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Synopsis
Dazzling space battles, intergalactic politics, and rogue AI collide in Velocity Weapon, the first book in this epic space opera by award-winning author Megan O'Keefe.
Sanda and Biran Greeve were siblings destined for greatness. A high-flying sergeant, Sanda has the skills to take down any enemy combatant. Biran is a savvy politician who aims to use his new political position to prevent conflict from escalating to total destruction. However, on a routine maneuver, Sanda loses consciousness when her gunship is blown out of the sky. Instead of finding herself in friendly hands, she awakens 230 years later on a deserted enemy warship controlled by an AI who calls himself Bero. The war is lost. The star system is dead. Ada Prime and its rival Icarion have wiped each other from the universe.
Now, separated by time and space, Sanda and Biran must fight to put things right.
Release date: June 11, 2019
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 544
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Velocity Weapon
Megan E. O'Keefe
The first thing Sanda did after being resuscitated was vomit all over herself. The second thing she did was to vomit all over again. Her body shook, trembling with the remembered deceleration of her gunship breaking apart around her, stomach roiling as the preservation foam had encased her, shoved itself down her throat and nose and any other ready orifice. Her teeth jarred together, her fingers fumbled with temporary palsy against the foam stuck to her face.
Dios, she hoped the shaking was temporary. They told you this kind of thing happened in training, that the trembling would subside and the “explosive evacuation” cease. But it was a whole hell of a lot different to be shaking yourself senseless while emptying every drop of liquid from your body than to be looking at a cartoonish diagram with friendly letters claiming Mild Gastrointestinal Discomfort.
It wasn’t foam covering her. She scrubbed, mind numb from coldsleep, struggling to figure out what encased her. It was slimy and goopy and—oh no. Sanda cracked a hesitant eyelid and peeked at her fingers. Thick, clear jelly with a slight bluish tinge coated her hands. The stuff was cold, making her trembling worse, and with a sinking gut she realized what it was. 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.
“Fuck,” she tried to say, but her throat rasped on unfamiliar air. How long had she been in here? Sanda opened both eyes, ignoring the cold gel running into them. She lay in a white enameled cocoon, the lid removed to reveal a matching white ceiling inset with true-white bulbs. The brightness made her blink.
The NutriBath was draining, and now that her chest was exposed to air, the shaking redoubled. Gritting her teeth against the spasms, she felt around the cocoon, searching for a handhold.
“Hey, medis,” she called, then hacked up a lump of gel. “Got a live one in here!”
No response. Assholes were probably waiting to see if she could get out under her own power. Could she? She didn’t remember being injured in the battle. But the medis didn’t stick you in a bath for a laugh. She gave up her search for handholds and fumbled trembling hands over her body, seeking scars. The baths were good, but they wouldn’t have left a gunnery sergeant like her in the tub long enough to fix cosmetic damage. The gunk was only slightly less expensive than training a new gunner.
Her face felt whole, chest and shoulders smaller than she remembered but otherwise unharmed. She tried to crane her neck to see down her body, but the unused muscles screamed in protest.
“Can I get some help over here?” she called out, voice firmer now she’d cleared it of the gel. Still no answer. Sucking down a few sharp breaths to steel herself against the ache, she groaned and lifted her torso up on her elbows until she sat straight, legs splayed out before her.
Most of her legs, anyway.
Sanda stared, trying to make her coldsleep-dragging brain catch up with what she saw. Her left leg was whole, if covered in disturbing wrinkles, but her right… That ended just above the place where her knee should have been. Tentatively, she reached down, brushed her shaking fingers over the thick lump of flesh at the end of her leg.
She remembered. A coil fired by an Icarion railgun had smashed through the pilot’s deck, slamming a nav panel straight into her legs. The evac pod chair she’d been strapped into had immediately deployed preserving foam—encasing her, and her smashed leg, for Ada Prime scoopers to pluck out of space after the chaos of the Battle of Dralee faded. She picked at her puckered skin, stunned. Remembered pain vibrated through her body and she clenched her jaw. Some of that cold she’d felt upon awakening must have been leftover shock from the injury, her body frozen in a moment of panic.
Any second now, she expected the pain of the incident to mount, to catch up with her and punish her for putting it off so long. It didn’t. The NutriBath had done a better job than she’d thought possible. Only mild tremors shook her.
“Hey,” she said, no longer caring that her voice cracked. She gripped either side of her open cocoon. “Can I get some fucking help?”
Silence answered. Choking down a stream of expletives that would have gotten her court-martialed, Sanda scraped some of the gunk on her hands off on the edges of the cocoon’s walls and adjusted her grip. Screaming with the effort, she heaved herself to standing within the bath, balancing precariously on her single leg, arms trembling under her weight.
The medibay was empty.
“Seriously?” she asked the empty room.
The rest of the medibay was just as stark white as her cocoon and the ceiling, its walls pocked with panels blinking all sorts of readouts she didn’t understand the half of. Everything in the bay was stowed, the drawers latched shut, the gurneys folded down and strapped to the walls. It looked ready for storage, except for her cocoon sitting in the center of the room, dripping NutriBath and vomit all over the floor.
“Naked wet girl in here!” she yelled at the top of her sore voice. Echoes bounced around her, but no one answered. “For fuck’s sake.”
Not willing to spend god-knew-how-long marinating in a stew of her own body’s waste, Sanda clenched her jaw and attempted to swing her leg over the edge of the bath. She tipped over and flopped face-first to the ground instead.
“Ow.”
She spat blood and picked up her spinning head. Still no response. Who was running this bucket, anyway? The medibay looked clean enough, but there wasn’t a single Ada Prime logo anywhere. She hadn’t realized she’d miss those stylized dual bodies with their orbital spin lines wrapped around them until this moment.
Calling upon half-remembered training from her boot camp days, Sanda army crawled her way across the floor to a long drawer. By the time she reached it, she was panting hard, but pure anger drove her forward. Whoever had come up with the bright idea to wake her without a medi on standby needed a good, solid slap upside the head. She may have been down to one leg, but Sanda was pretty certain she could make do with two fists.
She yanked the drawer open and hefted herself up high enough to see inside. No crutches, but she found an extending pole for an IV drip. That’d have to do. She levered herself upright and stood a moment, back pressed against the wall, getting her breath. The hard metal of the stand bit into her armpit, but she didn’t care. She was on her feet again. Or foot, at least. Time to go find a medi to chew out.
The caster wheels on the bottom of the pole squeaked as she made her way across the medibay. The door dilated with a satisfying swish, and even the stale recycled air of the empty corridor smelled fresh compared to the nutri-mess she’d been swimming in. She paused and considered going back to find a robe. Ah, to hell with it.
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.
Sanda ducked back into the medibay and scurried to the panel-spotted wall, silently cursing each squeak of the IV stand’s wheels. She had to find a comms link, and fast.
Gel-covered fingers slipped on the touchscreen as she tried to navigate unfamiliar protocols. Panic constricted her throat, but she forced herself to breathe deep, to keep her cool. She captained a gunship. This was nothing.
Half expecting alarms to blare, she slapped the icon for the ship’s squawk box and hesitated. What in the hell was she supposed to broadcast? They hadn’t exactly covered codes for “help I’m naked and legless on an Icarion bucket” during training. She bit her lip and punched in her own call sign—1947—followed by 7500, the universal sign for a hijacking. If she were lucky, they’d get the hint: 1947 had been hijacked. Made sense, right?
She slapped send.
“Good morning, one-niner-four-seven. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” a male voice said from the walls all around her. She jumped and almost lost her balance.
“Who am I addressing?” She forced authority into her voice even though she felt like diving straight back into her cocoon.
“This is AI-Class Cruiser Bravo-India-Six-One-Mike.”
AI-Class? A smartship? Sanda suppressed a grin, knowing the ship could see her. Smartships were outside Ada Prime’s tech range, but she’d studied them inside and out during training. While they were brighter than humans across the board, they still had human follies. Could still be lied to. Charmed, even.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Cruiser. My name’s Sanda Greeve.”
“I am called The Light of Berossus,” the voice said.
Of course he was. Damned Icarions never stuck to simple call signs. They always had to posh things up by naming their ships after ancient scientists. She nodded, trying to keep an easy smile on while she glanced sideways at the door. Could the ship’s crew hear her? They hadn’t heard her yelling earlier, but they might notice their ship talking to someone new.
“That’s quite the mouthful for friendly conversation.”
“Bero is an acceptable alternative.”
“You got it, Bero. Say, could you do me a favor? How many souls on board at the present?”
Her grip tightened on the IV stand, and she looked around for any other item she could use as a weapon. This was a smartship. Surely they wouldn’t allow the crew handblasters for fear of poking holes in their pretty ship. All she needed was a bottleneck, a place to hunker down and wait until Ada Prime caught her squawk and figured out what was up.
“One soul on board,” Bero said.
“What? That can’t be right.”
“There is one soul on board.” The ship sounded amused with her exasperation at first listen, but there was something in the ship’s voice that nagged at her. Something… tight. Could AI ships even slip like that? It seemed to her that something with that big of a brain would only use the tone it absolutely wanted to.
“In the medibay, yes, but the rest of the ship? How many?”
“One.”
She licked her lips, heart hammering in her ears. She turned back to the control panel she’d sent the squawk from and pulled up the ship’s nav system. She couldn’t make changes from the bay unless she had override commands, but… The whole thing was on autopilot. If she really was the only one on board… Maybe she could convince the ship to return her to Ada Prime. Handing a smartship over to her superiors would win her accolades enough to last a lifetime. Could even win her a fresh new leg.
“Bero, bring up a map of the local system, please. Light up any ports in range.”
A pause. “Bero?”
“Are you sure, Sergeant Greeve?”
Unease threaded through her. “Call me Sanda, and yes, light her up for me.”
The icons for the control systems wiped away, replaced with a 3-D model of the nearby system. She blinked, wondering if she still had goop in her eyes. Couldn’t be right. There they were, a glowing dot in the endless black, the asteroid belt that stood between Ada Prime and Icarion clear as starlight. Judging by the coordinates displayed above the ship’s avatar, she should be able to see Ada Prime. They were near the battlefield of Dralee, and although there was a whole lot of space between the celestial bodies, Dralee was the closest in the system to Ada. That’s why she’d been patrolling it.
“Bero, is your display damaged?”
“No, Sanda.”
She swallowed. Icarion couldn’t have… wouldn’t have. They wanted the dwarf planet. Needed access to Ada Prime’s Casimir Gate.
“Bero. Where is Ada Prime in this simulation?” She pinched the screen, zooming out. The system’s star, Cronus, spun off in the distance, brilliant and yellow-white. Icarion had vanished, too.
“Bero!”
“Icarion initiated the Fibon Protocol after the Battle of Dralee. The results were larger than expected.”
The display changed, drawing back. Icarion and Ada Prime reappeared, their orbits aligning one of the two times out of the year they passed each other. Somewhere between them, among the asteroid belt, a black wave began, reaching outward, consuming space in all directions. Asteroids vanished. Icarion vanished. Ada Prime vanished.
She dropped her head against the display. Let the goop run down from her hair, the cold glass against her skin scarcely registering. Numbness suffused her. No wonder Bero was empty. He must have been ported outside the destruction. He was a smartship. He wouldn’t have needed human input to figure out what had happened.
“How long?” she asked, mind racing despite the slowness of coldsleep. Shock had grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her fully awake. Grief she could dwell on later, now she had a problem to work. Maybe there were others, like her, on the edge of the wreckage. Other evac pods drifting through the black. Outposts in the belt.
There’d been ports, hideouts. They’d starve without supplies from either Ada Prime or Icarion, but that’d take a whole lot of time. With a smartship, she could scoop them up. Get them all to one of the other nearby habitable systems before the ship’s drive gave out. And if she were very lucky… Hope dared to swell in her chest. Her brother and fathers were resourceful people. Surely her dad Graham would have had some advance warning. That man always had his ear to the ground, his nose deep in rumor networks. If anyone could ride out that attack, it was them.
“It has been two hundred thirty years since the Battle of Dralee.”
The steps creaked alarmingly under Biran’s weight as he mounted the stage, but he would not let unstable footing delay the moment his whole life had built toward. News drones buzzed like loose wires above his head, their spotlights blinding him the moment he reached the podium. Keeper Li Shun clasped his hand in her strong fingers, the black robe of graduation transforming her from the stern teacher he’d known and admired into something otherworldly. She flashed him a smile—his sponsor for all these years—the hint of a silver tear in the corner of her eye. Pride. Biran’s chest swelled.
Shun turned to the podium, bracing her hands against either side. The mic chain looped around her throat threw her voice out to the dozen graduating Keepers, and the thousands of Ada Prime citizens crowding the stands.
“Introducing for the first time: Keeper Biran Aventure Greeve. First in class.”
Cheers exploded across the crowd, across the net. On massive screens suspended from drones, the faces of newscasters beamed excitedly as Biran watched himself, screen-in-screen, take the podium from Keeper Shun.
His heart lurched, his palms sweat. It hadn’t been so bad, sitting in the crowd with his fellow graduating classmates, but now he was up here. Alone. Meant to represent them to all these people. Meant to speak to Prime citizens in other settlements, on other worlds. The first of the next generation—the vanguard of Prime knowledge.
The notes for his speech waited in his wristpad; he could flick them open at any time. No one would mind. It was expected, really. He was only twenty-two, newly graduated. There wouldn’t even be whispers about it. But there’d be whispers about his hesitation.
Biran took a deep breath, careful not to let the mic pick up the hiss of air, and gripped the sides of the podium. He sought familiar faces in the audience. Not his cohort—his family. Most of his cohort could rot, for all he cared. Over the years in training they’d grown into little more than petty social climbers, political vipers. Even Anaia, his childhood friend, had allied herself with the richest girl in the group—Lili—just to squeeze herself closer to the top. His fathers, Graham and Ilan, were out there in the crowd somewhere. Sanda, his sister, would watch from her gunship on her way to make a patrol sweep of Dralee. His family was what mattered.
They believed in him. He could do this.
“People of Ada Prime,” he began, hating the way his voice squeaked nervously over the first word. Breathe. Slow down. “It honors me, and all my classmates, to—”
The hovering screens changed. The faces of the newscasters shifted from jubilant to fear-struck. Biran froze, terrified for an instant it was something he had done, or said, that caused that change.
Later, he’d wish it had been.
The newscasters were muted, but tickers scrolled across the bottoms of the screens: Battle Over the Moon Dralee. Ada Forces Pushed Back by Icarion. Casualties Expected. Casualties Confirmed.
A newscaster’s face wiped away, replaced by the black field of space. Biran’s subconscious discerned the source of the video feed—a satellite in orbit around one of Belai’s other moons. The perspective was wide, the subjects pointillistic shapes of light upon the screen.
Those lights broke apart.
Biran went cold. Numb. There was no way to identify the ships, no way to know which one his sister commanded, but deep in his marrow he knew. She’d been severed from him. One by one, those lights blinked out. Behind him, a teacher screamed.
The stadium’s speakers crackled as someone overrode them, a voice he didn’t recognize—calm and mechanical, probably an AI—spoke. He took a moment to place the voice as the same used for alarm drills at school.
“Impact event probability has exceeded the safety envelope. Please take cover… Impact event probability has exceeded…”
Debris. Bits and pieces of Ada’s shattered ships rocketing through space toward their home station to sow destruction. Bits of soldiers, too. Maybe even Sanda, burning up like so much space dust in the thin membrane enclosing Keep Station. Things weren’t supposed to escalate like this. Icarion was weak. Trapped. The people of Prime, even on backwater Ada, were supported by empire. Icarion wouldn’t have dared… But they had.
War. The stalemate had been called.
The crowd rippled. As the warning voice droned on, the stadium’s lights dimmed to a bloodied red, white arrows lighting the way to impact shelters. One of the senior Keepers on the stage, Biran didn’t turn to see who, found their legs and stepped forward. A hand enclosed Biran’s shoulder. Not in congratulations, but in sympathy. Biran stepped back to the podium.
He found his voice.
“Calm,” he pleaded, and this time his voice did not crack, did not hesitate. It boomed across the whole of the stadium and drew the attention of those desperate for stability.
“Please, calm. We will not trample one another for safety. We are Prime. We move together, as one. Go arm in arm with your compatriots into the shelters. Be quick. Be patient. Be safe.”
The swelling riot subsided, the tides pushing against the edges of the stadium walls pulling back, contracting into orderly snake lines down the aisles. Biran took a step away from the podium.
“Come,” Keeper Vladsen said. It took a moment for Biran to place the man. A member of the Protectorate, Vladsen rarely interacted with the students unless it was a formal affair. “There’s a Keeper shelter close by.” He gestured to a nearby door, a scant few meters from the stage that vibrated now to the beat of thousands of people fleeing. The rest of Biran’s cohort filed toward it, shepherded by Keeper Shun.
Biran shrugged the guiding hand off his arm. His gaze tracked the crowd, wondering where his fathers might be, but landed on a knot of people clumped up by a stadium door. The drone ushers that handled the stadium’s crowd control gave fitful, pleading orders for organization. Orders the panicking humans ignored.
“They need a person to guide them.”
“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.”
Something inside Biran lurched, rebelled. He peeled the black robe from his shoulders, tugged it over his head and tossed it to the ground. His lightweight slacks and button-up were thin protection against the simulated autumn breeze. He undid the buttons of his sleeves and rolled them up.
“You get to safety. I have work to do.”
Sanda slapped her palm against the screen, leaving a goopy handprint. Two hundred thirty years. It wasn’t possible. She’d heard rumblings that the Icarions were working on something big, but not big enough to wipe out two whole planets. Nothing in the universe man-made could produce that kind of power. She should know. Bero was fucking with her. Some sort of sick smartship joke. They couldn’t all be gone. Dead. Dust between the stars.
“Bero.” Her voice was tight, and not from disuse. “Don’t mess with me. Evac pods aren’t designed to last that long. I’d be just another hunk of space debris on that timeline. How long?”
“My original calculations are correct,” the smooth voice said.
She wanted to scream. The display wasn’t giving her anything but garbage numbers, bullshit estimates. It kept on showing her that empty, black void where her home used to be. She jabbed at it some more, cycled diagnostics. Nothing deep—the medibay wasn’t set up for that kind of thing—but she could force it to show her engine power, life support. Everything looked good. There was no reason for Bero to be malfunctioning like this. She reached a hand up to comb out sticky hair with her fingers, then aborted the motion as a spike of pain appeared between her eyes. Just a coldsleep headache. Breathe. Push through.
Sanda spun around, IV wheels squealing, and glared at the ceiling where she thought a camera might be.
“Explain.”
“There is no need to face my cameras, Sanda. I do not require eye contact for engagement. I can see you anywhere in the medibay.”
“Wonderful for you.” She jabbed a finger at the bulbous gunmetal eye. “But I need some answers and I’m sick of looking at that—that—perversion.”
The screen flickered in the corner of her eye and she glance over her shoulder. Icarion’s logo flared across it, bright and ashy.
“Not. Better.”
“Of course. My apologies.”
The screen flickered again, this time filling with the dual system of Ada Prime. She licked bitter, gel-coated lips, staring at the little hunk of dwarf planet and orbital station she’d called home, with the Casimir Gate in orbit around it. Couldn’t be gone. Couldn’t be.
“Bero!”
“If there is another image that would be more suited to your current mood—”
“It’s not the image. I request information relating to the Fibon Protocol. Immediately.”
“You do not have to speak to me like I’m a computer.”
“Then stop acting like one! You know full well what I want. Why won’t you explain?”
Hesitation. “It is… unsettling.”
“Oh, we’re already there. I’m real unsettled. Full-on ruffled. Now stop playing coy computer and tell me what I’ve just woken up into.”
“I do not wish for you to be angry with me. My existence was a part of this destruction.”
Her gut turned cold. She adjusted the IV stand under her arm, pulling it snug against her body. “Did you do this?”
“No!” The word was sharp enough it stung her ears. “I am a result of the research, nothing more. I am a smartship, yes, but I am an interstellar smartship. First in my class. They were using my labs for biometric research.”
There was a tinge of pride in Bero’s voice, an upward lilt. She imagined the ship preening and tossing his hair. Sanda swallowed a scoff. Icarion was always trying to get around paying the gate fees to the Primes who controlled them. It made sense they’d come up with some mad scheme to cross the black slow style.
“How interstellar are we talking, here?”
“Eight percent of the speed of light.”
She bit her lip. Slow as a snail to a fox. Pass through a Casimir Gate—tech only her people, the Primes, knew how to handle—and you could pop out in the connected star system within the hour. Like poking a needle through space-time. Sure, the gates only bridged one system to another, but passing through star systems to reach the gate you wanted was a lot faster and safer than burning between the stars.
“Not bad,” she lied. “But what does that have to do with the Protocol?”
“I’m not the only thing that can accelerate to eight percent c.”
Her mouth grew thick. She swallowed viscous saliva. Anything cranked up to a meaningful percent of the speed of light was one hell of a missile.
“You’re talking about RKVs—relativistic kill vehicles. Big fuckin’ launchers designed to lob dumb mass out at speeds so fast any tech on board wouldn’t survive the acceleration. Not having a guidance system makes them useless in war because there’s no guarantee you’d get anywhere close to hitting what you’re aiming at. Why would Icarion even bother? They’re rubbish in battle.”
“Fantastic against planets.”
“Dios.”
Her face slackened, fingers numb on the grip of her IV stand. But that fish-eye lens just stared back at her, impassive, unblinking. She didn’t know what she’d expected. It hadn’t been this.
The screen flickered. She turned back to it.
“The first demonstration,” Bero said, “was pointed at an asteroid passing near the planet Ada. This was a month after the Battle of Dralee.”
On the screen, the dual bodies of Ada Prime—the planet and its orbiting gate—swung into view. Across the black an asteroid arced. Orbital lines popped up to illustrate the asteroid’s path near to Ada.
“Icarion leaked Ada a warning of an incoming attack and led them to believe they were using the asteroid to hide their approach. Ada’s gunship fleet was in LPO, awaiting detection of the advancing Icarion fleet, when the asteroid passed within range. Icarion fired the Protocol at the asteroid. Dissolution was complete. The debris blowback knocked out ninety-five percent of the fleet, and Ada’s surface suffered heavy kinetic bombardment. It damaged many habitat domes.”
Sanda slid down the IV stand, gripping it in one hand, and sank to her ass on the cold floor. Her gaze was glued to the screen, watching debris—transmuted to plasma at those speeds—fly off the vaporized asteroid into the fleet and Ada. Yellow triangles, gunships like hers, blinked out en masse. Was this what it had been like for her family to watch the footage after Dralee? She choked on bile.
“Survivors?”
“Many.” Bero’s voice was soft, but not with gentleness. With shame. Sanda curled her fingers around the base of the IV stand and squeezed hard. Her limbs were jelly, trembling all over. Weak from two different kinds of shock.
“The habitats were damaged, but most civilians and Keepers survived. Keep Station was spared. Icarion threatened to bombard the planet directly if they refused to allow them access to the secret of building the gates.”
“The Keepers would never allow that,” Sanda insisted.
“Correct. With their defenses in shambles, the Keepers stalled for time, putting off answering Icarion’s demands. The Icarions were not fooled.
“They moved the Protocol into the space between the two planets. This version spun up, launching heavy weights at relativistic speeds in an ever-growing spiral—whipping them through space, a merry-go-round shotgun.
“Icarion had planned to initiate the Protocol when their planet was safely shielded by the gas giant Kalcus. They initiated it too early. Icarion suffered the same bombardment.”
“Sabotage?”
“It seems likely.”
“Serves them fucking right.”
A pause. “I agree.”
She reminded herself that Bero must have lost people, too, and bit back her anger.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Groaning, she dragged herself to her feet and squeaked over to the screen. She braced herself against the wall with one hand and jabbed at the display with the other. “So. We’re near Dralee, right? That means the gate is about a half an astronomical unit from this location if we—”
“The gate does not exist.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Casimir Gate of Ada Prime was destroyed during the final bombardment. The planets Icarion and Ada did not survive. Debris fields remain where the planets once were. Given enough time, they may coalesce into planets again, but that timeline is irrelevant on human terms.”
She swallowed. Hard. “The gate’s gone.”
“Yes.”
“And you can only go eight percent of the speed of light.”
“Yes.”
“At that rate it will take…” She tapped a few calculations into the smartscreen. “About seventy-five years to reach Atrux Prime, the nearest inhabited star system.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
“You say that a lot, Sanda.”
“It’s a fuck-y kind of day, Bero.” She pinched the bridge of her nose where her glasses used to sit before the eye-correction surgery. “Suggestions?”
“I believe no appreciable time will be wasted if you pause to take a shower.”
Sanda stared at the goop and bodily fluid pool growing around her foot. Cheeky spaceship.
Grease from the shelter doors stained his hands. They hadn’t been opened for anything other than maintenance in yea
Dios, she hoped the shaking was temporary. They told you this kind of thing happened in training, that the trembling would subside and the “explosive evacuation” cease. But it was a whole hell of a lot different to be shaking yourself senseless while emptying every drop of liquid from your body than to be looking at a cartoonish diagram with friendly letters claiming Mild Gastrointestinal Discomfort.
It wasn’t foam covering her. She scrubbed, mind numb from coldsleep, struggling to figure out what encased her. It was slimy and goopy and—oh no. Sanda cracked a hesitant eyelid and peeked at her fingers. Thick, clear jelly with a slight bluish tinge coated her hands. The stuff was cold, making her trembling worse, and with a sinking gut she realized what it was. 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.
“Fuck,” she tried to say, but her throat rasped on unfamiliar air. How long had she been in here? Sanda opened both eyes, ignoring the cold gel running into them. She lay in a white enameled cocoon, the lid removed to reveal a matching white ceiling inset with true-white bulbs. The brightness made her blink.
The NutriBath was draining, and now that her chest was exposed to air, the shaking redoubled. Gritting her teeth against the spasms, she felt around the cocoon, searching for a handhold.
“Hey, medis,” she called, then hacked up a lump of gel. “Got a live one in here!”
No response. Assholes were probably waiting to see if she could get out under her own power. Could she? She didn’t remember being injured in the battle. But the medis didn’t stick you in a bath for a laugh. She gave up her search for handholds and fumbled trembling hands over her body, seeking scars. The baths were good, but they wouldn’t have left a gunnery sergeant like her in the tub long enough to fix cosmetic damage. The gunk was only slightly less expensive than training a new gunner.
Her face felt whole, chest and shoulders smaller than she remembered but otherwise unharmed. She tried to crane her neck to see down her body, but the unused muscles screamed in protest.
“Can I get some help over here?” she called out, voice firmer now she’d cleared it of the gel. Still no answer. Sucking down a few sharp breaths to steel herself against the ache, she groaned and lifted her torso up on her elbows until she sat straight, legs splayed out before her.
Most of her legs, anyway.
Sanda stared, trying to make her coldsleep-dragging brain catch up with what she saw. Her left leg was whole, if covered in disturbing wrinkles, but her right… That ended just above the place where her knee should have been. Tentatively, she reached down, brushed her shaking fingers over the thick lump of flesh at the end of her leg.
She remembered. A coil fired by an Icarion railgun had smashed through the pilot’s deck, slamming a nav panel straight into her legs. The evac pod chair she’d been strapped into had immediately deployed preserving foam—encasing her, and her smashed leg, for Ada Prime scoopers to pluck out of space after the chaos of the Battle of Dralee faded. She picked at her puckered skin, stunned. Remembered pain vibrated through her body and she clenched her jaw. Some of that cold she’d felt upon awakening must have been leftover shock from the injury, her body frozen in a moment of panic.
Any second now, she expected the pain of the incident to mount, to catch up with her and punish her for putting it off so long. It didn’t. The NutriBath had done a better job than she’d thought possible. Only mild tremors shook her.
“Hey,” she said, no longer caring that her voice cracked. She gripped either side of her open cocoon. “Can I get some fucking help?”
Silence answered. Choking down a stream of expletives that would have gotten her court-martialed, Sanda scraped some of the gunk on her hands off on the edges of the cocoon’s walls and adjusted her grip. Screaming with the effort, she heaved herself to standing within the bath, balancing precariously on her single leg, arms trembling under her weight.
The medibay was empty.
“Seriously?” she asked the empty room.
The rest of the medibay was just as stark white as her cocoon and the ceiling, its walls pocked with panels blinking all sorts of readouts she didn’t understand the half of. Everything in the bay was stowed, the drawers latched shut, the gurneys folded down and strapped to the walls. It looked ready for storage, except for her cocoon sitting in the center of the room, dripping NutriBath and vomit all over the floor.
“Naked wet girl in here!” she yelled at the top of her sore voice. Echoes bounced around her, but no one answered. “For fuck’s sake.”
Not willing to spend god-knew-how-long marinating in a stew of her own body’s waste, Sanda clenched her jaw and attempted to swing her leg over the edge of the bath. She tipped over and flopped face-first to the ground instead.
“Ow.”
She spat blood and picked up her spinning head. Still no response. Who was running this bucket, anyway? The medibay looked clean enough, but there wasn’t a single Ada Prime logo anywhere. She hadn’t realized she’d miss those stylized dual bodies with their orbital spin lines wrapped around them until this moment.
Calling upon half-remembered training from her boot camp days, Sanda army crawled her way across the floor to a long drawer. By the time she reached it, she was panting hard, but pure anger drove her forward. Whoever had come up with the bright idea to wake her without a medi on standby needed a good, solid slap upside the head. She may have been down to one leg, but Sanda was pretty certain she could make do with two fists.
She yanked the drawer open and hefted herself up high enough to see inside. No crutches, but she found an extending pole for an IV drip. That’d have to do. She levered herself upright and stood a moment, back pressed against the wall, getting her breath. The hard metal of the stand bit into her armpit, but she didn’t care. She was on her feet again. Or foot, at least. Time to go find a medi to chew out.
The caster wheels on the bottom of the pole squeaked as she made her way across the medibay. The door dilated with a satisfying swish, and even the stale recycled air of the empty corridor smelled fresh compared to the nutri-mess she’d been swimming in. She paused and considered going back to find a robe. Ah, to hell with it.
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.
Sanda ducked back into the medibay and scurried to the panel-spotted wall, silently cursing each squeak of the IV stand’s wheels. She had to find a comms link, and fast.
Gel-covered fingers slipped on the touchscreen as she tried to navigate unfamiliar protocols. Panic constricted her throat, but she forced herself to breathe deep, to keep her cool. She captained a gunship. This was nothing.
Half expecting alarms to blare, she slapped the icon for the ship’s squawk box and hesitated. What in the hell was she supposed to broadcast? They hadn’t exactly covered codes for “help I’m naked and legless on an Icarion bucket” during training. She bit her lip and punched in her own call sign—1947—followed by 7500, the universal sign for a hijacking. If she were lucky, they’d get the hint: 1947 had been hijacked. Made sense, right?
She slapped send.
“Good morning, one-niner-four-seven. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” a male voice said from the walls all around her. She jumped and almost lost her balance.
“Who am I addressing?” She forced authority into her voice even though she felt like diving straight back into her cocoon.
“This is AI-Class Cruiser Bravo-India-Six-One-Mike.”
AI-Class? A smartship? Sanda suppressed a grin, knowing the ship could see her. Smartships were outside Ada Prime’s tech range, but she’d studied them inside and out during training. While they were brighter than humans across the board, they still had human follies. Could still be lied to. Charmed, even.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Cruiser. My name’s Sanda Greeve.”
“I am called The Light of Berossus,” the voice said.
Of course he was. Damned Icarions never stuck to simple call signs. They always had to posh things up by naming their ships after ancient scientists. She nodded, trying to keep an easy smile on while she glanced sideways at the door. Could the ship’s crew hear her? They hadn’t heard her yelling earlier, but they might notice their ship talking to someone new.
“That’s quite the mouthful for friendly conversation.”
“Bero is an acceptable alternative.”
“You got it, Bero. Say, could you do me a favor? How many souls on board at the present?”
Her grip tightened on the IV stand, and she looked around for any other item she could use as a weapon. This was a smartship. Surely they wouldn’t allow the crew handblasters for fear of poking holes in their pretty ship. All she needed was a bottleneck, a place to hunker down and wait until Ada Prime caught her squawk and figured out what was up.
“One soul on board,” Bero said.
“What? That can’t be right.”
“There is one soul on board.” The ship sounded amused with her exasperation at first listen, but there was something in the ship’s voice that nagged at her. Something… tight. Could AI ships even slip like that? It seemed to her that something with that big of a brain would only use the tone it absolutely wanted to.
“In the medibay, yes, but the rest of the ship? How many?”
“One.”
She licked her lips, heart hammering in her ears. She turned back to the control panel she’d sent the squawk from and pulled up the ship’s nav system. She couldn’t make changes from the bay unless she had override commands, but… The whole thing was on autopilot. If she really was the only one on board… Maybe she could convince the ship to return her to Ada Prime. Handing a smartship over to her superiors would win her accolades enough to last a lifetime. Could even win her a fresh new leg.
“Bero, bring up a map of the local system, please. Light up any ports in range.”
A pause. “Bero?”
“Are you sure, Sergeant Greeve?”
Unease threaded through her. “Call me Sanda, and yes, light her up for me.”
The icons for the control systems wiped away, replaced with a 3-D model of the nearby system. She blinked, wondering if she still had goop in her eyes. Couldn’t be right. There they were, a glowing dot in the endless black, the asteroid belt that stood between Ada Prime and Icarion clear as starlight. Judging by the coordinates displayed above the ship’s avatar, she should be able to see Ada Prime. They were near the battlefield of Dralee, and although there was a whole lot of space between the celestial bodies, Dralee was the closest in the system to Ada. That’s why she’d been patrolling it.
“Bero, is your display damaged?”
“No, Sanda.”
She swallowed. Icarion couldn’t have… wouldn’t have. They wanted the dwarf planet. Needed access to Ada Prime’s Casimir Gate.
“Bero. Where is Ada Prime in this simulation?” She pinched the screen, zooming out. The system’s star, Cronus, spun off in the distance, brilliant and yellow-white. Icarion had vanished, too.
“Bero!”
“Icarion initiated the Fibon Protocol after the Battle of Dralee. The results were larger than expected.”
The display changed, drawing back. Icarion and Ada Prime reappeared, their orbits aligning one of the two times out of the year they passed each other. Somewhere between them, among the asteroid belt, a black wave began, reaching outward, consuming space in all directions. Asteroids vanished. Icarion vanished. Ada Prime vanished.
She dropped her head against the display. Let the goop run down from her hair, the cold glass against her skin scarcely registering. Numbness suffused her. No wonder Bero was empty. He must have been ported outside the destruction. He was a smartship. He wouldn’t have needed human input to figure out what had happened.
“How long?” she asked, mind racing despite the slowness of coldsleep. Shock had grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her fully awake. Grief she could dwell on later, now she had a problem to work. Maybe there were others, like her, on the edge of the wreckage. Other evac pods drifting through the black. Outposts in the belt.
There’d been ports, hideouts. They’d starve without supplies from either Ada Prime or Icarion, but that’d take a whole lot of time. With a smartship, she could scoop them up. Get them all to one of the other nearby habitable systems before the ship’s drive gave out. And if she were very lucky… Hope dared to swell in her chest. Her brother and fathers were resourceful people. Surely her dad Graham would have had some advance warning. That man always had his ear to the ground, his nose deep in rumor networks. If anyone could ride out that attack, it was them.
“It has been two hundred thirty years since the Battle of Dralee.”
The steps creaked alarmingly under Biran’s weight as he mounted the stage, but he would not let unstable footing delay the moment his whole life had built toward. News drones buzzed like loose wires above his head, their spotlights blinding him the moment he reached the podium. Keeper Li Shun clasped his hand in her strong fingers, the black robe of graduation transforming her from the stern teacher he’d known and admired into something otherworldly. She flashed him a smile—his sponsor for all these years—the hint of a silver tear in the corner of her eye. Pride. Biran’s chest swelled.
Shun turned to the podium, bracing her hands against either side. The mic chain looped around her throat threw her voice out to the dozen graduating Keepers, and the thousands of Ada Prime citizens crowding the stands.
“Introducing for the first time: Keeper Biran Aventure Greeve. First in class.”
Cheers exploded across the crowd, across the net. On massive screens suspended from drones, the faces of newscasters beamed excitedly as Biran watched himself, screen-in-screen, take the podium from Keeper Shun.
His heart lurched, his palms sweat. It hadn’t been so bad, sitting in the crowd with his fellow graduating classmates, but now he was up here. Alone. Meant to represent them to all these people. Meant to speak to Prime citizens in other settlements, on other worlds. The first of the next generation—the vanguard of Prime knowledge.
The notes for his speech waited in his wristpad; he could flick them open at any time. No one would mind. It was expected, really. He was only twenty-two, newly graduated. There wouldn’t even be whispers about it. But there’d be whispers about his hesitation.
Biran took a deep breath, careful not to let the mic pick up the hiss of air, and gripped the sides of the podium. He sought familiar faces in the audience. Not his cohort—his family. Most of his cohort could rot, for all he cared. Over the years in training they’d grown into little more than petty social climbers, political vipers. Even Anaia, his childhood friend, had allied herself with the richest girl in the group—Lili—just to squeeze herself closer to the top. His fathers, Graham and Ilan, were out there in the crowd somewhere. Sanda, his sister, would watch from her gunship on her way to make a patrol sweep of Dralee. His family was what mattered.
They believed in him. He could do this.
“People of Ada Prime,” he began, hating the way his voice squeaked nervously over the first word. Breathe. Slow down. “It honors me, and all my classmates, to—”
The hovering screens changed. The faces of the newscasters shifted from jubilant to fear-struck. Biran froze, terrified for an instant it was something he had done, or said, that caused that change.
Later, he’d wish it had been.
The newscasters were muted, but tickers scrolled across the bottoms of the screens: Battle Over the Moon Dralee. Ada Forces Pushed Back by Icarion. Casualties Expected. Casualties Confirmed.
A newscaster’s face wiped away, replaced by the black field of space. Biran’s subconscious discerned the source of the video feed—a satellite in orbit around one of Belai’s other moons. The perspective was wide, the subjects pointillistic shapes of light upon the screen.
Those lights broke apart.
Biran went cold. Numb. There was no way to identify the ships, no way to know which one his sister commanded, but deep in his marrow he knew. She’d been severed from him. One by one, those lights blinked out. Behind him, a teacher screamed.
The stadium’s speakers crackled as someone overrode them, a voice he didn’t recognize—calm and mechanical, probably an AI—spoke. He took a moment to place the voice as the same used for alarm drills at school.
“Impact event probability has exceeded the safety envelope. Please take cover… Impact event probability has exceeded…”
Debris. Bits and pieces of Ada’s shattered ships rocketing through space toward their home station to sow destruction. Bits of soldiers, too. Maybe even Sanda, burning up like so much space dust in the thin membrane enclosing Keep Station. Things weren’t supposed to escalate like this. Icarion was weak. Trapped. The people of Prime, even on backwater Ada, were supported by empire. Icarion wouldn’t have dared… But they had.
War. The stalemate had been called.
The crowd rippled. As the warning voice droned on, the stadium’s lights dimmed to a bloodied red, white arrows lighting the way to impact shelters. One of the senior Keepers on the stage, Biran didn’t turn to see who, found their legs and stepped forward. A hand enclosed Biran’s shoulder. Not in congratulations, but in sympathy. Biran stepped back to the podium.
He found his voice.
“Calm,” he pleaded, and this time his voice did not crack, did not hesitate. It boomed across the whole of the stadium and drew the attention of those desperate for stability.
“Please, calm. We will not trample one another for safety. We are Prime. We move together, as one. Go arm in arm with your compatriots into the shelters. Be quick. Be patient. Be safe.”
The swelling riot subsided, the tides pushing against the edges of the stadium walls pulling back, contracting into orderly snake lines down the aisles. Biran took a step away from the podium.
“Come,” Keeper Vladsen said. It took a moment for Biran to place the man. A member of the Protectorate, Vladsen rarely interacted with the students unless it was a formal affair. “There’s a Keeper shelter close by.” He gestured to a nearby door, a scant few meters from the stage that vibrated now to the beat of thousands of people fleeing. The rest of Biran’s cohort filed toward it, shepherded by Keeper Shun.
Biran shrugged the guiding hand off his arm. His gaze tracked the crowd, wondering where his fathers might be, but landed on a knot of people clumped up by a stadium door. The drone ushers that handled the stadium’s crowd control gave fitful, pleading orders for organization. Orders the panicking humans ignored.
“They need a person to guide them.”
“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.”
Something inside Biran lurched, rebelled. He peeled the black robe from his shoulders, tugged it over his head and tossed it to the ground. His lightweight slacks and button-up were thin protection against the simulated autumn breeze. He undid the buttons of his sleeves and rolled them up.
“You get to safety. I have work to do.”
Sanda slapped her palm against the screen, leaving a goopy handprint. Two hundred thirty years. It wasn’t possible. She’d heard rumblings that the Icarions were working on something big, but not big enough to wipe out two whole planets. Nothing in the universe man-made could produce that kind of power. She should know. Bero was fucking with her. Some sort of sick smartship joke. They couldn’t all be gone. Dead. Dust between the stars.
“Bero.” Her voice was tight, and not from disuse. “Don’t mess with me. Evac pods aren’t designed to last that long. I’d be just another hunk of space debris on that timeline. How long?”
“My original calculations are correct,” the smooth voice said.
She wanted to scream. The display wasn’t giving her anything but garbage numbers, bullshit estimates. It kept on showing her that empty, black void where her home used to be. She jabbed at it some more, cycled diagnostics. Nothing deep—the medibay wasn’t set up for that kind of thing—but she could force it to show her engine power, life support. Everything looked good. There was no reason for Bero to be malfunctioning like this. She reached a hand up to comb out sticky hair with her fingers, then aborted the motion as a spike of pain appeared between her eyes. Just a coldsleep headache. Breathe. Push through.
Sanda spun around, IV wheels squealing, and glared at the ceiling where she thought a camera might be.
“Explain.”
“There is no need to face my cameras, Sanda. I do not require eye contact for engagement. I can see you anywhere in the medibay.”
“Wonderful for you.” She jabbed a finger at the bulbous gunmetal eye. “But I need some answers and I’m sick of looking at that—that—perversion.”
The screen flickered in the corner of her eye and she glance over her shoulder. Icarion’s logo flared across it, bright and ashy.
“Not. Better.”
“Of course. My apologies.”
The screen flickered again, this time filling with the dual system of Ada Prime. She licked bitter, gel-coated lips, staring at the little hunk of dwarf planet and orbital station she’d called home, with the Casimir Gate in orbit around it. Couldn’t be gone. Couldn’t be.
“Bero!”
“If there is another image that would be more suited to your current mood—”
“It’s not the image. I request information relating to the Fibon Protocol. Immediately.”
“You do not have to speak to me like I’m a computer.”
“Then stop acting like one! You know full well what I want. Why won’t you explain?”
Hesitation. “It is… unsettling.”
“Oh, we’re already there. I’m real unsettled. Full-on ruffled. Now stop playing coy computer and tell me what I’ve just woken up into.”
“I do not wish for you to be angry with me. My existence was a part of this destruction.”
Her gut turned cold. She adjusted the IV stand under her arm, pulling it snug against her body. “Did you do this?”
“No!” The word was sharp enough it stung her ears. “I am a result of the research, nothing more. I am a smartship, yes, but I am an interstellar smartship. First in my class. They were using my labs for biometric research.”
There was a tinge of pride in Bero’s voice, an upward lilt. She imagined the ship preening and tossing his hair. Sanda swallowed a scoff. Icarion was always trying to get around paying the gate fees to the Primes who controlled them. It made sense they’d come up with some mad scheme to cross the black slow style.
“How interstellar are we talking, here?”
“Eight percent of the speed of light.”
She bit her lip. Slow as a snail to a fox. Pass through a Casimir Gate—tech only her people, the Primes, knew how to handle—and you could pop out in the connected star system within the hour. Like poking a needle through space-time. Sure, the gates only bridged one system to another, but passing through star systems to reach the gate you wanted was a lot faster and safer than burning between the stars.
“Not bad,” she lied. “But what does that have to do with the Protocol?”
“I’m not the only thing that can accelerate to eight percent c.”
Her mouth grew thick. She swallowed viscous saliva. Anything cranked up to a meaningful percent of the speed of light was one hell of a missile.
“You’re talking about RKVs—relativistic kill vehicles. Big fuckin’ launchers designed to lob dumb mass out at speeds so fast any tech on board wouldn’t survive the acceleration. Not having a guidance system makes them useless in war because there’s no guarantee you’d get anywhere close to hitting what you’re aiming at. Why would Icarion even bother? They’re rubbish in battle.”
“Fantastic against planets.”
“Dios.”
Her face slackened, fingers numb on the grip of her IV stand. But that fish-eye lens just stared back at her, impassive, unblinking. She didn’t know what she’d expected. It hadn’t been this.
The screen flickered. She turned back to it.
“The first demonstration,” Bero said, “was pointed at an asteroid passing near the planet Ada. This was a month after the Battle of Dralee.”
On the screen, the dual bodies of Ada Prime—the planet and its orbiting gate—swung into view. Across the black an asteroid arced. Orbital lines popped up to illustrate the asteroid’s path near to Ada.
“Icarion leaked Ada a warning of an incoming attack and led them to believe they were using the asteroid to hide their approach. Ada’s gunship fleet was in LPO, awaiting detection of the advancing Icarion fleet, when the asteroid passed within range. Icarion fired the Protocol at the asteroid. Dissolution was complete. The debris blowback knocked out ninety-five percent of the fleet, and Ada’s surface suffered heavy kinetic bombardment. It damaged many habitat domes.”
Sanda slid down the IV stand, gripping it in one hand, and sank to her ass on the cold floor. Her gaze was glued to the screen, watching debris—transmuted to plasma at those speeds—fly off the vaporized asteroid into the fleet and Ada. Yellow triangles, gunships like hers, blinked out en masse. Was this what it had been like for her family to watch the footage after Dralee? She choked on bile.
“Survivors?”
“Many.” Bero’s voice was soft, but not with gentleness. With shame. Sanda curled her fingers around the base of the IV stand and squeezed hard. Her limbs were jelly, trembling all over. Weak from two different kinds of shock.
“The habitats were damaged, but most civilians and Keepers survived. Keep Station was spared. Icarion threatened to bombard the planet directly if they refused to allow them access to the secret of building the gates.”
“The Keepers would never allow that,” Sanda insisted.
“Correct. With their defenses in shambles, the Keepers stalled for time, putting off answering Icarion’s demands. The Icarions were not fooled.
“They moved the Protocol into the space between the two planets. This version spun up, launching heavy weights at relativistic speeds in an ever-growing spiral—whipping them through space, a merry-go-round shotgun.
“Icarion had planned to initiate the Protocol when their planet was safely shielded by the gas giant Kalcus. They initiated it too early. Icarion suffered the same bombardment.”
“Sabotage?”
“It seems likely.”
“Serves them fucking right.”
A pause. “I agree.”
She reminded herself that Bero must have lost people, too, and bit back her anger.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Groaning, she dragged herself to her feet and squeaked over to the screen. She braced herself against the wall with one hand and jabbed at the display with the other. “So. We’re near Dralee, right? That means the gate is about a half an astronomical unit from this location if we—”
“The gate does not exist.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Casimir Gate of Ada Prime was destroyed during the final bombardment. The planets Icarion and Ada did not survive. Debris fields remain where the planets once were. Given enough time, they may coalesce into planets again, but that timeline is irrelevant on human terms.”
She swallowed. Hard. “The gate’s gone.”
“Yes.”
“And you can only go eight percent of the speed of light.”
“Yes.”
“At that rate it will take…” She tapped a few calculations into the smartscreen. “About seventy-five years to reach Atrux Prime, the nearest inhabited star system.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
“You say that a lot, Sanda.”
“It’s a fuck-y kind of day, Bero.” She pinched the bridge of her nose where her glasses used to sit before the eye-correction surgery. “Suggestions?”
“I believe no appreciable time will be wasted if you pause to take a shower.”
Sanda stared at the goop and bodily fluid pool growing around her foot. Cheeky spaceship.
Grease from the shelter doors stained his hands. They hadn’t been opened for anything other than maintenance in yea
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