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While the ten mediators who’d boarded Krebs’s ship discussed whether and how to find him, Elys stepped into his quarters. Krebs’s room was only about three times the size of her cell, and so neat she would’ve assumed no one was using it if the ship AI hadn’t told her otherwise. Krebs hadn’t left any hardware lying around. Nothing Elys saw would even have a biolock.
But most people used more storage than their pickups held. Krebs probably put the rest into shipboard storage. SHRIKE or the city could get it for her. However, the distance and security they’d have to traverse would make them take longer to find it, and people could stop them faster than they could stop a mediator in full armor.
Elys’s ears popped. She yawned to resettle the pressure in them while she searched Krebs’s room for something that’d give her access to the ship’s data storage. Somewhere in the ship, a single Republic gun fired. At least one wall muffled the bang from the exploding round. The mediators in the hallway oriented toward the noise in a nerve-grinding rattle of armor.
“Hey, Elys?” said Taia.
“I heard it.” One loud noise in near silence was something Elys’s brain could parse. SHRIKE seemed to have found a non-violent way to disable the soldiers’ weapons, but it must not have been a long-term solution. Earth was too far from here to allow SHRIKE a fast response to anything, and the pickup against her neck was buzzing uselessly. “Any progress getting Krebs in here?”
“We assumed this ship reported our attack and asked for reinforcements. We don’t want to walk home on these things’ air tanks.” Taia looked to the other mediators. “And we may have to switch to those soon. The air’s leaking out of this section of the ship.”
“Well, shit.” Elys rubbed at eyes that ached for sleep she still couldn’t have. “I’ll... ask the MCAIs to let us into shipboard storage. If they can. With the distances involved, I’m not counting on their help.”
Mediators were moving around in the hallway. After a few seconds they rearranged enough to admit Krebs. A mediator was pushing him along in front of them with a giant armored hand on his shoulder. The holster for the yellow electronic control weapon he’d been wearing was still on his hip, but empty.
The RIS officer’s exosuit chest piece dangled off the shoulder the mediator wasn’t holding, he had on one arm piece and no gloves, and his pants had either come from a uniform or the formal section of a yacht-owner’s catalog. After what he’d put Elys through, his furious scowl generated an uncomfortable mix of delight and terror in her. “I truly don’t understand how your city thought this unprovoked attack on a Republic vessel was a strategically sound idea, let alone a legally or morally appropriate one.”
“You kidnapped one Alyansan and had another one assassinated,” said a mediator. “We’re not interested in your opinions. Kundakçı, what do you need this guy for?”
“The only reason we’re still on this ship is that we need to know everything you’re doing to sabotage the city, and what the Republic has planned for Alyansa,” Elys said over her pickup’s persistent buzzing. Krebs’s scowl deepened, and she just couldn’t take him seriously with that giant hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, hi, not dead yet. So you could give us everything we want to know, or theoretically, we could take you back to Alyansa with us. It’ll take longer to download all of it from Alyansa, but that’ll be your problem, not ours.”
SHRIKE’s security protocols wouldn’t permit that kind of download. Krebs might not know that. The mediators’ confused frowns said that they weren’t at all sure they had the right to take him to Alyansa, but nobody was arguing where Elys and Krebs could hear it.
Krebs shrugged the shoulder the mediator was holding. The glove stayed clamped on. His pale face was approaching the same light gray as the mediators’ armor.
“The Republic won’t stand for this,” he said. A couple mediators rolled their eyes. “You want to know what they have planned? It’s a full-scale invasion of your one, single station. They think they need a full division and a fleet for it, and they may be correct. Imprisoning me will speed up their timetable, I assure you.”
“Let ‘em try,” one of the mediators said. Not one the CRU normally let do the talking, from the sharp looks the others gave them.
“We’re down to eighty kPa,” said a different mediator. “Might want to decide soon. We all have hours of air in these.” Elys didn’t, but the mediators would let her onto their ship before she suffocated. Krebs might not be so lucky with the soldiers who’d locked themselves in airtight rooms throughout the Orefield.
After a lot of back-and-forth Elys was too tired to follow, while air drained out of Krebs’s room and the adjoining hall, Krebs snapped, “Alright. Give me a digital destination and I’ll put documents there. It’s not as if the strategists can’t update their plans afterward.”
Elys leaned on the wall for balance under a sudden wave of dizziness. She sank to the floor, took off her pickup, and pressed the back of her neck to the metal wall for a few moments. When she put the pickup back on, she got it to open a document that didn’t have a mediator’s role beside it to show they were reading it. The document listed names and show titles, with notes on the side. Les Conlen’s was the first she recognized.
“Krebs, are these—”
“If you can’t understand what you’re reading, I won’t help you.” Krebs leaned as far away from the mediator holding him as their grip allowed. “I’ve done enough for you backwater layabouts. Now, let me go.”
The unit commander turned to Krebs. “You’re walking us out. If you tell your allies so, they may leave you some air to do that with.”
“You won’t let me suffocate. It’s against your code of ethics.” Krebs glared. That was about the only thing the mediators were letting him do.
With an armored hand locked over his shoulder, he wasn’t going anywhere the mediators didn’t want him to go. They put him in front as they followed the halls to the airlock. Although there were several unsanitary orders shouted in Republic accents from behind sealed doors, nobody shot at them.
At the airlock, wind blew Elys’s overly long hair in front of her overheated face. The temporary repairs the soldiers had made to the airlock were in pieces that screeched against the floor when the mediators kicked them aside to make a path to the ship docked beyond it. “What’s happening?”
“They’re venting air from...” The wind took some of the commander’s words. “Don’t worry... We’ll be...” That might’ve been a whole sentence. “...patch their airlock again.” The mediator holding Krebs’s shoulder released him. With one last glare at Elys, Krebs stormed back up the hallway toward the bridge.
“Don’t you wish we could do something to him?” Elys asked the CRU. “It doesn’t seem right to let him walk away like that, after all he’s done. Not just to me, to all of us.”
“What would be the point?” The mediator who asked looked genuinely confused.
“Let’s discuss it somewhere the air’s not draining out of.” Taia rested a gloved hand on Elys’s back. “And Elys... You’re not going to like this, but we came on Vatirah’s ship.”
Elys stopped walking, stopping Taia with her. Dizziness swept over her, even though her oxygen intake hadn’t changed appreciably. The Alyansans finally sold Elys out.
“Why?” Shock choked Elys’s voice until it sounded like it belonged to somebody else.
“We wound up in the same place at the same time.”
“How does that make you allies? She will make so much money putting us all in prison.”
Taia gave Elys a gentle shove between the shoulder blades, sending her stumbling toward the airlock. “Come on. We can’t stay here. I’ll tell you everything when we’re somewhere safe.”
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Elys couldn’t think of anything else she could do on Krebs’s ship. Besides, even if the Alyansans had sold her out, Elys would rather die on a civilian ship than a Republic government one. She followed the mediators through the airlock and into a ship that was too narrow to accommodate so much armor.
Ten mediators crowded into the ship’s entryway, meeting another who waved them farther into the ship. Elys was already standing inside, listening to the clunk and shudder of the airlocks behind her disengaging, before she noticed the cage. It was empty, but big enough to hold a person if nobody cared whether the occupant had room to lie down. The air was more humid in here than it had been on Krebs’s ship. It smelled like sweat, metal, and, oddly, cloves.
“Where is she?” Elys asked quietly.
The mediators shuffled around to places where they could lock their armor in a seated configuration. Taia had arranged hers the same way, and she held out an armored hand to Elys. “Vatirah’s piloting. Her partner and our auxiliary commander are with her. Come over here so you won’t get knocked around. We’re not going to let anybody hurt you.”
Elys worried less about gravity shifts than she did about getting crushed between two sets of CRU armor. Despite that, she wove through the other armored suits to take Taia’s hand. Self-preservation seemed a bit futile, now.
Taia’s shoulder was about the level of Elys’s ribs, the perfect height to lean on. Taia wrapped her arm around Elys’s hips, steadying her. Elys had missed being touched by somebody who cared what happened to her.
“About Krebs,” Taia said. Vatirah’s ship detached from the Republic one in a low rumble Elys felt more than she heard.
“Well, he’s behind us now.”
Taia had to duck her head to look Elys in the eyes. “But he’s still bothering you.”
He’d killed her. Her body just hadn’t acknowledged that yet. She wasn’t ready to either, not to Taia. There was still a chance that, despite the exhaustion and unsettling sense of wrongness, he’d lied about poisoning her.
“Could you hear what I said to him, before?” Elys asked.
“No,” Taia said, and Elys relaxed a little. She hadn’t heard Elys offering to spy on Alyansa for Krebs, however disingenuous that offer had been. “The Off-world Affairs technicians said your mic got damaged right after the Republic soldiers took you.”
The ship jerked into a sharp turn. Elys’s “Whoa!” got lost under rattling armor and she fell against Taia’s steadying arm. A ship that could move like that was too small to need a bridge. Vatirah would be controlling it through visualization, which meant she might be anywhere, watching Elys and Taia, waiting for... What was she waiting for?
The ship twisted under her again. Taia’s free hand slammed against the wall to brace her and Elys’s combined weight. Mediators not holding unarmored former prisoners stood, and their suits’ armored panels kept shifting, stabilizing the suits to match the ship’s maneuvers.
“It was like this on the way in, too. The operation coordinator said Vatirah was our best chance of docking with Krebs’s ship safely.” But Taia sounded nervous. That scared Elys more than the ship’s sudden movements did.
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After what felt like an hour but was probably less, the flight away from Krebs’s ship settled out. Elys had just begun considering whether she could sleep on the floor without getting stepped on when Vatirah and her wiry partner squeezed between two mediators and into the crowded room with the cage. Elys remained standing behind as many giant armored suits as she could put between her and Vatirah.
In full light, Vatirah’s width and girth combined with armored clothes and pale scars in the gold-toned skin of her knuckles to make her look thoroughly inescapable. Beside her, her partner seemed to make up for his lack of mass with gear and weapons that hung from his belt and inside his jacket. A mediator, presumably the auxiliary commander, stayed in the hallway behind them since there was no more room in the one the rest of the CRU occupied.
A profile appeared beside Vatirah, Republic red, announcing her title as Bail Enforcement Agent despite the fact that Elys was long past bail eligibility in the Republic.
Taia released her hold on Elys’s waist and stood. Her suit carried her well beyond Elys’s height. The other mediators stood too, until it looked like the ceiling was being held up by twelve armored statues, all facing Vatirah. Maybe Elys would survive this little reunion after all.
Vatirah raised her hands to shoulder height. When she elbowed her wiry partner — Vernell Washington, his profile called him, although Vatirah had called him Vern on Mars — raised his hands too.
“Hey,” said Vatirah. Elys got Nisse to make a transcript for her so she wouldn’t miss a word Vatirah said. “I just came in to tell you I’ve saved your armored asses. Let’s not get hostile now.” Her gaze locked on Elys. “There you are again. I think she looked healthier when we caught her, eh Vern?”
“Sure did,” said Vern.
“So, the Republic ship isn’t following us?” the unit commander asked.
“Oh no, it is.” Vatirah grinned. “Just not the us you’re thinking of. This ship’s out of visual range, so I put out some copies of the ship’s ID and engine signature. If they’d thought about it hard enough they might’ve picked the right one, but you never have to worry about that with a Republic military crew. In a minute they’ll hare off toward one of seven other stars while we’re safely on course toward Mayari.”
How much had the mediators paid Vatirah to do all that? Elys was glad she’d completed that citizenship course. Even if she cost Alyansans more than any other citizen in the station’s history, their station-wide agreements still wouldn’t let them stop her from returning to Mayari.
“Thanks, I think.” The unit commander frowned. “Won’t the ship’s crew figure out what happened?”
“Yeah, after we’re so far out of range they’ll have to get an approval or two from their superiors to chase us. By then, I’ll have a record of that hijacking you pulled. And maybe a prisoner, if you don’t behave yourself.” Vatirah winked at Elys.
If Elys had any illusions of combat prowess, she would’ve punched Vatirah in her smug face. As it was, she had to lean on the wall with one hand to stay standing. “I am too sick and tired for any more threats,” Elys growled. “Come and get me or shut the fuck up.”
Taia gave Elys a worried glance before returning her attention to Vatirah, who was chuckling. When Vatirah turned to answer another mediator’s question, Elys let herself lean more heavily on the wall. If Vatirah took her up on that taunt, and Taia let her, it would’ve been an embarrassingly short standoff.
“You know she was... What’s the word...” Taia’s armored glove clattered quietly as her hand clenched into a loose fist in front of her, like she was catching the term out of the air. “Framed?”
“Yeah, I know that now.” Vatirah was still laughing. Elys was, possibly, losing what sanity she’d retained during the past week. “Why do you think I agreed to get you on and off that ship? You oughta at least pay for all the air and water you people are sucking down, though. I’ll have to resupply a lot sooner than I planned on.”
“I did my research this time,” Taia told Elys. To Vatirah, she said, “It’s fair to expect Alyansa to cover your expenses and legal fees. We calculated that this amount might make more sense than what I offered you on Mars.”
The new price Taia named made Elys’s face feel so hot she was sure she was about to start sweating again, despite the low air temperature. Vern’s hands slowly lowered, like he’d forgotten why he’d raised them in the first place. Vatirah whistled in a descending pitch.
“Now,” she said, “we’re talking.