3

The shuttle ride to Central was about twenty minutes and as promised the stealth craft made the trip undetected up to the last moment.

“This is station control, pilot please identify and provide vectoring uplink. Where the hell-”

And then a storm broke in space, a storm of electromagnetic fury as all seven academy stations turned their masses of computing power toward hacking every machine orbiting the Earth. The Central Orbital Transit Platform was the center at which the waves of disruption met and coalesced into a boiling sea. The creature in the mobile shell, which indicated to me that he had been given a proper name by Isidro, Quetzalcoatl, dove into the whirlpool and struck a death blow to the station’s defensive AI. After he had made a puppet of the broken security system he took over the control systems and settled in as temporary master of the station.

Turn off all the artificial gravity emitters; I have the advantage in micro. Kill the lights, take down everything. Keep this thing in orbit and the air flowing, but nothing else.

I looked over Central where it loomed large beyond the shuttle’s window trying to imagine where Isidro would be held. There was a small brig on the station, but an outside group might want to secure him on their own terms. Near a docked shuttle was a distinct possibility, but any infiltrator following the hack would be expected to come in at a docking port, so the mooring columns might be among the most watched areas. Besides, the columns themselves lacked bridges except where they attached to the station; moving from one to another would be time consuming if I didn’t know which dock they were using.

Under my direction, Quetzalcoatl drove the boat to a corridor within the nest of engineering blocks at the root of the station and latched onto an emergency vent hatch. It was unlikely as an entrance and near the branching paths up the platform’s different blocks. I watched the airlock in the shuttle’s hold slide open with growing trepidation. The interior vent was already open so I was immediately staring into the station corridor.

I hesitated at the threshold. No matter how far beyond the line of normalcy I’d already gone, I dreaded pulling myself into the dark hall ahead of me. Quetzalcoatl chirped in my ear and presented me with the image of a guard patrol coming down the shaft. I floated into the station sluggishly, just so I could see the patrol with my own eyes. They were still many meters away and would be hard pressed to find me with their dim flashlights. I had time to think over my plan, or rather, time for more hesitation.

The AI cried out more excitedly and began pushing a stream of videos and documents into my head. The rush of images was too much to decipher rationally, but the construct’s argument reacted in my subconscious. By instinct, I knew he had found Isidro. I pulled on the mental threads of ghost images of him being dragged away from the boarding checkpoint and taken by side passages to one of the mooring blocks. I saw a first aid station at the top of the block, near a shuttle with UN registration, a clip of a man in a military issue flight suit stepping into the room and smashing the security camera.

There was an easy enough path to get there and I could avoid the men coming down the junction by moving ahead in the same direction. I coiled my body to spring off the wall and away down the corridor. If I went the other way, through the patrol, it would be faster.

Are you really going to hesitate this much? Even an extra minute might be too much. Why? I fought back tears and tried desperately to contain my pounding heart. I’m not doing this for some other purpose. To save someone right in front me, I can be allowed that much selfishness, right?

Somewhere deep inside myself lay a sword that I had broken and tossed aside. I searched for it with groping hands. I put aside all of the images of my own past, kept with me only that one stupid smirking face as I took hold of something fiery that had once been my only way of living. A snarl stretched the atrophied muscles in my face, then I roared my frustration aloud and kicked off toward the approaching guards. Gauntlet raised in front of my body, I glided through the corridor until the patrol spotted me a few meters away. They wore standard airtight crew suits with visored helmets and raised needle-rifles at me warily. On the back of my hand, the Hand of Glory’s eye clicked open exposing the slice of nothingness contained within the device.

“Stop! Who-” One guard began before shouldering his weapon more seriously. It was apparent to them from my momentum that I intended to attack.

Black sparks overflowed from the gauntlet’s open abyss while the air between me and the patrol shimmered as if in a haze of heat. The calculating AI in the Hand interpreted my intent, then twisted and kneaded the world with gravity waves to grant my wish. The haze between us clarified into a solid shield-like distortion projected in front of the gauntlet which gave the distinct impression of gazing through a looking glass.

When the patrol opened fire with their rifles, their tranquilizer laced needles simply bounced away upon striking the intervening lens. I felt a static charge pass through my body, some of the old sense of power and control. Uselessly, the guards emptied their magazines firing into the barrier membrane. After they had finished, dozens of shining quills spilled through the air in every direction. Some became fixed in the sides of the corridor while others tumbled end over end back toward the patrol.

I flexed my fingers and then waved the gauntlet out to the side. The glassy barrier shattered into a rain of shards that fragmented fractally until they filled the shaft and became a barrage of shock waves that scattered the guards like fallen leaves in an autumn wind.

That was only enough to briefly stun the men, so I reached out with my right hand toward the nearest and then drew it back like a fisher hauling in a net. The Hand of Glory wrapped its warping tendrils around the guard and pulled him into my path. I closed the gauntlet into a hammer-like fist and swung my legs out to catch the junction wall. Pivoting as much momentum into my lunge as I could before bracing against the wall, I punched the oncoming figure in the solar plexus and sent him plummeting back toward his companions. Those other two had reclaimed their bearings and trained their weapons on me again.

Their next volley of needles was just as ineffective as the first. The Hand projected a crystal shield in front of me as I leapt from handle to handle to propel myself into their formation. I slipped my foot into a hold on the wall and pivoted myself into place standing between the two. I swiped at the one in front of me, dispelling my shield in a typhoon burst that slammed him against the adjacent wall, then rolled backward and grappled the other as he swung at me with his rifle-butt. I pulled him and curled to draw us into a floating deathball while raining blows down on him with my armored fist. Finally I kicked his body away into the corridor where he drifted limply. Neither of the other two guards seemed to be recovering consciousness.

I had done it. Relief and fear oozed from the parts of my mind that had been frozen in combat. What the hell am I going to do with you now? These were security guys, but it’s not like they were soldiers or corporate mercs. They might as well be civilians and weren’t even trained on how to actually fight in microgravity; I decided to leave them as they were and took a few moments to calm my thundering heart. Those kids, even Burton himself, they all thought I must be some fearless, ironhearted woman, but even seven years ago I was desperately afraid every time the Knights went to battle.

Quetzalcoatl urged me forward, running maps in front of my eyes and showing how I might slip through the patrols to reach the mooring block. I kicked off from the wall. There was no more room for hesitation; I was on the warpath again after so many years of hiding. In my mind were only thoughts about the room in front of me, and the next one beyond it, and my target in the distance.

Luckily, no one else seemed to care to try to stop me. None of the other people I encountered as I moved through the station’s lower levels were security personnel, just a few regular people half-terrified by Central’s sudden loss of gravity control and non-emergency lighting. With the comms networks down, they didn’t even know that some invader had come aboard after crashing the computers. I spent five minutes swimming room to room, waving politely to anyone I happened to see clinging to the walls and clutching at computer pads in frustration.

Gliding into place around the corner, I arrived at the entrance to the mooring block. I peeked into the connector and saw a dark shaft extending hundreds of meters into the distance. If I was really lucky, the outside agents would have dismissed the station security to preserve their secrecy, but I didn’t have much of a choice even if there were a hundred guards waiting for me. There was no room in the confines of a station for any approach other than a frontal assault. Gripping the handles in the connector, I pulled myself into the mooring corridor and squared myself to the wall so that I could push off with the most momentum.

I leapt from the edge of the connector and soared through the cylindrical passage, passing the hatches of docking ports on the walls rapidly. A few minutes passed in the still corridor. It was totally empty; I heard only my own breathing and the ambient hum of the satellite’s artificial breathing. Finally, I reached out to grab a handhold and bring myself to a stop near the aid station door. The sound of my impact with the wall was louder than I’d hoped and I moved to the door before anyone inside might have time to react.

When I surged toward the portal, Quetzalcoatl stepped in to retract the door and flash on the lights in the previously dark room. My visor shifted into a filtered image, comfortably dim and with everything of note inside the aid station highlighted with neon outlines. There was one man a few feet from the door caught in the process of donning an environment suit and then abandoning the effort to reach for a gun holster. Middle aged, White. He had the hard edged but clean cut look of an intelligence agent or special forces soldier. A pulsing red frame glowed around him.

I reached out toward him with my gauntlet and then closed my fist decisively. The spook didn’t have time to show his shock before his body twisted and crunched, leaving him as little more than a spiraling tangle of limbs slowly drifting away toward the back wall.

On the far side of the room, another agent half-stuffed into a safety suit floated with a red border pasted onto him. He had taken his eyes off me to watch in horror what had become of his comrade and was slow to even try drawing his own gun. I swung my fist toward him, sending out a shockwave that blasted him back against the far side of the room. Again and again, I hammered away at the man until the wall deformed under the force of the impacts. He bounced away through the air along with a spreading asteroid field of blood droplets.

Isidro was floating above a table near the center of the room, stuffed into something that looked like a more durable floatbag with straps and bindings. It reminded me of old straitjackets. They were probably preparing him for a trip groundside.

“Hey, can you hear me? Are you alright?” I asked as I tore away at the fabric to free him. The hood came away and I saw that he was alive, but his eyelids drooped nearly shut and he turned to face me seemingly more from the sound of my voice rather than seeing clearly. His olive skin was streaked with sweat.

“Ash?” he mumbled. His movements were all weighted by lethargy. While he struggled to get his bearings, still partially tangled up in the imprisoning bag, I removed my helmet so that he could see my face. Looking down on him, relief rolled through my chest like a rising tide.

“That’s right; I’ve come to get you.”

“Faster than I was expecting,” he said sleepily. His right hand drifted up to gingerly touch my cheek as he focused his listless eyes on mine. I gripped his hand tightly with my unarmored left hand.

“Idiot, if counting on me like this is what gave you the confidence to go shuttling around in the open…” There was no way I could finish such a statement. After all, hadn’t I come running to bail him out?

I looked around the room again, trying to spot any vials or injection kits. It was clear that Isidro had been drugged, but I didn’t know what juices were part of a spook’s kit anymore. Or maybe they had used something from the aid station’s cache. Quetzalcoatl painted a small object floating nearby with bright green flares; it was a spent autoinjector, no label.

“Did they happen to mention what they dosed you with?”

“No,” he replied slowly. Then, as if remembering something from afar he added, “But if you brought one of the med kits from our armory, I think a pyramid will do the trick.”

“Pyramids” weren’t exactly a common feature of medical bags, but I quickly found in my pouch a few plastic trinkets of that shape. He took the one I offered and slammed it against his thigh with a slight gasp. After a second, he pulled the pyramidal autoinjector away and let it tumble out of hand. What must have been a cocktail of stimulants brought him to wakefulness in mere moments. He took stock of the room with fresh eyes. They lingered momentarily on the broken bodies of the agents, but then scanned away looking for something else.

“There was a third guy with them, tall as the room I think, or maybe that was just the drugs. He was big though; did you run into him already?”

“No, just these two and some Central security. We’ve got a bit of a hike to get to the escape craft, let’s go.” I wasn’t particularly concerned about another spook, no matter how big he might be. “Can you move on your own?”

“For the most part, just pull me along every now and then,” he said as he started navigating toward the door. “If we’re using that shuttle, that means the plan is we go down to Earth from here, right?”

“Unless you can think of an alternative at this point.”

He shook his head and lapsed into silence. I wondered how prepared he was to return groundside. At some point his quest would have required it, but who knows how many more years they would have schemed there in orbit before making a move. As I watched him drift from ledge to ledge along the mooring corridor, I noticed that he was only wearing his academy flight suit. Would there even be a point in getting him an environment suit? If our shuttle had trouble on the way down, we were probably just goners.

The long term storage docks were located away from the regular traffic of the mooring blocks. Quetzalcoatl showed me clear pathways to our destination, free of patrols and even the civilians who had migrated to shelter cabinets as the seriousness of the situation set in. The AI was on edge over something, apparent difficulties in keeping control of the station’s computers. It was just another reason to leave quickly.

In the dry docks, craft were kept inside compartmented hangars rather than simply attaching to the outside of the station. When we got to the corridor with our shuttle’s compartment in it, I sent Isidro ahead to prepare for launch. Something in my gut warned of danger.

I listened. The ambient hum of the station and the sounds of Isidro opening the shuttle. Straining to discern the smallest echoes in the distance, I heard something out of place. The clank and rattle of someone moving rapidly through an adjoining corridor. It sounded almost more like loose cargo banging its way through a passage. Quetzalcoatl went into a frenzy; I felt my hair stand on end as his agitation passed into my mind. Something else had been locking him out of certain security systems, had been messing with the station since before they had even arrived. Someone was moving around the station under the blanket of camera blackouts. I slipped my helmet back over my head and sealed it.

Floating back toward the door to our hangar, I waited with eyes locked on the connector junction and gauntlet raised in front of me defensively. I was confident in dealing with any combatant I might encounter in space due to the awesome power of the device, but that confidence wavered as a totally unexpected figure pulled itself into view from the head of the adjacent passage. It wasn’t possible to tell what sex the person was; they were covered head to toe by an armored carapace. The ultimate in infantry hardware: a framework of armor that drew on synthetic muscles and aetheric energy to turn a soldier into a walking tank. It was only a light A-Frame, used for scouting and skirmishes, but with it on the wearer was nearly nine feet tall and wholly too large for the confined corridors of the station.

I grimaced. Of course it would be me. As far as I’d ever heard, no one had brought an A-Frame into space before for much the same reason guns were so scarce in the fragile artificial environments. This was almost certainly the first fight involving powered armor in orbital history, and I had to be the one on the other side. The hardened surfaces of the suit were painted a flat black with no insignias or markings. The Ghost built into the A-Frame probed Quetzalcoatl for weaknesses and the space between us filled with the invisible war of the computers. I had no idea how long our AI could hold out against that sort of juggernaut.

“Get that boat prepped NOW!”

Isidro turned from where he sat fiddling with the craft’s controls, looking at me uncertainly. Just then, the A-Frame leveled a gun almost as large as I was at me and fired a stream of glowing bullets down the corridor. I splayed my armored fingers and blocked the torrent of steel with another projected barrier. The bullets crashed into the distortion and ricocheted off creating a rain of shrapnel that scraped and dented the corridor walls. Isidro set about his work feverishly.

When the barrage stopped, I drew my rattler with my left hand, braced my legs against the wall, and sprayed the weapon’s large magazine downrange. Ordinarily such a small gun should have no effect on an A-Frame, but the aether treated ammo it used could chew through the armor and give the wearer reason to retreat to cover. However, the hissing swarm fell short of their mark, bouncing away from some intervening, invisible barrier. I looked on in shock to see the figure had raised its own right arm and there the armored frame broke open to release void-like sparks from a well of emptiness contained on the back of its gauntlet.

What the hell? Astonishment turned my body cold. But was it really such a surprise? Of the five Hands we’d made, I could account only for the one then on my arm. Any of the other four might have reached some mil-corp lab, and Dr. Pavlita had taken his research to the establishment anyway. Who’s to say they wouldn’t make their own version of the design? My thoughts raced as we stared each other down through our helmets. The A-Frame’s visor was completely hidden behind an armored faceplate, giving the suit the appearance of facelessness. The question that finally settled out of the slurry of my thoughts was this: Have you dared to test a contest between two of these? Back in the day, we’d been too scared to try pitting the gauntlets against each other.

The person in the A-Frame made no moves to approach closer or threaten further attacks. We simply faced each other across the corridor, arms raised in front of us. No ordinary weapons would be effective so the confrontation would only continue if one of us resolved to a duel of gauntlets. The skill of the AI controlling the gravity core, the output capacity of the emission circuits, the size of aether batteries in reserve; these were the factors that would determine which glove overpowered the other. I was confident in Isidro’s AI, but the hardware on an A-Frame was almost certainly better than mine. However, the first casualty of such a clash would probably be the station itself. Central would be torn apart before we found out who was the victor. The other person’s hesitation told me that they either hadn’t done the testing or that the result was as dangerous as we’d feared.

“Ash, let’s go!” Isidro shouted. I took one last look down the corridor and then sprang through the doorway. My momentum took me into the shuttle where I crashed against the back of a seat in the confined capsule. Isidro was already in motion; he slammed the door shut and yelled, “Override everything, launch!” Chaos erupted outside the shuttle as emergency release bolts exploded and the vacuum of space tore open the hangar to suck out everything. We were thrown around the small cockpit as the craft tumbled into open space on the rushing whirlwind of bleeding atmosphere.

I wrapped myself around Isidro during one of our collisions and tried to protect him from the beating walls of our enclosure. Eventually, the shuttle’s attitude control jets halted the uncontrolled motion of the boat. I wondered if it was even appropriate to refer to it as a boat since its purpose was deorbiting rather than travel between stations. The idle thought turned in my mind as Isidro and I spun slowly through the small gap behind the seats. For a time, the only sounds were the steady firing of the craft’s jets as it moved us onto a reentry vector and the growl of the air conditioning.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Fine…sounded like someone brought a damn cannon…” His words trailed off without energy.

“An entire suit of powered armor, actually,” I said quietly. He whistled under his breath. I was too weary to mention the opposing gauntlet.

Indicators flared inside the capsule letting us know to get ready for reentry. We disentangled ourselves and strapped into the seats. There were no portholes on the craft, but on a small monitor we watched the Earth growing larger and larger as we fell toward it. I pulled off my helmet and breathed deeply from the recycled air. Several spots on my sides and back were tender where I touched them; I tried to replay the tumult of our exit in my mind and connect the nascent bruises to specific impacts with the sides of the craft.

Isidro sat still and silent, watching the monitor with a more serious expression than I had ever seen him wear. As we drifted through the darkness, I cast my thoughts toward what was to come next, but I was too drained to see the road ahead. I knew that, logically, I was about to land in the remote plains of Manchuria but I didn’t have the energy to process that fact. It appeared that my self-imposed exile was going to be a lot shorter than I’d imagined; I hadn’t wanted to return to the planet at all. Isidro turned toward me and our gazes met. He managed a small smile and thanked me.

“This isn’t really how I wanted it to happen, but I’m glad that you’re with me.”