We’re flying over a district dotted evenly in stout, squat buildings, a few kilometers beneath which rests the cache Kieran picked up on the orbital scanners. We couldn’t pick up any other ships in orbit or boots on the ground, just like on Panev, but now that we know Verity Co. is in this cluster, we don’t expect to. Even if they were right in front of us, we don’t expect to. Their stealth technology is the best home has to offer and is reserved for their operatives alone. If they’re here, we’ll just have to work around them to get to the cache. It’s a likelihood I’ve psyched myself up for.
The planet below, Nebul, looks very different from Panev. On Panev, we flew into a guarded, central area of an expansive urban zone touched with wide and frequent plots of unpaved nature. Impressive sky-reaching architecture was distinct even from the atmosphere. Here, nature is entirely overlaid with steel and plasticrete. The city below stretches from horizon to horizon, a perfectly manufactured grid of straight lines and evenly spaced properties, most of which stand a single story high. Given the sun’s proximity and the coordinates of the cache, I find myself wondering—and noting, in my suit’s internal computer—if the Stelhari on this planet spent much of their time underground.
Kieran leans over the dash closer to the front-facing window. “Hey, is that—”
“Shit,” I say, because we see them at the same time: the two Verity Co. grunts in their sleek, V-marked uniforms, fussing over the partly broken steel double doors of an impressive-looking building. Impressive-looking because among a sea of single-story, block-shaped structures, it stands three stories tall with a domed roof.
One of the grunts, the guy, looks up at us just as Kieran is trying to veer out of sight. “Shit,” I say again.
“Maybe they didn’t see us.”
“They saw us.” I go to rub my temples but touch my helmet instead. Doesn’t have quite the same effect. “Nothing to do but land.”
“Are you sure?” There’s a slight whine in Kieran’s tone, a high note of worry. Pumpkin echoes him with a yowl of his own, but I think it’s because he’s tired of the straps keeping him in his seat.
“We have to,” I say.
I’m stressed too. I’m worried too. I don’t want to get shot or watch my brother or my cat get shot, but if Verity Co. is already busting down a door... I look at the locked-in coordinates for the cache on the dashboard. It’s underground, pretty much right below us—right below them.
“What are you going to do?” Kieran asks warily, like he thinks I might ask him to ram them with our dinghy. He’s activated the underside thrusters, lowering us onto a patch of flat road not far from the doors Verity Co. is trying to break down. Or, was trying to break down. The grunts are walking our way now.
“We have to make them see reason.”
The landers meet plasticrete, the engine powers down, and Kieran lets Pumpkin out of his seat. I push open the hatch to a pair of guns pointed at us. Even prepared for it, my breath catches. Those weapons are lethal, their wielders soulless, and I’m standing here having to persuade what is essentially stone to be...something nicer and more personable than stone.
“Whoa! Hey!” Kieran puts his hands up. Pumpkin hops down from his strapped prison and rolls along the floor. “Don’t shoot!”
“Best close that hatch and fly back up to space,” the woman says. She’s smirking. “And we won’t.”
“Have you found the cache?” My voice comes out even despite the rib-rattling heartbeat.
“That’s not really your concern right now, is it? Given I’m pointing a gun at you and the only thing that will stop me pulling the trigger is if you close that door and go back to orbit.”
“Shame to die so far from home,” the guy says. His smirk matches hers. Confident and demeaning, like bullies in a schoolyard. That’s basically what Verity Co. is. Bullies in a schoolyard, where the schoolyard’s all the universe.
I hold in a frustrated sigh. “Just hear us out.”
“No,” the woman says.
“Fine. Then shoot me.”
“Scout!” I can practically hear Kieran’s jaw drop, can feel his eyes widen to burn a hole in the back of my head.
Pumpkin pads in from behind me and winds himself through my legs. He sits between my feet and stares up at the Verity grunts like, Yeah, what are you gonna do, shoot me?
The man fires.
I scream; Kieran screams; Pumpkin screams. He retreats from the shot’s small crater ten centimeters from where his little booted paw had touched this world’s pavement.
“Holy shit!” Kieran cries.
“You’d shoot a cat?” I yell. My arms are over my head, as if that would save me from a bullet.
Pumpkin is in the cockpit screaming for us to ascend.
“Of course not. That was a warning,” the definitely supervillain-wannabe growls, but maybe this is where I’ve got them cornered—finally—because his partner looks, for a moment, starkly surprised that he fired at all. “Next one’s through your head.”
“Scout,” Kieran begs. “Let’s just go.”
“Ma-meow!” Pumpkin cries. “Ma-meow!” Ascend! Ascend!
“You two can go,” I say and take a step off the dinghy.
There’s a very real moment where the man’s face goes deadpan, and his gun shifts, and I am certain I’m going to die, but then the woman puts her hand to his weapon and forces it—softly—down. “What a little idiot you are,” she tells me.
“The cache you stole details what happened to this cluster, what might have happened to every dead civilization we’ve ever come across. They knew.”
“Great. Sounds like pay dirt.” But she sniffs, looks left, puts her tongue in her cheek. She cares. Even if it’s just a tiny, infinitesimal amount of empathy, it’s there. I just know it. I’m not good with tech or weapons or heights or goodbyes, but I know people. It’s my job to know them.
I take a breath. “If you take it to Verity Co.—”
“If? If?” She laughs, pretty and cruel. “We’re taking the cache home, kid.”
“Kid? Seriously?” I can’t stop a smirk. Going by looks—though you can’t always tell, especially with Verity Co.—we’re the same age.
“Oh please,” the woman says. She’s all sneers now, no flicker of empathy to be found. “Your asinine daydreamer’s gig with the Archivists says all anyone needs to know about your maturity. We’re taking this and any other cache in this cluster, and we’re bringing them to Verity Co. You’ve lost. Go home.”
I think a moment. “No.”
The man groans. “June, just shoot them.”
The woman, June, I guess, scoffs. She’s squinting her eyes; her lips are just slightly twitching out of reflex. Telepathy. The man is squinting too.
“June,” I say, “I’m Scout. And this is my brother, Kieran, and our cat, Pumpkin.” (Ascend!) “I know it’s your job to shop the cosmos for your masters”—I get a viper’s glare at this—“but both our homes’ safety is in very real danger. We’ve been searching for years for some sign of what destroyed all these civilizations, something beyond the Remnants, and now we’ve found a cache that details a last stand and a working knowledge of—”
June puts her hand up. It’s such a cutting gesture that I stop talking immediately.
“You can scour this planet if you want,” she says, “but the cache is ours. Come any closer to the main building than this and we will shoot.”
Main building. I flick my eyes over their shoulders toward the building with the partially busted doors and the Stelhari Organizer’s emblem above them.
“Hey.” She snaps her fingers to draw my gaze back to her narrowed eyes. “I’m serious. Do you understand?”
“Why can’t—”
“This is professionalism, Scout.” I guess she was listening to what I was saying, at least partly. “We’re not friends. We’re not chums. We’re two organizations after the same prize, and like usual, yours has fallen short.”
“Scout,” Kieran warns, but I can’t keep my mouth shut. I just don’t get it.
“Why even work for those assholes?” is all I can manage. Why can’t they see the value in the thing they’re taking? Why can’t they see what Verity Co. would, or wouldn’t, do with it?
“Because this is the real world.” June holsters her gun. “Make the right call for your brother and your...this is not an appropriate environment for a cat.”
“He likes it,” Kieran mumbles, but Pumpkin has not stopped yowling.
She gives my brother a look like he’s diseased and highly contagious, then shakes her head and retreats back to the building. The Organizer’s office. Her partner trails after her, but unlike her, he keeps his gun out. He looks back at us a few times, seemingly willing and eager to use it. After a little while, when we don’t follow, he touches June’s shoulder. They share a derisive laugh.
I watch them all the way up the steps. June starts examining the doors while the guy plucks six black spheres from his belt and throws them into the air. They float a moment, disperse, and then a sheen of translucence slips over them like a wave, turning them invisible.
Sensor drones. They’d really shoot us if we got close. They really would.
I sit down on the cracked plasticrete.
“Hey.” Kieran sits next to me, and Pumpkin, who has stopped screaming, sits next to him. “You tried.”
“I failed.”
My brother sighs and puts an arm around my shoulders, bopping his helmet to mine once. “It’s Verity Co. Let’s just go.”
I make a frustrated sound in my throat. It wants to turn into a remark that he’s wrong, that we can still get to the cache first, but it fizzles into nothing but a tired huff of air.