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IN THE DREAM, the smell of rust thickened the air, sharp enough to taste, yet Sloane’s jaw was locked in place, leaving her unable to spit out the sourness. Mechanical teeth bit into her neck, her cheeks, her arms, burrowing into her bones and holding her fast within a sea of metal until she joined with the shield, just another panel in the glimmering infestation that wrapped itself around Elter’s skies.
She must be breathing—she wasn’t dead, or at least she didn’t think she was—but she couldn’t feel the muscles of her chest moving, or the squeeze of her heart. Only the insistent clamp of the shield, the bitter taste of its poisonous rust.
And she could do nothing but watch as Elter burned.
The ground writhed in red flame, smoke pouring up to choke the too-close sky. Towers ignited into blistering infernos, and it didn’t matter if it made sense. All that mattered was that she was helpless. Part of their pain.
The reason for their pain. Caught in the shield, she would be forced to watch as every last building fell, listen as every last scream died away. The wind picked up, bringing with it a breath of dusty char, and her chest spasmed as she tried to cough.
Sloane sat up with a gasp as the dream evaporated. Sweat beaded her forehead, the aftermath of the dream still scorching the backs of her eyelids, but she was on her own ship. Moneymaker’s quiet hums greeted her, and a soft band of light seeped in under the door from the hall. Gareth slept beside her, his chest rising and falling with the gentle rhythm of deep slumber—her waking gasp must not have been as bad as she’d thought—and her lungs worked. She was safe.
The real Elter, however, was not.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, moving carefully so as not to wake Gareth. They all needed their rest, whenever they could get it. She rubbed her face, trying to dispel the last of the dream, but the feeling it’d left in her chest was heavy and cold.
The Cosmic Trade Federation really had locked her planet in a metallic shield, and every other planet in her home System along with it. The dream might’ve been a little overly dramatic—there was no reason why the surface should be burning—but overall it’d been a pretty solid realization of her fears. Her family was trapped, out of communication, and she had no way of knowing how long they’d be stuck. Or what might happen to the planet if the surface remained locked away from Ilya’s light.
Sloane slipped out of the cabin and made her way up the spiral staircase, padding through the galley toward the flight deck. Goosebumps prickled her skin, a relief after the heat of the dream, and she didn’t pull a sweatshirt on over her sleeveless shirt.
The clocks were well into the night shift, yet Sloane found Hilda sitting in the pilot’s seat, her braid hanging over the back of the chair, her parakeet resting on her knee. Sometimes Sloane got the feeling that the bird didn’t want to be around when the rest of them were.
As if to prove her right, it cheeped as she entered, then fled the flight deck in a flutter of green feathers.
“What are you doing up?” Sloane asked, slipping into the copilot’s seat. She considered tipping the chair back to rest her feet on the dash, but she didn’t particularly want to be banished right now.
“Damian’s not up to flying,” Hilda said.
Sloane frowned. Damian was sick with some kind of alien disease—or alien-affecting disease; she wasn’t sure which—but she’d never seen him give up a chance to take the ship’s controls. “We’re in the Current,” she said. “You could let the ship fly on auto.”
Hilda flipped a switch on the dash, though Sloane was ninety-nine percent sure the movement was just for show. “Yes, well, you kind of blew up the whole ‘Currents are safe’ status quo when you and your Commander attacked the CTF. I’m edgy.”
Sloane slumped down in her chair, reconsidering the foot-propping idea. “I get it. I can’t sleep, either.”
Hilda nudged the switch back into place. Sloane pictured a light turning on and off in the bathroom. “Trying to decide where we should go next?” Hilda asked.
The pain of the dream was fading quickly, but the core of it—that feeling of helplessness, the need to save her family—wasn’t something she could escape. She felt it with every waking breath; no reason sleep should be any different.
Sloane rubbed her eyes again. They’d be puffy later, but it was hard to care. “Kent’s gathering all these System leaders together.”
She’d managed to convince her ex that it was better to band together, even with people you hated, if it meant keeping your freedom. And he’d taken it to heart. So much so that he’d begun reaching out to his contacts around the galaxy, pulling various System leaders into one spot for a meeting. So that she could convince them they should be friends.
See, this was the problem with doing a good job at something. Everyone expected you to keep on doing it.
Hilda tapped her fingers on the dash, as if to the rhythm of some song in her head. “We’ve got a common enemy now.”
“Assuming they believe
that. They might go the way of Gareth’s friend Alisa and betray us.”
“Kent thinks you can convince them.”
It all hinged on them being the kind of people who’d listen to sense. Kent had, yes. But Sloane didn’t trust the rest of them not to be idiots.
“I should go home,” she said softly. “Ilya’s under attack.”
Hilda sat back in her chair, reaching over her shoulder as if for the bird, and grabbed her braid instead, whipping it off the back of the chair to land onto her shoulder with a quiet thump. “Helping the galaxy will help Ilya. And Elter.”
“I know.”
“They’ll listen to you. You’re smart. Sometimes.”
The pilot was trying for a pep talk, and even though Sloane was pretty sure Hilda was incapable of false flattery, she didn’t feel comforted. Maybe it was the still-lingering effect of the dream.
“Will they listen, though?” she asked. “I’m about to show up and ask Schere to get over its snobbery about the Outer Systems. And ask Zalkalar, who barely even trades with anyone, to go to war with everyone.”
Hilda huffed out a breath. “When you put it that way, it does sound a little far-fetched.”
“Exactly.”
Worse, Sloane was having a difficult time believing they’d listen to her specifically. Kent was the politician. Why couldn’t he convince them? Or Gareth, for that matter. Though to be fair, half the galaxy kind of hated Gareth for one reason or another. And half was a generous estimate in his favor.
Still. She might need to smack all those kings and councils and presidents into listening, instead of speaking sense to them. Why should they listen, when the advice she’d given Kent had resulted in his planet getting shielded, too?
She’d fixed it, obviously. But now Elter was covered. So there was that.
After a moment, Hilda said, “Kent got Zalkalar to come?”
Sloane slumped farther down in her chair. One more inch, and she’d be on the floor. She wasn’t sure she’d mind. “Yeah.”
A loud clang reverberated through the ship, as if they’d knocked into the wall of a bell. Sloane sat up, alarmed. What the hell made a noise like that in the middle of Current travel? The hull was practically vibrating with it, whatever it was.
Hilda was scanning
the dash, shaking her head like whatever had clanged them wasn’t messing with the ship’s systems. That was very much a ‘yet’ kind of status, as far as Sloane was concerned, but at least they hadn’t been torn apart.
What the hell would there be to run into in the Current?
“BRO?” Hilda said. “What was that?”
“An octopus!” The AI sounded excited about the idea, unnervingly so. Sloane could picture it pulling up reams of information on the subject. “A huge one! A space kraken. And she’s got us!”
As if it was an honor rather than a terrifying prospect.
Sloane exchanged a glance with Hilda, who shrugged. “That’s a new one.”
“It sounded like metal,” Sloane said. “Not tentacles.”
Hilda cocked her head to the side, like she was trying to play the sound in her mind. “I’m afraid to ask what you think space tentacles would sound like.”
“I know! I know! Pick me!” BRO said. “Tentacles would be like thwp thwp. This was a definite clang. But not a clang clang. One clang. Singular.”
Sloane wasn’t sure if it was just her imagination, or if the AI was actually getting weirder. “So, not a kraken,” she said.
“Oh.” BRO actually sounded deflated, its enthusiasm dampened by cold, heartless reality. “Maybe not. But it looks like a—”
The ship jerked to a stop, dislodging Sloane rudely from her seat. Hilda shot out a leg to interrupt Sloane’s flight toward the dashboard, sending her somersaulting headfirst toward the floor instead.
Hilda retracted her leg. “Pulled a muscle,” she grumbled. “And also, I told you so.”
Sloane picked herself up off the floor. “You’ve told me so a lot of times. Which one are you referring to? That I should’ve strapped in?”
She seemed destined never to remember that one.
“You should, but no. The fact that you and your Commander ruined Current travel forever.”
Oh, right. That. “Times change. BRO, what’s—”
The ship lurched, and Sloane’s feet flew out from under her. She landed on her back between the two pilot seats, slamming the back of her head onto the floor.
Definitely should’ve strapped in. “What happened?” she asked.
Hilda bent over the controls, scanning the systems for information. “We’re stopped.”
“That’s not possible!” BRO said.
These days, ‘possible’ was a relative term. “But is it true?” Sloane asked.
“Yes!”
For the second time in the last minute, Sloane picked herself up off the floor. Maybe she ought to stay there next time. “Is it the Interplanetary Dwellers? They ripped us out of the Current once.”
Hilda shook her head. Her muscles were tight with focus, but when she spoke, there was a definite undercurrent of what-the-hell. “No. We’re still in the Current.”
They were also on friendly terms with the Interplanetary Dwellers these days. Surely Amayra would simply hail them instead of making a grab for the ship.
Moneymaker jerked again, and Sloane managed to fall over the arm of the copilot’s chair, landing in the seat this time. Fewer bruises for the win.
“Whoever it is, they’re holding on to us with some kind of tagging system,” Hilda said.
“Tethers? Like Alex’s?” The thought made her stomach sink. Alex had created new-and-improved tethers, claiming they wouldn’t snap unless the universe imploded. Which might have been an exaggeration.
“Not the tethers,” Hilda said. “Some kind of tech.”
“Tethers are tech!” BRO added.
Hilda ignored it. “I haven’t seen it before. It’s like… lasers? Attached by magnets? I don’t know.”
“Laser-mags!” BRO said.
Sloane was pretty sure the AI was just making things up at this point.
“The CTF got some of the Interplanetary Dwellers’ tech,” Sloane said. Maybe all of it; they didn’t know how much Striker had managed to drop, copy, or disperse before the Fleet had recaptured the vault.
Sloane risked getting up out of the chair—the ship was stopped, though that didn’t necessarily translate to safety—and headed for the door. ““I have a feeling this is about to get ugly.”
GARETH WAS no stranger to rude awakenings during space travel, though he certainly could have done without the violent wrench that would’ve knocked him out of the bed had it not been equipped with a safety line. He struggled to sit up, brain fogged with sleep as he fought Moneymaker’s wild bucking to throw the covers off.
He dressed hastily and stumbled his way to the hall as the ship wove drunkenly back and forth, lurching in long, wide swings. It was a strange sort of movement, not at all like dodging fire—he was all too familiar with the feeling of dodging fire, in this ship and others—and almost too slow. Too fluid.
It certainly didn’t feel like the dreamy stillness of Current travel. Not that it’d been all that still lately; his dreams played against a background of distant song, like a faraway choir drifting in on a traveling wind, a melody that felt simultaneously familiar and strange. The music was a constant now when he traveled in the Current, though Sloane had said she couldn’t hear it.
Damian met him in the hall, looking steady enough on his feet despite the poisonous purple lines that crawled up his neck like errant roots. He braced one hand on the wall, his shoulders deliberately squared in concentration, as if his entire focus were bent on remaining upright. “Who’s playing zeeball with the ship?”
“I have a guess,” Gareth said.
Striker had escaped out from under them just a day ago, maybe a few hours more, and now he was using their technique of in-Current attack to enact his revenge. If not Striker personally, then someone else who worked for the Cosmic Trade Federation. ...
