“The roughest,” she replied. “But it’s not for me.” Nash popped the top of the cannister, and little purple flowers peeked over the edge, sprouted from pale stems so thin and delicate he figured they’d wilt if he looked at them too hard.
“Smells like soap,” he said, turning back to the stall. He caught the vendor’s eye and motioned to the basket of palm berries and assorted dried fruits. Too sugary—he hated the stuff. He asked for a bag of each. “What is it?”
Nash scowled and popped the lid back on the cannister. “It’s lavender,” she said. “My bunk’s pretty much empty, you know? Depressing. Bad energy.” She shrugged. “Just figured I’d get something to spruce it up a bit.”
Saint arched an eyebrow. “I see.”
“There’s nothing to see.”
“Of course not,” Saint said, agreeably. “You just bought her flowers.”
A flustered Nash was a rare sight indeed. Damn near mythical, in the sense that few who saw it lived to tell about it. The ship could be on fire and she’d barely break a sweat, but there she was, getting a little color on her cheeks. “It’s for the room,” she said.
“Right.”
Nash opened her mouth to reply, and punched him in the arm instead. “Shut up and get your fruit,” she said, and as he turned to pay the merchant—he wasn’t laughing, honest—Anke and Jal came shuffling across the street to join them. Each had a couple bags on their arms. Not much, just a few shirts and a couple pairs of pants, but Saint reckoned it would be enough to tide them over until they could put this mess behind them and get everyone back where they belonged.
Wherever the hell that is, he thought, eyeing Jal as he lingered by the fruit cart. Felt so strange to watch him, now—to see him holding back, hovering at the edge of the crowd by the cart, when the Jal he’d known would’ve loped straight into the middle of it without a second thought. He had a tension in him now that Saint didn’t recognize. A push-pull in the shifting of his feet forward and back again, like the old Jal was still in there, eager and excited, but something kept holding him back. Too much scar tissue; this Jal had his own snipers in the trees.
Still had that goddamn sweet tooth of his, though; he scanned the baskets of many-colored fruits like a hummingbird to hibiscus. “Here,” Saint said, tossing him the bag of palm berries he’d bought. “Still like those, don’t you?” Jal used to carry a bag of them in his gear, munching on them by the fistful every chance they got. Saint still remembered the smell of them, peachy-pineappley and tart, in the midday heat.
A slow, nostalgic smile spread on Jal’s face as he opened the bag. “I forgot about these,” he said, but it must’ve come back to him all right. He grabbed a fistful, just like he used to, and tossed them back like candy. Pop, pop, pop. One by one, the firm, ripe fruits burst between his teeth. Saint used to hate that sound. Sitting beside him on a rooftop while he chatted or hummed and chewed those berries, pop, pop, pop.
Close your mouth, he used to gripe. And turn off your mic, for mercy’s sake. Most annoying sound in the whole goddamn spiral, and he’d never had a problem telling him so.
Funny how much you missed those sorts of things when someone was gone.
“What about you?” he asked Anke, ignoring the smirk Nash flung his way. And you gave me shit about the lavender, said the hand tucked pointedly on her hip. Lord help him. “You get what you needed?”
“And then some.” The coder had brightened up a lot since they’d stepped off the ship. Fresh air had that effect on people, and there’d always been something joyful about the Weald. Upbeat and vibrant, whole spectrums of colors and sounds and smells wrapped snug in the muggy warmth of the jungle. “How long before we need to be back on the ship?”
Saint started to check his GLASS, but something in the reflection caught his eye. “Those guys by the brew cart,” he said, dropping his voice below the din of the crowd. “Something about them seem off to you?” Four of them stood under the ratty green awning, sipping cheap blur and shooting the shit. Watching them, Saint felt the back of his neck prickle.
Jal leaned in, presumably to catch a look in the reflection. His eyebrows bunched the way they always did when he focused, but man, Saint didn’t remember those lines on his forehead cutting so deep.
When’d you go and get old, kid?
“Short guy ain’t drinking,” Jal said, slowly. “Talking, either.”
“Like those other three don’t even know him.” Nash swore, tugging at the straps of her backpack. Not fidgeting; preparing. It was a hell of a lot easier to run with a tight pack. “Think we picked up a tail?”
Saint scanned the crowd, fingers itching for the grip of his gun. Wasn’t like he was about to start a shoot-out in the middle of the market, but old habits were a bitch. “Eoan, you copy? Need a quick scan on the cam footage. Think we might’ve got something stuck to our shoes.” Bodycams were Guild protocol for missions, but he and Nash wore theirs just about anytime they went planetside. Kept Eoan in the loop back on the ship.
Came in real handy, in times like these.
“Already on it,” Eoan said, because of course they were. “Ah, good news.”
“We’re not being followed?” Anke guessed, or maybe it was just a bit of her glowing optimism. Either way, she was in for disappointment. Saint knew that tone.
“Oh,” said Eoan. “No, you’re definitely being followed. That fellow at the cart. Another up ahead, as well. See the woman in the blue cap? The one pretending to smell the same bar of soap for the third, ah, fourth time—that’s the one.”
“That’s good news?” Anke yelped. Her head started to turn, but Nash tipped it straight again and, after a moment’s hesitation, patted her shoulder. Most awkward thing Saint had seen in a while, but nice to see her making an effort.
“Of course it is,” Eoan replied, patient as ever. “A tail you can make is a tail you can shake, as they say. But you’d better get on that, dears; I’ve clocked four more likelies since you left the port.”
Even for Eoan, it was calculated guesswork—picking out the faces that Saint and Nash had passed too many times to be coincidence, isolating strange behaviors, playing the odds. Eoan had been at this business longer than any of them had been alive, though, and Saint would put their guesswork above anybody else’s sure thing any day of the week.
Six tails, though. That we know of. His teeth ground together. If they were smart enough to fly under the radar that long, to spread out and trade off contact so Saint and the others wouldn’t pick up a pattern, then they were probably smart enough to keep a few waiting in the wings. Suddenly those rooftops looked awfully suspicious again. The streets were too crowded. Too many people, too many blind spots and pinch points and—
Jal offered him the bag of palm berries. “Have one?”
“Not really the time for snacking, miner boy,” said Nash, but Saint caught his black-lensed gaze and dipped his head. He’d needed the distraction. Something to throw Saint’s bloodhound brain off the scent before it got away from him.
He forced his shoulders lower. Have to relax, he thought. Or at least look the part. They didn’t want their tagalongs thinking they were wise to them. “Any idea who they are?”
“Not Guild,” said Eoan, and Saint knew it was pointless to be relieved, but he was. They still had half a dozen bogeys on their asses, but at least they weren’t wearing the same badge. “Not agitators, either, as far as I can tell. Freelance outfit. Looks like mostly cargo escorts, and who wants to guess their top-paying client?”
“Always knew this job would give me Trust issues,” Nash muttered.
Saint shot her a flat look. “Don’t blame that on the job.”
“More mercenaries. Awesome.” Anke chuckled tightly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but if this is the safest stop-off from here to the center spiral, I’d hate to see the most dangerous.”
It was supposed to be the safest, though, damn it. No established Trust presence, not even a real Guild presence since the strikes ended. Something occurred to Saint, though, as a cold weight settled around his chest.
Maybe there was no safe place.
The Trust had eyes everywhere, and hands in everything. This wasn’t the Ambit’s usual customer—not some smuggling ring in the frontier, or an upstart militia with chips on their shoulders and more guns than sense. This was an institution. This was the institution, and they were gearing up to give it one hell of a poke in the eye.
He took a slow breath and let it out in a sigh. Fuck. “What’s the story here, Cap? They follow us from the depot?”
“No, I would’ve picked up the signal,” said Eoan. “Must’ve found another way to track us. Something from the rockhopper seems most likely, but I scanned everything Anke brought with her.”
“Ditto,” said Anke, firmly. “There’s no way they locked onto anything of mine. I’m not just saying that because I don’t want this to be my fault, either. Which I don’t, but it’s not, so.” She’d chewed her bottom lip red, but otherwise she kept the nerves under control. “Sorry. Nervous.”
“Don’t be nervous,” Nash told her. “We can lose them.” Softer, to Saint, “But it’d be a hell of a lot easier if we could figure out what they’re following. I gutted the ankle monitor; wasn’t anything in there. Someone had to have brought something back. Something—”
“Fuck.” Abruptly, Jal shoved his hand in his pocket. A bit of fishing around, and with the chime of thin-pressed metal, tags dropped from his fingers by a ball chain. “Riesen’s,” he said, grimacing. “But before you go and start—”
“Give me that.” Nash snatched it from him almost too fast to see, turning it over in her hands. Deft little wrench-slinger; she flashed a tiny screwdriver from out of nowhere and found a seam in the tag. A quick twist, and the tag split in two, and nestled between the two metal shells was a vellum-thin chip no bigger than a thumbnail. “There’re your bread crumbs, Hansel,” she said, passing it to Saint. “Passive satellite frequency tag. Wouldn’t put off a signal ’til it passed in close range to a reader, so Cap’s off the hook.”
“I wasn’t aware I was on one,” said Eoan.
Nash ignored them. “Trust must have people looking out for the signal, and these clowns picked it up when we docked. Great job, miner boy.” Just because she didn’t raise her voice didn’t mean she wasn’t stabbing knives through it. “The hell were you thinking?”
Shoulders up, head down—Jal was strung so tight, he’d have played a tune if you plucked him. “I was thinking he might have people.” It was low enough to be a growl, but it didn’t have the heat. “Body’s nothing but scattered ash. Figured at least this way they’d have something to say goodbye to. Closure or something.”
Doesn’t work that way, Saint almost said. Ask Bitsie. The image had stuck with him: the way she’d stood behind her mama’s legs when he’d told them the news about Jal, skinned knees and blonde pigtails, clutching that chain around her neck. Like she thought that if she held on to Jal’s tags tight enough, she could hold on to him, too.
“We’re not doing this right now,” he said. Not the bickering, and definitely not reminiscing. “If they’re after Anke, then we need to get her on the ship. Don’t care how much the Trust is paying these guys, they’re not gonna risk firing on a Guild vessel in an open port.”
“Then they’re Eoan’s problem, anyway.” Nash smirked, but she already had a fight in her eyes. No tensing, no weapons grabs; that wasn’t Nash’s style. She had a fresh fluidity to her stance, though, that said she’d be ready to move when the time came. “We’ll split up,” she said decisively. “I’ll get Anke to the ship. You two, try to lead as many of them off our asses as you can.”
It didn’t miss him that she’d given herself the harder task. Ask anybody with gray in their hair what job they’d rather take, escort or decoy, and they’d take decoy before you finished asking the question. Cuffing yourself to somebody in a combat situation, fighting with one eye on the prize at all times—more folks died trying to keep somebody else alive than any other causes put together. Bar sheer goddamn stupidity, he thought.
Well, if that was how Nash wanted to play it, he wasn’t about to fight her for it. “Regroup on the ship quick as you’re able,” he said, and Nash nodded back. Beside her, Anke squared up her shoulders, looking for all the world like she’d march over and deck that guy at the brew cart herself. If her eyes were a little wide, and her face shined a little with sweat, then Saint still had nothing but respect. Coder, civvy, ranger, whatever—that flashy pink hair had an awful lot of fight behind it.
“Gimme your bags,” Jal said to her, holding out his scarred-up hands. Saint had a mind to tell them to drop them, but it’d be a shame if it turned out to be a false alarm, and they really did need clothes. Nothing on the ship fit either of them.
“But won’t you—” Anke started to protest, but Nash plucked them from her and shoved them at Jal.
“The man ran rocks in floating mines half his life,” she said curtly. “Unless you stuffed a boulder in there, it’s not gonna slow him down.” Then, to Saint, with the unflinching seriousness of someone bracing for a fight, “If you’re too slow, we’re leaving without you.”
She wouldn’t; it wasn’t how they worked. But he’d be damned if they had to call her bluff.
“Just make sure we don’t beat you there, glowworm,” Jal grunted, earning a glare and a swat that was, for Nash, nearly friendly, even if she was still pissed about the Guild tags.
“All right, dears,” Eoan said, cheerfully unconcerned. They didn’t put a lot of stock in things like faith and luck, Saint knew, but they put stock in their people. All the best captains did. “Run.”