The Apocalypse Ocean (17 page)

Kay had seen it in his eyes. An implacable, long-hardened decision that she couldn’t reach, break, or affect.

And it still hadn’t made sense.

She’d tried to get through to crack him and steer him. Get him to stop. But he’d shot her, even as her words made him flinch slightly.

He’d been standing behind the other man the whole time. Building up the anger, the strength, to step forward and do it.

The force of the bullet felt like a thunderclap from an inch away. A strange electric shock tore through her, and her breath was sucked away by the receding noise.

There’d been a gap. She didn’t remember falling, but she remembered her head hitting the floor. Bouncing.

So much hate in that boy’s face.

#

“Don’t move,” Pepper said.

Kay looked over at him. She didn’t feel she had the strength to argue.

“You were shot.” Pepper walked over to her. They were either accelerating, or on a planet. There was gravity. She could feel it more acutely than ever. It was hard to breathe.

“I’m alive!” Kay said. Hearing the words affected her more than she realized they would. Something inside bubbled up. Prickled fear. And relief.

A single tear rolled off the side of her face. There was a numbness in her chest. She didn’t dare try to look down.

“I can’t make it work,” she said to Pepper.

“What work?” He leaned over, his dreadlocks falling forward toward her.

“I’m failing to make it all work. I can’t control it all. It’s falling apart,” she said. “I looked in his eyes and I could see all the gears leading back to the moment. He didn’t decide to pull that trigger. I drove him to it. I was the one who set it in motion. I shot myself. I set those movements into motion through my actions all the while ago, and he responded.”

“Karma’s a bitch,” Pepper said. “Push hard, and the world often has a habit of pushing back.”

“If that’s really true, why did the universe let me be born a slave to the Nesaru?”

“You’re still thinking too hard,” Pepper said. “I didn’t say the universe was fair. Or that everyone started out with the same advantages. Just that it had a habit of pushing back.”

“Tiago pushed back. Is he okay?”

For the first time, Pepper smiled at her. Asking that question had been the right thing to do. “Thinkerer broke his arm. It got tense. But everyone is talking now. And Tiago’s not allowed to carry anymore. You can relax.”

“I understand why he did it,” Kay said. “He wanted to protect you from me.”

“He’s tougher than you realize,” Pepper said.

“I realized he was canny and tough. That’s why I recruited and trained him. To use his brain. Instead of scrapping for leftovers and aiming low. He was useful.”

“He’s more than useful, he’s a good kid,” Pepper said. “Loyal to his friends.”

Someone Kay hadn’t met moved Pepper aside. Kay frowned. “Who are you?”

The man was checking her chest wound, moving a machine off the bullet hole and replacing it with another that felt like it was wriggling deep into her. But there was no pain. “Matty Mallette,” the newcomer said. “Off the
Selby
. We moved on board yesterday to help clean out resistance, and because
Selby
is barely able to limp along. They also wanted medical assistance, so you’re stuck with me. Our medic died on board in the first fight.”

Kay dared look down. A pair of robotic machines clamped to her chest and foam oozed down her ribs. She wasn’t sure what that was about. Something to do with the technology that was healing her.

How bad had that shot been?

“Yesterday?” Kay repeated, her mind latching onto something.

“What?” Mallette asked.

“Yesterday? You came yesterday. I’ve been out of it for how long?”

“About thirty hours. We’ve been in a running battle.
Selby
and parts of Thinkerer’s remaining ships are covering our rear and we’re about to reach Trumball.”

There was relief. Thinkerer was working with them. They were headed back toward Placa del Fuego. Which was good. She’d left some things in place there. Things that she could use her new allies to plug back into.

For a moment all that wavered. It didn’t matter what was back on the island if she died on her way there, did it?

And where was Avris? She looked around, feeling the absence.

“She’s out helping install mines on the hull, in case we get boarded,” Pepper said, seeing Kay looking around and figuring out why. “She’ll be back.”

For a moment Kay thought about lying and saying she wasn’t looking for Avris. Keeping those old walls up. But Pepper was reading her like she could read most people. Kay nodded.

She was at the mercy of this team. Wounded and vulnerable. Not completely able to think right. There were drugs coursing through her system and some strange technology healing her chest. People she didn’t know, or control, working to fix her.

And she was just going to have to trust them.

Kay rolled her head back to stare down at the metal machine clasping her chest and tried to relax.

#

They dove into Trumball’s wormhole, shaking and shivering, as anti-ship fire scorched the outer hull. Kay listened to Nashara calmly talking to the
Selby
and coordinating the plunge.

As far as Kay could tell, they were getting torn up by smaller League ships.

City batteries fired at them as they came out into the city’s waterways, engines throwing up steam and melting docks as they powered their way out toward the ocean. It was ugly, but they struggled through.

Thinkerer had spies out in the city blow up many of the larger anti-ship weapons. And then Thinkerer had larger battleships waiting to help them just offshore of the city. Slow-moving monstrosities built out of ice in the arctic regions of Octavia over the last year, manned by mercenaries, slowly trickled in from various League territories.

Thinkerer had been busy, Kay thought with admiration.

Under the protective guns of Thinkerer’s ice fleet they sailed for Placa del Fuego.

Avris came back and sat next to Kay on the floor. “We got through just in time,” she muttered.

“What’s happening?” Kay asked.

“A lot of League ships are right behind us,” Avris said. “And there are Xenowealth ships coming out on the other side and headed for the edge of Placa del Fuego.”

Kay grinned to herself. It was the first time doing that since the Doaq had attacked. It was all coming together, wasn’t it?

Pepper stood up in front of one of the makeshift screens. “You disavowed both Nashara and me,” he said to someone. “You told the League that we were working without orders. That we had gone rogue. You think I’ll forget that easily.”

A nervous person replied, “What else could we do? You are triggering a full incident. This could turn to war. Our
responsibility
is peace for our citizenry. We cannot come to your aide right now. Those ice-ships and the
Selby
are all you got, and all you’re gonna get, you hear?”

“Councilor, it will not look good if the League kills off the heroes of the creation of the Xenowealth itself,” Nashara said, acid dripping in her tone.

“You
invaded
them,” the voice said indignantly. “They have every right to come for you.”

“Invaded! We took a few ships across the line to stop them from shutting down the Trumball wormhole, and cutting us off forever,” Pepper said. “At best, I’d label this an incident, not an invasion.”

“Whatever the fuck you want to call it, Pepper, and no matter how famous or how many favors you can pull here on the Council, this may create a war. And that’s your fault. We have to stand clear. You
know
this.”

Pepper growled, “You’ll pay a price for this.” He cut the connection, and then smiled at Nashara. “That’ll help the Council out when the League intercepts that conversation.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“We will get back over there to her,” Pepper said. “Piper will be safe.”

There was a moment between them. A split second of worry, doubt, reassurance. A hand on a shoulder. Old friends worrying about another old friend.

Kay filed away the moment. “Can I sit up, now?” she asked. It hurt a little bit to talk, but not that much. “Is it safe?”

“You shouldn’t let her speak,” Tiago said from somewhere behind her. His voice startled her. For a split second, she remembered him raising that gun.

“Tiago! Shut up,” Avris hissed. “You’ve done enough.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Tiago said, and then Kay heard his feet stomping out of the cockpit.

Avris leaned over and held her by the shoulders. “It’s okay to sit up. I can help you. You’re healing. You can’t run, but by tomorrow you should be able to walk.”

“Tiago,” Kay called out.

He stopped. She painfully sat up on the bloodstained bedroll they had her lying on and looked back over her shoulder. He turned back around, defiant, but a little scared. “Yes?”

“I understand,” she said. “I would have done the same thing in your place.”

“Fuck you,” he said, face quirking with a mixture of hatred and rage. “That’s exactly what you would say to manipulate us. Honesty. Sincerity. We suddenly believe you’re all sunshine and a team player? Is that it? The truth is that our lives mean nothing to you.”

Kay took a deep breath and ignored the stab of pain that came with it.

 “You are right. Your life does mean nothing to me,” she admitted.

He rocked back and opened his mouth slightly. Shocked. Dismayed.

“Oh, look at you now,” Kay said bitterly. “You wanted the lie, wanted me to protest, maybe even believed it a little, deep down in yourself, that I was changed. But I was created to be like this. You understand that? I was built like this. But I’m not some damn machine. I’m not perfect at what I do. You can manipulate someone to the point where they break and become useless. That’s what I did. I broke you. I realize it.”

Tiago stared at her. “Broke me? You don’t really know anything about people, do you?”

Kay stopped craning over her neck to look at him. It was starting to hurt too much, and she didn’t have the strength for it. “Maybe you’re right,” she said.

“Maybe you’re right,” he mimicked her tired tone. “Just know this: they took my gun away, but I can still watch out for you. I know what you are.”

Kay pulled up her knees and leaned into them. “Fair enough,” she said, tight lipped. She grabbed Avris’s hand as she struggled to stand and look around. It felt good to be upright.

Avris helped, but there was a hesitation to her movements. Kay looked at her, and Avris avoided her eyes.

Another ally lost. Tiago’s words had affected Avris.

“You’ve been in war,” Kay told Avris. “I may not be trustworthy, or what you thought I was. But I’m the smaller monster. The enemy of your enemy. The Doaq, and whatever stands behind on the other side of the wormhole hidden on Placa del Fuego, that’s your real enemy.”

“I don’t think of you as our enemy,” Avris whispered. “But I agree that you’re still dangerous.”

All the lights flickered and the screens on the walls died. Nashara swore and dropped to a knee, clutching her thigh. The machine on Kay’s chest sparked and spat smoke, then released its hold on her and cluttering to the ground before she could even react.

“What happened?” Avris shouted.

Kay stumbled forward in the dim emergency lighting and clutched her chest. The machine had fallen right off. What was going to happen to her?

Thinkerer blurred into action, moving across the surfaces of the panels around the cockpit. “I can get it up and running,” he said, shoving a hand deep into the entrails of a control center. Parts of his arm whirred and split apart, then injected themselves even deeper inside the ship’s control circuitry.

“My healing machine fell of my chest,” Kay said, letting her worry come out in her voice.

Captain Mallette moved over. “You’ll be okay,” he told Kay. “Surgery is over, the machine was monitoring you. Just go easy.”

The front of the cockpit lit up, the walls revealing the waves outside in front of them. Ice ships surrounded them, smoke stacks bellowing dirty black columns of smoke as they continued pulling them along.

Instead of pure white ice Kay noticed they were dirty. Something filled in with the water to cement it together once it froze. Latticework under the hulls hinted at forms that had helped shape them.

They were long, longer than the
Saguenay
.

“Won’t they melt?” she asked. “They’re ice.”

“Glaciers melt slowly. Icebergs sink ships. It takes a long time. And these ships have refrigeration cables to help slow the process. Or make more hull, if needed. They can take a beating, and they’re cheap to build. And easy to hide,” Thinkerer said.

Something in the distance slowly fell out of the sky. A mote plunging toward the ocean’s surface. It disappeared in a plume of salt-spray and a rising fireball. There were more. Ships dropping out of the sky. Planes too.

Kay looked to the right where screens showed the high skyline of Trumball. League planes and spaceships dropped toward the ocean as well.

“The Doaq is attacking,” Thinkerer said. “It expanded the dead zone outwards.” He pulled his hand free of the console, and metallic pieces snapped back up into his palm.

Nashara stood back up, swearing under her breath. “That was not pleasant,” she said.

“It’s defending itself,” Kay said. “It sees all this gathering as a threat. Or it wouldn’t have reacted like this. Which means it can be harmed. So let’s harm it. Let’s burn it out.”

Pepper had been leaning against a wall. “The cost, with the dead zone pushed out this far, for them, will be high. The Doaq will have time to get assistance through its wormhole onto the island as we very slowly make our way there. They should consider falling back behind their own wormholes. Coming up with contingency plans.”

“
They
should,” Kay agreed. “But we have a chance to get at it quickly, thanks to Thinkerer’s planning, your assets, and mine. Combined, we can move quickly. Strike fast. Strike hard.”

“Your assets?” Nashara asked. “What assets do you have left on the island?”

“The criminal organization I built was eaten by the creature,” Kay said. “But there were others. People I’d paid to study the Doaq’s movements and collate them. They’ve been using steam powered analytical machines to understand where the Doaq’s movements intersect and where they lead back. My spotters are passive observers, and are still back on the island. They were close to backtracking where the Doaq’s home on the island was when I left. I imagine that’s where we’ll find a hidden wormhole. And that’s where we can take the fight right to the alien.”

She’d been shot. She was alone in this room, even though these were her allies.

But she could still kill the Doaq.