Arjay watched the two smaller women stalk into the commissary before he let out a curse. “She’s the one alone in the deeps for who knows how long, and yet we sound like the ignorant creeps.”
Jashanna shrugged. “The truth hurts. And we’re as likely to end up dead as her mothers before all this is over.”
Gavyn raised one eyebrow at her. “You joined us quick enough when we told you about the rebellion.”
She snorted. “What other choice did we have? Just because we might die is no reason not to try.”
“But it’s not the preferred outcome,” Gavyn said wryly. He returned his attention to Arjay. “I see what you mean about bringing the girl over to our side.” He shook his head. “But she’s barely more than a child, and I wanted to keep them far, far away from this ugly business.”
Jashanna shook a finger at them. “She’s clearly an adult. Don’t think less of her just because she’s small.”
“Technically of age, maybe,” Arjay said. “And should be a ghost, if the date on her expired nanites is correct. But depending on what age she went into cryo, and how long she’s been isolated and exposed to crude Q, she might or might not be able to claim legal inheritorship of Ydro-Down.”
“Now we want to do this the legal way?” Jashanna’s eye roll was hard enough to set off a seismometer.
“Possession might be colloquially nine-tenths of the law,” Arjay said, “but for the last tenth, it’d be nice to have actual law on our side.”
“I’m sure QueCorp will be very impressed,” Jashanna drawled. “I yield my portion of the day’s calories to the little scrapnapper. Since you’re setting her up as a martyr to transgalactic justice.” She swiveled on her heel and strode off, her big boots thundering with the force of her ire.
Gavyn tilted his head in her direction. “She has a point. We of all people know that QueCorp doesn’t abide by law or compassion. We might not know the specifics of how they took Ydro-Down in the beginning, but we have the scars to show how they held it.” His icy gaze turned even harder. “And we know they’ll do worse to regain it.”
“Armed insurrection was only ever the first step,” Arjay argued. “We knew that. Even when we thought we’d perish in the attempt, we hoped there’d be a time after. It wasn’t enough to win—we have to keep holding on. We need business contacts. We need products to market to the Rim. We need to think bigger.”
Gavyn gazed at him. “I know you weren’t a criminal. And I know you are more cunning than anyone on this planetoid… Except maybe Ahmya.” A small, secret smile curved his lips for a moment, before his reflective irises sent something back to Arjay that he wasn’t sure he wanted to see. “But I think you still believe in something long gone. I only want to make Ydro-Down a fair home for these people, where their work and their lives have value and meaning. But you think Ydro-Down could be a power.”
“It is a power,” Arjay said, a note of frustration sharpening his voice. “There aren’t so many sources of qubition left in the Salty Way that anyone will fail to acknowledge what we have. If we can prove it’s ours—by force, yes, but also by law.”
Gavyn scraped one hand over his head, knocking his protective lenses into place over his eyes. “You would’ve made a very impressive barrister before the Obsidian Wars, arguing over every detail of transgalactic law.” Arjay felt the weight of his friend’s stare even through the bronzed glass between them. “I don’t see how we can re-create any of that here on a dead moon. But I’ve trusted you this far. Take the heir-apparent and see what you find.”
When his friend gripped his shoulder, Arjay nodded, but something colder clenched his spine. Before the Oblivion Wars, the people who’d multiplied through the Salty Way had been so brave, so confident their procedures and traditions would last until the heat death of the universe. Instead, their lives had gone up in a flare of quintessence energy that hollowed the galactic core and left the spiral arms spinning into the void. There was nothing to bring back.
Maybe he hadn’t been a criminal before, but he was one now.
There was no coming back for him either.
In the commissary, Ahmya and Tick were seated next to each other facing the doorway. For a second, he amused himself with picturing the two suspicious females silently jostling for the guarded position. Then his amusement faded.
They’d both earned that defensiveness: the former Order operative distrusting because of what she knew and the orphaned heir distrusting because of what she didn’t know.
And they were both shoveling through the nutrient sludge like it was their last meal.
He didn’t want to delve too deeply into that possibility either. He filled a bowl of the slurry for himself and took the seat opposite them. Tick was focused on the food, but Ahmya met his gaze, her amber eyes half-lidded.
She’d helped the miners take Ydro-Down from QueCorp, but she’d been sent to kill them. He had trouble reconciling those mutually exclusive directives even if his friend seemed to have zero qualms about the danger she represented, as an assassin and a distraction.
Her thin smile seemed to acknowledge how he felt—which didn’t exactly lessen his reservations—as she nudged a shaker of vita-pellets toward him. “Take your vitamins,” she murmured. “Must keep up your strength.”
Tick shot him a glare as direct as Ahmya’s but lacking all the subtlety. “No vita-bits in the deeps,” she told him in a snarky tone. “Maybe that’s why I’m wormy.”
He restrained a sigh. “Well, I guess I’ll see when you take me down there.”
Ahmya addressed the little gremlin at her side. “You will bring him back, yes?” While Arjay sputtered, she continued with great seriousness, “I realize he can be insufferable, but we value him.”
Tick narrowed her purple eyes. “How valuable?”
“Hey,” Arjay said, though they ignored him.
“If you bring him back essentially intact I will give you a thermal ambient recharger. It’s not fast, but it’s reliable anywhere there is a temperature change.”
Arjay scowled at the former assassin. Well, not so former considering the way she was butchering his self-esteem.
Tick pursed her lips. “And three of the food bars.” She tapped her utensil against the empty bowl. “Not this slurry, but the solid bars that last forever.”
Arjay grumbled to himself while Ahmya nodded thoughtfully. “Oh, he is definitely worth the solid bars instead of the sludge.” She slanted a slight glance at him.
He gave them both a flat stare. “If you’re done haggling over me?”
“Definitely.” Tick pushed to her feet, then paused. “Do we need to agree on what intact means?”
Ahmya smiled. “I trust you.”
Arjay managed not to snort. He didn’t even think the Order’s operative was lying, and she didn’t trust anybody except Gavyn. Well, the feeling was mutual.
Instead, he was putting his life in the hands—the very small hands—of a cryo-stunted, Q-addled gremlin. His life had veered wildly off course a long time ago, but this new path had to be one of the worst jaunts he’d ever considered.
When Ahmya took their bowls with a murmured farewell, Tick gestured at him impatiently. “Are you feeling strong enough?”
He didn’t reply to the insult. “I left my pack at the shaft where you carved the arrows for me. I assume it will take us back to your lair.”
She shrugged, a cagey expression on her impish face. “Not a straight path.”
He headed out to the tunnels at her side. “You led me through a maze while I was suffering a concussion?”
“You lived,” she said with a toss of her head.
He had. Sometimes he couldn’t believe all the things he’d lived through. And he wondered why. Just to dive into the deeps with this ghost of old atrocities, a victim no one had sought of a crime even she didn’t remember? Even if he could establish her existing claim to Ydro-Down, QueCorp wouldn’t be inclined to honor it, nor would the other corporations and pirates lurking just beyond the unstable radiation zone of the precious mineral. The moment any one of those entities ran their numbers and determined that the rewards—which were substantial—outweighed the risks, they would swoop in, pulse weapons blazing. The best the rebellious minors could hope for was enslavement again, but more than likely they’d be removed, fatally, from the only home most of them had known.
He’d always known he would never see his homeworld, or his work, or his family again. And if there’d been a single moment, no more than a nanosecond, where he’d imagined that maybe he might reclaim what he’d lost… No, all the Q exposure in the Salty Way wasn’t enough to delude him.
His brooding silence brought them to the shaft access where he’d emerged from his encounter with her, and he lifted his pack. From one of the pockets, he extracted the anti-sensor gadget and lobbed it to her. “I’m trusting you not to leave me behind.”
She snatched the device out of the air. “Don’t need this to do that.” The little box disappeared somewhere on her person, and she redirected her focus to his pack with an expression wavering between avarice and doubt. “Air filter? Water and food? Cave-in kit?”
“I’ve been mining on Ydro-Down longer than you’ve been conscious, I suspect. And as you so kindly pointed out, I lived.”
“The deeps don’t care.” She pivoted on her heel and vanished into the dark.
Since that left him scowling at nothing, he jammed a hard hat on his head, flicked on a lume-stick, and followed her.
He couldn’t be sure because she moved too quickly for him to cast around for the etched arrows she’d left last time, but he thought she did not take him the same route exactly. Not that it seemed any straighter. The maze of official tunnels, unmarked spurs, and natural fractures was exactly why he’d sent the crawler on its mapping run. Poor abducted bot. While the miners could 3D print much of what they needed, there were some items that were too complicated to manufacture themselves or required specialized components they hadn’t been able to stock before the rebellion. And they still didn’t have enough food production to be self-sustaining. They needed to establish their viability as a business soon, or they’d have to sell out or risk starvation. He wanted the bot back, but even more than that, he wanted answers whether she might be the key to claiming Ydro-Down.
“Just so you know, I am very lost. So if you’d like to just get on with this...”
“There are no direct routes.”
Yeah, he’d learned that the hard way even before he’d been thrown down in the mines.
Though he’d been down in the tunnels alone before, like when he’d been checking on the crawler, for some reason the darkness seemed closer this time. Maybe because Tick was ahead of him, her slender body blocking his view.
From behind, he studied her. She’d left off the ill-fitting coat she’d obviously stolen at some point, revealing the lean musculature of her arms. The bulky hip pack she’d arrived with emphasized the width of her backside and the curves of her waist. He’d been thinking of her as a child because of her stilted language, but she was a woman—
His hard hat struck a low spot in the ceiling that would’ve dented his skull. He ducked—so much for reflexes—and cursed under his breath as a low jut of rock dented his shin. A step later, his boot descended an unexpected hollow, and the wall was jagged under his palm when he caught himself. Somewhere along the way, they’d crossed from excavated tunnels to a natural tectonic crack, and he hadn’t noticed.
Probably because he’d been looking at her ass.
Tick glanced over her shoulder at him. Since she hadn’t illuminated her own stick, her body was an inverse silhouette against the black. “Turn off your light.”
“So I can bash my head for you?” He snorted. “Thanks anyway.”
She huffed out a breath. “The moving light makes it hard to judge distance. Use the ambient light and you’ll be fine.”
Since when did the gremlin know the word ambient? In a strange way, she reminded him of how he used to program a search algorithm in his old life, watching it slowly becoming more complex as it gathered and parsed information. He’d never been in cryo, and even at the lowest point in his childhood, he’d always had people around him. And his exposure to Q had been mitigated by his time out of the deeps. He couldn’t imagine what she’d gone through to come this far.
So maybe he should listen to her about the light. With one last muttered curse, he extinguished his stick.
For more heartbeats than he cared to count—his pulse was going much too fast anyway—darkness ruled. “Tick…”
“Wait.” In the absolute black, her whisper seemed unbearably intimate.
A shudder traced down his spine. He hadn’t been intimate with anyone since his spouses. He’d had sex, sometimes willingly, sometimes less so, whatever was needed to stay alive. But she was the first one to be so close in the dark since they’d won their precarious freedom. And for the first time since his last days on AlpesPrimus, when the electronic bonds had gone around his neck and limbs, he allowed himself to think about whether he’d ever again be able to accept a touch without ulterior motive.
His breath hitched painfully in his chest, and Tick’s soft voice again reached through the dark. “You see it? So pretty.”
And then he did see it—a pale smolder like opalescent embers embedded in the stone. Nowhere near as bright as the lume-sticks, of course, but somehow more soothing. Maybe, as she said, because the illumination stayed in place instead of casting eerie, moving shadows as they went. Almost as if, in this one place at least, the long-dead gods had deigned to share a glimpse through the darkness instead of leaving their wayward mortal offspring to bumble on their own.
“I’ve seen cave glow before, but never so bright.”
“It’s shy,” she told him. “If you bring the false lights, it hides.”
He shook his head. The bioluminescence was mineral and bacterial, nothing with the sentience she insinuated. But he wasn’t going to argue with her for no reason.
“How much farther?”
“A ways.”
He grimaced at her curvy backside as she strode on. He’d argue with her about this, but he doubted it would do any good.
And it was easier to walk without the bobbing artificial light obscuring the path.
“I didn’t realize there was such an extensive tunnel system when the first colonists came to Ydro-Down,” he mused.
To his surprise, Tick answered. “There wasn’t. My mothers and the others knew there was platinum, rhodium, and palladium mining here, but most was intended to be open pit harvesting, just to pay for terraforming. There was enough geothermal energy to make that possible, even if it would take generations. But then they found qubition.” She hunched her shoulders in a way that made Arjay think she was ducking some obstacle in the cleft. But there was nothing there, just a barrier in her own mind.
“You remember all that?” he asked carefully. Depending on the reliability of her memories, some of what she said might be admissible in court. “They must’ve been very excited to discover the opportunity.”
“No. They knew it would bring trouble. They talked about whether they could sublicense the rights to a corporation.”
Ambient light, sublicensing, the way she’d casually rattled off the list of valuable minerals—the little ghost was definitely waking up. She’d just needed to clear the Q fog from her system. “Was QueCorp the first to make an offer?”
“I don’t think so. There were discussion about best deals, but I can’t remember all the names. The only reason I remember QueCorp is because my mothers were so afraid.”
“QueCorp has always been known for its ruthless business practices, but most of the Rim looks the other way when it comes to how bad they really are. People need Q more than they care about miners.”
“Or anyone else.” She ducked again, but this time she was squeezing past a tight spot. Her boots balanced lightly on the narrow ledge, and to her left…
A drop off into nothingness. Not even the nebulous luminescence brightened the abyssal dark.
He balked. They’d long ago left the official tunnels or even the test digs, which had been reinforced with 3D printed crossbeams. “This rock isn’t stable,” he told her, eyeing the sheared fault lines, any of which might give way again and send them plummeting into the black. “We shouldn’t go this way.”
“This is the only way.” She stopped and turned to face him, making his stomach clench with her nonchalant disregard for the danger right next to her. “It cracked once, but it will stay. For now.” She patted the rock gently before glancing back at him. “And we’re almost there.”
She squeezed past the fallen slab.
If he fell…
Well, that would end some of his problems anyway.
Gritting his teeth, he edged along the outcropping, his back to the void. The distance was only a few steps but it seemed much, much farther. When the rock walls closed around him again, it was almost comforting this time.
He swallowed hard and rested his forehead against the stone. With his nose just centimeters from the wall, the hazy cave glow glinted on strangely regular marks in the rock, not unlike the arrows she’d left for him.
Lifting his head, he flicked on the lume-stick at its lowest intensity. The light almost blinded him, and he hastily extinguished it. But what he’d seen burned in his blinded vision.
Dig marks. Not the big bites of a whomper or even the more delicate scrapings of the hand tools used by the miners as they approached a fragile and unstable qubition vein.
No, he’d seen these markings before. On the wrong side of fatal cave-ins.
The evidence squeezed the last little bit of air out of him that he needed to slip through the tight confines and follow her through the tight slot. The way opened again on the other side, not much but enough. Though she’d gotten ahead of him, his eyes were readjusting again, more quickly than before. And the opalescent glow calmed his racing heartbeat.
Finally, the constricted slot opened up into a natural cavern, and the abrupt return of space made his head spin with vertigo. His racing heartbeat seemed to echo in the space with a sound like skittering claws…
The crawler emerged from the shadows and circled once around Tick. She put her hand on its shell.
“My bot,” he said.
For the first time, she didn’t contradict him. “This is where I woke.” She flicked on her hard hat light and propped it in a crack to beam across the space.
In the harsher glow, he saw it all.
Her protective mothers had put her down in this natural cave to keep her out of their fight with QueCorp. Maybe they’d still had hope of staving off the avaricious corporation, or maybe they realized they would lose in the worst possible way—but gambled on her survival in cry. But she’d awakened in this darkness, alone, the way out blocked by the rockslide behind them. Somehow, she’d dug and chipped her way out with whatever she’d been left. Only to emerge from the dark into true nothingness, alone.
He glanced around the space, but the eclectic collection of mining paraphernalia from many eras confused him on the timeline. “Tick, how old were you when your mothers sent you down here?”
“It was my birthday,” she whispered. “My last dose of youth nanites.”
Meaning thirteen. At least that was when most people started their adult boosters. But instead of celebrating that milestone, she’d been entombed in the rock.
She drifted away from him, the crawler clattering after her as she made her way to a gray casket. He joined her next to the obsolete cryo-chamber.
She pointed out a warning light frozen on the front panel. “Low-power,” she noted. “The failsafe ejected me.”
The unit wasn’t even one of the elaborate models built for the old generation ships. This was an emergency chamber intended to hold a sick or injured individual until help could be arranged. If the casket had failed with her inside, she would’ve been mummified there. Maybe some exploratory shaft would’ve pierced this cavern eventually.
Or maybe not. He grimaced. “You were lucky.”
Her gaze flashed up to him, the brilliant purple darkened to coal. “Was I?”
If he answered her, he’d have to ask that question of himself.
Instead, he pulled a data tablet from his pack and crouched next to the casket. “Why didn’t you seek out help when you woke?”
“My mothers told me to wait for them. So I did. But the meal packs had spoiled, and the cistern was almost dry. The rock had shifted, and I had to dig out. It took…awhile.” While she spoke, she paced a restless circle around the cave, each step as precise as the crawler’s.
This was all the space she’d had, he realized. For however long she’d been awake and waiting, she’d walked the uneven floor as she realized she’d been buried and left. “But after you got out?”
Abruptly, her pacing halted. “I didn’t know who was here. Only who wasn’t.”
She’d feared QueCorp, and rightly so. If she had emerged from the dark, she would’ve been put to work in the mines, just like the rest of them.
Or murdered outright if the overseer had realized what she represented—a legal threat to the possession of the galaxy’s most prized resource.
Of course, she was also now a threat to the miners’ claim.
His hands, busy connecting the tab to the cryo-chamber, faltered. Had Gavyn sent him down here with her to make sure she didn’t come back?
Together, he and the foreman had schemed and stolen. While Gavyn had yes-sir-ed and bashed through solid rock to earn a place of standing with management and with the other miners, Arjay had used his background—and his body—more subtly. He’d gone after the armed guards with a smile, teasing clits for access codes and prostates for programming time on the otherwise restricted mainframe. He’d drunk far too much banned sunshine to get the guards to look the other way, with alky-crossed eyes, while the miners cemented their plans.
Gavyn had always offered him an out—“I need your skills, not your sacrifice”—but Arjay knew the rebellion would need both. While Gavyn had called for a bloodless mutiny, Ydro-Down’s overseer and a handful of his underlings had died when explosive vapors had swept the tunnels, and Arjay suspected Gavyn had been the trigger that ignited the actual flames.
With the rebels on literal rocky ground, maybe Gavyn hoped this new wrinkle would be smoothed away with no one the wiser.
Forcing himself to get back to work, Arjay connected to the casket memory. He still had time to figure out what rights Tick might have to Ydro-Down—and whether that claim would end with her buried again.