Remnants. Remnants Remnants Remnants.
I hit one of the dilapidated dashboards at the edge of the room and, on pure reaction alone, manage to scoop Pumpkin out of the air before he does the same. Thank whoever for those booties, because he’s flailing around like a drowning person for air. My butt hits the floor after the dashboard cracks, and it’s definitely something I’m going to feel later, but right now all of me is electrified with the energy to run, move, scream!
“Kieran!” I call, but the dust clears around the central platform, and that is definitely not Kieran.
A woman hangs from a cord, dropping fast from the shadowed ceiling like a puppet toward the cache. Sleek black uniform, state-of-the-art weaponry at her all obsidian-and-neon belt—and that stupid royal-purple V on the left side of the chest.
Verity Co.
“Hey!” I come to an embarrassingly shaky stand and settle into the dizziness. Pumpkin stands beside me in his ready-to-pounce position and hisses. Good boy.
The woman lands—steel-bottomed boots on steel platform—with a crisp click. She ducks beneath the storage core, disappearing into the whirr of extraction tools. I disengage my pistol and run forward, and yep, there’s the back pain. But I push through, bounding up and over the platform’s gut-high railing in a leap. I land right on top of Kieran and trip.
“Ow,” he says plainly as my helmet bounces off the floor. It would take a lot more force than that to crack the thing, but my head rolls around inside like a bowling ball in a sealed trash can. All I can say is I’ve done my best, and I need a minute.
The grinding sound of extraction stops. There’s a hiss of steam, and the Verity grunt rises above the storage unit with a beaming expression and the cylindrical data cache in a slender hand. “Thanks for disengaging the primary locking interfaces,” she says, looking down at us. “We were having a tough time of it.”
“I told you there was someone here,” I mumble.
“Scout, really?” Kieran rolls me off of him, dejected. “United front, sib.”
I look up at the high-pitched whine of a nanobeam pistol. The lady is pointing it right at my brother. One shot and bam—full of violent nanobots that’ll eat him from the inside out. I’m mad as shit at him, but I do not want him to die.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he and I say, almost at the exact same time and pitch. He raises his arms. I sit up and do the same. “Please don’t kill us,” Kieran says, and the woman laughs.
“Don’t give me a reason to,” she says sweetly, but sweet like...sour candy that is way too sour. Or chocolate laced with poison. With one hand she fastens the big-as-her-head cache to the carrier strap on her chest. There’s a pause, but her lips twitch slightly, and I bet she’s communicating telepathically with whoever else from Verity Co. is around.
She’s still silently mumbling when a rocket darts off the railing. Only, it’s not a rocket. It’s Pumpkin. He fires true and lands with his back feet on the woman’s collar, then bats her helmet with his front ones, his suited tummy right in her face. Just: bat bat bat bat bat, like a pro boxer’s flurry of hooks. Unfortunately, he’s wearing those booties, so aside from the pleasing dull smack every time he lands a blow, it doesn’t do much. She does scream, though.
In a quick, graceful motion that betrays her mercenary training, she puts the pistol to her belt and scoops Pumpkin up by his armpits, hoisting him away. “Is this a fucking cat?”
“Um,” Kieran says. Pumpkin’s still swiping.
“Who the fuck brings a cat to space? I thought it was a dog!”
I should go for the cache. She’s distracted, and it’s right there, but I move a centimeter, halting at the back pain, and there’s the zipping slide of another descender from above. A man slips down and lands beside the lady. Where she’s slender and shapely and all that stuff the vids back home say a woman should be, he’s bulky and broad-shouldered and strong-jawed, so...everything the vids back home say a man should be. He’s wearing a matching matte-black uniform, Kevlar armor on the chest and shoulders, with that purple V, but he’s packing what looks like a freaking mounted machine gun on his back. It’s nearly bigger than he is. Verity Co. always comes packing, but this is ridiculous.
He pushes a button on the descender he’s holding, and the cord falls from above, zipping into the device like a snake into a hole. “Told you it was a cat.” His voice is like pure evil. A concrete grinder with demon horns. He probably laughs like the deathbots in those movies Kieran and I like. But he pokes Pumpkin’s belly with a finger, and I swear, he smiles.
“Ridiculous.” His partner shakes her head at Pumpkin. She sets him on the floor quite gently—to my grateful surprise—and he thanks her by going for her ankles. She ignores him. “Well, whatever. Ready?”
“Wait!” I blurt. “Please. Did you hear what the Organizer President—what Blyreena—was saying?”
“You mean the dead alien?”
“They said they knew what was destroying all the civilizations in the universe,” I say quickly, because it’s clear her attention is already spent. “They said they were going to enact a last stand.”
The woman brings up a holographic display from a wristcomp and swipes through an indecipherable sequence. “Didn’t really work out for them, did it?” she mumbles.
“Even so, do you know what that means? What that could mean?”
“Means a big paycheck,” the guy says. Practically the Verity Co. mantra.
I bend my knee to stand, and his tree trunk of a gun autolocks on me. I can’t decide if being eaten from the inside out or shredded from the outside in is worse. “Don’t,” he growls.
“Please,” I say. I cannot believe this is happening, that they would overlook the implications behind what we’ve just found. The natives of this planet knew what was coming for them. They had a plan to stand against it, a plan that could become ours.
“Come on, guys,” Kieran says.
Something beeps on the Verity grunts’ suits. The holographic interface sucks back into the woman’s wristcomp. “Ta,” she says with a smile, and she and her partner and everything on them—including the cache—turn to light and phase away. Just, blink out of existence from here to somewhere else.
“Shit,” I say. “We gotta go.” I creak to a stand. “We can still catch them.”
Kieran follows after me, Pumpkin at his heels. I’m building from a wavering walk into a jog. I need it to be a sprint, but I’m still dizzy from Verity Co.’s concussive grenade.
“They’re gone,” Kieran huffs. “Scout, they’re gone.”
“Teleportation can get them to orbit?”
“Well. No—”
“Then they’re here. They must have gone back to a dinghy somewhere.”
Pumpkin whines, and Kieran’s silence is, as usual, his disagreement. I love them both, but after what we’ve found, we have to catch up with Verity Co. We just have to run back to our dinghy, break orbit, and restart our ship...all before they’re able to jump to wherever they’re going next. I know the odds are implausible. I know. But we have to try.