Who cares what befalls the inhabitants of a failing colony world when nobody will admit responsibility for its failure? Sauscony Lahaylia Valdoria: Jagernaut, that’s who. Distinguished theoretical physicist, teacher, singer, former professional dancer and award-winning author, Catherine Asaro unveils a new chapter in the glittering history of the Skolian Empire – a story that features the incomparable Soz Valdoria.
Following up a BS with highest honours in Chemistry from UCLA with a Master’s degree in Physics and a PhD in Chemical Physics from Harvard isn’t the worst way to start a career. Becoming a visiting physics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and holding positions at various times at the University of Toronto and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics isn’t a bad way to continue. Doubtless this helps explain why Catherine Asaro is as renowned for building complex mathematical concepts into her fiction as she is for the action and romance it so often features.
HYPRON OPENED HIS eyes into the darkness and sensed emptiness. The house was too quiet. He called out to his brother. “Oxim? Are you there?”
Silence. Usually by this time, his brother was in the living room, listening to reports from the mainland areas of the colony.
“Lumos on,” Hypron said.
The room remained dark. That surprised him less then the silence; the Evolving Intelligence, or EI, that ran the house had failed months ago. The backup systems worked, but they weren’t reliable. He wanted to believe that was why he heard nothing from the other room, but the silence was in his mind as well, and that shook him, for he always sensed his brother’s moods if the two of them weren’t separated by too much distance.
Hypron slid to a small table by the bed and brushed a panel there, trying to toggle on the lumos. Nothing. The room stayed dark. With care, he eased off the bed, intending to sit on the floor, but he slipped and fell onto the ground with a thud, groaning as pain shot up his calves. At least he could still feel his legs. The sensation in them would probably go next.
Rolling onto his stomach was easy; after that, matters became more complicated. He braced his elbows on the floor and pulled his legs under him, but when he tried to kneel, his legs gave way and he pitched forward onto his stomach. With a grimace, he pushed up on his elbows and crawled across the floor, using his arms, dragging his legs.
The entire time, he kept searching for Oxim with his mind. He felt nothing, which meant his brother was either asleep or far away. Surely Oxim wouldn’t come home without letting Hypron know he was back safely. Perhaps he had just fallen asleep on the sofa. Nearly a day had passed since their last full meal, and hunger gnawed at them both. Oxim had gone to find supplies, searching for an outpost or any place where survivors still lived out here. The mud-sloop didn’t have enough fuel to travel any great distance, which meant if Oxim had ventured too far, he might be stranded and unable to return home.
When Hypron reached the bedroom door, he sat against it, catching his breath. Then he grabbed one of the bars he and Oxim had installed on the wall and pulled himself to his feet. Leaning against the door, he used it for the support his withered legs could no longer provide. Unbidden, memories came to him of when he had been healthy, when he could stride, run, jump, full of vigour. He pushed away the images, hiding them in recesses of his mind where they wouldn’t hurt so much. As he slid open the door, he hung on to it so he could stay upright. Outside, he made his way along the hallway using bars hammered into the walls, dragging his legs along. Despite the cool air, he was sweating by the time he reached the front room where he and his brother often sat in the evening, watching the holo-vid, reading, talking.
It was dark.
“Oxim, are you here?” he asked. “Did you fall asleep?”
No answer. No snores or grunts. Nothing.
He slid his hand across the wall until he found the control panel for the EI. He scraped at it, tapped the surface, banged it with his fist, all to no avail.
“House, answer!” Hypron said.
Silence.
He edged forward – and stumbled on some object. With a curse, he fell to his knees. Grabbing at whatever had tripped him, he caught a wheel of the mobile recliner he had built. It must have rolled out of its usual place when the house shifted on its floating supports. He pushed it against the wall and slid into the seat, his legs stretched in front of him, his arms draped over the armrests, his palms flat on the cool floor. The velvety darkness surrounded him with a quietude that could have comforted had he felt secure, but that offered only fear now, as he worried about Oxim.
He rolled the recliner across the room. If he opened the outside door, the blue moons would flood him with their cool light, and he could see if anything was out there. Or anyone. He easily reached the door, a crude airlock, little more than a double panel with a layer of air between. When he pushed its autolock, nothing happened. He tried the safety release, which was supposed to work even if the power failed, but it was either jammed or broken, because the door refused to budge.
Hypron exhaled in frustration. Maybe his brother couldn’t get inside. With neither their house nor their personal comms working, Oxim had no way to contact him. They had also lost contact with the mainland when their neutrino transmitter failed. Hypron could fix it if they located replacement parts, but whatever remained of the colonial authority had stranded them out here with little recourse. They had never had many neighbors this far from the mainland, and only a few had survived the civil war that devastated the colony. Even more colonists had died in the aftermath of the war, when mud-pirates took to the seas and looted the drifting homesteads.
Although Oxim would never talk about it, Hypron knew his brother had killed to defend their home. Oxim had always been the protector. When Hypron’s health had failed, a neurological disease that took more from him every year, Oxim became a caretaker as well. Without that lifeline, Hypron would have died on this godforsaken mudball of a world.
Oxim, where are you? Closing his eyes, Hypron let his thoughts spread outward, searching. Oxim was like everyone else; he didn’t feel the ebb and flow of other people’s moods. The rest of humanity inhabited a barren land where people knew only their own emotions. Hypron had starved his entire life for the touch of another mind like his, but Oxim came closer to understanding than anyone else. His mind was strong and deep, a bedrock to Hypron’s mercurial moods.
For so long it had been just the two of them. Their parents had died in a mining accident when Oxim had been fifteen and Hypron eight. Oxim had gone to work in an ore refinery on the asteroid where they lived, but he insisted Hypron stay in school. At age fifteen, Hypron had joined him on the job, both of them saving their pay, day by day, year by year, until finally they had enough to escape the planetoid. Six years ago, on Hypron’s twenty-third birthday, they had signed up as colonists for this world called New Day. So they had come here, full of optimism, to a colony that promised a sunrise in their lives. They had dreamed of so much: their own algae farm, air they could breathe, warm days, all those luxuries they had never known.
Sunrise. Right. He gritted his teeth and banished the memories, trying to clear his mind. Gradually his mood calmed and his thoughts expanded like ripples in a lake. On the edges of his awareness, far distant, he caught a mental warmth. Oxim? He tried to focus, but the sense drifted away from him.
Hypron wasn’t certain how long he searched, but eventually he had to let go. He sagged in his chair, exhausted. His health had deteriorated until just this much effort wore him out. He would rest a bit and then see if he could fix the generator and open the door. The air still smelled fresh, and he was warm, so the house hadn’t completely failed. After so many years of living on the edge of survival, he had learned a great deal about coping with faulty systems.
The darkness pressed in on him. It was lonely. Well, hell, he should be used to the loneliness. He had hoped to find a wife here, but he’d never had much luck, even in the beginning, when he had been healthy. He could meet women; they found him pleasant enough to look at. But they always ended up saying he was impractical, moody, unreliable. It wasn’t that he minded work. He could toil for hours and never know time was passing. But the farm he and Oxim had started here, growing crust-algae in slop-flats, bored him mindless, and he came home every day stinking of sweat and mud. If he’d been a woman, he wouldn’t have wanted to marry him, either. He’d joked that way once with a girl he liked, but instead of laughing, she had stared as if he were an idiot. So much for his sparkling humour.
Oxim claimed Hypron was out of his element, that he was an artist, a dreamer full of imagination. He swore Hypron just needed an outlet for his creativity. Hypron didn’t see it. He wished he could be like the other colonists, satisfied with New Day. Except instead of a new life, they had come to failure. So many had died. And each time another colonist passed away, the survivors mourned, until it scarred Hypron’s mind, for he couldn’t turn off the grief, neither for himself nor for what he felt from others around him.
A thought came to him. Oxim’s filter mask might have clogged. It was unlikely; Oxim hadn’t been outside long enough, and he always took a spare. But the worry lodged in Hypron’s mind. If his brother was unconscious, put out by the noxious atmosphere, that could explain why his mind felt distant.
Hypron felt along the wall to the storage niche at waist height. He pulled out a filter mask and fastened the mesh over his mouth and nose, then crumpled a spare mask into his pocket. He had two options to open the door: repair the generator and return power, or break down the door and do repairs later. He knew from experience that even if he managed to fix the generator without replacement parts, it might take hours. If he could break the door, that would probably be a lot faster. Once he found Oxim, they could live in a back room until they fixed both the door and generator. They had equipped every room here with air filtration systems after the atmosphere of New Day had degraded so much, they couldn’t breathe it for more than an hour. That had been two years ago. These days, they couldn’t take it for more than fifteen minutes. If Oxim was trapped out there with a faulty mask, he needed help now, not in a few hours.
Steeling himself, Hypron grabbed a bar on the wall and yanked, twisting at the same time, trying to wrench it free. He kept pulling and twisting until sweat soaked his shirt.
With a screech, the bar tore away from the wall, and the momentum of his yank sent the recliner rolling backward as the bar thumped into his lap. Grunting, he stopped the rolling chair with his hands and pushed it back to the door. Then he hefted up the bar and swung at the airlock, and again, and again, hammering the recalcitrant barrier.
When the strained composite of the door finally buckled and collapsed, it sounded as if the house were groaning. Wet, warm air hit Hypron’s face. Even wearing his mask, he couldn’t escape the stench, and bile rose in his throat from the stink of fetid mud. Blue light poured across him, limning jagged pieces of the door that jutted up from the ground. The larger moon was full and overhead, the smaller one a fat crescent near the horizon. Bathed in their eerie light, a pier stretched in front of him from the doorway to a dock. Hypron inched his recliner out onto the pier, using his hands to clear a path as best he could. The mud-sea swelled around the house, endless, its fluorescent sea-mats glinting with iridescent specks like small islands in the vast, dark expanse.
As Hypron rolled forward, the pier swayed, its stabilizers as compromised as the rest of the house. Mud slopped over its sides and across his hands, oozing between his fingers, coating his skin, thick and granular with the remains of dead lobsterites no bigger than the tip of his finger. His palms scraped the rough pier as his hands slid through the gunk. The recliner had good traction, but in this mess, he could slide into the mud-sea, which teemed with fish-snakes that grew bigger every year. Then what? He doubted he could pull himself back onto the pier. He grimaced and tried to stop thinking.
As he neared the dock, a shadow at its end resolved into the sloop docked at the boathouse. It meant Oxim had returned. The big seine net was attached to the pier to snag the smaller, edible eels, so Oxim must have disembarked from the ship. If he had collapsed out here with a faulty mask, gods only knew how sick he might be by now.
The dock shook as Hypron rolled onto it, and mud squirted between its uneven boards, slowing the recliner. He forced his way onward, his biceps straining. The sloop was pulling on its tether, swaying in the lethargic waves—
Hypron hit a barrier. He stopped, peering into the blue-tinged night. A ridge stretched in front of him, a few handspans high. He felt along it … uneven and soft, like a bulky sack …
A body.
Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He struggled to draw in air and gagged on the rancid smell. Bracing himself, he searched the body until he found the neck. His fingertips scraped the bumps of a raised tattoo there. An ID mark. Imperial Space Command, or ISC, provided one for every colonist, a means to identify anyone.
Anyone.
“Oxim!” Hypron shook his brother. “Oximsonner! Wake up!” He fumbled with Oxim’s mask, looking for the toggles that would tell him how badly it had failed. They were smooth on a working mask, but became progressively rougher as the gunk that saturated the atmosphere clogged the filter.
The toggles were as smooth as a burnished coin.
“Oxim,” he whispered. “Answer me.” He pulled up the sleeves of his brother’s jacket to take his pulse.
Nothing.
No. No. This couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Yet he didn’t sense his brother’s mind even here, right next to him. Clenching Oxim’s bicep, he planted his other hand on the pier and strained to push the recliner backward, bringing his brother with him. He just barely moved the body. Taking a ragged breath, he tried again and pulled Oxim another handspan.
Bit by excruciating bit, Hypron dragged his brother home. He struggled to ignore the stiffness of Oxim’s muscles. Rigor mortis his mind screamed, and he refused to acknowledge it, as if that could undo this agony. But nothing could change the truth, that mud-pirates prowled out here, using weapons they had stolen from ruins of the colony. They killed the owners of homesteads and looted the remains with impunity. No one went after them, no retribution even from the supposedly oh-so-formidable ISC. No one gave a flaming damn about this world that was tearing itself apart while its desperate colonists killed one another.
Hypron didn’t realize he had reached the house until he rammed backward into the door frame. He choked in a breath. Only a little further. He strained to pull Oxim’s body over the broken remains of the entrance, and debris ripped his skin. Mud seeped into his bleeding cuts, probably infecting him with gods only knew what. He didn’t care. He would rather die than leave Oxim to rot out in this miserable night.
Finally they were inside. Like a pressure valve that suddenly released, knowledge burst within him. Oxim was dead. Dead. The one constant in his world, the one person who cared whether he existed, the one person he loved, was gone.
He had no food. He had no way to contact anyone. He couldn’t pilot the mud-sloop alone. He had used all his resources except one – the projectile pistol. He could make his death quick instead of long and gruesome from starvation and exposure.
Hypron cradled Oxim in his arms, his head bent over his brother’s body while he cried.
“This planet is disgusting,” Soz Valdoria said.
She stood at the prow of the mud-racer while the ship cut through the viscous glop of a sea. Gunk splattered her uniform, the black knee-boots, leather pants and vest. It left dark blotches on the two gold armbands around each of her leanly muscled biceps, the sign of her rank as a Jagernaut Secondary in Imperial Space Command.
The sea ahead suddenly roiled and churned. An enraged creature once again lifted out of it, a snakelike monster with giant green eyes and a body armoured in purple and silver scales. Just the part of its neck that showed above the mud was four times Soz’s height and twice as thick as her body. Fangs ringed its huge mouth. It reared above the ship, whipping back and forth while screaming its challenge at her.
“Just a little closer, you ugly reject from hell,” she told the monster. “Come on, babe.”
Yells were coming from behind Soz, someone shouting at her to go below the deck, but she ignored them. This critter had pissed her off.
Its teeth glinted as its maw gaped above her, ready to snap her in two. Soz raised her jumbler, a mammoth black gun that glittered in the watery sunlight of this ridiculously named planet, New Day. She waited until she had a clear shot straight down the snake’s throat.
She fired.
The jumbler shot sub-electronic particles known as abitons, often called wimpons because of their low energy. They annihilated bitons, making flashes of orange light. In the air, the anti-particles created only a few sparkles – but when the beam hit the serpent, its head disintegrated in a dramatic burst of light. The beheaded neck snapped wildly over the boat. If the racer hadn’t been marginally intelligent, the spasming monster would have shattered the ship’s mast. As it was, the pole barely managed to bend aside in time to avoid being smashed.
With a final whip of its body, the headless serpent slammed into the mud and vanished below the surface. Black waves leaped above the boat and rained sludge over the deck and Soz.
“Gods,” she muttered. This planet deserved to be shoved into a black hole.
“Are you out of your flaming mind?” someone shouted behind her.
Now that the commotion was dying down, Soz turned around. Dale Yaetes, the racer’s captain, was standing there, soaked in mud, staring as if she had grown a second head. Rex Blackstone was leaning his towering, bulky self against a strut of the ship not far away, his brawny arms crossed, his Jagernaut uniform covered with mud. Yaetes was wearing a silver filter mask that covered his nose and mouth, but neither Soz nor Rex needed one; their physical augmentations included filters in their respiratory tracts that could deal with the atmosphere for short periods. As usual, Rex looked intimidating. But Soz felt his mood. He was struggling not to laugh. Honestly. She ought to throw him in the brig. Except their star-fighters didn’t have brigs, lucky man.
“I don’t think I was ever in my mind,” she told Yaetes. “So I suppose I’m out of it.”
“You can’t do that!” He waved at the revolting sea, which was still sloshing around. “Those serpents kill anything that threatens them.”
“Didn’t kill me.” Soz hefted her gun, which unfortunately was drenched in mud. She’d have to take it apart to clean it properly. Damn. Dismantling a miniature particle accelerator was no small task.
“It wanted to eat her,” Rex said. “The poor thing.”
She glowered at him. “And you just stood there?” In truth, she knew Rex had her back. He had in all the years they had flown together in a Jag squad, from the days when they had been cadets at the Academy until now, when she commanded the squad and he served as her second.
Rex grinned at her. “I felt sorry for the critter, the way it was so outmatched.”
“Colonel Valdoria,” Yaetes said. “If you decide to kill every creature that looks at us cross-eyed, we’ll never get the colonists evacuated.”
He had a point. Monsters infested this planet. She couldn’t get rid of them all; besides which, destroying the mutated wildlife here wouldn’t help what remained of the colonists. This world was too far gone.
“We’ll set up a base as soon as we find a suitable location,” she said. Then she added, “I’m a Secondary, Captain. The rank is roughly equivalent to colonel, but not the same.”
“Ah. Yes. Of course.” He looked as flustered now as he had yesterday when her squad had arrived with the rest of the ISC forces to help the beleaguered colony. He didn’t shield his mind well; she could tell he thought she looked too young for a colonel. Actually, he thought she looked like a sex goddess from an erotic holovid. What a bizarre thought. Some of his images were vivid enough that she picked them up even with her own mind fortified by mental barriers. No way could she contort her body into those positions. She wondered if he realized Jagernauts were psions. They had to be, given that they linked mentally to their ships. She hadn’t said anything because he was a good officer who genuinely wanted to help these people, and he’d be mortified if he knew she had picked up his, um, creative imagination.
Rex walked forward with that easy gait of his, his jumbler holstered at his hip. Soz nodded to him, and he nodded back, acknowledging her thanks for his backup. Yaetes watched as if he were observing the tribal rites of some dangerous alien race. Soz supposed he had reason. ISC classified Jagernauts as a different species from Homo sapiens because they were human weapons with biomech systems in their bodies that let them think, move, and react faster and with more strength than normal humans. Soz thought it was absurd to call them another species, given that Jagernauts and humans could interbreed just fine. Regardless of how ISC labelled them, their function remained the same. Kill.
Well, not always. Sometimes they ended up on missions like this one, cleaning up ISC messes. Not that ISC would admit they had screwed up royally here on New-drilling Day. The terraforming had become unstable, turning the supposed paradise into crud. Another few decades and the planet would be uninhabitable. Her squad had come with a recovery team assigned to help the colonists. Not many remained; most of those who had survived the miserable environment had killed each other off in a vicious civil war that erupted over the shortage of supplies and livable habitats.
Soz was mad. This should never have happened. What the blazes had been going on at HQ? Oh, she knew. It was politics. She hated politics. ISC was in bed with the Newland Corporation that had bought and terraformed this world. Corporate hadn’t wanted to admit to such a spectacular failure because it would bankrupt them. So they pretended it didn’t happen, giving the colonists stupid assurances they would fix everything even while they scrambled to cut their losses. It had taken a special commission determined to investigate rumours of the growing death toll to blow apart the scandal. Damn it, ISC should have paid more attention.
A ways behind Captain Yaetes, the hatch to the below-decks compartments opened, and a lanky woman with short yellow hair climbed out into the sticky wind, her face protected by one of the silvery masks.
Who is that? Soz thought.
Jen Foley, the navigator, the node implanted in her spine thought. It communicated by firing bio-electrodes in her neurons, which she experienced as thoughts.
Foley. Soz committed it to memory. She was still learning names of the crew Yaetes had brought onboard today. She felt the navigator’s mood. Foley was more disturbed by the mud than the sea serpent. That was all Soz could tell, though; like most people, Foley instinctively raised natural barriers to protect her mind. Soz had them as well, but hers were more sophisticated given that she had trained for decades to use her mental abilities. Regardless of how shaken the navigator felt, she came forward with a steady walk, which Soz respected.
“All secure below,” Foley said as she joined them.
“You all right?” Captain Yaetes asked her.
“I’ll live.” Foley grimaced. “I’m not so sure about the racer. It’s thick with mud, including the engines. You hear how laboured they sound? If they stall, we can use sails to travel, but I don’t like to depend on them. We need to dock and clean the engines.”
Yaetes looked out at the sea stretching in every direction. “Dock where?”
Foley pointed southeast. “Satellite maps say an island is a few hours that way.”
Soz’s expertise was starships not water ships, but she could hear the uneven chugging of the engines. They should be cleaned now, not in a few hours. Surely they could find something closer. Locating the smallest settlements was a bit dicey because the atmosphere interfered with their sensors, all those particulates that saturated the air, a plethora of bacteria and microscopic insectoids. She could ask the flagship in orbit to step up their search, but Soz had an idea that could work faster and wouldn’t draw resources away from other rescue operations. Closing her eyes, she eased down her mental shields. Her awareness spread out, across the mud ocean with its teeming, putrid life. Nothing …
Wait. A golden, clean warmth glowed amid the mess of New Day. Where …?
She opened her eyes. Rex had a glazed look very different from his usual laser-focus. His gaze met hers.
You catch that? Soz asked.
Something, he thought. I’m not sure what. But strong.
As Soz nodded, pain jabbed her temples. She raised her barriers again, protecting her mind, and lifted her arm, pointing northwest. “We go there,” she told Yaetes and Foley.
“Nothing is out that way,” Foley said. “Just mud, mud, and oh gosh, more freaking mud.”
Soz smiled. She could get to like this Foley person. “It looks that way. But something is close by. If we find even a small outpost, we can commandeer it and set up a base. And you can clean your engines.”
Yaetes shook his head. “I’m no military officer, just a merchant serving what’s left of our outliers. So maybe I’m not used to ISC lingo. But what will you commandeer? Most likely all we’ll find are dead people and shattered dreams.”
Soz spoke quietly. “We’ll use respect, Captain.”
“If you’re wrong about its location,” he said, “we’ll be even further from help.”
“I’m sure it’s there,” Soz said. Why, she couldn’t have said. But she had no doubt.
The door of the house was broken, the place had no power, and mud caked the living room. Soz wondered what had happened. It must have been recent; the mud was relatively fresh, if anything that disagreeable could be called “fresh”.
She stood in the doorway of the damaged house and looked outside, checking the area. The sun glowed like a white-hot rivet overhead, and green-tinged clouds scudded across the dusky blue sky. She wondered who at the Newland Corporation had come up with the whacked idea of telling the settlers that the green came from chlorophyll. The colonists had scientists. They knew it was a lie. Every year more toxic compounds formed on New Day, including traces of green chlorine gas. It wasn’t much, and most gathered in low areas rather than high in the atmosphere, but it took very little to poison humans and it could cause violent reactions. That was only one of thousands of problems here.
While Rex and the crew carried in equipment from the racer, Soz checked the house. The crew could bivouac in the living room. She needed a separate area for a command centre to coordinate the rescue efforts for this area. They hadn’t found this homestead in time, but they might be able to help other survivors out here.
How had everything unravelled so badly on this world? She meant to find answers, and she didn’t care whose politics she ruffled. So fine, she was no diplomat. But the people had come here with such dreams, and they deserved so much more than what Newland Corporation had handed them.
Foley came over to her. “We found a room for your office.”
“Good.” Soz could tell Foley was upset, but not why. “What’s wrong?”
The navigator took a breath. “There are dead people in there.”
Damn. “Show me.”
Foley took her to a bedroom. It had a desk, a recliner on wheels, a bed, a mesh table with a glossy tech surface that had gone dark – and two bodies on the flex-metal floor. The men were of average height and similar age, possibly twins, one of them thinner than the other. Dried, caked mud covered them both.
Doctor Carlon, the racer’s medic, was kneeling by the thinner man. Looking up, he pushed a lock of his tousled red hair out of his eyes. “This one is unconscious,” he told Soz.
Relief sparked in her. Maybe they hadn’t been too late after all. Her makeshift command centre could easily serve as a makeshift hospital, too. Kneeling by Carlon, she touched the man’s neck. His pulse felt weak but steady. He had the face of a gaunt angel, with high cheekbones, a turned-up nose and a full mouth. His light brown hair had yellow sun-streaks.
“Can you help him?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Carlon said, as laconic as always. “He looks nearly starved.”
“He is.” Carlon slid his arms under the man’s body. “We should put him someplace better.”
Together, they carried the man to the rumpled bed. After they laid him down, Carlon went to work, injecting nanomeds to replenish his patient’s depleted body. He set med-strips on the man’s torso, and holos were soon rotating above them with displays of the fellow’s muscles, skeleton, neural systems, and more, as well as large macro-molecules in bright colours that turned while Carlon examined them. Oddly, despite the man’s critical condition, something about him seemed right. Soz couldn’t figure it out. Something warm? No, not warm.
She drew in a sharp breath. “He’s a psion.”
Carlon kept working. “I thought you couldn’t tell when someone was unconscious.”
“Normally, no. But his mind is so strong, it comes through even now.” She stroked the man’s forehead. His skin felt gritty, and green-brown flakes of mud scattered on the bed. In his gaunt face, his high cheekbones looked finely carved, as if he were a statue rather than a living man. Flustered, she pulled back her hand. Enraged mud-monsters she could deal with, but handsome empaths were a different story. She had no problem with Jagernauts like Rex; he was as cocky as they came, and she understood that fine. It was the shy, gentle ones that disconcerted her. Why she thought that description applied to this man, she didn’t know, but she felt certain about it.
“Will he live?” she asked.
“If he makes it through the next few hours.” Carlon glanced at the man’s legs. “In a manner of speaking.”
That didn’t sound good. “Speaking how?”
“Something is wrong with his legs.” Carlon shook his head. “Fungus, virus, something. Native to this planet, I’d say. Attacked his body. And it’s getting worse.”
She scowled. “The colonists were supposed to have immunizations.”
“Supposed to have a lot,” Carlon said. “A lot failed. Hell, the blasted planet failed.”
Soz had no answer to that.
Hypron opened his eyes into darkness. He drowsed for a moment – until he remembered.
Oxim was dead.
It all rushed back, the shock, the grief, the misery. He hadn’t expected to wake again, but here he was, alive, still trapped in this cursed body.
When Hypron’s body had begun to fail, the process had been gradual. The doctors had helped at first, even reversing the withering of his legs for a time. In the same way, when this homestead had failed, it hadn’t happened all at once. Their life’s work had decayed slowly, and they had never believed it would be permanent. The process would reverse, the air would become clean, Newland Corporation would fix the problems. It had been miserable, yes, but bearable. Their bond as brothers kept them going, the partnership that had seen them through the death of their parents, their meagre survival on the asteroid, and the decline of their fortunes here. During it all, they had been each other’s strength.
Now he had nothing except starvation.
And yet … his hunger was gone, not completely, but greatly receded. He felt clean and fresh. The pain from his injuries and his nausea from the atmosphere had faded. In their place was a warmth so welcome, he wondered if he had died. Perhaps this was how it felt when your body gave up and death took you gently into oblivion.
A memory stirred. He had sensed a mental warmth when he searched for Oxim. He felt it now, too, but no longer far away. It was all around him, powerful, luminous.
He tried to say, Who’s there? but no words came out.
Something moved behind him. A woman answered sleepily. Sorry … needed to rest a moment … floor hard …
What the hell? Those words were in his mind. So he was dead. That was the only explanation why a woman would appear in his bed and talk in his mind. He hadn’t expected death to be in the dark, but at least he wasn’t alone. He rolled onto his back, wincing as pain stabbed his bruised, cut-up body. It didn’t seem fair that he still hurt if he no longer lived. His cheek came to rest against someone’s head, and she shifted position, her forehead rubbing his ear.
Are you a hallucination? he asked.
No response. Perhaps this was his dying delirium. Well, so, it was his delirium, and a pleasant one at that, given the lean curves of her body. Normally he was reticent with women; he would probably pause even if he found one in his bed. Not that such had ever happened in real life. But this was surreal, a creation of his mind, perhaps of his death. So he brushed his lips across her forehead.
The woman stirred against him. He waited, but she didn’t protest, so he lowered his head, searching for her mouth. When his lips found hers, he kissed her, first softly, then more deeply. He knew for certain then that she was a creation of his mind, because she kissed him back instead of slapping him. Her lips felt unexpectedly warm for a hallucination.
As their kiss deepened, though, her mood changed, going from unfocused sleepiness to a brighter awareness.
With a start, the woman jerked away from him. “Gods almighty!” she said, scrambling into a sitting position. “I ought to throw myself in the brig.”
Well, damn. That didn’t sound like anything he would hallucinate. Her retreat had taken away the heat of her body, but her mind remained with its enfolding warmth. It somehow kept the worst of his grief at bay.
“Why are you here?” he said.
“I’m sorry.” She sounded mortified. “I didn’t mean to take advantage. I swear. I had only planned to rest for a moment. I hadn’t expected to fall asleep. Honestly.”
He wished she didn’t sound so embarrassed. He’d rather enjoyed it. “Who are you?”
“Soz Valdoria,” she said. “I command a Jagernaut squad assigned to this planet.” With apology, she added, “I’m afraid I’ve commandeered your house.”
He must have heard wrong. Jagernaut? One of the elite, inhuman killing machines created by ISC? He wouldn’t hallucinate a monster in his bed.
“For flaming sake,” she grumbled. “We aren’t monsters.”
He hadn’t said that aloud. Gods, this person could hear him think. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and dim blue light leaked in from somewhere. He could see her profile, the small nose, the hair curling around her cheeks and shoulders, tousled and untamed. She didn’t look like a monster. She was pretty. Her soft face contrasted with her dark vest and pants, which smelled like rich leather. Her mech-tech gauntlets had scraped his arm when she moved and barbaric armbands glinted around each of her biceps. This seemed less and less like a hallucination. But if he were alive, that meant he still existed in a universe without Oxim.
Hypron spoke in a low voice. “My brother?”
He felt her recognition. She knew who he meant. He had never picked up another person’s emotions so well. Nor was it only her moods; a few of her thoughts came through as well, strong ones on the surface of her mind, including her misty image of Oxim’s body on the floor. His grief surged and he withdrew into himself.
“I’m sorry.” She awkwardly drew his head into her lap and stroked his hair, her gestures gentle despite being clumsy.
Hypron couldn’t answer; he could only think that he hadn’t even buried Oxim. He should have given his brother a funeral pyre in the sea.
“We can arrange the ceremony,” Soz said in a low voice.
He didn’t understand how she knew what he needed, or why she would help, but in the vulnerability of this half-dream he simply answered, Thank you.
She murmured, he didn’t know what, only that it soothed. He lay with his head in her lap, and eventually the grief receded enough for him to doze fitfully.
Some time later, the door scraped open. “Commander?” a man said in the dark.
Soz spoke. “Here, Carlon. On the bed.”
The man cleared his throat. “Uh … oh.”
“I’m just sitting here, Doctor,” Soz growled.
Carlon, a doctor apparently, spared them any comment on the sleeping arrangements. “Got a message from the mainland,” he told her. “They’re evacuating colonists offworld.”
Soz said only, “Good,” but her relief washed over Hypron. “How’s the patient?” Carlon asked.
“He woke up for a while,” Soz said. “He’s sleeping again.”
“If he woke up, he’ll live.” Carlon sounded far more pleased than Hypron felt about it.
The covers rustled as Soz eased Hypron’s head back on the pillow. He heard more than felt her slide off the bed. “I need to get back to work,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” Carlon told her. “You need to sleep. My file here says you’ve been up thirty-two hours straight.”
“My biomech web makes stimulants to keep me awake.” Her voice receded as her footsteps crossed the room. “Believe me, after we straighten out this mess I’ll sleep for a day.”
Hypron listened to their voices fade. They were evacuating the colony? The last he had heard, Corporate wouldn’t let anyone leave, or at least they would neither authorize nor cover the costs of departures, which was equivalent to forbidding them, since few colonists could afford offworld transport or obtain documents for resettlement without help. Rumours had circulated that Corporate was blocking offworld communications even as they assured the colonists everything would be fine.
Liars. If they had evacuated earlier, Oxim would be alive.
“Here.” Soz rolled Hypron’s chair up to the dichromesh glass that made up the entire north wall of the living room. With people to help him into the seat, he didn’t need it so near the floor, so he had raised the seat.
“Thanks,” he said, his voice rusty. This was the first time in ages he had looked out the window, which had stopped being transparent several years ago. Captain Yaetes and his people had fixed it, and now they were repairing the door. Another woman was sitting at the console by the far wall, working on the house EI.
Soz stood behind Hypron. Her reflection showed in the glass as she looked over his head and through the window-wall. Two sailors from the racer were outside with Rex Blackstone, the other Jagernaut. As Hypron watched, they slid a raft from the dock into the sluggishly roiling sea. Oxim’s pyre. They had built it from dismantled pieces of the house. It seemed a fitting end for what remained of their home, which Hypron would have to abandon when he evacuated.
The other crew here inside the house joined them at the window. Outside, Rex lit the torch he had made and laid it in the dried sea-vines heaped on the raft. Flames soon engulfed the pyre. The raft drifted away from the dock, burning brightly in the bitter sunlight.
A tear ran down Hypron’s cheek. Soz rested her hands on his shoulders, a simple gesture, but welcome. The fresh scent of her bath soap drifted around him. She thought she was shielding her mind, and probably she was from anyone else, but he felt her mood. She mourned with him, unable to close his grief out of her mind. He affected her, he wasn’t sure how, but she noticed him. Desired him. How strange. Although some women had found him attractive before his illness, most of those among the colonists preferred rugged muscle-bound types. Yet Soz really liked the way he looked. Whatever features and body type appealed to her, apparently he had both. She didn’t care that he was different; it troubled her only because she realized how deeply it bothered him. In a different world, he would have savoured her unexpected interest.
Today he could see only his brother’s pyre.
“Goodbye, Oxim,” he said softly. “Sleep well.”
Eventually the flames died and the raft sank beneath the mud. Rex returned to the racer with the two sailors, and within moments the craft was nosing out into the sea. Yaetes and the others went back to their repairs. The captain had sent Rex with the ship so the rest of them could work here with Soz on plans for relocating any survivors they found.
“How long will it take them to reach the mainland?” Hypron asked, watching the racer.
“Normally, about six hours,” Soz said. “But with their search, it’ll take longer.”
He turned his recliner so he was facing her. “I doubt they’ll find any settlers alive. Those people your orbital system located are probably pirates.” The words were sour in his mouth, for he knew now how Oxim died. The doctor had done an autopsy. Beaten to death. The murderers had left their brand on him, a pirate tattoo, as if he were another notch in their list of crimes. Hypron didn’t know where to put his fury. He hated even more that it had happened right outside their home while he had lain inside, exhausted and asleep.
Soz murmured, and a mental glow spread over him. He wondered if she even knew she was doing it. He thought of the way she had held him last night. She believed she was clumsy in offering comfort, awkward with words. She had no idea. She didn’t need to say anything. These moments with her gave him so much, the balm of human touch after he had lost everything.
She sat on a stack of crates someone had carried inside, bringing her eyes level with his. It seemed incongruous that one of ISC’s most notorious killers had such a sweet face. He wished he could paint a holo-portrait using special lights for her hair, the way it glistened black, then shaded into wine-red and ended in metallic gold, tousling around her shoulders. She had changed out of her uniform into a blue snug-suit that did nothing to hide her curves. He didn’t believe she was a combat machine. Her mind was a sun, warm and vibrant.
Then again, he only picked up her outermost thoughts. She wasn’t armed now, but he had seen her cleaning that gun of hers in the bedroom earlier, a mammoth weapon with a thick, ugly snout.
“What will you do after you evacuate?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve nowhere to go.”
“No home?”
“I grew up on an asteroid. I was a miner.” He hit the heel of his hand against his useless thigh. “I can’t go back there like this.”
“So you can’t work?” Soz asked. Then she winced. “Sorry. That was rude.”
“It’s all right.” He didn’t mind. People here went out of their way to avoid mentioning his illness. Most wouldn’t even look at him, as if one glance would cause them to catch whatever was killing him. He preferred Soz’s matter-of-fact acknowledgement that yes, he was sick.
“I’ll find something,” he said. What, he had no idea, given his lack of training for anything except hard labour. Even healthy, he would have less value to prospective employers than a labour robot, because unlike him, bots didn’t require food or sleep.
“Secondary Valdoria!” a man called. “You better take a look at this.”
As Soz stood up, turning towards the door, Hypron glanced over. Captain Yaetes was standing in front of the view screen by the door, which they had fixed, and he was staring hard at whatever showed there. Looking through the window-wall, Hypron saw a mud-frigate docking outside, looming and ugly, its weathered masts pocked and leaning.
Pirate ship.
Soz scowled at the frigate, annoyed again, as with the mud monster. Sailors in ragged shirts and trousers were disembarking from the noxious vessel, men and women with tarnished filter masks. Some were armed with projectile pistols, others with laser carbines.
“Well, shit,” Soz said.
Yaetes pressed his hand against the new door, which offered a dubious protection given that they hadn’t yet installed its lock. “They’ll kill us for this homestead.”
“Not on my watch,” Soz said. She really wished creatures, human or otherwise, would quit hampering her attempts to rescue these people. Twelve pirates had stepped onto the dock, and three more were in sight on the frigate. Although the masts indicated the vessel could travel by sail, she had no doubt it possessed powerful engines as well. “They must have good tech shrouds for that ship. Illegal shrouds. Otherwise, we’d have known they were here.”
“How would we know?” Yaetes asked. “My racer doesn’t have surveillance equipment.”
“I do,” Soz said. “It’s part of me.” She studied the invaders as they strode up the pier. From outside, they couldn’t see through the window-wall, but they probably knew how many people were inside. “They must’ve been watching us. When the racer left, they moved in.”
Carlon came over and handed Yaetes a projectile pistol. “Seven of us,” the doctor said. He motioned towards the pirates. “Fifteen of them.”
Hypron clenched his fist on the arm of the recliner. “I won’t surrender my house.”
Soz felt his calm – and his fatalistic determination. He would rather die than leave his home to pirates. He would fight them for as long as he breathed, however he could manage, until they killed him. Well, hell. She didn’t intend for anyone to die.
“What weapons do we have?” she asked.
Yaetes glanced at Hypron and hefted the pistol. “Any besides this?”
Hypron shook his head. “Just that.”
The captain tapped the holstered gun on his hip, a second pulse pistol. “I have this.” To Soz, he added, “And there’s that monster you were cleaning. That’s it.”
Three guns. Soz nodded. She could work with that. “Don’t challenge them. Stay calm, and they won’t see you as a threat.” With that, she strode for the bedroom. She distantly felt the minds of the pirates. Her training in empathic surveillance let her dissect that vague impression; they wouldn’t kill the people here right away unless they felt threatened, but it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge.
She picked up the people in the house more clearly. Yaetes had tensed like a cable pulled taut, but he was calm. Although Carlon didn’t want to fight, he would if necessary. The woman who had been fixing the EI was scared, but Soz didn’t think she would panic. The other man and woman were more tightly strung, more of a risk. Hypron wasn’t scared, he was angry, furious over his limited ability to defend his home.
Soz pulled back from their minds. She couldn’t risk too strong a connection; her empathic ability could cripple her in combat if it swamped her in the emotions of other people in the battle.
Inside the bedroom, she grabbed her jumbler off the desk. As she checked her weapon, the door of the house slammed open.
“Real subtle,” she muttered. Banging doors offered no tactical advantage, so why do it? All they achieved was to reveal that they wanted to make a big entrance. That kind of bravado often came with overconfidence or a need to prove themselves that could be a weakness. She felt an ego from one of the intruders as big as a narcissist’s mirror. Another reason they wouldn’t start killing right away; he wanted an audience.
Node, activate jumbler link, Soz thought.
Activated, her spinal node answered. It sent pulses to biothreads in her body. They linked to sockets in her wrist that connected to her gauntlets, which could transmit messages to her jumbler. A sense of linking came to her as the gun locked on her neural patterns, clicking her into a well-known mental space. She released the safety on the weapon with a flick of her thumb.
A voice boomed in the front room. “All of you, over by the window. And someone get that coward hiding in the bedroom.”
So they knew she was here. No surprise there. If their shrouds could hide a fuel-powered frigate, their sensors were probably similarly advanced. She walked into the hall, but it was still empty, another sign of their overconfidence. They expected an easy capture here. The only working exit from the house was the front door, so she had no obvious means of escape.
Soz held the jumbler down by her side as she entered the living room, neither hiding her weapon nor offering challenge. Yaetes, Carlon and two of the crew were with Hypron at the window. The woman who had been working on the EI now stood by the console, her face pale. The pirates, five women and seven men, were filing in through the front doorway. Damn mud-slugs. They had damaged the new door that Yaetes and his people had worked so hard to replace.
A muscular man with a craggy face and buzzed black hair was pulling off his filter mask. The huge ego emanated from him. The frigate captain, probably. Mesh nets and rivets studded his dark clothes. All very intimidating, supposedly, but none of it actually looked functional.
The captain scowled at Soz, his gaze raking over her jumbler. “What the hell is that? Throw it here, sweet cheeks. Now.”
Sweet cheeks? Screw him. Soz knelt on one knee, moving carefully, never taking her gaze off the captain. She set the gun on the floor and gave it a push, sliding it over to him.
Mode four activated, the gun told her, communicating via her spinal node. As the frigate captain picked it up off the floor, her gun added, This handler is hostile.
Get readings on him, Soz thought as she stood up. Physiological data, body language, verbal analysis, everything.
Reading, the gun answered.
The frigate captain turned the jumbler over in his hands. “What ammo does it shoot?”
“Abitons,” Soz said. “Anti-particles.”
He glanced up sharply. “I’m not stupid, sweet cheeks. Try again.”
So. They didn’t have lie detectors in all that ornate hardware they were wearing. She kept her face bland as she changed her truth to a lie. “It shoots serrated pulse projectiles.”
“Where’d you get it?” He sounded more curious than worried. “Jorman Fringe Market,” she said. It was a lucrative venue for smugglers.
He looked her over. “You a private operator?”
“Just trying to survive,” she said. Nothing too cocky, but neither did she want to appear afraid.
Yaetes and the others were watching them in silence, intent, primed to fight like spring-loaded coils. Hypron’s anger blazed in her mind. He had no intention of sitting by while yet another person he cared for died.
Your gun has finished its analysis, her node thought.
Does that guy have any clue what he’s holding? Soz asked.
His vital signs don’t indicate the fear most people experience when facing a Jagernaut or their weaponry. I’d say he’s never seen a jumbler before.
Good. The pirates probably would have recognized her uniform if she had been wearing it; most people knew what a Jagernaut looked like. But jumblers were less infamous than the tech-mech warriors who carried them. The more this captain underestimated her, the better. Given how badly her people were outnumbered, she needed every advantage, for she had little doubt these intruders would kill them after they finished enjoying their captives.
“Captain, I’m getting a weird reading.” That came from the pirate woman who had spoken earlier. She was frowning at her ingot-encrusted gauntlet.
What’s she looking at? Soz asked her node.
I’m not sure. A sensor. Your jumbler isn’t close enough to determine more.
The captain glanced at the woman. “What kind of reading?”
She indicated Soz. “Uh, sir … it says she’s a micro-fusion reactor.”
Damn! How had they picked that up? Her internal power source was shielded by state-of-the-art military-grade shrouds.
The captain scowled at the woman. “Is that a fucking joke?”
“No, sir.” She held out her gauntlet. “You can see the reading.”
“That tech is a piece of crap,” he said. “You should never have taken it off that corpse.”
Soz gritted her teeth. Very few sensors could pick up the reactor that powered her internal systems. If they had murdered an ISC officer with a rank high enough to carry such a detector, that added assassination to their crimes.
“So.” The captain looked Soz up and down, his gaze lingering on her breasts and hips. “You don’t look like a micro-fusion reactor to me.”
“Yeah, sure, I explode like a bomb,” Soz said. In truth, it was almost impossible, given the safeguards on her reactor.
The captain gave a raspy laugh. “Sounds like fun. Come here, sweets.”
Hypron’s anger surged, and Soz knew he was about to push his chair forward. Of course they would shoot him before he made it halfway across the room.
Hypron, stop! Soz thought.
Shock exploded over her. His shock, at hearing her “voice” in his mind. Outwardly, he showed almost no reaction, a phenomenal display of self-control given his stunned mental response.
Soz? he asked. Is that you?
Yes. She stepped carefully towards the captain. Stay put. He’s giving me an excuse to get close to them.
Be careful, he thought.
She felt how hard it was for him to hold back. He didn’t care about dying; as far as he was concerned, he had no reason to live. She wanted whoever had murdered his brother to pay, and she’d bet a year’s wage the killers were in this room. She didn’t pick up any details about the death on the surface of their minds, and she couldn’t risk lowering her shields more, but she had a general sense that at least some of them had been here before.
She stopped in front of the frigate captain. He was tall, but with her boots, she stood at his height. He put an arm around her waist and yanked her closer. “What do you think, hmm? Still trying to survive? I got thoughts on how you can do that, babe.”
“I’m sure you do,” she said. Toggle combat mode, she thought.
Toggled, her node answered.
Soz spun out of the captain’s grip. The world slowed down; everyone else seemed to move at a fraction of normal speed. She kicked up her leg as she whirled, jamming her boot heel in the captain’s stomach. As he slammed back into the wall, she swung her fist, her aim fine-tuned by combat libraries in her node. Her knuckles smashed the wrist of the woman with the gauntlet sensor, and the crack of shattering bone broke the air. The woman screamed, a counterpoint to the captain’s bellow. In Soz’s speeded-up state, their voices sounded eerily deepened and drawn out.
People converged on her in slow motion. Soz kicked the gun out of one man’s hand while she broke the arm of another pirate, a woman who was raising a pistol. Shouts rang out, strange and sluggish. She caught the flicker of someone’s hand an instant before he fired his laser, and she dropped out of the beam’s path as it shot across the room. Rolling across the floor, she tackled him in the knees and knocked him unconscious when he hit the ground. Yaetes fired his pistol, catching one of the pirates in the torso. Another pirate swung his laser carbine around to shoot, and Soz lunged into him, knocking the gun out of his grip. Someone else fired and Soz jumped high, flipping over the path of a projectile bullet. She glimpsed the carbine she had liberated spinning through the air towards Hypron, and in the instant she landed, Hypron caught the laser.
Someone slammed Soz in the back. An agonized scream penetrated her mind as she went down. Not her cry; a bullet had struck one of Yaetes’ men. Its serrated edges barely touched him, but its shock wave slammed through his body, and his reaction reverberated in Soz’s hyper-sensitized mind as if she had also been hit. Her training kept her going even as she mentally reeled from the blow. She threw her attacker backward, then flipped her over and pressed against the woman’s windpipe, using enough pressure to knock her out.
The frigate captain was trying to fire the jumbler. Aiming at Soz, he jammed his thumb on the firing stud again and again. When nothing happened, he swore furiously and hurled the gun away. It crashed into the wall, then slammed down onto the floor.
Get ready, Soz thought to the jumbler, her thoughts accelerated.
Priming, the gun answered.
Soz rolled across the floor and grabbed the jumbler as she jumped to her feet. She had a glimpse of Yaetes sprawled on the ground. He was in pain, vivid and intense, but it meant he was alive. With
Yaetes down, it also meant Hypron was wide open to attack.
In the same moment Soz realized the frigate captain was looking straight at Hypron, she felt the pirate’s horrified recognition. He thought Hypron was a man he had already killed on the very dock of this house before he had left for reinforcements to take the homestead itself. In that instant, he believed was looking into the living face of a dead man.
Oxim.
The captain’s reaction burst over Soz, both his memory of the warped pleasure he had taken in Oxim’s murder and his nightmare that someday one of his victims would rise from a gruesome death to exact revenge. Hypron’s face contorted as he caught the images of Oxim’s death, and his horror blasted over Soz. Rage filled him, so intense it seared. He had never shot another person in his life, but he raised the laser carbine without hesitation.
The entire time Soz kept moving, swinging around to face the pirates. Standing with her feet planted wide, she fired her jumbler, sweeping its beam across the ground in front of the intruders. The floor exploded in a blaze of orange light. As it collapsed, some of the pirates fell to their knees and others stumbled back. One shouted as his gun discharged, blasting a projectile into the wall. The captain was still standing, staring at Hypron with his face contorted in a raw, unthinking hatred. He raised his gun to finish a man he believed he had already destroyed—
Hypron fired.
The laser beam shot across the room in a brilliant red streak. When it hit the frigate captain, his body flared so brightly it threw the room into a sharp relief of light and shadow. He blazed, and the stench of incinerated skin scorched the air.
The impact of his death slammed into Soz’s mind, and she reeled. Hypron picked it up as well, and it hit his untrained mind like an explosion. He had no mental shield that could withstand that onslaught. As colour drained from his face, Soz instinctively reached out to protect him. Her node spurred neural transmitters to block her synapses, muting what she felt, and she tried to do the same for Hypron. It couldn’t completely turn off their empathic reception; interfering with that many synapses would knock a person unconscious. But it could make the shock more bearable.
Soz stopped moving.
She stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard. The place was in shambles, the floor ravaged, the furniture broken, the window-wall networked by shatter patterns where bullets had hit the supposedly break-proof glass. The stench of the atmosphere leaked inside, and mud seeped into the trench in the floor.
Everyone was staring at her. The pirates were crouched on the ground or lying still. Yaetes’ people had taken shelter behind a pulverized table. Soz kept her jumbler up and primed as she swung from side to side, watching everyone, her mind focused like a laser.
Hostiles neutralized, her node thought. Kill or capture?
Hold, Soz answered.
Motion flickered in her side vision.
In the same instant Soz whirled, her gun thought, Primed to fire.
No! Soz told it. That’s Yaetes. The racer captain was climbing to his feet with careful movements, his gaze fixed on Soz.
He is too close to the psion you are protecting, her node thought. Advise attack.
She wondered why her node singled out Hypron as the person she was protecting. I’m here to defend everyone. Including Captain Yaetes.
The captain took a deep breath, holding his pistol by his side. He let the gun drop, and it clattered on the floor. Then he limped towards Soz, holding out his hands to show he had no other weapons.
Defence primed, her node thought. Attack?
No attack, Soz told it.
Yaetes stopped a few metres away. “Secondary Valdoria, it’s over. You can stand down.”
Soz considered him. He had a point. Combat mode off, she told her node.
Toggled off.
With an exhale, Soz lowered her jumbler.
“Gods almighty,” one of the pirates muttered.
Doctor Carlon spoke, his voice easily carrying in the stunned silence. “She’s a Jagernaut, asshole.”
Soz looked around at the pirates. “And all of you,” she said, “are under arrest.”
Hypron sat on the edge of his bed in the dark, fully dressed, worn out but unable to lie down. Nothing could erase the images burned into his mind. He had killed today, and lived that death as if it were his own. Worse, he had felt that monster’s pleasure in murdering Oxim.
After the battle, he had said nothing. He felt as if amber encased him. While Soz and the others had guarded the pirates, he had worked on repairing the mesh circuitry in the backup EI. When the racer returned with patrol authorities from the mainland, the officers asked for his statement, and Hypron had somehow given it, his voice numb. He had watched them take away the surviving pirates and the remains of the frigate captain. The ashes. No one arrested Hypron. No one condemned him. Self-defence, they said. He couldn’t respond. Too much had happened, too much loss, pain, grief, violence. It seared his mind.
The door creaked, and an invisible cloak of calm spread over his thoughts. Soz.
Hypron closed his eyes. He didn’t understand how her mind could be so luminous given what she lived through in battle, experiencing the injuries of her enemies, their pain, fear, cruelty, whatever they felt. Their deaths. He knew now, from Soz, what to call himself. Empath. Perhaps even a telepath. How could she survive it? ISC was even worse than he had thought, sending empaths into combat, even technologically enhancing their abilities, all so they could become better killers. He was surprised Jagernauts didn’t all commit suicide.
“Hypron.” Her voice was soft in the dark. The bed rustled as she sat next to him. She laid her hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t accept comfort, not after what he had done. She stroked his cheek, until finally his resolve crumbled and he pulled her close, resting his cheek on the top of her head.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “You’ll be all right, I swear.”
“Soz—” His voice cracked. Nothing would ever be right again.
She touched his chin with her fingers and turned his face towards hers. Her lips were warm as she kissed him. He knew he shouldn’t hold her, that making love wouldn’t fix anything, but gods, he needed the refuge. He was breaking inside. He pulled her close, and she drew him onto the bed, caressing him.
As they came together in the deep, quiet places of the night, his mind blended with hers. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he moved within her, strong and steady, until he finally lost all thought in the oblivion of a healing as old as the human race.
Hypron was drowsily aware of Soz turning over in bed. He lay on his back, one arm thrown over his head, the other feeling cold as she moved away. He wondered if she would leave.
“Not unless you want,” she mumbled, her voice deepened by sleep.
“Stay,” he murmured. She was shielding her mind somehow, but he picked up her contentment. After a moment, he added, “How can you hear what I think?”
She rolled over and nestled against his side. “I can’t that much, only if the thought is intense and on the surface of your mind.”
“I’ve never met anyone like me.” He put his arm around her, settling her head against his shoulder. “Someone who feels moods.” The closest he had known was with Oxim. Hard on the heels of that memory came a sharp pang of grief.
“You must have loved him a lot,” Soz said. Then she muttered, “Gods, that sounded trite.”
“It’s fine,” he said softly, leaning his head against hers. “I’m glad you stayed tonight.”
“It’s been a long time. I mean, since, you know.” She slid her hand across his chest. “Since I’ve done this.”
He hadn’t expected that from so sensuous a woman. He knew little about Jagernauts, though. It wouldn’t surprise him if they had trouble with the softer aspects of life given what they endured in battle.
“Why with me?” As soon as the question came out, he wished he had kept his mouth shut. He had no desire to know if she had slept with him out of pity.
Soz just said, “It seemed right.” She shifted against him, slight movements, but erotic. “Such a sexy man.”
Sexy? Good gods. Her brain was fried.
“You really have no idea, do you?” Her voice trailed off, sleepy and warm. “Foolish women here. Their loss … my gain.”
He didn’t know what to make of that, but he liked it. He was less comfortable with her hearing his thoughts. He imagined a shroud over his mind. Then he thought, You have green tufts of fur on your ears. He smiled, imagining her reaction.
After a moment, when nothing happened, he thought, I wish you weren’t leaving.
Nothing.
He imagined his thoughts forming outside his mental shroud. Did you catch that?
She stirred against him. Catch what?
So. He could hide his thoughts. I wondered how long you would be here.
Until we finish the evacuation. Then she added, We won’t strand you, Hypron. We’ll help you resettle.
He closed his eyes, relieved. That’s good to know. Just those moments of exchanging thoughts made his temples ache. He mentally retreated, settling his shroud around his mind.
After a moment, Soz spoke. “Does it bother you that I have augmentation inside of me?”
He blinked, unsure how to answer. “It’s different.”
“The system is called a biomech web.”
He supposed it should make him uncomfortable. She was probably the most dangerous human being he had ever met. But she felt so human, her body lithe and female against his. Even if this was only for one night, it was hard to believe a woman like her actually wanted him. Hell no, it didn’t bother him.
“I’m all right with it,” he said.
“I have an enhanced muscle system and skeleton,” she said. “Hydraulics, bioelectrodes, neurotrophic protections, bio-active threads, ear and optical implants, all that.”
He wondered why she wanted him to know. “Sounds impressive.”
“You’re sure you’re fine about this?”
“Really, it’s no problem.”
“Good.” Then, in a perfectly normal voice, she shook his universe. “Because we can get the biomech for you. Not a weapons-grade system, but certainly the structural mech. So you can walk again.”
Walk again? She was serious! His instant of euphoria died as fast as it had come. “I’m sure I can’t afford that kind of treatment.”
“Hell, yes, you can.” Her voice was low, but none the less ominous for that. “Make a claim against Newland Corporation. I’ll help you file. They owe you. Big time.”
“Aren’t you an ISC officer?” He wasn’t sure, but he thought Jagernaut Secondary was a high rank in the military. “ISC helped Newland set up this colony.”
“You’re damn right. That means I know how to deal with the system. When I get back to HQ, there will be hell to pay. Newland might as well have given you colonists a death sentence.”
“Oh.” He hardly knew how to absorb her words. Then he wanted to kick himself. She was offering to give him back his life, and the best he could do was Oh? He was a dolt.
“Thank you.” He wished he knew how to express how much it meant to him. “I don’t have the words to say that right.”
Her voice softened. “You don’t need words. You shine inside. You must be an artist or something.”
“My brother used to say that.” He doubted he would ever again talk about his life without remembering Oxim. “I really don’t know. I’ve been too busy trying to stay alive.”
“We’ll have to find out what you like when you don’t have to worry about just surviving.”
“It’s hard to imagine.” Nor had he missed what else she had said. “‘We?’”
She tensed against him. “If, uh … you’d like that.”
The night’s quiet suddenly seemed thick. “You would want me, too?”
She spoke awkwardly. “Unless you don’t like the idea.”
Gods, she was serious. Of course he wanted her. “I do,” he said. “Like the idea, I mean.”
She exhaled, her body relaxing. They lay together in a silence after that, their limbs tangled together. An emotion came to him, one so rare it took a moment to sink in. He was glad to be alive. He had been dying inside for so long, he almost didn’t recognize the lightness. Even if she left tomorrow and he never saw her again, she had given him a reason to pick up his life and learn to deal with his grief.
“I won’t leave,” she said. “You’ll stay with me, yes? Let’s see what happens. See if it works out.”
He pressed his lips against her forehead. “Yes. Let’s do that.”
For the first time in years, Hypron drifted to sleep looking forward to the morning.