Fire strike, p.3
Fire Strike, page 3
And if she happened to find the one whose fingerprint or breath would unlock her new tablet, even better. She should’ve used her newer, unbreakable cords and kept him around until she was sure she wouldn’t need him. One of the first rules of the settler handbook was ‘all resources are good resources.’ And he was big enough that she wouldn’t’ve had to feed him for a while.
Her winding journey to the shallows took a little longer than she’d expected. There was a mining crew working outside their usual pattern, almost as if they were more desperate than her for resources. But the ring of their heavy tools on hard stone echoed so far it was easy enough to avoid them for the quieter path.
From one of the cracks in the rock, she popped out into the inhabited tunnels. None of the miners would be able to fit through that slot, she thought smugly. So they’d never expect anyone else to emerge from there either.
She pried the nearest diode out of its socket. She wouldn’t take so many as to leave them completely in the dark. Not because she cared if they stubbed their faces in the dark, but she didn’t want them to become too suspicious.
Life in the tunnels wasn’t always easy, but it would be much harder if angry, broken-nosed miners were looking for her. It was one thing to be haunted by gremlins, something else entirely to hunt them.
But the change in schedule in the tunnels was making her more than a little wary. Down in the solid black rock, change could be catastrophically bad.
Since she was here, maybe she’d poke around some more. Maybe she’d even sneak into the hydroponics bay. She’d only been there once when the hollow had appeared in her seismographic readings. Though she’d read about gardens and seen images, she hadn’t been able to understand. So when she’d peeked in, she had only vaguely known what to expect, but… It made her heartbeat too fast, all that falling water and greenery. She didn’t like it. They were trying to turn her quiet, dead moon into something it wasn’t.
But after that strange flood recently, she wondered where all the water came from. The only place she knew with that much extracted dihydrogen monoxide was the garden. Maybe it had been emptied and was gone now.
That would be for the best. She didn’t want Ydro-Down to be so changed that her mothers couldn’t find their way back.
But while she waited for them to come back for her, she’d stock up on more of those tasty nutrient lumps.
She slipped silently through the halls, liberating a diode here and there. She even found a hard hat that someone had left in a doorway, probably intending to retrieve later. Such finds were rare, so even though she only had one head, she tucked the hat under her arm with an almost silent grunt of satisfaction.
When she realized she wasn’t far from the room where the food lumps came from, she decided to swing past. Although the door had always been locked in a way she hadn’t been able to access, it seemed worthwhile to try again when the miners’ usual patterns seemed so disrupted. Enough of those food lumps would keep her alive until her mothers returned.
To her delight, the food room wasn’t just unlocked, the door was wide open. What an opportunity! She would not go hungry for a turn at least.
She stepped into the dark chamber, yanking out her respirator to inhale deeply. Food smell. She’d never had so much in one place that it left an odor, like an etching on rock. Saliva pooled in the hinges of her jaw.
Keeping her visor on, she scrutinized the wall panel with its strange array of levers and spigots. A dispenser of some kind. Clearly powered down. She grumbled to herself. To be so close… She tapped a few buttons carefully. Couldn’t linger, not when she was so far away from her safe places. But the lure of close food was irresistible. She poked at another button.
Bright white light flooded the room, and her precisely calibrated visor exploded in a blinding glare.
With a screech of surprise and pain, she knocked the visor off her face. But the glare didn’t diminish. Her bare eyes were almost as sensitive as the visor.
She kept both hands over her eyes, leaving just the slightest space between her fingers to peer out. It didn’t help. Tears spilled from her shocked eyes, and what little she could see of the room through her fingers and the hot welling wavered like the mirages that sometimes appeared in the deeps.
With her sense of direction thwarted by the all-consuming light, she whimpered.
“Not so much a Q-ghost as a rat creeping around my kitchen.”
She slammed the little gap between her fingers closed, as if that would make the voice go away. It’d been so long since she heard any voice but her own, she recognized this one immediately.
The miner she’d caught in the deep tunnels, whose toys she’d taken. How had he caught her?
He said something more, but the water from her eyes seemed to wash through the rest of her in waves of panic and rage, and his words flowed together, as devastating as the flood.
As out-of-control as a pebble in that rush, she fled blankly ahead of the mocking tone. Where was the door? The tunnels only had two ways, three at most, but this chamber was suddenly a terrifyingly emptiness of space.
“Hey, watch out—”
Her knees connected sharply with an obstacle, and she flew forward. She reached out to catch herself and slammed into something else. She cried out at the bruising pain in her wrists. She rolled, taking the rest of the fall on her shoulder.
Once, while traipsing along a familiar route, she’d accidentally stepped into a newly opened crevice. For a heart-stopping moment, before she got wedged in the slot and scrambled out again, she’d wondered if she would just keep dropping.
Somehow, she knew this fall would take her to even stranger places.
She rolled to her knees, determined to scramble away. In which direction, it didn’t matter. But a hard hand between her shoulder blades pressed her to the ground. Under her cheek, the floor was smoother than anything she’d ever touched.
Grunting, she heaved backward against the suffocating weight.
“Don’t fight me.” The voice was so close to her ear, too close. No one had been this close to her since her mothers had put her in the hole.
They had done everything they could to save her, left her the tools to teach herself to keep living. She wasn’t going to let some rock-headed miner take her things.
Or take back the things she’d taken from him.
Letting out the startled breath she’d sucked in when he tackled her, she went flat as an algal mat. And as slick.
She wriggled out from underneath him, leaving her outer coat behind as she scrabbled to a crouch.
Well, it was his coat anyway—
Long fingers latched around her ankle—stronger than the old cord she used to bind him, unfair!—and yanked her down again.
With a screech, she slammed her free boot backward at his hold. Ruthlessly, he grabbed her other foot and dragged her toward him. The smooth floor gave her nothing to grab onto so she lunged for the bench that had tripped her. At least her vision was clearing a little…
Only enough to glimpse the angry contortion of his mouth as he yelled something at her. Words words words. So many swatting and clutching at her, like his hands.
When she rolled to face him, twisting her legs in a knot, he let loose one of her ankles, staring at her. “You’re just a girl.”
Through her tears, his face was smeared and ghastly, and she put every gram of muscle into her kick.
He grabbed for her again, but her boot smashed his fist into his nose, and he fell back, cursing. He should punch himself for trying to take her stuff.
She flipped to a squat and launched herself toward her memory of the doorway, leaving behind the coat and her visor but also the angry miner.
Her palms hit the unyielding door.
Of course he’d locked her in. How unfair he played! She’d only strung a garroting wire to stop his pursuit, not a whole locked door!
Unable to slow her momentum, she bashed into the barrier and knocked herself out cold.
Chapter 4
Holding one hand over his gushing bloody nose, Arjay approached the unmoving gremlin cautiously. Not a gremlin, a girl. But one with the kick of twice-distilled sunshine alky.
Had he killed her? Shame knifed through him, crueler than any blow she’d dealt him. He’d known the little thief would creep out again sometime, and the sensor he’d left in the discarded helmet had warned him of her presence. But he’d meant to contain an intruder, not bully a young girl. If he’d killed her over a few nutrient bars, he’d never forgive himself.
He hadn’t even realized there was anything left of himself to forgive.
Dropping to one knee beside her prone body, he shoved aside the dismay—whether at the discovery that she was a delicate female or his own long-missing morals he wasn’t sure. More to the point, Gavyn would be upset. The rebel leader had mentioned the lost miners before, wondering if they could be recruited for the insurrection. To Arjay, though, the stories sounded like wistful legend, the sort of thing humanity invented to give itself dawning hope or darkest shivers depending on what time of day or night it was.
Ydro-Down had a fast rotation, and the tales of the lost miners oscillated wildly between plucky but unlucky immigrants on a brave new world and feral mutants with a taste for their fellow humans.
Arjay studied her. When the gremlin had attacked him in the deeps, the creature had seemed weirdly contoured and preternaturally kinetic. Now that she’d molted her outer layers in her escape attempt, he realized the anomalous shape and movement was mostly bulky, ill-fitting clothes over a short, scrawny body. The patchwork coveralls she wore underneath were still too big but at least allowed confirmation that she was human.
Even more cautiously than before, not entirely convinced that she wouldn’t bite a chunk out of him, he leaned forward to press his fingertips to the side of her throat. Beneath warm, gritty skin, her pulse pounded against his touch.
With a thin mist of blood, he let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. She was alive.
And maybe not as young as he’d first imagined. Still scrawny though. And now with a red bump rising on her forehead.
Well, she’d knocked him out, so they were even. Maybe the universe understood fairness after all.
But what was he going to do with her? After Jashanna had explained there was no way to track down the gremlin, Arjay had told Gavyn about the missing crawler. The foreman had been philosophical about the loss.
“At least you came back,” he’d told Arjay. “Need your brain more than a bot.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a long time.”
A quirk at the corner of Gavyn’s serious mouth would’ve been a belly laugh on another man. “Oh, we appreciate the body you’ve put on the line for us too. Now if we could just unearth your heart…”
Arjay shuddered. “Not for all the Q in Ydro-Down, hun.”
He’d always given the best of himself to his work. That was how he’d been told he’d get to the top. Instead, his diligence and devotion had gotten him buried in the mines. From now on, he was saving his love for his bots.
Speaking of which, where was his little bot? Had this scrapnapper broken it up for parts?
Annoyance sparked through him as he lifted her. He hadn’t actually expected to catch her. She’d seemed too much a creature of the deeps. But now, all the niggling aggravations of missing tech and supplies that he’d had to deal with over the turns suddenly had a face.
A pointy-chinned, wide-cheeked face, streaked with more dirt than any respectable hard rock miner would approve. Though she’d lost the mono-lens shield in their struggle, he hadn’t gotten a good look at her eyes. She’d obviously been overcome by the lights when he’d only meant to show her that she was caught dead to rights.
Now dead to the world. She weighed practically nothing in his arms compared to the rock he’d hauled or even a rebuilt crawler. When he peered down at her, guilt choked him like clots of the blood dripping down the back of his throat. He’d done terrible things since being sold off AlpesPrimus, broken every code he’d ever claimed to uphold. But he’d never hurt anyone weaker than him. Every blow he’d ever struck was aimed upward.
He squelched the shame as he’d learned to crush every softer emotion. She was a thief and a mugger, not to mention a security risk to this planetoid. And he of all people knew what happened when petty corruption was allowed to fester.
Once, he’d failed the people of AlpesPrimus, including his mentor and his spouses, with his naïve idealism that he could fix the world with the right code. He would not let the rebels on Ydro-Down fall victim to the brutality of hope.
Hardening his sympathetic inclinations, he let himself into the outpost’s med bay. The small, understocked room was quiet. The medic had been exiled on the overseer’s shuttle along with everyone else who wouldn’t or couldn’t support their cause. They’d banished some bad people, including the guards who had survived the uprising, but they’d also lost some skilled workers—ore processors and cargo handlers from the surface and trained push jockeys on the space station who handled the delicate qubition. The medic had been a spy for QueCorp, but at least he’d had training. More, he’d had experience dealing with the harms caused by management’s relentless push for more product.
Would Gavyn be able to treat his people better and still make Ydro-Down self-supporting?
Or would they all end up reverting to gibbering cave trolls like this girl?
Arjay grabbed the restraints that were used on miners suffering from the violent hallucinations of Q exposure. He wasn’t going to let her wreck this place—or steal it.
But after seeing how she’d reacted to bright lights, he kept the room dim as he washed off the blood and prodded at his nose. It had been broken before, but not this time. Not wanting to waste supplies but not wanting to bleed everywhere either, he cut only the smallest strip off a hemostatic bandage and shoved the ends up his nostrils. He smoothed another piece over the contusion on her forehead to reduce the hematoma.
Next, he went through her pack. Diodes she’d stolen, a half-filled canteen of water, more trash fit only for the recycling hopper, and one strange device.
He prodded the gadget, a battered box no bigger than his two thumbs together, but could find no port or other access. He ran the med scanner over it. The scanner was one of the more advanced pieces of technology that management had paid for, mostly to justify not having sufficient medical staff despite the high-risk nature of mining. But he got nothing.
Literally nothing. The scanner didn’t see it.
Intrigued, he found a scalpel and pried at a faint seam on one end of the box. Inside was nestled a miniscule capsule of qubition. Now the scanner beeped an exposure alarm, but it had ignored the box before.
Curiosity swelled to amazement. The device was a personal anti-sensor shield powered by the anarchic energies of raw Q. The same characteristics that stabilized the sleeting forces spacetime into a traversable wormhole were twisted at this smaller scale into a practical invisibility, at least to the sensors he had here. No wonder she’d been able to sneak around Ydro-Down unnoticed. As long as no person actually saw her, to the electronic security eyes of the compound, she was a ghost.
An astonishing and extravagant use of the rare mineral. And he’d never seen its like. Where had she gotten it? And did she have more? Ydro-Down needed ideas and commodities for its future beyond natural resource extraction.
Maybe she wasn’t just a simple scrapnapper.
Carefully setting aside the device, he sanitized again before reaching for the med scanner. Although he could guess easily enough why his prisoner was unconscious, he might as well take the opportunity to make sure she wasn’t carrying any surveillance devices or weapons that he couldn’t see.
A rattle from the med bed behind him warned him at least one of the scan passes would no longer be necessary. She was awake.
He glanced over his shoulder at her, making no move to approach. All her limbs were taut against the hold of the restraints, and the woven metal bands creaked at the strain. He should be glad she hadn’t landed more of those kicks; that scrawny body was stronger than seemed likely.
Like her glare.
And not just any glare—a clear, crystalline violet flash not found in even the purest samplings of any gemstone anywhere in the Salty Way. That hue was a cosmetic enhancement, and nothing she could’ve gotten on Ydro-Down. Someone had paid for that look; likely she’d been enhanced in utero by someone with the credits and the whimsy to give their offspring a pretty gaze.
Had his spouses made any alterations to their child? Gemma would’ve been practical, looking into genetic markers for robustness and intelligence, but Chen might’ve chosen purple eyes. They’d certainly been left with enough credits for anything they needed or wanted.
Yanking the hem-stat out of his nose, Arjay winced at the sting.
From a safe distance, he aimed the scanner at his prisoner. He ignored her glare while the laser light tracked her form from snarled dark hair to oversized boots. Though it beeped a warning that he needed to do a deeper probe for a full analysis, the baseline read clear.
“You bumped your head,” he told her, probably unnecessarily. “But the scan says you’ll be fine.”
“You locked me in,” she hissed. “You took me.”
Even without the vocoder, there was a strange hitch to her inflections, as if she was dredging up words she hadn’t spoken aloud in a very long time.
Maybe she hadn’t. “How many more of you are down there?” He crossed his arms over his chest, staring down at her sternly. “Be truthful or I’ll lock them up too.”
That purple glare flashed at him. “Ghost walks alone.”
He wasn’t sure he believed her, but she was the only one he had, so he’d start there. “Where’s my crawler?”
“Mine now.” She smirked at him.
