The pain is sharp, like needles pricking the flesh of my thigh. I push Ocho down firmly, forcing my cat-thing familiar to lie in my lap and stop kneading me. I scratch behind her ear and within seconds she’s purring.
“Alright, Pale; let’s try that again.”
The boy nods, somber look on his face like this might be life or death. Maybe one day it will be, but right now it’s just me throwing chunks of plastic at him.
I take a cube of plastic for the fabricator and toss it fast at Pale’s belly. He sweeps his arm and forms a psychic barrier, knocking the block into the wall.
“Good,” I say.
I’m cross-legged on the floor with Ocho; Pale stands at the far end of the room. The scars that wreath his skull have started to fade—the white lines barely visible against his white skin. I keep his head shaved, because if he can get a grip on the hairs he pulls them out. I guess it’s a stress response, and I can’t really blame the kid for being messed up after four years sealed in a metal box. MEPHISTO couldn’t trust the psychic boys with autonomy, so they kept them catatonic and ran a surge of current through them to produce psychic blasts on command.
He’s looking better than he did when I pulled him out of that weapon platform, but he’s still too skinny, his power still lacking in nuance.
I throw another cube, faster and a bit higher, and he knocks it to the other side of the room with a grunt, moving his left hand this time to direct his power.
I’m trying to teach him some of the things the MEPHISTO doctors drilled into me when I was a child: controlling psychic intent through physical movement and vocalization, and using your abilities for defense as well as attack. I’m leaving out the bits where they isolated us from friends and family, starved us and experimented on us, the hypnotic commands, the mind games . . .
“Here’s an easy one,” I say, but pelt the plastic at his face as hard as I can.
Pale flinches, squeals, and instead of forming a barrier he reverts to the kid in the box, responding to stimulus with violence. His attack sends the cube rocketing over my head, but I ignore it and neutralize the blast itself, catching it and crushing it down to a vibration in the bones of my hand. He’s already put a couple of dents in the walls of the Mouse—don’t need him adding any more. The cube bounces off the wall behind me and hits the ground with a loud clatter. The noise scares Ocho out of my lap, and she leaves fresh punctures in my skin.
“Fuck,” I whisper, and Pale starts crying. “No, not you,” I say, then I stand and go over to the boy, resting a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”
He throws his arms around my waist and I pat him on the head while he sniffles.
“Mars?” Waren’s artificial voice comes from the speakers hidden somewhere overhead. Technically the Mouse is his ship, but the AI acts like I’m in charge, even though—or maybe because—I let him go untethered.
“Yes, Waren?”
“Squid would like to see you aboard the Nova.”
“Tell them I’ll be right over.” I make a kiss sound and Ocho runs up my body and deposits herself on my shoulder. “You want to come with me?” I ask Pale.
“Okay,” he whispers. He releases my waist, wipes his nose on the sleeve of his shirt, and clasps onto my hand, smiling.
He’s a sweet kid, but it’s still weird having someone that looks up to me, that wants to be around me. Then again, we are cut from the same cloth, and we’ve got the matching skull scars to prove it.
I walk to the air lock with my two charges and open both doors, revealing the largely empty cargo hold of the Nova.
The Nova is a crusher and tug, the sole ship in Squid’s scavenging business; though they haven’t really had much time to scavenge since I came along. Sorry, Squid.
“Einri?” I say loudly, my voice echoing in the massive space. “Where can I find Squid?”
“Captain Squid is in the cockpit,” the Nova’s AI says, its voice flat, sans voice modulation.
“Thanks.”
We make our way through the few scavenged ships and hunks of scrap in the hold, and pass by the living quarters. Winding in and out of the corridors, we reach the mess hall where Trix is tinkering with her exoskeleton, its parts laid out on the dining table.
“Hey, Trix,” I say.
She looks at me, then diverts her glance to Pale. “Hi, little man.”
He waves with his free hand, and Trix gets back to work. Since we lost Mookie, she’s let her crew-cut grow out, and the dark circles beneath her eyes tell me she’s barely been sleeping. Her exoskeleton and weapons, though? They’ve never been so well maintained.
Mookie went AWOL from the imperial military when he met Trix, and that came back to bite him in the ass—thanks to me. After they caught Squid’s crew to try and bait me, MEPHISTO sent Mookie away to be court-martialed. Trix has hardly spoken to me since. I don’t blame her.
When Pale and I reach the cockpit, Squid is leaning against the viewscreen, wearing a charcoal suit jacket with sharp shoulders and a fine lapel, and loose-fitting pants long enough to pool at their bare feet. Ocho jumps down from my shoulder and trots over to Squid; they turn away from the viewscreen and crouch down to pat Ocho. “How are you, Mars?” they ask.
Guilty? Pissed off? Anxious? I don’t know, but I’ll feel better when we have Mookie back. “Good,” is all I say, saving Squid the hassle of hearing my uncertainties. “Just been training this guy.”
“I didn’t interrupt, did I?” they ask.
I pick Pale up with a groan and drop him into the pilot’s seat. “Nah, we were finished.”
“How is it going?” Squid asks, aiming the question at Pale, but he only shrugs in response.
“Slowly,” I say. “What did you want to see me for?”
“We’re almost there,” Squid says; “come have a look.” They stand and face the viewscreen, pressing their long fingers against the glass. “There,” they say, magnifying a square of the void beyond.
Lekaplica stands out against the darkness, jagged edges jutting out at random.
“How have I not heard of this place before now?” Squid asks.
Two cruisers form the main structure of Lekaplica, fused together top-to-top so they mirror each other. A carrier and countless frigates are attached outboard, like mushrooms sprouting from shit. All told, it has almost as much living space as Aylett Station, but the makeshift structure is notoriously hard to navigate.
“Does that place look like it was put together by professional scavengers?”
Squid chuckles and a flush of pale blue glides across their cheeks. “No, I guess not.”
The station is in orbit around a neutron star—the only object of note left in the system after the sun went supernova millions of years back. As far as I know, the system doesn’t even have a name. The stackheads chose it because it’s an underutilized node in the Trystero network, leaving plenty of spare bandwidth for them to fill with their endless streams of data.
“Transmission incoming,” Einri says.
“Patch it through.”
“Nova crew: please state your name, and your business at Lekaplica.” They sound like an AI without a voice mod, but more likely it’s a person who wishes they were a machine.
“Lekaplica, this is Mariam Xi.” I let that hang in the air for a few seconds. If anyone besides MEPHISTO knows what I did to Briggs’s fleet, it’s these intel-hunting, data-hoarding weirdos. “I’m here to see a friend: Miguel Guano.”
* * *
I walk into Modem, the main bar in Lekaplica’s transit hub. The place is packed wall-to-wall with stackheads—singularity zealots with skulls packed full of augmentations, storing everything they see and hear in the hope of one day digitizing their full consciousness. There’s a constant din of chatter: half conversation, half “internal” monologue spoken out loud.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve had nightmares that started out like this,” I say to no one in particular. Ocho must agree, because she makes a low mraow and slips off my shoulder to hide in the hood of my cloak.
“Miguel!” I yell it loud and for a split second the bar goes quiet, my voice imprinted into the endless storage of every patron.
I see movement at the bar—Miguel waving—and push forward.
“Hey,” I say, as I sidle up beside him.
“Hey, Mars. Good to see you still in one piece,” he says. Then in his “inside” voice, “Did she really destroy a whole fleet single-handed? Shit is crazy.”
“Yes, Miguel, I really did. And since you’ve brought me all the way out to the ass-end of nowhere, the least you could do is talk to me, not about me.”
“Eh, sorry, chica.”
“Why aren’t you at Aylett, anyway?”
Miguel shrugs. “Didn’t want to risk showing my face there after I helped you out. Besides, it’s good to be around other stackheads, y’know?”
“I really don’t,” I say deadpan. “You got what I need? You found out where they’re keeping Mookie?”
He doesn’t so much shake his head as tip it from side to side.
“Then why am I here, Miguel?”
“Listen; it ain’t that easy—we’re talking military records, imperial data encryption. But I got you the next best thing.”
He grins, and I can tell he’s going to make me ask, so I do. “What?”
“The location of MEPHISTO’s Data Storage Facility. All their records; not just prisoner transfer, but everything they’ve got about you, about the program, about the other women like you.”
It takes me a second to process that.
“Fuck.” The word falls from my lips, and Miguel’s grin stretches even further. “How much?” I ask.
“This could be the haul of the decade. Top secret data delivered to me by a void-damned space witch. How about this: no charge for the intel, but whatever data you can scrape off their servers you forward on to me?”
“Deal,” I say, because really, it’s too easy to agree now and change my mind later; it’s not like I’m speaking my thoughts out loud.
He slips a shard across the bar, spreading a ring of condensation over the black glass counter. “Everything you need—just promise me you’ll be careful.”
“Shit, Miguel, you’re worried about me, and you haven’t made even one sleazy pass at me: what happened to you?”
“That was only ever in jest, Mariam; I apologize,” he says. Then, “Truth is, I’m scared shitless now.”
I smile at that, slap Miguel on the shoulder, and make my way out of the bar, pushing through the muttering din.