First, Azad noticed the exo-suit tank, tucked into the corner of a storage space. She didn’t know what it was, but Severyne’s reaction told her it was something important, and bad: the Letnev stiffened, and then emitted a sort of keening wail. “Where is the medical bay?” she snapped.
Azad, who had the basic schematics for a whole bunch of different ship models filed away in her head, didn’t ask questions; she just led the way. The medical bay was gleaming and sterile – there were automated systems in place to keep it that way, even on a Coalition ship – and Severyne was clearly familiar enough with the basic layout to pull up the information she needed. She consulted a terminal, then went to a wall full of rectangular panels of various sizes and pressed the smallest one.
The panel hissed, then slid open with a gout of icy vapor, a drawer extending into the room. There was a Hylar body on the rack, pseudopods curled up, body shriveled in the cold, various sensors connected to her. Was the ship conducting some sort of diagnostic, perhaps to determine cause of death? There was no obvious sign of injury.
“Shelma is dead.” Severyne’s voice, always icy, was now absolute zero.
“I’m so sorry, Severyne,” Azad said.
“I will be executed for this.”
Azad winced. Sev was probably not wrong. “You don’t know that. There are still ways you can turn this around.”
“What ways?” She spun, fists clenched, and glared at Azad. “My sole mission was to recover Shelma! As long as I brought her back, we could cover up everything else, and life would go on. My director would have hated me, and I would have had to transfer to another posting at some point if I hoped to advance, but my life would have continued. Now I will be on record as overseeing a catastrophic security breach, and failing to redress that breach. I am dead. I am walking, and talking, and dead.”
Azad took a step toward her. “We still have Thales. He’s not in a drawer here, and if he was gone, Duval wouldn’t be rushing around making moves. Your lot tried to recruit Thales, too, so…” She trailed off.
Severyne laughed. “So what? Do we cut him in half? Or do you propose to share custody of the man? A joint project between the Barony and the Federation? We’ll make wormholes and explore the universe together? You were going to betray me and try to take both of the scientists and all their files anyway. Now that there’s only one scientist, you want to share?”
“You were going to betray me, too,” Azad said quietly. “It’s the business. We work together until we don’t. But now I don’t have to betray anybody, and neither do you.” Relief flooded through her. There was a way through this. “Sev, why don’t you come with me?”
The Letnev blinked at her. “What are you talking about?”
“You said it yourself. If you return to the Barony empty-handed, you’re dead. So stay with me instead. Help me complete my mission. Don’t go back.”
“The director will send people to find me. They have ways of tracking down rogue officers.”
“If you defect to the Federation, we can protect you.”
Severyne shuddered. “You want me to join the humans?”
“Is that worse than joining your ancestors?”
“You will have to give me a moment to think about that.”
Azad laughed.
Severyne took a deep breath, then closed the morgue drawer. “I will consider your offer. In the meantime, my personal mission has changed. It is no longer possible to recover Shelma. Instead, my new objective is to destroy Felix Duval. To ruin his life as thoroughly as he has ruined mine.”
“Well, hey,” Azad said. “We’re standing on his ship. That’s a pretty good start–”
“You have made overtures toward me,” Severyne said abruptly. “Were they sincere, or were you merely mocking me?”
Whoa. Having your life destroyed could do a number on anyone’s sense of self and priorities, but that was a pretty abrupt turn, even by catastrophe standards. Unless Severyne had been interested all along, and now that her old life was over, she was willing to loosen up certain strictures…
Oh. Or it could be for another reason. “They were sincere, but I didn’t think you’d take me up on them. Listen, you’re under a lot of strain. I don’t want you to do anything you’ll regret later–”
“Letnev do not allow themselves regrets,” Severyne said. “We only move forward. Let us go.” She turned and stalked back toward Duval’s cabin.
Azad watched Severyne go and ran a complex mental calculation. She had no particular need to kill Severyne now, that was true, which opened up the way for a different kind of relationship… but Severyne had even more incentive to kill Azad. That was the only way she could lay claim to Thales, after all, and halfway redeem herself with her superiors. Azad figured this sudden desire for carnal connection was about thirty percent terror-induced arousal (that was absolutely a real thing, as many eve-of-battle assignations over the years had proven to Azad’s satisfaction). The other seventy percent was an attempt to get Azad to let her guard down – to make her think Severyne had feelings and affection for her, so she wouldn’t see the gunshot to the back of the head coming.
Azad made her decision. Sure, it violated her rule, but transgression made it more exciting in a way, didn’t it?
She was used to people trying to kill her. At least this way, they’d both get some enjoyment out of being alive first.
•••
Afterward, Azad stretched like a cat and turned over in Duval’s bed – the captain’s quarters had the best bunk, which was nice – and looked at Severyne’s face. The Letnev woman had the slightly stunned expression of someone who’d just tried, for the first time, something that would become their new avocation, passion, or addiction. “Nice, huh?” Azad said.
Severyne turned her head, looked at Azad for a moment, then looked back at the ceiling. “I am not inexperienced. At the academy, sometimes… well. The nights in the dormitory were cold, and there were few ways to warm up. But humans do run hotter than Letnev, it seems.”
“Could be that’s just me.”
Severyne’s expression shifted to seriousness. “We should prepare ourselves for Duval’s return.”
“Oh, even if they went to Jol-Nar, committed the theft in five minutes, and came straight back, we’d still have hours.”
“Nevertheless, I desire no further surprises. We need to fully seize control of the ship’s systems.”
“Look at you, going from all pleasure to all business. Fine, I’ll put my pants on.” Azad kissed Severyne’s cheek and rolled out of the bunk. It was still safe, to a high degree of certainty, to turn her back on Severyne; the Letnev still needed her. But once they subdued Duval and had Thales in hand, then Azad would have to get properly vigilant.
That was fine. Vigilant was pretty much her default state.
•••
Severyne sat in the captain’s chair on the bridge while Azad hacked the ship’s systems. “What’s funny is, the intrusion tools I’m using are made by the Mentak Coalition. It’s no good being a pirate captain if you can’t take control of captured vessels, so they’ve got a whole suite of techniques for spoofing authorizations and cracking encryption. But because the Coalition is full of people with rather flexible moral systems, those tools didn’t stay proprietary for long – they got sold on the black market, and Sol got their hands on one, reverse engineered it, made some tweaks so the tools could attack Coalition safeguards too, and here we are. A nearly universal spaceship key. And… there. Welcome, Captain Severyne, to the good ship Temerarious, now yours to command.”
“Wait. You’re giving me the priority authorizations?”
“You’re the one sitting in the big chair. I’m much better at running weapons anyway. The ship is ours. Now we just wait, for word from your people on the garbage scow, or for Duval to stroll through the door.”
So they waited. They ate in the galley, ran diagnostic checks on the weapons, and took turns showering in the captain’s bathroom. Severyne considered showing open affection to further distract Azad and keep her off balance, but was afraid it would be seen as manipulation; better to carry on as she had been.
Sleeping with Azad had been enjoyable, she had to admit, if only to herself. Severyne didn’t have much time for pleasure for pleasure’s sake in her usual life, let alone with someone of a different species, but that sense of the forbidden had ultimately made it exciting instead of disgusting. Maybe I really have misjudged myself my whole life. She thought, briefly, of what would happen if she took Azad up on her offer, but “Come with me” didn’t mean “Travel through the stars committing various interesting crimes and having sex” – not really. It meant “Defect, and sit in a Federation of Sol military interview room for one million hours describing Barony security protocols.” That was not appealing. It was even less appealing than going home a failure and being executed; at least that would be over relatively quickly, and cause her less shame.
Severyne’s comms buzzed with a message from the squad leader on the garbage scow. “We engaged the enemy, assistant director,” he said, and his tone was so stiff she couldn’t tell whether he’d succeeded or failed. “They disabled our ship and escaped.”
“How did they disable your ship?” she demanded. “They were in a long-distance exploration vessel, not a gunship!”
“They utilized a weapon of unknown provenance.”
“What? Did they steal some kind experimental weapon while they were on Jol-Nar too?”
“I lack necessary data to draw a conclusion–”
“Never mind. Can you repair the ship?”
“We are attempting repairs, and expect to have partial function restored to the engines within seventy-two hours, which should allow us to return to the scrapyard. Unless you would prefer to rendezvous with us in the Grim Countenance – if you can bring repair parts, we would not have to fabricate them here, and that would greatly reduce our–”
“You’ll have to make your own way. I’m going to be busy succeeding at the mission where you failed.”
“Yes, assistant director. I will send status updates–”
She cut the connection, squeezing the armrests of the captain’s chair tight. “Duval apparently has some kind of super-weapon now.”
Azad, standing at the tactical board, shook her head. “I bet they just plugged the ship’s shitty little cannons into the power source they stole. That’s what I would have done.”
Severyne blinked. “That would work?”
“Your basic energy cannon is just a conduit for and focuser of power. How strong the cannons are depends on the energy source. That thing they went to steal is supposed to be like a hundred fusion reactors, only so small you can carry it around in a backpack.”
“Then the power source, in itself, has great value,” Severyne mused.
“If you brought that back to the Barony, you might not get executed, it’s true,” Azad said. “Unfortunately, I can’t let you have it, since Thales needs it to power his prototype. Sorry about that. Maybe we can get you the schematics or something, and your people can reverse engineer the thing, if you want to give that a shot.”
“How very generous.”
Azad shrugged but didn’t look up from the panel. “I like you, Severyne. I’ll help you as much as I can without hurting myself. But that’s as far as I can go. Would you respect me if I did anything else?”
“This is a miserable situation,” Severyne said. “I am miserable.”
“Ah, but there’s an upside. Duval is on his way back here. And if your crew played your video like they were supposed to–”
“Of course they did. They follow orders to the letter, without deviation. The Letnev are not as prone to improvisation as humans are.” Though Severyne herself had done some improvising lately, hadn’t she? Azad was corrupting her.
“Then Duval thinks we’re floating in a dead ship in the void,” Azad said. “He’s going to walk in here with supreme and misplaced confidence. Even more than usual.”
“And then I can kill him?” Severyne said.
“And then you can kill him.”
“I feel slightly less miserable now.”
•••
“Aw, hell,” Azad said.
Severyne hurried over to the security station. “What is it?”
“Two people just stepped into the airlock. Only two.” She pulled up the camera feed and saw Thales carrying a rucksack, and the Hacan security officer, Calred, holding a file box. He was awkwardly juggling the box in an attempt to hold it one-handed while unlocking the ship with his fingertip.
“Where is Duval?” Severyne demanded.
“Maybe he had to take a piss.”
“Then where is the Yssaril?”
“Could be lurking invisibly, I guess, though it’s bad etiquette to sneak around on Sagasa’s station, and they’ve got no reason to expect an attack, so she’s probably with Duval. Yssaril have to piss sometimes too.”
“They’ll be on board any moment!”
“They’ll try to get on board any moment. They’ll be unconscious a moment after that. Let’s get down there and collect them.”
Sev grabbed her arm. “We have to wait for Duval.”
“Sev, it’s Thales, and his stuff. What I need is Thales, and his stuff. I’d like to see Duval dead, too, but that part isn’t mission critical.”
She tightened her grip, nails digging in. “It is critical for my mission. My only mission is revenge.”
Your only mission is killing me and taking Thales for yourself, Azad thought. But… Sev really did want to kill Duval, and waiting for him would put off her inevitable betrayal for a while longer. Azad did enjoy having the Letnev woman alive. She calculated risk and came up with an acceptable number. “All right. But only because you’re so cute when you’re homicidal. Let’s secure the owl and the pussycat, and then we’ll wait for the others to show up.”
They went down to the airlock, weapons ready.