“‘Chocolate,’” she said. “That’s kind of a code word between me and Tekla. I think we should open the hatch.”
They did so, not before arming themselves with whatever makeshift weapons they could find, and found Tekla, suffering from a knife wound to the hand; Zeke, looking flustered but unharmed; and a woman, barely recognizable as Julia Bliss Flaherty given that most of her hair was gone and she had both of her hands firmly clamped over her mouth. Tekla vaulted into the Hammerhead and pulled Julia along behind her.
“What is going on?” Ivy demanded.
Zeke held up both hands. “I got this,” he said. “We have killed four of them already. Two more are casualties. We have them outnumbered. We just have to keep fighting.”
“You need to get into a storm shelter,” Ivy said.
Tekla, unaccustomed to working in even weak gravity, had gotten her footing enough to drag Julia into a corner of the Hammerhead and sit her down on the floor. She then turned back toward the hatch. Dinah had never seen Tekla in this state before, and feared her greatly in that moment. Moira had a different reaction; peeling off her headphones, she lurched across the space and threw her arms around Tekla’s neck. It looked like a greeting but soon developed into something else as Tekla began dragging Moira toward the hatch and Moira began trying to prevent her from returning to the fray.
“Sweet one,” Tekla was mumbling into Moira’s ear, “you want me to use wrestling moves on you? Then you should let me go, because I am going to kill that bitch A?da.”
“Zipping into storm shelters is exactly what they wanted us to do,” Zeke explained. “Their plan was to take the ship as soon as we did so. Good thing you warned us.”
Tekla by now had peeled herself loose from Moira’s grip and advanced toward the hatch with a full stride.
Zeke, waiting for her, reached out with one hand. He was holding a small black plastic box. He pressed it against Tekla’s thigh and pulled a little trigger on its side. The device erupted with a sharp ticking, buzzing noise. Tekla’s leg collapsed and she floated to the floor, glassy-eyed.
“Sorry, Tekla,” Zeke said. “You stay here. Get your hand fixed. Keep Moira company—she needs you. And if you have a little boy, name it Zeke.”
Then, before any of them could respond, he slammed the hatch shut.
In the silence that followed, a sharp crack resounded through the structure of Endurance. Everyone knew the sound: they’d just taken a hit from a bolide.
“Aren’t you supposed to be flying the ship?” Doob shouted to Ivy.
Wordlessly, Ivy went back to her screen.
Dinah rounded on Julia. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded.
Julia’s hair had been cropped. In the last three years it had gone silvery. Her hands still obscured the lower half of her face. Her eyes were clearly recognizable, though without benefit of cosmetics they seemed to be staring out of a face two decades older.
Slowly she removed her hands.
She was sticking her tongue out. It looked like a piece of metal was caught in her teeth.
On a closer look, it was clear that J.B.F. now had a pierced tongue. It had been done cleanly and professionally; there was no bleeding, no apparent signs of infection or discomfort. A stainless steel bolt about two inches long had been inserted vertically through the piercing, fixed in place with nuts and washers above and below the tongue. It was too long to fit into Julia’s mouth, so it kept her tongue stretched out. Above and below, the rod pressed against her lips.
“Oh Jesus Christ,” Dinah said.
Julia tapped at the bolt with one finger, then made screwing and unscrewing gestures with both hands. The nuts had been doubled, and torqued tightly against each other. Dinah took a multitool from a holster on her belt and unfolded its needlenosed pliers, then borrowed Ivy’s. By twisting gently in opposite directions she was able to loosen the nuts. Julia pushed her away and unscrewed the nuts with her fingertips, then gently extracted the bolt. Her tongue retracted into her mouth. She put one hand over her lips and leaned back against a bulkhead for a few moments, moving her jaw to work up some saliva and get limbered up.
When she finally spoke, Julia sounded weirdly normal, as if delivering remarks from the White House briefing room. “When we surrendered,” she said, “they took my gun, and they tortured Spencer Grindstaff until he spilled everything he knew about the IT systems here. All the passwords, all the back doors, all the details as to how it all works. Exactly what they would need in order to take the place over. Then they killed him, and . . .”
“Ate him?”
Julia nodded. “They have a sort of hacker type among their group. When he came on board just now, he went to a terminal and began to execute this plan. Steve Lake tried to stop him. One of the others had the gun—shot Steve to death. That was always part of their plan. They knew that only Steve could stop them.”