Tyche's Crown Read online

  STASIS EFFECT: ACTIVE.

  CARGO STATE: ALIVE.

  Underneath that was a list of things that looked like a sideways view of vitals. Not blood pressure or heart rate, but levels of glucose (low), hydration (good), and brain activity (nominal).

  “They’ve brought a bunch of people on ice to feed to the Ezeroc,” said Grace. “Those fuckers.”

  “There is one piece of good news,” said Nate.

  “What’s that?”

  “That door,” he said, pointing to the bulkhead across from them. “Looks like it leads back to the hub. Which means there’s no horrible bugs on this level to bite us in the ass if we go down.”

  “That’s good news,” she agreed. “It means we’ve still got to find the bugs.”

  “Always half-empty,” he said.

  “It’s not half-empty,” said Grace. “The cup just needs more wine. Let’s go, lover.”

  • • •

  The elevator down was a simple trip, but it didn’t mean Grace found it easy. Down here was where the station had kept its monsters. Or, depending on your point of view, where the monsters lived. Where they sat waiting, like spiders in a web, for more people to come to them.

  The trap was beautiful. All signs pointed towards this being a bad place to be. The only reason Grace and Nate were here was to get Harlow, because Nate called him a friend and those sorts of things were important. Also, Grace admitted, to get Amedea. The woman didn’t tick any likable boxes, but if accounts were to be believed, she had headed up the Resistance, led the revolt against the Intelligencers in charge of the Republic. Good deeds deserved a reward.

  Also, she knew all the Resistance’s secrets. With an alien race that could read minds, that was an unpleasant problem. So, they’d need to hoist her out of here, or make sure she was all the way dead. Neither of those prospects gave Grace a warm glow.

  The elevator clanked to a halt as it reached the bottom of the short trip down, a shudder through the car the only evidence so far that the station wasn’t under human control anymore. If it was, someone in maintenance would get an enthusiastic conversation from someone in charge. Do your job, that kind of thing. Maintenance were long dead, and this elevator might have been in frequent use, ferrying things from the upside to the downside.

  Things. You mean people, Grace.

  The door opened in front of them. Grace took in the room: an open-style barracks, large enough to hold maybe thirty or forty soldiers. Rooms set around the perimeter, no doubt quarters for officers. About a third of the bunks — let’s call it ten guys, Grace — were occupied. By people.

  But they weren’t giving off human thought patterns. The hiss of Ezeroc communication was heavy in the air, so thick she could almost smell it. When they’d first encountered ‘people’ like these on Absalom Delta, Grace didn’t know what was going on. She hadn’t realized that the Ezeroc could infect human hosts with larvae that would eat out a person’s brain over time, filling their skull with a collective of small insects. That person would cease to exist in the regular sense, but Grace figured that their knowledge would be subsumed into the collective mind of the Ezeroc. Nasty way to go, but it left a bunch of human-looking assholes walking around that needed killing. “They’re bugs, Nate,” she said.

  “Got it,” he said, and shot the closest one — short, male, half on his feet — with his blaster. The plasma blast hit the man in the chest, lifting him up and throwing him across the room to land in a pile of burning meat. The man’s head hit the wall with a crack, and he lay still. Might still be bugs alive inside, but that was a problem they could solve if they survived the next couple of minutes.

  The remaining nine moved towards them. Correction: eight moved towards them. One, towards the rear — female, officer uniform, short-cropped hair — reached towards the deck by her feet. She hefted a laser carbine and pointed it at Nate.

  No time for thought. Grace twisted back, then tossed her sword across the room. In a silver flash, it turned through the air and embedded itself in the officer. The sword’s blade impacted against her face, slicing through, then lodged in the wall behind her. Which solved one problem, but Grace had to admit that it left her with another. She was in a room with eight Ezeroc who wanted them dead, and she’d just thrown her weapon to the other side of the room.

  Correction the second: they wanted Nate dead. Grace, they wanted alive. For whatever reason. They had always wanted Grace alive.

  Nate fired two more blasts, the first shot hitting nothing but station wall, the second hitting one more soldier in the head, the top half of his torso immolated in a pyre. There was a keening sound, like five distinct things crying as they burned alive, and the torso toppled to the deck.

  Not to be left out of the fray, the station’s systems worked out that there was actual fire in the room, and the emergency sprinklers kicked in, a deluge of water cascading down.

  Grace turned to Nate, grabbing the sword poking out over his shoulder. She drew the black blade and turned to face the horde. This weapon felt heavier than her sword, deliberate, purposeful. She’d used it once before, on Absalom Delta. It hadn’t kept her from falling to the Ezeroc, but that’s not why she wanted it. She wanted it because it had an edge that could cut things in half.

  She ducked into the room, meeting the reaching hands of the first person she came too. Red hair. Blank face. She felt his hands close around her ship suit, so she brought Nate’s blade around in a whirl that severed those hands. Grace then stepped back and reversed the motion, running the red-hair man through. The bugs might be in charge of his body, but without a pumping heart he wasn’t going anywhere.

  An Ezeroc-piloted woman came at her from the left, Grace ducking low and to the right, away from those reaching hands. The woman was hit by a blast from Nate, tossed back in a hissing shower of meat as the water cut the flames down. Grace’s back foot slipped in the water, and she went down on one knee. She saw two more coming at her from the front, both big men, and she used her free hand to rise faster. The sword licked out, like it was thirsty and all this water was doing nothing to slake it. Like it wanted something thicker to drink. She used it to take the head off the first man, not watching it to bounce free on the deck, the blood that fountained mingling with the deluge from the ceiling.

  Arms closed around her from behind, a hug with desperate strength. Fighting in the suit, with the water, was like fighting without half her senses, and one of them had come up behind her. The second man in front of her closed hands on the neck seal of her suit, trying to work the collar free. It was as if the Ezeroc thought she was helpless with someone holding her from behind. Like the Ezeroc hadn’t learned how humans fought humans.

  Grace dropped her weight down and back, causing her attacker at the rear to stumble, the grip loosening. In that moment of opportunity, she brought her sword hand down, her free hand up, breaking the grip behind her. She kicked back to where she figured a leg would be, and was rewarded by the impact of the strike. She jumped up, tucking herself into a ball, and then kicked out both her legs into the man in front of her. He was pushed back, Grace hitting against the person behind her, them both going down. Bright plasma roared across the room, hitting the big man again and again, his body disappearing in chunks of smoking meat to hiss and steam in the water.

  Placing a hand beside her, Grace twisted her legs in a whirl, getting them under her. She sprang to her feet, sword whipping around and down, going through the person who’d attacked her from behind. She didn’t even check if it was male or female, tall or short, because it wasn’t important. Surviving was important.

  Panic/fear. She turned to see Nate, in the elevator, the last two Ezeroc-piloted humans reaching for him. They had pieces of metal — pipes or conduit — and were swinging hard. They’d moved around Grace, straight for the guy with the blaster. Not a sloppy idea. For a bunch of guys with hollowed-out skulls they were getting smarter. Learning, not just random walkers anymore. There’d be time for introspection later
, if there was a later. For now, Nate was in trouble. Grace ran back toward him, water on the deck splashing as she moved. One of the Ezeroc-piloted humans swung a pipe to crack against the side of Nate’s helmet. Grace could see it before it happened, the swing, the promised impact, and knew she would never be fast enough to get there. When the pipe hit Nate’s helmet, it felt like fate. She’d expected the helmet to take the blow, because it was a space suit, and space suits were designed for hard knocks. The crack and rupture of glass said it had taken one too many knocks before now, and it had had enough.

  Nate fell to the ground as Grace reached them. One of the Ezeroc turned to face her, and Grace swung — clang, clang as her sword rang against the pipe. The Ezeroc returned a swing at her, and Grace spun out of the way, keeping the movement going and put the black edge of the sword through the neck of the Ezeroc-piloted human. The head bounced away.

  Then she stepped forward and ran the other one through, the blade running thought its spine and out its front. She braced, then twisted her blade as she pulled it back. The body dropped to the deck, all motion and will stolen from it. Grace realized she was panting, her breath loud in her helmet. She reached a hand down to Nate, and he took it, coming to his feet.

  He looked past her shoulder, then at the bodies at their feet. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said. She looked at his visor. “Your helmet’s totally…”

  “Fucked. Yeah.” He turned the neck seal, releasing the clamp, and lifted it free of his head to clatter and splash against the deck. Nate turned his face to the sprinklers in the roof, water cascading down his face. “Ah. That’s nice.”

  There could be a pathogen here. Spores. The Ezeroc do things you don’t know about. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered, unless they could do it together. She unclasped the ring about her own neck and dropped her helmet beside Nate’s.

  He was right. The water was nice. Like spring rain.

  Grace!

  She turned her face toward one of the two doors leading from the room. She’d barely processed them on entry. The door towards the left? Simple, unassuming. Blank. Just a door. The one on the right? It looked the same, but it felt different. She pointed towards the rightmost door. “There,” she said. “The fucking locusts are in there.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  NATE RUBBED WATER from his face. The sprinklers were stopping. Stations were weird, because if the gravity failed, spraying a bunch of water around would just drown people inside. But you couldn’t do other effective things to stop fire. Suck the air out? People died. Halon? People died. Etcetera. Tricky problem. Station automation worked its way down a list of least-dangerous things, and if the grav was on, the rain came down.

  Yay for grav. Nate frowned. “You’re saying the death insects are behind door number two?”

  “That’s right,” said Grace.

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re calling to me,” she said. “They’re the only ones I’ve ever heard in my mind. Like words I can’t ignore.”

  “Keep the sword,” said Nate. “I’ll use yours.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, holding the black blade out to him. She tapped the side of her head with her other hand. “Chad’s been … helpful.”

  “Okay,” he said, taking his sword back. He watched her move to retrieve her own blade from the Ezeroc-piloted human she’d thrown it through. Nate figured it wouldn’t matter the circumstance, he’d never tire of watching her move. Like oiled perfection. What she was doing with a broken-down bum like him he’d never know, but he planned to keep it for as long as he had breath. Because she was more important than breath.

  He reached down for her helmet. You never knew when you’d have to ram a lid back on someone’s suit so their brains wouldn’t boil out their ears in a vacuum. She came back to join him, so he reached for her, pulling her close for a kiss. Then he clipped the helmet to her belt. He’d worry about a helmet for himself later.

  “What about yours?” she said.

  “Eh,” he said. “Bound to be a spare around here somewhere. I’m going to suggest something radical.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Let’s save the room with the death bugs for last.” He walked towards the leftmost door. “We’re here for Harlow, remember? We can always hole the station from space.” He tapped the door’s console, and it slid open in front of them. “Okay,” he said, after a moment’s silence. “We’ve found the real carnival of horrors.”

  The room they’d opened was a lab. Plain and simple, it was designed for experiments. Calling it a lab was like calling a torture rack a table though; it didn’t convey the true emotions that should come with it. This lab was white, sterile, the smell of disinfectant in the air. It was about what he’d expect from anyone with at least mild sociopathy. Banks of tables were arrayed around it, white sheets — some stained red — atop bodies on those tables. Consoles littered the area, holos bright with data.

  Grace moved past him into the room. “This is … where it started, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like it,” said Nate. He flipped the sheet back on a bed nearby. It was a human male, an old scar running down from his shoulder. Looked like a knife wound, healed a long time ago. A prisoner’s barcode was etched on his left chest. The top of his head had been sectioned off, a collection of dead brain insects in a jar at the head of the bed. The dead man’s eyes sightless eyes stared at the roof. “I’m going to say the bad guys found the Ezeroc, and then experimented on humans with them.”

  “Or on them with humans,” said Grace, at another bed. There was a woman there, normal from the neck up. Her torso was mottled with chitin, plates of it interspersed like scar tissue over her frame. An old yellow fluid, long dried, ran down from where chitin met skin. Whether the Ezeroc’s immune system fought the human, or the other way around, it was impossible to tell. “Might be the origins of the men in black.”

  “How long?” said Nate. He held a hand out to the room. “How long have they been doing this? Experimenting out here? This is the ninth station, Grace. What about the other eight?”

  “They might not be Ezeroc experiment zones.”

  “I don’t know if that’s better or worse,” said Nate, running a gloved hand through his wet hair. “Okay, so whoever’s in charge … they what, they find some Ezeroc spore? A new form of life.”

  “Maybe there was an accident. Maybe it was on purpose. But they worked out that Ezeroc could manipulate human DNA,” said Grace, picking up the thread.

  “Then, because you can only do so much on a station,” said Nate, pulling the sheet back on a horrific meld of human face and Ezeroc feeding mandibles, “they sent spores to Absalom Delta. They sent it to the other side of the planet from the human establishment.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Why not just infect the colonists from the get-go?”

  “Might be an administrative error, but I don’t think so.” Nate thought about the kinds of people who felt themselves to be gods among other humans. Those who could read and change minds. And what they might want from an alien tool they’d use to suppress humans with. “I think they sent these things to the other side to find out just how hungry they were. To find out whether they wanted it enough.”

  “How effective,” offered Grace.

  “Yeah, that,” said Nate. “You don’t want your death spores to be lazy.” He kept walking around the room, blaster ready, but whatever had happened in here, it’d happened aways back. Nothing left alive, a chemical smell overlaying everything. Preservatives. Don’t want the specimens rotting on the bench. “And, I don’t know, I guess they’re not very lazy. Busy little bees.”

  “Okay, it’s a theory,” said Grace. “Proving it will take a little work.”

  “We’ll get there,” said Nate. “We’ll pop the lid on all of these,” and he pointed to the consoles, “and find out the truth.”

  “Why?” said Grace.

  “What?”

&nbs
p; “Why are we finding out the truth?” She looked a little weary, and he wanted to hold her. To tell her it’s okay or we’ll get through this. But it wouldn’t have worked. Don’t sell to a seller. Don’t lie to a liar. Especially if they can read your feelings. “I get that the Republic are assholes, Nate, but that is past tense. The Republic is fucked. Finding the truth is a distraction.”

  He gritted his teeth, but kept his voice level. Not that it would matter … because she could sense his emotions. The shape of his keel. “The truth is never a distraction.”

  “I don’t mean it like that, and you know it,” she said, her voice softening. She pointed a hand at the wall behind her, a door set in it. “Through there are your friends. Our friends. Once we’ve got them squared away, we can go truth-hunting. But even then? That’s not why we’re here. We need to find the source. The only truth that matters.”

  “The Ezeroc homeworld.”

  “The Ezeroc fucking homeworld,” she agreed. “We’ve all had a heaping helping of shit inside a plain whitebread wrapper from the Republic, Nate. All of us. But that’s a problem that’ll solve itself. There’s a bigger issue. You need to work out whether you’re the one who wants to solve it.”

  “I’m the captain of a tiny ship,” said Nate.

  “Not the size of the dog in the fight.”

  He thought about that. “It’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

  “Always has been. Always will be. And you know what?” She quirked her lips in a half-smile. “We’ve got Lady Luck on our side. We fly with a goddess, Nate. She might be tiny, but her heart is mighty.”

  He looked down at the deck. This is it, Chevell. The point where you decide whether being a hero is in your job description. Last time you tried the hero gig, you lost a hand and a leg and a good life. The Old Empire fell around your ears because heroes fail.

  Another part of him chimed in, you could just wallow in it. Forget about Dom and Annamarie. Pretend it never happened. Run with your Endless Drive and your ship to a part of the galaxy where there are no insects and no Republic. And then you can die alone, hating yourself, because you know you were meant to do better. You are better.