“I’m still spaceworthy,” Kalo said, as if she’d somehow done something to offend him. A deep breath cooled the fire of Triz’s outrage. She didn’t have time to be angry right now, or to unpack his hurt feelings, real or feigned. Casne didn’t have time. She found the access panel and punched her way through. It screeched on its hinges as it swung down into the wrenchworks. Triz followed it, boots first.
It took Kalo another moment to land behind her in the dark wrenchworks. The emergency lighting gleamed eerie blue here, too, turning the stranded Swarmers into pale ghosts of their former glory. Other systems had come online, though: This far at the end of the Hab from the primary ambient generators, the ‘works had a few systems important enough to warrant redundant emergency power sources of their own. A faint dry breeze wafted down from the air vents, and the amber operation light shone beside the huge airlocks at the center of the ‘works. That loosened the tight set of Triz’s jaw a little.
As Triz surveyed the situation, the wallport lit up, its screen crawling with red and yellow warning symbols. A good sign. The maintenance crews uphab must be busy. She crossed to the wallport and offered her fob, which clicked once and promptly died. It, too, had lost its integrity to the bacteria in Reclamation. She unlatched the manual keypad from its node and typed in her own queries. She didn’t look up when Kalo approached, but resentment crawled out between her clenched teeth anyway. “So, you’re a Ceebee.”
“Gods of—do they have exclusive rights to mods? There’s billions of people in the Confederated Worlds and most of them have one augment or another.”
He hadn’t actually answered her accusation. She met his bluster with stony silence.
He exhaled noisily. “No, Triz, I’m not a Ceebee! Or if I am, I’m a pretty awful one, considering how many of them I blasted out of the sky at Hedgehome. You think I’m the only pilot with nano repairs? Or combat mods?” He sat down against the wallport, smearing a sticky trail of muck down the wall. “Being a Ceebee isn’t about what you do to yourself. It’s about what you do to other people to get what you think you deserve. So tell me, Triz, what exactly do I deserve?”
Triz bit her tongue. She didn’t know whether he was lying to her and didn’t have the stomach to figure it out now, to hold up the pieces side by side, and see where they matched up. Someone wanted Casne’s career ended, someone close to her who had the opportunity, motive, Fleet access . . .
She couldn’t make the shapes fit the Kalo she’d known, so she didn’t try and keyed in a query to the family quadhome instead. The call rang and rang and rang unanswered, so she tried another query. This time, she put in a request to an unmanned wallport terminal upstairs in the Arcade. “What are you doing?” Kalo asked. She ignored him, and he let his head fall back against the wall behind him.
Mercifully, this time it pinged a response, and she keyed in her passcode for access. When she needed to do her weekly shopping, she’d always liked to use an open Arcade port to make sure the crowds weren’t packed around the fungus vendors and the nutrient tankers. Maybe she could use the same method now to get a glimpse of the situation upstairs. Better yet, someone might notice the in-use port and actually tell her what in all the worlds was going on in the Hab. And whether whatever was going on uphab might be going on in Justice too. If Kalo couldn’t handle it, maybe she could fly the Scooper herself? How hard could an old ore hauler be to fly?
She grasped at the tenuous fragments of that fantasy as the screen flickered, then resolved. Or almost resolved; Triz squinted and tried to make sense of what she saw.
After a moment, the image came together in her brain as well as on the screen. It was the Arcade she knew, but scribbled over in lines of gnarled green-brown. White lines flashed back and forth and left lingering visions on the port screen. Triz asked for volume and received it. The shrill hum of the white lines sliced through her. After a moment, a pair of lancet guns barked in answer.
Kalo’s chin lifted off his chest. “What was that?”
She gestured to the screen, wordless.
He whistled low. “Tunnelguns.”
That word Triz recognized. Tunnelguns were Ceebee stuff, the technology still beyond what the Fleet’s exotics-wranglers had been able to come up with. And probably more unpredictable than what the Admiralty would have tolerated in service anyway. “That green shit must be one of their bioweapons,” Triz murmured. The Hab’s immunodefenses should have stopped any kind of bioweapon, Triz wanted to say, but should haves didn’t patch the plastiglass.
Kalo was already on his feet. “Rocan,” he said, and cursed. “Rocan has to be behind this. Someone helped him escape Justice.” He looked around wildly. “I need a fighter. Get me in the most spaceworthy one you’ve got.”
“What?” That tore her attention from the wallport. “To stop him or to save him?”
He rounded on her, his bad hand held close to his chest, bent at an unnatural angle that indicated it was missing some significant metal-based infrastructure. “Shitting stars, Triz! You want to have, what, an ethical debate on biomods right this second?”
Arguments died in her throat. This was Kalo she was talking about. What an awful thing, to accuse someone she’d . . . cared about of being a Ceebee. “I’m sorry,” she said, trying to mean it. His shoulders pulled taut. “I don’t—I don’t understand, and I can work on that later, but what I want right this second is to make sure Casne’s safe.”
His stiff posture slackened a little and the hard tendon in his jaw softened. “Getting me in a light attack Swarmer right now gets you a step closer to that.”
“There’s two whaleships at anchor outside! Let their swarms handle it.”
He gestured violently to the port. “They don’t know he’s on the loose with a Ceebee rendezvous on the way, but we do.”
“I think you’re overlooking one shitting detail. What are you going to fly with? Your feet?”
“I’ll figure something out.” He was already stomping toward the row of moribund Skimmers and Arcwings, stepping over the coils of loose tubing and ducking under the tangles of wires that dragged out of open panels. “This one doesn’t look half bad.” He pointed, hand flapping.
Triz threw her arms in the air. “It looks fine because we pulled the entire arc array out of it for refitting. We were stomping all over its guts in Metal Reclamation ten minutes ago. Leave it be.”
A flicker of activity tugged Triz’s eyes back to the wallport. Two figures cut their way across the Arcade, in her view. The one taking cover behind must be Rocan. The Ceebee commander’s eyes weren’t mere holes anymore: even at the distance afforded by the wallport, Triz saw the faint gleam of some kind of misbegotten tech. The translucent outline of exotic-based body armor draped the shoulders of both men like a cloak, only flaring into full light when a lancet burst came close.
The second man . . . looked like Lanniq?
That didn’t make any sense.
Triz frowned at the strange sight and tried to remember what she’d been saying. “The only thing close to ready is the Scooper I told you about. Kalo, I think Rocan is on the move. And . . .” Confusion bit off her words. She’d already seen the damage done by a misplaced accusation. Shitting stars, she’d done a little damage herself just now. But this time, she didn’t think her eyes had lied to her. “And I think he’s got Lanniq with him running cover.”
“Lanniq?” Kalo spun on one heel and almost tripped over a vacuum casing. “No. He hates the Ceebees. His nephew joined them, and Lanniq never heard from him again.”
“See for yourself.” Triz gestured at the port screen so violently she almost missed the flash of movement. Not a barrage of lancet fire. Just one body in Fleet gray that dropped onto Lanniq from the Arcade level above. Triz’s heart beat a ragged double-time.
Casne. Casne, why?
Casne’s legs scissored between Lanniq’s and sent him sprawling. She ripped his antilancet cloak away from him, but a vicious kick knocked her rolling several paces. Triz gasped. When Lanniq ran to meet her head-on, she was on her feet waiting, and he seemed to see her for the first time. Whatever words passed between them were lost in the chaos. Then, a flash of movement behind Casne: Rocan’s palm, turning upward toward her.
A scream of warning died in Triz’s throat.
The tunnelgun hidden inside Rocan’s wrist fired.
Casne took a step forward. Triz couldn’t say which happened first, until the white lines cleared from her vision, and she saw Casne tumbling head over foot toward the new hole in the Arcade perimeter. A hole opening into space.
“No,” Triz heard herself say softly.
That tiny figure was framed in the space of the hole for just a moment, a perfect X. A shimmer at the neck: Casne’s Tactics collar insignia catching a shard of light.
Then the limp doll of a Justice officer’s body slammed into Casne, and they both blinked out of existence. Only a black hole left where Casne had been, with starlight flickering like funeral lights in the void.
“No,” Triz said, “no, no, she can’t, no.” She couldn’t feel her face; her teeth clipped her tongue, and her mouth filled with blood, but it didn’t hurt. It felt like drowning.
She couldn’t look away from the wallport. Lanniq and Rocan strained, their feet held securely against the metal plates of the deck. Mag boots—or Mag feet, perhaps, in Rocan’s case. She couldn’t see Lanniq’s face, but Rocan’s was expressionless, intent only on their destination across the Arcade.
The lift tubes.
They still have reserves hidden out there, Saabe had argued. Maybe somewhere webward of Golros.
The Fleet detected an encrypted tight-beam transmission to the Webward Pearls, Kalo had told her.
And he’d asked her for a fighter . . . oh.
The Ceebees were coming to collect their wayward leader.
So Lanniq and Rocan were heading for the lift to climb down to the wrenchworks. Of course they were, because the wrenchworks was their ticket out of the Hab. Rocan would never be able to swim an umbilicus tube fast enough to make it to a rescue ship before the whaleboats mustered their Light Attack Swarms to intercept. But a fast, small ship could enter via the wrenchworks airlock and be gone again before the whaleships could react.
When Triz blinked, the broken pieces of her rescue fantasy cut the insides of her eyelids. “I’ll get you a ship,” Triz said, and blood ran down her chin. Casne would have known what to do now. Maybe Kalo would too.
But when she looked over her shoulder, he was gone.