I pull my datapad out with one hand, almost dropping it over the rail, and pull up the last video played. Security cam footage. A wintery landscape fills the air in front of me. Careless raindrops punch through the holo. Trigg is stranded on the bridge to a landing pad that juts out from a mountainside like a waiter’s arm bringing a tray. A huge Gold in blue armor charges him as he runs back to the Reaper. She plunges her blade through his spine out his stomach and hoists him in the air like a street vendor’s kebab. Then she hurls him off the side of the bridge. My love spatters against the rocks beneath. His blood darkens the white snow.
I hurl the datapad down into the abyss, tears and rain blurring my vision. The railing is slippery against my hands as I find myself climbing it. Standing on the edge, looking at the cars beneath and the darkness beyond them. I feel the pain just as sharply as I did ten years ago when Holiday called me. I was in the Piraeus Insurance offices. Didn’t even make a sound when I hung up. I just took off my uniform, ditched my badge, and left that office for the last time.
I could leave that quietly now.
But as I lean forward to go over the edge, something stops me. A hand gripping the back of my jacket. I feel my feet slide out from under me as I’m jerked off the rail back onto the sidewalk. I land hard on the wet concrete, the air rushing out of me. Three pale-faced men in black leather dusters and chrome glasses stare down at me.
“Who the fu—”
A fist the size of a small dog sends me to darkness.
IN THE COCKPIT, PYTHA has gone silent, now locked into the ship’s battle sync. Her eyes stare distantly as her mind and the ship’s computer function as one. “Better start thinking about how you want to die,” Cassius says to me as I slide into the observation seat behind Pytha’s. “One engine’s down thanks to you playing Lorn. This is worse than the astral dump on Lorio.”
“Nothing’s worse than that.” I look at the sensor displays and the data readouts. “Never mind.” We’re being pursued by the three craft. Not slapped-together pirate ships, but military vessels. Doesn’t matter that they’re old. Their engines seem to be in prime shape. Pytha’s returning mid-range fire with our own railguns. Can’t see the drama of it—it’s all displays and sensor readouts in here. I feel the familiar shudder in the ship as her munitions funnel out of their magazines into the magnetic firing rods and race across space toward our pursuers. How many more shots till we run dry?
“Can we lose them in the asteroid field?” I ask.
“Not dense enough,” Cassius says.
“Can we set down?”
“They’re too close.”
“Can we—”
“No,” he says. “Can’t hide. Can’t run. Can’t fight. Dammit.” He slams his hand on the console. “You should have listened to me.”
“I’m sorry, Cassius.”
“Don’t use my name. We have guests on board.”
“She’s unconscious.”
“That crew isn’t. You want one of them trying to collect a Core bounty while we’re dodging Ascomanni?” He shakes his head, marveling at my stupidity.
“I wasn’t going to stand by and let those savages eat one of us.”
“?‘One of us’…”
“My grandfather would have tried to save her.”
“Course he would have. He’d have gutted a hundred lowColors to save one Gold life. Today, you killed how many…a dozen?” I see their mouths frothing in fear. Their eyes wide like a dying horse’s. All white. “Was it worth it? You could have helped them,” he says sorrowfully. “But you went for her! One person!”
I take the punishment. It’s earned. But he’ll forget today. It’ll be diluted by time. For me I know it will not. My memory will trap me with those screaming faces even as I lie on my deathbed. I will see their cracking nails against the mesh. Smell the urine on the deck. And I’ll wonder how many I could have saved if I’d had more sense.
Our ship shudders again as another projectile hits us. Our kinetic shields send it ricocheting off into space. If they were aiming to kill, they’d use missiles, but they’re aiming for our engines. “They want us alive,” I say.
“Of course they do. They saw that we’re Golds. They’ll rape us and kill us when they get bored of it.”
“And they’ll eat us,” I say. “These ones are cannibals.” He catches the fear in my voice. “How long can the engines last if we overburn?” I ask, knowing the answer, but knowing too where I need to push him.
He glances down at Pytha. “Not long. Maybe an hour, two. Then we’re dead metal. But where would we go? Nearest asteroid city is five days out.”
“The Rim.”
“The Rim, he says. You forget your last name? My last name?” He lowers his voice, looking back down the hall. “Your grandmother ordered the destruction of one of their moons and their docks.”
“So they say.”
“They think I personally stomped in the head of Revus au Raa.”
“The Ascomanni won’t follow if we make the Line. They fear the Rim more than we do.”
“There’s a reason for that.”
“The chance they’ll have a warship even six days away from where we enter is negligible.” Our ship shudders again. Pytha jerks in her seat. Blood dribbles down her lips. She’s bitten her tongue. Her mouth guard wobbles on the console. I pry open her teeth and push the thin slip of plastic in. “I made a mistake in there. But this is a matter of probability. We can slip over the Line, shed the Ascomanni, fix our engines, then…”
“No ship has crossed into Rim Space in ten years. I won’t risk starting a war.”
“Then what’s your plan?” I ask.
“We turn around and fight. We can get inside one of their ships. Turn the guns on the other corvettes. I’ve seen men do it.”
Fight. Of course that’s his answer.
“We’re not those men,” I say. His warrior vanity looks wounded. “And we don’t have a launch tube on the rear of the ship. We’d have to pivot the ship starboard. And then we’d fire back into a fusillade of railgun fire. And if we make it through that, adding their current velocity to the velocity of the spitTube we will hit their viewports with…” I pull from my memory the detailed report and analysis my grandmother had me make on Darrow’s mathematically suicidal assault on the Vanguard. “…potentially nine times the velocity used to breach the Vanguard. Our bones will be indistinguishable from our urine.”
“Really?”
“Care to wager?”
“Shit.”
“What about S-1392?”
“The asteroid?”
“It’s the one the Gold bought passage to.” I reference the sensors. “It’s two hours away. Three hours closer than the Line. Before she fell unconscious, the girl said that help was there.”
His eyes narrow. “When exactly did you have time to have a conversation with her?”
“In the medical bay.”
“We don’t know who she is. We don’t know where she’s from. Do you even know what kind of help she meant?”
“No,” I confess. “But opportunities multiply as they are seized.”
“Don’t quote Sun Tzu at me like it was your idea. Her ‘help’ could be anyone. It could be the gorydamn Ash Lord himself.”
“That would be a boon for us.”
“For you, maybe. Your godfather would skin me alive.” He stares at the Obsidian ships on the sensors. “She used your razor. Did she have a scar?”
If I say yes, he won’t go to S-1392. He’ll try to fight.
“No. No scar,” I say. Then I feel the guilt building. My brain has always been faster than my conscience.