‘That’s how war often is. Most everywhere is peaceful and normal, but some spots are pure hell.’

  This was a peek into the unquiet spots.

  Which meant she was in the right place. She did not want to sit this one out, and she definitely did not want to be quiet.

  They passed the room’s second door, catching another glimpse of soot-scorched walls and half-melted pre-fab collapsing like strings of wax from the ceiling and walls. Someone else passed, ducking in, a dark smear of blood on the outside of their uniform’s arm as they carried a kit under a bandaged hand.

  Calm resolve came over her. Like a shift inside her mind. She felt a touch of the ocean, the branches of the Hive Mind filtering in. Felt a small zap.

  Everything focused. Just a bit.

  Tylanus looked back at her for a few seconds, dark eyes slipping over hers with a slight furrow to his brows. Then, he turned back around.

  A few corridors and a security elevator later, they entered the heart of the command post.

  The war room looked like the bridge of a ship. Computers and life support droned in the backdrop, drowned out by the bustle of organized activity. The command square in the center had a bevy of desks and people, with lines painted for officers and techs to deliver reports and supplies without interfering with the organization.

  A table in the center held five different holopoint maps and models. Only half of the command crew sat, the rest mostly leaning on the backs of chairs. She spotted Steudel standing at the center of the table, staring at a holopoint in front of her. The dimness of the center-room combined with the anemic glow of the holopoint put a dark pall on her skin, making her look particularly dire. Behind her, the comms stations was a loosely packed array of feeds and wired comms, manned by a small fleet of people.

  A tinge of smoke hung in the air here, too, and one comm station sat dead and blackened, its dashboards and projector fields cracked and scorched from a blaze that had not spread.

  Several more people, including Steudel, had blood smeared over parts of their uniforms. She still had some on her neck, looking like it had rubbed there from her collar.

  She looked exhausted.

  The armada of coffee mugs on the table attested to how everyone in the room felt.

  Someone approached her side. She leaned in to listen to them, then her gaze flicked up to where Soo-jin stood. An eyebrow lifted when she saw Nyland, and the flatness of her expression became distinctly resigned.

  She beckoned them to approach.

  “Captain Dokgo. Good to see you on your feet. I was sorry to hear about Commander Baik. Are you all right?”

  All right? No, she was not ‘all right.’ She was so far from it, she’d come back around its other side like some wild, smoking orbit of a space rock and landed on ‘fine.’

  “Still in one piece, somehow.” No thanks to you and the fighters that almost blew me up. She shoved the thought to the back of her mind. They didn’t have time for that, not now. “I think I know what Baik is planning to do. Me and my crew want to go after him and try blowing up the gate.”

  “I see.” Steudel’s gaze slid back up to Nyland. “Is this one part of your crew?”

  “No,” Soo-jin said at the same time Nyland said, “Yes.”

  Steudel lifted an eyebrow again.

  “Yes,” Soo-jin amended.

  “Uh huh.” Both eyebrows were up now. She glanced between them. “Are you here to ask for my help or my permission?”

  “Both. I don’t want to get in the way of your fighters again.”

  Crap. Hadn’t she decided not to bring that up?

  Oh, well. Steudel’s eyebrow-raised expression had sobered at the reminder.

  “I want to borrow Tylanus for this trip. I need his transfer abilities.”

  “Ah.”

  That wasn’t a yes. Then again, it wasn’t a no, either.

  Steudel blew out a breath, then turned her attention to the holopoint maps on the table, brows furrowing in contemplation.

  “You’re planning on blowing it up?” she asked.

  Her hopes surged.

  Oh, shit. Was the general actually considering it?

  Well, of course she was. By the looks of the holopoints, Novan Defense had been cut off at the heels. If Huli Jing and Hammerclaw could get inside and blow the gate up, that’d be a huge advantage.

  And, if not…

  Well, Tylanus was wily. He could probably survive.

  “It’s also possible my mother can figure out what has happened to the Shadows,” Tylanus said.

  “It’s also possible his mother can fix it. And f—mess—up some aliens,” Soo-jin added, hastily censoring the swear. “She’s a talented woman.”

  Steudel regarded her. “Didn’t she try to kill you once?”

  “Yes. Several times. Fortunately, I am a very adaptable, forgiving soul.”

  Nyland snorted. Steudel’s gaze flicked to him and stayed for several long seconds. Then, returned to the holopoint.

  She narrowed her eyes, one finger tapping on the table.

  Then, she turned and strode off to the side, jerking her head to indicate they should follow.

  “Come on. My office. Cooper, you, too.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  Steudel’s office was a cramped affair, but it had enough room for the four of them to cram in. The fifth, a comms officer by the looks of it, closed the door behind him.

  “Secure, sir,” he announced.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.” Steudel expelled a loud breath, leaned against the top of her desk, crossed her arms over her chest, and squinted up at Nyland. “So. You.”

  “Me,” Nyland rumbled.

  He was grinning.

  “You’re in on this one?”

  “I am.”

  Soo-jin’s brows furrowed. Her mind went back to what Nyland had said before.

  ‘It’ll be fine. Both Khan and Steudel know me.’

  Huh. Just how well did they know each other?

  More than a simple memorizing of wanted posters, that was for sure.

  Nyland had been an Alliance officer before. SpecOps, she’d heard. Then there’d been some falling out, and he’d gone rogue. The records didn’t say which crimes the Alliance had charged him with, but the censorship itself spoke to something huge—and he’d been so specifically pissed at the Alliance that he made a special point of raiding Alliance weapon and munition stores and pissing on their property.

  Steudel’s sharp gaze slid back to her. “You know who he is, right?”

  Soo-jin raised an eyebrow. “His wanted posters aren’t exactly state secrets.”

  Something happened to the general’s face just then, a change in her expression—surprise, quickly and strongly hidden. General Steudel stared at Soo-jin for several long seconds, and Soo-jin had the distinct feeling the woman was re-evaluating her intelligence—and not in her favor.

  Nyland, too, was masking his expression. In his case, though, he appeared to be trying not to laugh.

  Soo-jin rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah, yeah, I have interesting friends, but this interesting friend just risked his entire crew and ship saving my ass when you tried to blow it up. And yeah, I am still pissed about that, but we’re a little fucking beyond that now, aren’t we? Water under the bridge or what-the-fuck-ever. And if I can get over that, then I think you can get over a little pirate history. We all want to fuck up these aliens, right? Aligned goals? Let me take Huli Jing and Hammerclaw to that gate and deliver several piles of fuck you bombs. Our crews have worked together before, in and out of the Shadow World, and we’re more familiar with the situation and the people involved than anything you can offer, except maybe for Special Agent Sato. I’m also familiar with Tylanus and his mother. And Baik. And the Shadows, should Sasha manage to contact them. Let us do this.”

  Silence followed her words.

  Now everyone was staring at her. Except for Nyland. He was still staring at Steudel, and still trying not to laugh.

  Hells. I just cussed out another general.

  At least, she was predictable.

  General Steudel waited several beats before speaking. “What do you know about Commander Baik’s intentions? You said you had a theory?”

  Ah. So they were just going to ignore that little swearfest, were they?

  Fine by her.

  “I—” She halted, glancing sharply to the side where Cooper, the Maybe Communications Officer, stood. “Er, has his head been checked for units?”

  “He’s cleared,” Steudel said dryly.

  “Okay, good. So, I think he’s fighting it. Wiggling around its control. He told me as much when he attacked me, and right before he let me go, he told me that he thought I was right about my father, and that he agreed with me. He said the unit makes him do what’s in the best interest of the Lightkeepers, and just the other day, I’d literally told him that I thought my father’s death was in their best interests. Which it is.” She drew a sharp breath, covering up the scrape of grief blooming in her chest. “I think he’s going to kill my father.”

  More silence. Shorter this time, though. And more contemplative. People were furrowing their brows instead of staring at her like she’d grown a second head.

  Maybe it was the lack of swearing.

  “That’s…quite a theory.” General Steudel’s eyebrows had lifted again, doubt clear in her expression. “And not something I can bank on.”

  “Then bank on us. Let us go in and do our worst. At minimum, we’ll recon the entire place for you, send you back the data, and probably kill some assholes for you. If we’re successful? We’ll blow up the gate and the aliens with it—and maybe bring the Shadows back.”

  Steudel stared at her. Then, she let out a sigh and slid a pointed look at Nyland.

  “No. You won’t.”

  Soo-jin’s hopes fell straight into panic. “What?! But⁠—”

  “You won’t blow up the gate. That could collapse the planet’s crust in on itself, especially with the grav pin right there. What you will do is escort and protect the team of specialized engineers who have been prepping for a gate disabling mission for the past eight hours and make sure they succeed. Anything else you do is up to you. Protect my team, make sure they succeed, and I don’t care what else you do, so long as it doesn’t compromise the structural integrity of this planet.”

  This time, the silence was on her. And the staring. Her jaw had dropped open, her mind flatlining, unsure if she’d heard right.

  “I…don’t think Zan has enough explosives for that,” she said weakly.

  Steudel ignored her, sliding her attention back to Nyland. “Captain, I’ll entrust the security of my team and their success to you. Get them in, protect them, make sure they do their job. Try to get them out. I’ll put it through the usual channel.”

  Soo-jin frowned.

  Did Steudel just address Nyland as ‘Captain’? And...‘usual channel?’

  Did he and Steudel talk a lot?

  Probably. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have let him into the command post, notorious pirate that he was.

  Maybe they’d gone to officer school together or something.

  Whatever. Steudel was letting them go. Even better, she was giving them experts to fuck up the gate for them. Safely.

  A cold, giddy feeling slid into her.

  They were actually going to do this!

  Steudel was talking again. Something important. With some effort, Soo-jin stopped the giddy, cold drift of her brain and forced herself to focus as the general addressed Tylanus.

  “You are currently our only link to the Shadow World. Yes, bring Dr. Sasha along. Do what you can to work out what happened to the Shadows, but do not compromise your own safety. You need to survive this. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Tylanus said.

  “Good. And good luck. You’ll need it. Now, Captain Dokgo, Nyland—” With a gesture, General Steudel activated the holopoint on her desk, bringing a tactical map of the terraformer and its immediate area into the air. “Let’s talk strategy.”

  Strategy talk was mostly Steudel and the probably-not-actually-a-comms-officer telling them where Alliance ships were placed and what messages to autoflash on their transponders should they find themselves and their ships somehow in the Main Reality and needing to make a quick exit without a bunch of friendly fire coming down on them.

  Probably-Not-A-Comms-Officer Cooper also, at Steudel’s behest, organized a ground pickup location should they find themselves in the same situation but without their ships.

  It was very nice of them. Nicer than the general had been when she was scrambling missiles up Soo-jin’s ass.

  Yeah, she definitely wasn’t going to let that go.

  But, thirty minutes later, they had an official okay for their mission, were winding their way back through the command post’s corridors toward its underground rail exit, and she wasn’t feeling completely dogshit tired.

  Instead, a drifty giddiness kept filling her. Like a bouncing, happy cloud.

  They were actually doing this. She was going to get Ji-hun back. And she wasn’t going to have to help Nomiki and the rest of them figure out how to break a gate.

  All she needed to do was go in, kick ass, and get out.

  One way or another, her father was going to die tonight.

  She pushed the thought from her mind and ran through a mental list of what she was going to need. Shooting the man was closer to an end-point of this plan. She still needed to get to him. And Ji-hun was the priority. If she was right about his intentions, she’d likely find them close together, but she still had to somehow detain the man and get him out.

  Her father’s death was somewhat less of a priority.

  “The last time I saw you this quiet, Captain Dokgo, you were in a nano-induced coma,” Nyland observed. “Something on your mind?”

  Hah. Funny.

  “Oh, this and that,” she drawled. “Say, got any tips for subduing a man with a Quicksave long enough to drag him out of an ancient terraforming facility full of cult worshipers?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think you’d like my methods.”

  “Drat.”

  “I can take him to Tartarus,” Tylanus said.

  She opened her mouth, then closed it, thinking.

  “I thought you were supposed to be playing it safe?” she asked in a clipped tone.

  Tylanus shrugged. “I’m safe enough.” He hesitated. “I think you people forget how dangerous I am.”

  Oh. Yes. She definitely had. Even though she had first-hand experience with that danger.

  Tylanus’ Project Eurynome powers weren’t like Nomiki’s. Instead of violence, he had control over an entire subdimension. His mother, the other ‘Dr. Sasha’, had once used it to try and replace the universe—and had trapped Soo-jin and her entire crew into yet another subdimension, though honestly, she wasn’t sure if that had been Sasha’s subdimension or Tylanus’, and she hadn’t asked. All she knew was that they’d been trapped, and the total experience had been really fucking freaky.

  “And we all thank you for not giving us cause to remember,” she said quickly, repressing a shudder as a rush of memories batted her mind, along with a phantom twinge from her shoulder.

  His mother had shot her that day, too. And she had, somehow, purged that memory from her mind until now.

  Yeah. Tylanus and Sasha—they were gonna be just fine on this mission.

  Time for a topic switch.

  “So,” she said, rounding back on Nyland. “You and Steudel—you seemed way more chummy than I’d thought you’d be. You guys go through Basic together or something?”

  His lips tightened.

  For a second, she tensed, thinking she’d hit a nerve.

  Then, she realized he was, once again, trying not to laugh.

  “Captain Dokgo,” he said, as if they were discussing something over tea. “Have you ever heard of the term ‘sheep-dipped’?”

  She frowned. “Yeah?”

  ‘Sheep-dipped’ was a military term. She’d heard it a couple times among her merc friends, mostly in speculation about other mercs possibly not being actual mercs but instead active military personnel dressed up in civilian ‘sheep’ clothing and mixing in with the rest of the civilian population while on some clandestine mission. It was real spy thriller stuff, and very popular in netdramas, but she didn’t think it happened all that much in real life, and why was Nyland asking her about⁠—

  She halted.

  Like a cascade of suddenly-clicking gears, all the puzzle pieces fell into a picture in her mind.

  Nyland wasn’t a typical pirate. He was a nice pirate. She’d only ever seen him risking his and his crew’s life to do good in stupidly dangerous situations. They’d first met when he’d saved her ass from other pirates—actual pirates, unlike him, apparently. And he’d said he’d been tracking her, which made a helluva lot more sense in this sheep-dipped context than it had when he’d been looking for an ‘angel runner’ mail delivery service and secrets on Project Eurynome.

  Of course Alliance had her as a person of interest. She’d been in a lot of militarily-interesting, world-wrecking situations. And he’d found her right around the time the Lightkeepers had been making bigger moves.

  Someone had probably sent him.

  Hells, did Ji-hun know?

  She tried to think back. They’d both been tense at the first meeting. She’d thought they’d been tense due to the whole ‘he’s a pirate, and he’s the intersystem police’ thing, but in hindsight, Ji-hun had likely known all about Nyland’s sheep-dipping. The man had been in High Command up until recently.

  And the meeting they’d just been in, where she’d pissily told General Steudel that she knew very well Nyland was a pirate, and that was fine by her, and then proceeded to snipe at her and cuss out a request.

  Hells, if Hammerclaw and its crew were still Alliance, then Steudel technically hadn’t been aiming to collateral damage her out of existence—Hammerclaw had been right there, pulling her ass out of the fire.

  Sol.

  She heard her name and looked up. The rest of the group had stopped a little farther on and were looking back at her.

 

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