25

We had retrieved weapons. The three of us had loaded up everything we could hang off our armor or carry in silence. I had an MP9 hanging from each shoulder, a handgun, and magazines clipped into pinchers up and down my thighs.

Also, after staring at it for a moment, I picked up Boris’s cutting torch. Amira paused in front of a shelf, then pulled out what looked like an RPG launcher. But the tube was solid, and ribbed with high-density battery packs and high-energy cabling that crawled in and out of hundreds of ports, giving it a surprisingly cobbled-together look.

I glanced at the labeling on the shelf she’d taken it off. EPC-I was all it said.

Efua broke the silence as we slowly crawled out over the lunar surface for the ridge that would cover us: the far rim of the Icarus crater. “We’re pinned down,” she informed us, her voice somewhat flat and calm. “There is a raptor outside, and crickets inside. We’re trying to use as little ammunition as we can, but eventually . . . the raptor will come for us.”

“We’re coming,” I said solemnly. “But it’s going to take a while to get past the ridge.” We were moving from shadow to shadow again, easing our way over the pockmarked surface out of the line of sight of the Conglomerate ship.

“And how long do you think ‘a while’ might be?” Efua asked.

“It took five hours to cross last time,” Amira said. “Plus time to get from the ridge to the mines.”

“Five hours,” Efua repeated. “Okay. Okay, six hours. We will see you then.”

She didn’t sound sure of that. She was talking herself into it.

“The ghost isn’t dead,” Amira whispered. “It’s still on the Accordance networks, trying to find me. I have to stay locked down.”

“It could be a different ghost,” Ken said, speaking for the first time in over an hour.

“It could be,” Amira agreed. She didn’t sound sure.

“Trolls,” I said from my spot in the dark. The giant creatures had come around the side of the base, roving back and forth in a crude search pattern.

+  +  +  +

“They’re going to slaughter everyone in Tranquility,” Ken said, two hours later. We crouched in separate craters, waiting for the trolls to turn their backs so we could move. “And then they’ll come for Earth.”

“I know.” I was in the clear. I scrabbled over broken rock to leap out from the shadows in the dark. I landed on the tip of a boulder, then swung behind it just before a troll turned and looked my way.

No dust, I pleaded. It had been a long, risky move.

“It didn’t see you,” Amira said.

I let out a breath.

“Clear to spot for me,” she said a moment later.

I peeked around the boulder and got eyes on both massive aliens.

“What are we going to do?” Ken asked.

“Stay alive,” I said. “Try to get word out. Try to walk out from under this jamming and get Amira to send a message. And you’re good, Amira. Go.”

I saw Amira kangaroo out from boulder to boulder in almost a straight line. The impacts looked brutal, but it kept her from arcing up high over the surface.

Smart. I’d have to try that.

“It’s going to take too long to walk out from under this,” Ken said. “They will move away and attack Tranquility before we have a chance to get within range of something that can hear our suits. We need to take direct action.”

“You’re welcome to pop up and wave at the trolls anytime you want,” I told him. “I don’t want to be toe-paste.”

“There is more than just surviving,” Ken snapped. “The stakes are much higher.”

“Stay alive first,” Amira cautioned. “The longer we do, the more options we can scare up.”

“I just . . . ,” Ken started.

“I know,” Amira said. “Save that. Just hold on to it for later.”

I leaned back against the boulder and looked up over the ridge that we’d been slowly, too slowly, moving closer to.

Something twinkled up into the dark sky between a notch in the rock, then disappeared, blocked from my sight as it was flung into orbit.

“Efua, Devlin here,” I said. “Is the mass driver still launching payloads?”

“Devlin, I hear you, just one moment.” Efua grunted. The sound of something like a slap came through, and tortured metal. Efua panted. “Yes. It just launched. I think the Conglomeration is leaving it alone, so that no one from Tranquility realizes anything is wrong over here.”

No gunshots. Her team had to be attacking crickets by their armored hands to save ammunition.

Dangerous. But they were trapped and running low.

Buying time, I thought. All we were doing was buying time. And the end was the same no matter what. We were not going to live through this. Even if we got word out, or hid and survived, eventually our air would run out.

We needed to go about this in a different direction. We needed to stop running and start thinking.

I looked back up at the notch where the twinkle of the launch came through.

“I think Ken’s right,” I said, before I’d even realized it.

“Shit. You too?” Amira sighed. “What are you thinking now? We storm the base?”

“No. We’re fucked,” I told her. “We’re outnumbered. We’d get cut down the moment we popped our heads up. But maybe we can still hurt them. Hurt them enough to get a signal out. When Zeus flew us in, he said the mass driver could change where it delivered packages.”

“It’s giant artillery,” Amira said. “Right in front of us. You’re right. But there is a raptor and a shitload of crickets crawling around.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy. Or guaranteed. But can you access the systems?”

“That’s not the biggest problem,” Amira said.

What had I missed? “What’s the problem?”

“The moment I get into the Accordance systems on that thing, the ghost will know. It’s sniffing everything around here. I see why the Accordance uses entangled quantum systems for our team comms, and tries to use regular frequencies as little as possible. Trolls aren’t looking, you’re a go.”

“Moving.” I took a deep breath and shot across the surface and up the ridge. I smacked into rocks, some of them tumbling down the base-facing side. “Shit.”

On the other side I rabbited again.

“They’re focused elsewhere, still good. Still good. Ken: Go!”

I found a bolt-hole on the other side of the slope and watched the horizon.

“Can you trick it?” I asked.

“Go,” Ken said.

Amira responded with a grunt. She was moving now. I looked left just in time to see her somersault over the ridge and arc slowly down into the crater. She hit in a plume of dust.

“Get clear of that,” Ken said.

She hopped from rock to rock, away from dirt, trying to avoid leaving tracks from the large divot she’d made. “What do you mean, ‘trick it’?”

“They’re going to know we’re attacking and retaking the mass driver and the mines supplying it,” I said. “So they’re not going to be that surprised if you show up on the network. I don’t know a ton about systems and networks, but can you trick them into thinking you’re trying to break out a signal?”

Amira bounced around some more, then came to a stop. “Maybe,” she said thoughtfully.

“As long as they don’t realize we’re fucking with the mass driver,” I said. “We hit their ship, the jamming goes down, we warn everyone.”

“And then all hell breaks loose.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And a lot of lives might be saved.”

“We are clear,” Ken said, arcing overhead in a long jump away from the rim. “They are circling back the other way. And I think Devlin has the plan.”

“My last one wasn’t so hot,” I said.

Ken hit dirt. “I want to see that seething mass of Conglo­merate shit fall out of the sky and burn. I can’t think of any other way to make that happen, and it’s a better plan than any I’ve come up with. Amira, are you willing?”

“You can’t do this without me,” she said.

“It matters how we choose to die,” Ken said.

“Don’t lecture me about how to die, Ken. I’ve seen people throw themselves at a cause and bleed out in the street. I’ve held arms while basement surgeons try to save a fighter for a cause. When the moment comes, all you have is pain and fear. No one’s marching off into it full of fervor and excitement. They beg for their mothers. They beg for relief.”

“They scream,” Ken agreed softly. “Then they choke, because the air is sucked out of the building. You try to give them air, but some of them wave you away. And then their heads pop, hit by concentrated energy. Hundreds of them. No fervor, Amira. Just survival.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot you were in there when it happened.”

“And so was Boris,” Ken said. “I want to give them back a taste of what they did. Will you help?”

“Well, we’re going to head over there to help Efua out anyway,” Amira said. “We might as well try this.”

“Good.” I stood up and loped along behind them. “Efua, we’re coming!”

“I heard your plan,” she said. “But you need to hurry.”

We picked up the pace as best we could.