So she kept the sword, gloved hand firm around the scabbard as she ran.
• • •
The tower reached up out of the forest ahead of her, set atop the hill like a spike. It was dark; she could see it only by the stars it blotted out through breaks in the trees. It’s where the voice was.
Grace.
Together.
There were things rumbling in the dark about her, massive shapes that were more shadow than creature. They rasped at her and at each other in what might have been language.
It could also be hunger making them gnash their mandibles.
Smaller things that rustled in the brushwood chittered and scattered before the lights of her suit. She wanted to take her helmet off to breathe easier, to feel the cold night air on the sweat beading her skin. But to take off her helmet, she’d need both hands, and that would mean dropping the sword. Her body wanted the sword, so instead she ran.
There were lights, readouts in her visor that spoke of oxygen levels and lactate buildups and adrenaline. They’d be there after she spoke with the voice, so she ignored them for now. Plenty of time for that … after.
Grace Grace Grace Grace Grace!
She clambered up the rise, bursting into a cleared area at the base of the tower. The tower reached to the sky, a communications facility for speaking to the stars. The kind of thing that would transmit to the Guild Bridge. Messages of comfort could be sent home if you had a family who didn’t think of you as mongrel/hated/lesser. Grace had used facilities like this to lie and cheat and steal.
There was a chain link fence with razor wire set at the top. The chain link was old, rusted, and the razor wire broken and missing. Something huge had trampled it all down, making for easy access to the tower. Grace walked over the flattened fence, her boots crunching on an old sign. REPUBLIC SCIENCE FACILITY ABSALOM DELTA. Above and below that were the words INTRUDERS WILL BE EXECUTED.
She paused. Science facility guards generally didn’t shoot people for getting too close. Black ops sites, now those shot at people. Grace looked back at the forest behind her. She saw a massive insect creature standing almost 3 meters tall, looking back at her. One of the Ezeroc, guarding her passage.
Or preventing her escape.
Grace.
Together!
The rust on the fence spoke of an age well beyond the Ezeroc’s week-long infestation of this planet. Whatever had happened here had been long ago. She’d missed the action, and that was just fine. There were turrets at the base of the tower, dark and quiet, barrels pointed down or plain missing.
The tower itself was larger than she’d been expecting, moss and lichen of the woods creeping up the walls. The forest wanted to claim it for its own. The structure tapered towards the top, but here at the base it was a hundred meters a side, easy. It was no simple comm tower like she’d thought. She wanted to rub her head to clear it. But to do that she’d need to take off her helmet. To take off her helmet, she’d need to put down Nate’s sword.
Nate.
She’d taken his sword, and she couldn’t remember why.
• • •
She’d stepped inside the tower with ease. The doors were massive, vaulted metal, on the floor inside. They’d been torn off and tossed aside like paper. To do that, you’d need some kind of industrial equipment.
Inside was a confusion of equipment amid a jumble of bones that might have been people once. Shells, hard casings from fallen Ezeroc. All covered in vines, moss, fungus. Holos stages were dark, their consoles inert. No people, and nothing automated minding the facility.
Grace.
She looked up at the voice, coming from above her now. She’d have to climb.
One of the Ezeroc came out of the darkness, a warrior drone. She felt it had come to collect her, to take her to the top, to be—
Together.
—with the voice. Those fore claws reached for her, and she wanted to close her eyes and just be. Be with something that wanted her. That wanted her. For just a minute, just a second, just a moment between thoughts, to be where she was needed, desirable.
Her body didn’t want that. It didn’t want that at all.
Where her mind was confused, her body was sure. Where her mind wandered, her body had the certainty of the drills. The sword she carried whispered free of the scabbard, the blade making one perfect cut as it crossed up, and another as she spun, bringing it on a reverse path back again. The Ezeroc’s fore claws fell to the ground, followed soon after by its head.
She stood in the silence, something dripping from the end of her blade in the darkness.
When she’d found the sword in Nate’s cabin—
Who is Nate?
Grace.
Together…
—she’d been so surprised. He hadn’t moved like a swordsman, all cocky show and a chin that jutted against authority just like hers. He’d fired a blaster. And yet, he owned a sword, with a blade black as obsidian. Gold circuitry inlaid the hilt, a motif or actual technology, impossible to tell. It was beautiful and strange. The balance of the blade was wrong in her hand, like it didn’t want her to know it, but it went with her nonetheless.
When her bare hand had closed around the hilt on the Tyche, the voices in her head had grown quieter, but out here with her suit on, they became more insistent, still scratching at her mind with sharp little claws. On the Tyche she’d been able to think, and so she’d gone hunting. Now she was here the voices were louder, the scratching more insistent, the claws not so little.
Grace looked up again. “Together, huh?” It helped to talk out loud. To speak words not just in her mind. “No problem. Together it is.” She found a stairwell, the door ajar, and climbed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Well, this is all fucked, isn’t it?
Nate’s suit said that way, and that way was up a Goddamn hill, at night. His suit was following Grace’s suit, a compass on his HUD placing a marker in the right place. Put your feet down, one after the other Nate, in that direction. You’ll die of exhaustion or find the sword.
Or be eaten by alien monsters. That was a distinct possibility.
He didn’t need the wayfinder. Even a city boy like him could tell which way Grace had gone. The leaves were trampled by her passage, like a herd of elephants had gone this way.
Hang on.
One person couldn’t have destroyed that much vegetation. There was some kind of truck or jeep or other damn thing on her trail. Which didn’t make sense, because the Tyche hadn’t seen anything with a power source for klicks in any direction. The ship was watching, and she hadn’t seen shit.
He keyed the comm. “Engineer.”
“You’ve got Hope,” she said.
“That’s great,” he said. “Look, I’ve got me a trail here. Some kind of industrial traffic, looks like. I don’t know. Can you do me a scan?”
“Scanning,” she said. “Nope.”