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She’d joked about the stuff, in training with her fellow gunshippers. Snail snot. Gelatinous splooge. But its real name was MedAssist Incubatory NutriBath, and you only got dunked in it if you needed intensive care with a capital I.
She shuffled out into the hall, picked a likely direction toward the pilot’s deck, and froze. The door swished shut beside her, revealing a logo she knew all too well: a single planet, fiery wings encircling it. Icarion. She was on an enemy ship. With one leg. Naked.
“You’re a Keeper now,” Vladsen said, voice tight. “Your duty is to survive.” “The academy gave us emergency-response training. I cannot imagine they did not mean for us to use it.” Vladsen cocked his head to the side, searching for something in Biran’s face. “We guard the knowledge of our people through the ages, not their bodies from moment to moment.”
A tinny female voice, not Bero’s, said, “Breach at airlock two. Breach at airlock two. Breach at airlock two…” Sanda wanted to kick something but thought better of it before she took another tumble. Space was getting on her nerves.
There was no telling how emotionally young Bero was. No telling what traveling the star system for a few hundred years with only Grippy here to talk to had done to his neural circuits. She might very well be cruising around space on the equivalent of a toddler. A toddler that controlled the airlocks. Or worse, a teenager.
“Oh my, Speaker Greeve.” He clucked his tongue against his teeth. “You are young.” “You came to my defense. You must believe what I had to say.” “You’ll find that I did not so much come to your defense as that, for a moment, our interests were aligned.”
“Is that… Are you being sarcastic, Bero?” A little boost of the jets, and she drifted deeper into the debris field. She stayed above it, keeping an eagle eye to avoid having her tether tangle with any of the smaller bits stuck on the plane of orbit below. “I learn by imitation.” “Wonderful.” “Precisely.”
“I’m holding on to hope,” he said, forcing a smile as he skirted right around a straight answer. “That’s all any of us can do,” she said, tracking the time out of the corner of her eye. One minute to air. “Ready?” He tried to smile hard enough to reach his eyes again but couldn’t. “Ready,” he lied.
His eyes glazed with tears that would not fall. Stars above, she was going to get so much fan mail.
As excited as she was to meet the man—get a chance to save somebody from this disaster—she dreaded that moment with all her heart.
Biran wondered what she would have thought of that. For all her visionary thinking, the writings she’d left behind hadn’t signaled that she was prone to that flavor of hubris.
“You can’t plan to make a mistake, Dad.” “Then stop being so hard on yourself, idiot.”
He could see all of that view, now. The autos and the trees and the constellation of city lights. But they were dull, lifeless. Not worth seeing without Sanda’s brightness obscuring the view.
When Jules was younger, she fancied one of them might be her father—and what a story would that make? Her making the unlikely discovery, tears in her long-lost dad’s eyes as she introduced herself and set on the long path of getting him on the straight and narrow. Maybe even get a dog, or something. She’d never been good at fantasies.
A hard-bitten woman who was loud to cover how scared she was—the kid at the core—the raw and unformed person she would be, could be, if only she stopped tumbling down the cliff she’d already thrown herself off of.
Bero was her life raft, her last-ditch effort to survive the destruction her species had wrought. And he put her in the same category as Grippy, the robot. Not that she had anything against robots, but she’d at least expected the AI to acknowledge she was another sentient being. She counted Bero as a person in her own mind. This was why Ada Prime didn’t give their AI personalities when it came right down to it. You couldn’t trust the cold, metal bastards.
“It’s different for me.” A harsh edge etched Bero’s voice. “You do not invite those you do not trust to enter your body, do you? You live in my veins. Can reach into my mind and rearrange things at will. There is… intimacy, in having your mind contained in a place of dwelling.”
“That’s computer-talk. Stop it.” A pause. “I’m afraid, Sanda.” She breathed out, emptying her lungs down to the bottom of her belly. “Me too. But I’ve got your back, Bero, and I need to know you’ve got mine, too.” “I do not have a back.” She laughed. “Fine. I’m looking out for you. You look out for me, too. Okay?” “Okay.”
It wasn’t deforestation that kept Lex up at night. It was the heat death of the universe.
Accidents of geography: setting perfectly ordinary people at one another’s throats since the Stone Age.
The proffered chair creaked as she sat. She eyed Tomas as he fussed over breakfast, a dread feeling growing in the pit of her stomach. A feeling worse than being told he’d been trying to adjust their course without her input. “You’re a morning person, aren’t you?” she asked.
Data is just leverage to get people talking, that’s when you discover the truth.”
“Nazca,” he said, and tapped the side of his temple. “I’ve been trained to be amenable in all situations. This will be a strain, I’m sure, but I can adjust my personality to be less abrasive to yours.” “See what I mean? I want to punch you already.”
This wasn’t a raid. This wasn’t burglary or theft. Everything of value had been smashed or tossed, but not taken. This was a slaughter. And a message. A message for her, maybe, written in the blood of those she loved.
Their eyes met, and something passed between them. Nothing like support, nothing like familial love and camaraderie. No. An understanding. An agreement. A contract, of a sort. This family was broken. But they’d hold together, just long enough. Long enough for vengeance.
Sanda shared a look with Tomas, and said, “Being offended by facts is a long human tradition.” “I’ll pass on that one,” Bero said. Tomas cracked a grin and laughed. “Does he know he’s being sarcastic?” “Do you know I can hear you?”
She didn’t bother putting any hustle into her step. If he was going to be an ass, he was about to find out she was far more practiced at assholery.
She had no doubt General Greybeard would space her without so much as a twinge of remorse. He’d probably use words like expedient and best course of action in his report about the incident.
Not a smart thing, firing any kind of weapon when the only thing between you and the void was inflatable tubing. The wall scrunched beneath her back. Sanda became aware of a soft hissing. “Fuck,” she said. Tomas got the gist. With Biran’s help, they yanked their way onto the Prime ship, Tomas cursing with every jostle of his arm and Sanda cursing just because it felt like the right thing to do.
Biran would never turn her in, and that was the problem. If he was ever found out for helping her, his career would be over, and a Keeper’s career was pretty tightly tied to their life.
It seemed they’d given her a posthumous promotion. She wondered if anyone regretted that now that she was decidedly humous.
“We must be better than a codified system,” Sanda pressed. “What good are our laws if they cannot be reexamined to better fit the needs of our present society?”
“Things do like to go from bad to worse around you.” “Which is why you need to stay here.” She moved to push off the wall, but he leaned forward, planting one palm firmly beside her shoulder and shadowing her body with his. “Safe bores me.” The intensity in his gaze made her toes tingle. “I gotta admit, I was hoping you’d say that.”
He’d never been a spiritual man, but part of him wished he could feel that moment. Some sort of quantum entanglement of brain waves between brother and sister—a mutual farewell, an ache acknowledged and answered.
the real players. The Protectorate members and the movers thereof. Thin in number, powerful in consequence. A family knit of distrust and petty thrusts. Divided. And divided, they would fall.
She may have been weak, but she wasn’t so worn out she couldn’t hug him back just as hard. Sanda buried her face in his chest and tried not to cry. Luckily, she was severely dehydrated.
