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Roland flexed the digits on his slashed hand. Most of the severed muscles and tendons had reattached themselves to the extent that his fingers now moved as commanded, though it would be at least another hour before his grip strength returned to any semblance of normal. This information was neither novel nor interesting, but Roland needed to think about something other than the loss of the memory core and the mottled bruises purpling Lucia’s neck. He was not by nature a hot-headed man, nor was he prone to throwing tantrums like some sort of green kid when things did not go his way. Yet Lucia’s brush with death at the hands of an old foe ignited a primal anger in Roland part of him wanted very badly to indulge.
He stopped looking at his hand and looked down on her. She stood, back straight and eyes bright while directing Privateers and station security no more than ten feet from where she came an inch from dying. The Rejects stood in a wide perimeter, their backs to her. A small crowd of curious onlookers tried to build, drawn by the fight and arrival of so many strange individuals. The mercenaries dispersed each group with gruff professionalism and a surplus of menace. All four appeared happy to have a task that did not involve dealing with Lucia. Despite her outward composure, Lucia radiated restrained tension in palpable waves. The others were staying clear as well. Mindy pored into the shadowed alcoves that lined the concourse. Her ability to see infrared and ultraviolet pierced the obscuring blackness and revealed any lurking enemies. There were none, of course. Both Roland and Mindy knew there would be none even without looking. Manny, too, seemed consumed by a need to do something, anything helpful. His pinched features stretched across his cheekbones so hard it looked like they might peel off his skull at any moment. He peered into his DataPad like a man searching for untold riches with little hope of finding any. In truth, the air around each person merely mirrored Lucia’s taut and electric anxiety. He understood the familiar pressure of frustration, anger, and failure all too well. The oldest and most experienced of them all, Roland had no easy answers for his people. None of them seemed ready to hear that sometimes you lose a round even when you do everything right. He might have tried to explain, but even his limited ability to read a room proved sufficient to prevent a doomed attempt. This was not the time, he decided.
“Did you get him, Manny?” Lucia asked. Roland knew the woman too well to mistake the microscopic tremble in her voice. She would never admit how shaken she was to anyone, but Roland could tell.
“He’s on a codelocked boarding pass with an attached diplomatic token, boss. Best I could do was change his ship assignment.”
“So he got away, then?” The anger in her retort drew a flinch from their scout.
Manny answered, and Roland thanked whatever gods existed that he did not seem to be affected by Lucia’s tone. “Yes, boss. I could not stop him. He’s on the Godspeed and checked in.”
“Pike!” she barked into the team channel. “I need you to shut down gate privileges for the Godspeed right now!”
No one had ever accused Christopher Pike of being a man plagued by empathy, nor did he take orders well. “Just how the fuck do you expect me to do that, lady? They’ve paid their money, cleared customs, and are in compliance with all regulations.”
“There’s an assassin and terrorist on board!”
“There’s an assassin and a terrorist in your crew!” Pike fired back with enough vehemence to make the comm signal crackle. “It’s a damn free trade zone! He’s guilty of stealing something from us that we stole from someone else. You wanna file that report?” He did not wait for an answer. “Frankly, I don’t have the authority to do shit under the circumstances.”
“Lucia,” Roland interjected before she made things any worse. Her head whipped around to fix him with an angry glare. He let it wash over his body without comment, meeting her blazing eyes with a face so calm and cold it seemed to pull heat from the air. “It’s one ship going through one gate. He can’t get away, and he can’t hide. We’ll alert the authorities at the other end of the gate and have them hold him.”
“Hold him?” Lucia threw up her hands. “Hold him? You want some backwater station security team to hold Killam Grimes? Not old-fashioned Grimes, either, by the way.” She pointed to her neck. “He’s all hopped up now, it turns out. How many of them do you think he’ll kill before they give up?”
“Then we will go get him ourselves,” Roland said, working to keep his own voice calm. Lucia was losing control, so he could not afford to. “Look at me!” Roland swore he could hear her heart pounding in her chest. “Breathe. This is not over, and we’re not done. Manny just fucked his escape all to hell. Right now, he’s stuck on a ship with no allies on a one-way trip to—” He looked at Manny.
“Gethsemane,” Manny said.
“He’s going to Gethsemane, Lucy, That’s actually a good thing for us.”
“Why?” Lucia looked to be exerting intense effort in controlling her breathing and facial expressions.
“They hate body modification of any kind there,” Mindy said, oddly quiet and reserved. Roland heard the edge of tension in her voice as well. “His movements will be limited, his access to resources too. It’s not a fun place to be if you’re... different.”
Mindy’s obvious discomfort seemed to flip a switch in Lucia. Her whole body shuddered, and her shoulders sagged. “Oh, Mindy. I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” said Manny. “I didn’t have time to pick a different ship.”
“You can’t warn the gate station over there,” Mindy said. “They can’t handle him all jumped up the way he is. It’ll just get a bunch of people killed.”
“His diplomatic credentials will get him through, either way,” said Manny. “It would be a waste of time to try.”
“You want us to just let him get off the ship?” Lucia’s agitation re-emerged. “We do nothing? Let him slip into the shadows and hide until OmniCorp comes to rescue him?” She folded her arms across her chest and stared at each in turn. “That’s not happening!”
Mindy stood her ground. “It has to. Come on, boss. Let your brain widgets do their thing, here. There’s only so many places he’ll be able to go.” She paused, as if to make sure she was choosing the correct words. “And I know all of them better than he does. He’ll be trying to hide from me on my home planet. I’m an assassin, boss. Let me hunt. I’ll get him.”
Roland detected more than one flaw in Mindy’s reasoning. “You have not been back in fifteen years, Mindy. Aren’t you a wanted criminal there?”
Mindy shook her head. “I was a minor when they found out about me. That meant mandatory re-education and stuff like that. So I left. As an adult?” She shrugged. “All they can do is arrest me if I do anything sinful like kiss a girl or have opinions they don’t like.”
“This place sounds great,” Manny said.
Roland snorted like a bull. “They named it after the place where their messiah questioned his own faith. Right before he was tortured and nailed to a tree, by the way.”
“Fantastic,” said Manny.
“So you want a hunt, huh?” Lucia sounded calmer. Roland tried to spot the telltale signs of her nanomachines exerting control over her brain chemistry but could not decide if she was calming on her own or with the assistance of her cybernetics. The line between the one and the other blurred more each passing day. “Fine. We need to get to Gethsemane,” Lucia said. The strength in her voice reassured Roland, though he could still sense her lingering agitation. “But OmniCorp will be right on our asses. Let’s walk, people.”
Lucia turned and stormed off, leaving her crew to stare at each other in bewilderment. Mindy broke the silence. “Is she all right, Roland?”
“No.” His reply brooked no further discussion.
As one, they turned to follow Lucia’s retreating back. They walked in silence, each grinding teeth against the flood of fears and questions begging to be spoken aloud. Pike met them at the gangplank for Exit Wound. He greeted them with a string of profanity and a frown so deep Roland thought his eyes were going to disappear altogether. Roland chose to head off a shouting match between Lucia and the commandant before it could get going. “Stow it,” he rumbled from deep in his chest. “We do not have time for this. We need to get to Gethsemane fast.”
“Do you give the orders now, Corporal?” Pike snarled.
“Yes,” Roland replied. Something in that syllable touched Pike’s anger. There was no threat, no bullying or macho posturing to be found. The statement wore the weight of finality wrapped in a polite request backed by overwhelming firepower.
Pike blinked. His jaw flexed, and he shook his head like an animal trying to dislodge biting insects. “Fuck it, then. Let’s go.”
“We need to stall OmniCorp,” Lucia said. “We need a head start.”
“Don’t you worry, LT,” Pike said, ushering them toward the boarding hatch. “When Maid of Orleans gates in, they’ll be stuck here for at least two days, maybe three. I’ve made goddamn sure of it.”
“That’s enough time to find him,” Mindy said.
“And bring him down,” Roland added.
They passed into the corvette, and their conversation was interrupted by a stern-looking brunette who greeted them on the reception deck. “Manny!” She blurted as soon as they were all inside. She hurled herself into his chest and wrapped him in a tight hug. He returned the gesture awkwardly, and she released him after several uncomfortable seconds. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, Catrina,” he answered.
“I’m okay too, Cat,” Pike drawled. “If you care, I mean.”
Catrina graced her uncle with a perfunctory smile. “You’re always fine.”
Pike conceded the point with an affable head tilt. “True enough. Get stowed and get cleaned up, troops. We de-brief this day-bacle in ten minutes.” The commandant slapped a control panel on the wall. “Skipper!”
“Go for Fischer,” a voice replied from a speaker.
“We need to be in Gethsemane yesterday, how copy?”
“We’ll push ourselves to the front of the line, Commandant. Standard jump from their gate is nine days this time of their solar cycle. I can do it in four.”
Lucia’s face brightened. “We’ll beat him there!”
Pike nodded. “With time to spare. See you in the conference room in ten minutes, LT.”
Roland followed Lucia to the cabin they shared. Too large for a regular bunk, Roland was forced to bivouac in a storage room. A cot for Lucia had been added, but beyond that the metal cube held nothing but their gear. Inside, Roland let the door slide closed behind him before putting a hand on Lucia’s shoulder. She spun, and for a moment Roland thought she might yell at him. Instead, she threw herself at his chest and sobbed into his shirt. Great heaving gasps racked her body, and she fell against him as if her legs could no longer support her weight. Roland held on to her and lowered them both to the floor so she could sit.
He said nothing. He had no words for this moment and did not think Lucia wanted him to find any. He just held her and let her cry. Her tears soaked his shirt, and Roland was suddenly struck by how odd it was that he could feel them. Guns and knives and bombs bounced off his skin without leaving a mark, but the tears of one woman burned like acid. He decided this was a good thing and let her cry.
When she stopped, he leaned back to look at her. She leaned back to meet his eyes with a small smile. “You okay?” he asked. The stupidity of his question hit him a tenth of a second after the words left his mouth. Too late to save himself, he tried to smile. “Relatively, I mean.”
“Oh, I’m great, Corporal,” she said. “Outstanding, really.”
He tried again. “It’s not an easy thing to get over. What happened with Grimes, I mean.”
“He could have killed me.”
Roland did not trust his voice to respond to that.
Lucia turned and rested her cheek on Roland’s chest. “But he didn’t. He had me cold. I couldn’t stop him...” Her voice caught in her throat. “I was helpless. Totally helpless. I didn’t think that...”
“That you could be helpless?”
“It sounds so stupid, but...” She sniffled and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’ve been so, I don’t know... unbeatable? For a while now. I think I forgot how scary it can be.”
Roland understood this part. “When you are in the moment... In the fight, I mean, it’s easy to forget the stakes. You think about the fighting, the mechanics of the hitting and the shooting, mostly. Sure, there’s fear, right? But also anger and focus and there just isn’t time to ever really think about what losing might mean.”
“Exactly,” Lucia said. “Except it’s worse for me. The things in me... Dad’s machines. They change my brain when I get stressed. They take away all the doubt, all the fear. It’s just action, reaction, plan and execute. All at seven times the speed of a regular person. I can tell which hand a guy is going to punch with because I have time to watch the muscles tense in his neck, Roland. It’s nothing but information and decisions. Automatic.” She shifted to move away, positioning herself on her knees in front of him. “He beat me, Roland. And when he had me by the neck, I knew what the next move was. I saw myself die, and for the first time...”
“You couldn’t stop it.”
Fresh tears filled her eyes. “Exactly. He needed one-quarter of a second to finish the job. And do you know how long a quarter of a second is for me? How long I had to think about that? I had to watch it happen. Can you imagine what that’s like?”
Finally, Roland had something to add. “Yes.”
Lucia blinked. “Really? But you’re so... indestructible.”
“That hasn’t always been the case, Lucy. I’ve seen my death coming before. I don’t talk about this much, but when the Red Hats set off that bomb, it took eighteen seconds for my team to recover me from the surface of Venus. Eighteen seconds at seven hundred degrees and thirteen hundred psi with a ruptured exposure suit that managed to be just good enough to keep me awake and alive for all of it.” He could not remember the last time he had told anyone about that day. He tried to sound strong and failed. “Eighteen seconds is a very long time when your eyeballs are boiling in your skull.”
Lucia stared at him. “You never told me that.”
“It’s not something I like to talk about. Now you know why. And I mean, really know why. You would not have understood before. Now you do. We are in a very elite fraternity, you and me. A brotherhood of people who shouldn’t be alive and know it.”
Lucia hugged her arms tight and shuddered. “How did you ever get over it?”
“I didn’t. It’s not something you get over.”
“You,” Lucia said while shaking her head, “are not helping.”
“Hear me out. You don’t get over it because there’s nothing to get over. You got lucky. I got lucky. We did not die when we were supposed to.” Roland twirled one big black finger in the air. “Yay us. We get to fight another day. It’s not fate, it’s not a sign. It’s just stupid random circumstance.”
“But what about the next time? What happens when you don’t get so lucky?”
“You die, Lucia.” Roland did not like even saying the words out loud. He never lied to Lucia, though, so he forced them out and moved on to what he felt was the more salient point. “Luck is an unreliable ally. It’s up to us to learn from this time so there won’t be a next time. You’ve figured out that not every battle is won or lost on skill. Great. But that doesn’t mean we throw our hands up and stop trying to stack the deck, right?”
“That makes sense, I suppose. But it won’t prevent the nightmares.”
“Nothing does.”
“Christ, you are bad at this. It’s a good thing I love you, because...” She stopped. “You know what? I got nothing.” Some of the sparkle returned to her eyes. “And what lessons do we take from today, then?”
“Well, Grimes got himself heavily augmented. First question is, how heavily?”
Lucia’s brow scrunched into deep furrows. “He’s still slower than me, but not by much. At least as fast as Mindy. Maybe faster. Hard to gauge his strength, but it felt like hitting a bag of wet sand. Plenty of MyoFiber and OsteoPlast under the skin.”
“How’d he beat you?”
Lucia thought about that for a moment. “He didn’t try to stop me from doing anything. He knew I was too fast, but he also knew I couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt him. So he ignored defense and focused on hitting me while I was attacking. Shit! That was stupid of me.”
“What was?”
“I fought him like I did the last time. Even after I realized he was augmented. I beat him so easily before. I just assumed...”
Roland smirked. “So your mistake was?”
“I did not respect him. His training and skills, I mean.”
Roland nodded. “Exactly. He was a Balisong, Lucy. These are some of the best-trained operatives in the galaxy. It can be a hard pill to swallow, but he’s better than you are. At a minimum, he’s now stronger than you too.”
“Are you saying I can’t take him?”
“I’m asking you why you would even try. Life is not a fair fight, Lucy. When I had to fight Haraldson in his giant AutoCat, how did I win?”
“You cheated. Manny sabotaged his cooling system.”
“Exactly. We’re here to do a job and get home alive. Not submit to stupid dick-waving contests. Only idiots and psychos go for those.”
Lucia’s smile was pure and bright with no trace of her earlier upset. Some piece of information must have fallen into place when he was not looking. “And Grimes is certainly no idiot,” she said with a wink.