Local Star by Aimee Ogden (ebook reader online free txt) 📕

She ripped his antilancet cloak away from him, but a vicious kick knocked her rolling several paces. Triz gasped. When Lanniq ran to meet her head-on, she was on her feet waiting, and he seemed to see her for the first time. Whatever words passed between them were lost in the chaos. Then, a flash of movement behind Casne: Rocan’s palm, turning upward toward her.

A scream of warning died in Triz’s throat.

The tunnelgun hidden inside Rocan’s wrist fired.

Casne took a step forward. Triz couldn’t say which happened first, until the white lines cleared from her vision, and she saw Casne tumbling head over foot toward the new hole in the Arcade perimeter. A hole opening into space.

“No,” Triz heard herself say softly.

That tiny figure was framed in the space of the hole for just a moment, a perfect X. A shimmer at the neck: Casne’s Tactics collar insignia catching a shard of light.

Then the limp doll of a Justice officer’s body slammed into Casne, and they both blinked out of existence. Only a black hole left where Casne had been, with starlight flickering like funeral lights in the void.

“No,” Triz said, “no, no, she can’t, no.” She couldn’t feel her face; her teeth clipped her tongue, and her mouth filled with blood, but it didn’t hurt. It felt like drowning.

She couldn’t look away from the wallport. Lanniq and Rocan strained, their feet held securely against the metal plates of the deck. Mag boots—or Mag feet, perhaps, in Rocan’s case. She couldn’t see Lanniq’s face, but Rocan’s was expressionless, intent only on their destination across the Arcade.

The lift tubes.

They still have reserves hidden out there, Saabe had argued. Maybe somewhere webward of Golros.

The Fleet detected an encrypted tight-beam transmission to the Webward Pearls, Kalo had told her.

And he’d asked her for a fighter . . . oh.

The Ceebees were coming to collect their wayward leader.

So Lanniq and Rocan were heading for the lift to climb down to the wrenchworks. Of course they were, because the wrenchworks was their ticket out of the Hab. Rocan would never be able to swim an umbilicus tube fast enough to make it to a rescue ship before the whaleboats mustered their Light Attack Swarms to intercept. But a fast, small ship could enter via the wrenchworks airlock and be gone again before the whaleships could react.

When Triz blinked, the broken pieces of her rescue fantasy cut the insides of her eyelids. “I’ll get you a ship,” Triz said, and blood ran down her chin. Casne would have known what to do now. Maybe Kalo would too.

But when she looked over her shoulder, he was gone.

Chapter Nine

Of course he was gone. Kalo was always going to be gone at some point, and that was why this shitting quad could never be. He was half man and half precarious quantum state teetering on the edge of collapse. Erased from existence by the barrage of a ground array’s superheater? Or beating a retreat from responsibility and sentiment and grief? Gone was gone.

Triz picked up her wrench. It didn’t matter what Casne would do, or what Kalo would say. She wasn’t either of them. And she knew what she needed to do now. She didn’t know how long it would take Lanniq and Rocan to climb down the length of the Hab, though with a tunnelgun in their possession, she guessed they wouldn’t suffer the indignity of having to traverse the recycling engines.

She had to get a ship working. One boot in front of the other. If there was no one else in position to intercept Rocan’s rescue, then she would have to do it herself. Sure, she’d never flown a ship before, but she’d been in one so many times, hadn’t she? Albeit on this side of the Hab bay doors. How different could it be to take this thing into space? Her stomach pitched queasily. She took a different tack: imagining how satisfying it would be to apply the drill bit to the hull of whatever Ceebee ship dropped out of space to make the pickup.

Her wrench bit down on a bolt. Two dust-clogged filters to replace, and this Scooper would be spaceworthy. Just two. Her wrist turned, her arm strained. It felt good to work. Working, at least at this stage of the process, did not require thinking. Only doing.

A dirty filter hit the floor and coughed up rust-red powder. Triz kicked it aside and hefted a clean one. It clicked neatly into place. Triz liked things in their place. So did Casne. Triz’s pairhome had always been neater than the rooms shared by Casne’s quadparents. It was comfortable to nestle, for a moment, in the warmth of memory. Too comfortable. In memory, Casne was still alive. Triz’s eyes watered, but she fastened the filter back into place and reached for the second one.

It was something, to have been witness to Casne’s final moments. An act of bravery. Never the cowardice they’d accused her of. She’d tell Veling and the other quadparents. Quelian too. She’d scream it into his face if he wouldn’t listen. She thought he would. She’d make him.

The second panel popped into place, and it occurred to Triz none of Casne’s quadparents might’ve survived her. She didn’t know how much of a hole the tunnelgun had created in the Hab. Obviously, support systems were still running, but it was entirely possible Rocan had shot through the part of the Hab where people lived. She closed the open wound in the Scooper’s side and probed the oozing sore of the possibility of an entire quadhome erased in an hour’s bloody work. No. She had to believe they were still alive, that Rocan’s main goal was getting here, to this wrenchworks.

And Nantha. Oh, no. She could imagine telling Casne’s mother what happened, their knees close together and hands twisted into two-tone knots. But her wife, who had made her home in Casne’s heart and occupied so many of the warm hollow spaces in Triz’s