CHAPTER ONE
SAINT
“I did tell you not to touch my shit.”
Nash snatched her bag back from the wide-eyed security technician as alarms bathed the checkpoint in red. She didn’t even look inside; just thrust her hand in, fiddled around, and after a few seconds the alarms stopped.
“What the hell was that?” said the tech, face flushing and blanching at the same time, in cheese-curd blotches. He watched the bag as Nash reclaimed it, like he half-expected whatever he’d touched to jump out and take a bite out of him.
Go with that instinct, Saint thought. He didn’t actually know what’d set everything off; could’ve been any one of the half-dozen fun, fantastically dangerous toys Nash kept in that bag. Being the crew medic and mechanic came with some interesting equipment.
Nash ignored the tech and turned back to Saint. “You heard me, right? I told him not to touch it.”
“You told him,” Saint agreed, gravely. He’d stopped a few steps back from the checkpoint, mostly to wait his turn for the scanner, but also to enjoy the show. Had to get your kicks where you could on a slow day, and lately, they’d had nothing but slow days. Nearly four months posted on that satellite, and in that time, Saint hadn’t had to punch, shoot, or bury a single soul. He woke up, drank his coffee, did his job, and went back to bed, and then he woke up and did it all over again.
Streaks like that never held.
With a damn right nod, Nash turned back to the tech. “You want to lose a finger, Newbie? Because that’s how you lose a finger.”
“Maybe a hand,” Saint said.
“Possibly the whole arm,” Nash agreed. “Say, Newbie, you a lefty or a righty?”
The newbie didn’t manage much more than an uneasy stare as Nash zipped her bag and shouldered it. That stare said he couldn’t decide if she was joking or if she was genuinely, ball-shrivellingly terrifying.
Don’t worry, Saint thought. She has that effect on everyone. Even Saint. Maybe especially Saint, because he knew her well enough to know that ball-shrivellingly terrifying was an undersell.
It took the tech a handful of seconds to recover. “Wait,” he said, finally. “I need you to sign in.”
“First shift, huh?” Saint thought he looked new. They’d passed through that checkpoint over two hundred times, coming and going. Always the same trip down the same hall at the same time of day; the only thing that ever changed was the technicians. A new face every few weeks—newbies on break-in rotation, and this guy fit the bill. Way too green to be a transfer, and if he’d hit his twenties, it was only by the tip of his pimpled nose. His oversized uniform said he’d either lied about his measurements, or just felt real optimistic that he still had some growing to do. They’re running a damn daycare down here. Saint guessed every organization had its version of a mail room; theirs just included a few more deadly weapons.
“We’ve got a standing reservation,” Nash told him, shrugging her bag onto her shoulders. “Table for two, under Shooty McBlastinshit.”
Saint pinched the bridge of his nose. “You have got to let that go.”
“Over my cold, dead body,” Nash replied sweetly. “That’s Shooty with a Y,” she told the tech. “And McBlastinshit with a—”
“We’re with the Ambit.” Saint cut in, and Nash coughed something into her elbow that sounded conspicuously like buzzkill. He ignored her. “Designation GS 31–770. We’re here for prisoner escort.” And while the tech fumbled with his holoscreen, Saint took his turn in the scanner. Christ, he hated the things. Every screw and plate in every bone, every keepsake shard of shrapnel under his skin, put on display. Always earned him a certain look, like one the Ambit got whenever they docked her in a new port. Like how the hell’s that thing still running?
Stubbornness was probably as good an answer as any.
“You’re clear,” the tech managed to say, in a voice that tripped on a crack and landed a pitch higher than it started. Out of the corner of his eye, Saint thought he saw Nash hiding a smile as he grabbed his shit from the bin. Belt and holsters, wallet and flask. Nash had already made it a few steps down the hall, so Saint dressed while he walked to catch up.
He wouldn’t miss it. Not the checkpoint, not the scanner, not the sterile white lights and bare metal walls of the secured sector. The Alpha Librae Satellite wasn’t exactly a tourist destination, even in the more civilized parts. Built into the icy crust of the sixth-largest Saturn moon, it was more colony than satellite, but never let it be said the Guild didn’t know the power of a word. Colony came with a whole lot of well-earned baggage that the Guild just didn’t want to carry.
So. Satellite. It domed up out of the ice, about 140 meters at its highest point. Like a massive militarized snow globe, Nash liked to say. Ever wondered what’d happen if you shook it? Saint leaned more toward iceberg, though: way more shit happening under the water than above it. Structures plunged like stalactites into the ocean below, all chitin and silica and oxidized aluminum alloy, woven together into something almost organic. Like coral grown around the bones of scuttled ships along the coasts where he’d grown up. Had to go deep; all the station’s power came from the hydrothermal vents at the moon’s core, and it turned out they didn’t make extension cords that long.
The temp in the station never rose above a balmy seventeen degrees Celsius, which meant creaky joints for Saint, and a near-endless rotation of hand-knit sweaters and shiny bomber jackets for Nash. There in Sector F, though, he swore it got even colder. Set into the deeper parts of the satellite, it had the silence of something buried. Sector F was where the Guild housed most of its security operations—station surveillance, armory, the brig. Even the lobby past the checkpoint felt like something out of a penitentiary, without so much as a potted plant to spruce it up. No place to sit, no pictures on the walls, just two rounded elevator bays cutting through the center of the room like glass tree trunks. Only one of them serviced all the floors of the sector; the other was overflow for the administrative floors.
Nash and Saint made for the one marked BRIG ACCESS. “Okay,” said Nash, as they walked. “Who shit in your sugarflakes?”
“What?”
“All the bitching you’ve been doing about our babysitting detail, I’d have thought you’d be thrilled to pass the torch. Half-expected you to dance your way to the brig.”
“Not much of a dancer,” he replied.
“Cry one single, solitary tear of joy?”
“You know satellite atmo dries me out.”
“Not even a little jazz hands?” She glanced over, and he sighed and stuck up his hands. Gave them a wiggle. Got a grimace for his efforts. “Aw, sad hands.”
“I’m not sad.”
“Tell that to your frown lines.”
“They’re not frown lines. They’re line lines. It’s called getting old.”
Nash snorted. “You’re not even forty,” she said, patting his arm as he hit the call button and keyed in his access code on the biometric pad. Code, facial recognition, retinal scan; they really didn’t want anybody getting into that elevator without a damn good reason and some damn high clearance. “Relax, you’ve still got a few good years left in you before I gotta start replacing parts.”
Whatever face Saint pulled, it screwed so badly with the facial rec that the pad flashed red. He shot her a flat look over his shoulder, like look what you did, but she just smiled and gave him another pat. Don’t know why I bother. “Nobody’s replacing my parts,” he grumbled as he rekeyed his code. This time the facial rec and retinal scanner got what they needed, and the doors slid open. “My parts work fine. I like my parts.” He’d just like them better with a little less scar tissue was all. Maybe forty wasn’t old, but Saint felt that way. Old and tired, in ways even four months’ downtime couldn’t fix. He shook his head. “Get in the damn elevator.”
She did, but probably only because the doors had started to close. He slid in right after her, his back to the rounded glass walls as they started their descent. That elevator was the only way in or out of the brig’s high-security ward. Main brig, you could take the stairs if shit got dicey, but for the unlucky bastards in deep lockup, that was it—one long umbilical stretching down another hundred meters from the brig, ready to get snipped at the first sign of trouble. Hit the right button, trip the right alarm, and the whole ward could be detached from the rest of the station and jettisoned into the dark. Alpha Librae didn’t fuck around.
Not a bad view, though, once they got down past the brig. Floors of dull lobbies rose like curtains around the elevator, until only ocean remained. If he looked up, Saint could still make out the backlit windows of all the different stalactite structures of the station glittering like diamonds in the dark. Like stars whose glow haloed the whole station below the water’s surface. He’d have been content to take the ride in silence, watching the lights grow dimmer as they sank farther and farther away.
Nash had other ideas. “Seriously, though,” she said, leaning back against the wall with her arms crossed. “Bad mood. What gives? It’s our last day of daycare—we should be celebrating. Cap, back me up, here.”
“You know I don’t take sides,” Eoan’s airless voice said over the comms. Nash and Saint were a long way from the Ambit, which was still docked in one of the surface ports, but the signal came clear as day. Nash had done a lot of tinkering with their comms since the shitshow on Noether. Her way of coping, and something to do with all the time she spent holed up on her own. Socializing hadn’t been too high on her to-do list lately. “Although…”
Saint scowled. “There’s no although.” Nothing to talk about that they hadn’t already talked about the other couple hundred times they’d taken that long-ass ride on that slow-ass elevator. The trouble with an underwater base was all the damn pressure. The car had to stop every thirty meters or so to let folks’ ears pop or to rejigger the gas mixtures, because apparently oxygen did some real weird shit at depth. Nobody wanted a bunch of stoned rangers stumbling around, bleeding out of their ears.
Eoan chuckled, voice warm with amusement. Lot of folks didn’t expect that kind of affection from a centuries-old AI, but with the benefit of years under Eoan’s command, Saint knew better. He’d never met a captain with more grit, compassion, and sheer damn savvy than their Eoan. Even if they did have a cosmic curious streak and a bad habit of playing Secret Science Experiment with their crewmates.
Undeterred, they said, “It’s just an observation, dear. You’ve never been fond of prisoner details, and I know this one’s been harder to stomach than most.”
“It’s been fine.”
“Bullshit,” said Nash. “It’s been boring as hell. Same thing day after day after day. I wanted to scramble my brains with a knitting needle by week three, and I actually have hobbies outside of work. Don’t tell me you’re not going full-on non compos mentis in this bitch.”
“I didn’t know you spoke Latin,” Saint muttered.
She ignored him. “You hate this detail,” she said. “I know you do. Cap knows you do. But you’re walking around today, our last day of this snoozefest, in your own personal storm cloud. So, I say again: What. Gives.” She punctuated the words with a poke to Saint’s chest and a stare promising tragedy and torment if he even thought about giving her the runaround.
He might’ve chanced it, anyway, but Eoan intervened. “It’s not about the detail, is it?” they said. It sounded like a question, but for Eoan, it was more like a hypothesis. They’d considered all the variables and arrived at the most likely explanation. “It’s been quite nice, hasn’t it? Having the Red family on base. I hear Regan’s doing excellent things in the communications division.”
Well, Eoan wasn’t wrong.
At first they hadn’t been sure where Jal and his family would end up after Jal recovered enough to travel. The Captains’ Council didn’t stick to one place, and shit had been so crazy there for a while, he could’ve gotten shipped to any one of a half-dozen Guild outposts. Wasn’t until about a month after the Ambit’s assignment to Alpha Librae that the council finally decided to bring Jal there for the hearings, and everything kind of sorted itself out after that. Regan got herself a position as a comms engineer; Eoan pulled some strings, got Bitsie into school with all the other station kids; and Jal had ready access to the best docs on offer, Nash included, while he finished healing from the fall on Noether that should’ve killed him. Couldn’t have worked out better.
Except.
“Does he know we’re shipping out tomorrow?” Eoan asked gently.
Except for that.
Saint sighed again, rolling his neck and shoulders. Damn cold always made him seize up like a rusty hinge. “He does.”
“And how’d he take it?” Nash, this time, but she didn’t look at him as she asked it. She’d turned to the wall, puffing hot breath on the glass and drawing her finger through the fog. She and some other poor, bored bastard had a running series of tic-tac-toe games—maybe fifteen rounds and counting. She drew an X in the bottom right corner, scratched a line through it and the two above it, and drew a smiley face below it. No new hash. No sixteenth game.
“I don’t know,” Saint admitted.
Nash squinted. “You don’t know?”
“That’s what I said.”
“How do you not know?”
You don’t know, either, Saint tactfully didn’t point out. Wasn’t like she spent a lot of time with Jal, anyway. Tagged along with them for drinks a few times, and dragged Jal aboard the Ambit sometimes to upgrade the specs she’d made him. For the most part, though, Nash kept her distance, and Saint couldn’t help wondering if it was because Jal reminded her of something she’d rather forget.
Or someone, maybe.
“I thought he took it fine, all right?” he said instead. “But we were supposed to meet up last night, and he begged off last minute. Hasn’t answered any of my comms since.”
Nash raised a hand. “Yeah, I’m gonna say definitely not taking it all right.”
“Thanks for that.” Brutal honesty was just another service Nash provided. She’s right. He’d told himself something similar—just a lot of murky water under that particular bridge. If the kid was having trouble getting left behind again, Saint could hardly blame him.
It just … didn’t sit right. Jal’d been so damn serious about keeping in touch and, Don’t you leave without a proper send-off, old man, or I’ll hop a ship and run you down myself. Kid wasn’t exactly the sulking type, either. Golden retriever personified. So maybe that did have something to do with the knot in his stomach. The itch between his shoulder blades.
Or maybe those had more to do with what waited at the bottom of that elevator.
Copyright © 2024 by Morgan Stanfield
