Chapter Twenty-Five
A few days after the Woede attack on their shuttle, Leda and Stein were almost back to the original position the Equinox had been in when Tuva had shown up.
Stein said Oline probably started tracing the Chandra until Tuva’s after-market modifications blocked the trail, so they’d have to do a number of leaps to find Equinox. Leda had settled in for a long trip, though the shuttles weren’t designed for prolonged journeys. There was only one small sleeping platform on board—which Stein only mentioned an hour ago—and it came out of a panel in the wall near the door. And of course, the one bed had sustained damage when the Woede boarding pod cut through that shuttle wall.
Jerks.
At least they had a small restroom, complete with a shower. In the past few days, Leda had figured the system out—she even managed to wash and dry her clothes. Wearing the same dirty shirt and pants day after day was one thing, but she needed clean underwear.
They had just caught a hint of Equinox and were about to perform a shuttle leap to the proposed location. Leda worked the replicator beforehand and served them lunch, consisting of tasteless colorful cubes. She’d gotten used to them now, though she longed for the burst of flavor from fresh fruits and vegetables.
Stein was in the pilot’s chair, his expression tight. Intense. He was mad that he couldn’t reach Equinox, Leda knew. So she thought she’d take his mind off of their current predicament.
“How long have you known Roar?”
Stein mustn’t have expected the question. For a moment he was still, his eyes trained on the screen ahead. “I met him a while ago, but I doubt he remembers. I looked…a lot different than I do now.”
Leda’s stomach squeezed. Obviously Roar would have a past, but she didn’t like to think that Stein—as Sofia—might have been a part of it. She swallowed the sharp, bitter taste in her mouth. “Oh, cool.”
Stein smirked. “It’s not what you think. He was trying out the prototype for the RomTek suits, and I had to show my face. The event took all afternoon, from Roar fighting in an arena to an early banquet dinner hosted at the most prestigious hotel in the city. Roar and I were at the same table during dinner. We talked, but not about anything important. Small talk, I guess you’d say. Then he went home to the Elders, and I went back to my life.”
“So you two never…?”
“Oh, hell to the no. Roar’s not my type.” Stein winked.
“Who is your type? Someone like Oline?”
Barking laughter was his reply. “Yeah, again, no.”
She thought for a moment. “Hmm, you probably need someone who’s your polar opposite. Let’s see: you’re loud, brash, kind of an asshole—”
“You wound me!” He faked an arrow to the chest.
Leda rolled her eyes and continued. “So your ideal person would be someone…softer. The ‘strong but silent’ to your ‘unorganized chaos’ or something like that.” She laughed at her own joke but noticed he didn’t seem very amused. Stein was blushing. How close to the mark had she come? “Does this person exist? Is it someone I know? Someone on Equinox?”
He angled away from her. “Drop it.”
“It is! Oh, c’mon, Stein. Tell me! I won’t say anything. I promise.”
“Leda,” he said, her name a warning.
“So it’s not Oline or Roar. Definitely not my grandmother, or my uncle.”
Irritation seethed from him, raising the shuttle’s temperature.
“And there’s no way you’d ever date a Woede, am I right?”
He snorted. “You got that right.”
“That crosses Nils off the list.”
“Can’t you just shut up for like, five minutes?”
“I probably could, but this is getting exciting.”
A muscle ticked in Stein’s jaw. “Why is this so important to you?”
“I like knowing things about people. It helps me decide if I can trust them or not.”
“How the hell does that make any sense at all?”
She nibbled the tip of her tongue. “You’ve lied to people you love, right?”
The color drained from his face.
“So have I. We all do it, and there’s mostly an acceptable reason for it. But you can tell the difference, if you look for it.”
“Difference between what?”
“A calculated lie and an outburst of honesty. It’s the unexpected honesty that carries the most weight. That’s how I know I can trust someone.” She leaned toward him and grinned. “Tell me. Tell meeeee. Stein, just tell me!”
“Shut up.” He covered his ears. “Not listening.”
“Well, I’ve gone through everyone on Equinox with three left over. Obviously you’re not into me. You can’t handle this awesome.”
“La-la-la-la-la!”
“And I can’t see you going for Rika.”
Stein hummed loud and out of tune.
“That leaves…” Leda raised her voice over Stein’s.
It was almost funny, the way Stein froze in place. Every part of him went still at once. He didn’t even blink. Out of the stillness, she nearly missed the soft-spoken word.
“Petrus.” He swallowed then, the sound like Fourth of July fireworks over Manhattan.
She reached for his hand but Stein busied himself at the controls. “I’m guessing things on Aurelis are sort of the same as they are on Earth, and you can’t freely be yourself without others judging you, hating you. There are good people in the universe, you know. People who don’t care about your gender or who you love. People who know what it feels like to be judged by things beyond their control.”
Stein kept his attention on whatever he was doing with the shuttle.
“Does Petrus know how you feel?”
He didn’t reply.
“Are you mad at me?”
Again, nothing.
“Am I the first person you admitted your feelings for Petrus to?”
“If I answer, will you stop talking?”
Her smile felt 100 percent triumphant. “About this? Yes. I can’t promise I’ll be quiet forever, though.”
“Fine. Yes, you’re the first. I haven’t even really admitted this to Petrus.”
Leda pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t burst out in a chorus of awwwwwwww! She guessed that in a universe this big, there were a million complications two people had to overcome if they wanted to be together.
Like knowing you might literally kill each other.
Maybe it was better this way, her separated from Roar. But she did miss him so deeply that her chest ached. She wanted to see him again. Just once.
Once she composed herself, she turned to Stein with a smile. “Thank you for trusting me.”
“You didn’t give me much of a choice.”
She pretended not to hear him. “Now that I know you’re mostly trustworthy, tell me how you got mixed up with Tuva.”
He avoided eye contact with Leda as he engaged the drive for a leap. She recognized the sensations now, but no matter how many times she tried to prepare for it, she still experienced the weightless feeling, and her stomach flopped in her gut like a fish out of water. When it was over, she swallowed and resisted the urge to dry heave.
Stein released the controls and pulled up the radar. Nothing showed up onscreen. He rested a hand on the panel, then spun his chair to face Leda. “I was going through a lot back then,” he began. “My father didn’t understand me. He kept forcing me to be something I wasn’t. So I rebelled. The Underground seemed like the perfect answer for me, a way to get out from under my father’s thumb and a place where I’d belong, no matter who, or what, I was. They didn’t care how I looked, only that I believed things were wrong on Aurelis.”
“Wrong how? The way Oline and Roar told it, things work pretty well on your home world.”
“For them, maybe.” Stein unclipped his harness and pushed to his feet. “Not everyone on Aurelis is treated equally. Did you notice how Petrus has the same kind of name as the rest of us, but he doesn’t look like us?”
She had noticed. “I just thought maybe his parents moved somewhere more uh, ‘western’ and…” At Stein’s arch look, Leda broke off. “Okay, so that’s not it.”
“No. It happened over a few generations, but basically, other cultures were erased. There’s no more traditions, nothing that makes people special. We’re all the same, even if we don’t all look the same.”
“They just got rid of other cultures? How can they do that?”
Stein turned, facing the sealed hole in the door. “By outlawing any practices that are considered inferior.”
The answer stunned her. “So, when Tuva said something about people having to run away and live in caves to keep their ancestors’ traditions alive, she wasn’t kidding?”
He shook his head. “Anyway. That’s an issue that isn’t going to get fixed anytime soon. In the meantime, you and I need to focus a little harder on trying to find Equinox. Barring that, I hope you’re a good actor.”
Leda jerked her head back in surprise. “Why?”
“Because you and I are going to have to steal a spaceship.”
She thought he was joking, but Stein had been serious. After a couple of days searching for Equinox and coming up with nothing, Stein piloted the shuttle toward what he called an outlying spaceport, on the far edges of Stein’s home galaxy.
Leda noticed something. “If we’re in Aurelite territory, how come there’s no Woede here?”
“They started off with the smaller planets farther in the galaxy to get a foothold on Aurelis. By the time they took over, we didn’t know what had hit us. And Aurelis was their goal, not backwater space like this.”
Leda opened her mouth to ask another question, but Stein cut her off. “When we step off this shuttle, you have to stay in your suit at all times.”
“What if I need to go to the bathroom?”
He fixed a sharp look in her direction. “Obviously you can take it off if you gotta go, but I’d rather you hold it in. We’ll be on borrowed time until the ship we steal clears Liider airspace.”
She pushed her lips into a pout but nodded in assent. They went over Stein’s plan until Leda could repeat it, word-for-word, with no prompting. Then it was time to go.
It took several boring hours to make it to Liider Spaceport, and Leda slept through the landing. She woke, angry with herself, but Stein assured her that she’d see a much grander spaceport when they arrived on Aurelis. She perked up as she attached several weapons to their holsters on the suit. If all went according to plan, she’d see Aurelis sooner than anticipated. Liider was the half-way point between the outer edges of Aurelis’s galaxy, and the planet itself.
After docking, Stein and Leda left the shuttle and went to find his contact, who handed him a small chip as he shook Stein’s hand. Leda felt safe assuming it was a he, even in a RomTek suit with the visor pulled down. He stood a couple of heads taller than her, with broad shoulders and a deep voice. Plus, Stein referred to his contact as “Odin,” who was male—at least in mythology.
The exchange went like this: Leda followed Stein through the spaceport, they came to a big courtyard, and “ran into” the tall suited guy. He shook Stein’s hand, said hello, acknowledged Leda, then walked off, getting lost in the crowds. Leda felt a little let down by the lack of excitement, but she consoled herself with the fact that they weren’t in the air yet. Plenty could go wrong still.
Stein walked to a deserted hallway leading to a dock. He slipped the chip into a slot on his arm and was silent as he viewed its contents. Then he told Leda they had two options, and both were docked three levels down.
“We’re supposed to remove our helmets in a spaceport if we’re not with Aurelis Security, but if you have the right attitude, no one will question you.” Stein held his back ramrod straight in the suit, his arms loose at his sides, one hand on the butt of his plasma gun. He walked down the hall, then back to Leda. “Like that. Try it.”
Leda mimicked his stance, throwing a little swagger into her step. When she turned and walked back toward him, Stein chuckled in her headset.
“Perfect. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’d done this before.”
Momentary pride blossomed in her chest. “Guess I’m a natural.”
“One more thing,” he said. “If someone asks you for ID, don’t freeze up. You need to own it. Act like you have more of a right to be there than they do, and they’ll let you off the hook.”
“So basically, I should act like a self-righteous prick who thinks the universe revolves around them.”
Stein laughed again. “Exactly. Now, I’m sending the info on this chip to your suit. You’ll be able to pull it up using the neural link, if you need it.”
A second later, the visor showed an incoming packet. Leda zeroed in on it with her eyes, and the packet downloaded. She now knew everything Stein knew.
“Let’s go.” He went first, and Leda followed.
They took a crowded elevator down to dock LD72. In the lift, a child stared up at Leda with wide, awe-filled eyes. She cocked her head to one side, letting his reflection in her visor distort a little. He giggled and shoved his thumb in his mouth. When the mother saw, she yanked the boy to her other side, away from Leda.
They really do fear Aurelis Security.
When the lift reached their destination, Stein pushed through the crowds to exit, and Leda imitated him. It was the kind of move she hated making, but desperate times and all that. She followed him to an empty hallway, identical to the one they’d been in before.
At the end, Stein said into the mic, “Count the guards while I locate the ships.”
Leda peered around the corner and counted the number of guards on the dock. There were three, all wearing the same dark blue uniforms with a string of seven white stars across the left shoulder as the rest of the spaceport’s security members.
She ducked back into the hall before they saw her. Down the hall she and Stein were in, Liider Spaceport’s main courtyard was bustling with lunchtime shoppers. The spaceport reminded Leda of an airport, with seating areas near carriers taking passengers to other stations and planets, restaurants, shops, and even a few hotels. Above them, a dome mimicked bright afternoon sunlight.
Stein was staring out a wide porthole showing a hint of the ships moored at the dock they were casing. Intel from his unknown contact had said there were two ships in Liider Spaceport that could easily be taken by a crew of two. Neither was close to Equinox in size, speed, or tech, which suited their needs fine. Their focus lay on stealth. Though older models of Escort Class ships, designed to escort important delegates through dangerous space, both were equipped with aftermarket cloaks and powerful shields.
“How many guards?” Stein whispered, still staring out the porthole. His face was obscured by the helmet’s visor, which he kept down since they docked the shuttle on the other side of the spaceport.
“Three.” Leda rolled her shoulders inside the suit, the weight of it now familiar. She’d had to rely on the suit since her crutches were on Equinox.
Stein stretched his arms out on either side of him, and through the comm connection, Leda heard his back pop. “Set your plasma gun to low.” He flicked a switch on the side of his weapon, holstered to his thigh.
Leda did the same. The weapon whined to life. “Will this kill them?”
He shook his head. “At a low dose, a plasma weapon emits a static pulse, sort of like a stunner, but it leaves a burn.”
Small price they’d have to pay in the grand scheme. Leda already had a massive scar on her back, much bigger than before. She assumed she’d collect a couple more before this was over.
Stein put a hand on her arm. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
He paused for a second. “Follow me. And remember, act like you belong and no one will question you. You’re supposed to be here, and anyone else is inferior.”
“Got it.” Sweat dripped down her back.
“Let’s go.” Stein stood taller as he stepped out of the corridor, headed down the dock.
Leda mirrored his movements, keeping that swagger in her step, watching the guards straighten when they heard the heavy thud from their RomTek boots. Inside her suit, beads of sweat trailed over her skin. The suit was like an oven.
“You,” one of the guards said, pointing at Stein. “Let me see your docking slip.”
Stein paused, turning his head toward the guard. Leda could see the man’s reflection in Stein’s visor. A thread of panic knotted in her stomach as Stein took a step toward the guard, his fingers dancing on the holstered plasma gun.
“What’s your problem, Kransvik?” the shortest guard hissed. “He’s Aurelis Security.”
Kransvik glanced between his two fellow sentries, wariness flashing in his eyes. “Why didn’t anyone say there were AS agents in this terminal?”
The third guard, too slight for his uniform and young enough to have just a year or two on Leda, backed away, flattening himself against the wall behind him. “Just let them pass,” he said, his voice shaking as much as his hands.
These Aurelis Security guys must be worse than Stein let on. Leda shot Stein a look through her visor, wondering how much he was going to play this role up. If the guards called for backup, she could see needing to shoot their way out of here with more power behind the plasma guns than a slight charge. She didn’t want anyone getting killed, but they were in the way.
“Let them wonder,” Stein whispered through the comm. At the same time, he began walking toward the skinny guard like a soldier possessed of a single purpose.
If things got rough, Leda would be prepared. She closed the distance between her and the shorter guard. Blood pounded in her ears, a rush of adrenaline pumping through her veins. By sheer will alone, she kept from panicking or pulling out her weapon, but she kept her fingers near.
Stein reached the thin sentry and stood so close that his visor touched the guard’s nose. Stein was still as the guard shook, beads of sweat running down his face and onto his uniform. He said nothing, just stood there, patient.
Leda passed the short guard and Stein, continuing on like she had every right to be there, and they were holding her up. About halfway down the dock she spotted one of the two ships they were casing. It seemed perfect, and there weren’t any docking clamps holding it down. Acting uninterested by the macho display, she sighed heavily, turning on her heels to face the three guards and Stein, who still hadn’t spoken or moved. In the suit, he made for a menacing figure.
“Are you done?” she said, sounding bored, though her pulse hammered in her ears. “I want to get a move on.”
Stein tilted his helmet. “Are we done?” His voice sounded much lower than usual, and gravelly.
The young sentry stammered an apology, shaking so violently Leda thought he’d fall to pieces and land on the floor in a heap of bones and fabric. A moment of empathy for the guard flickered in her chest, but she extinguished the spark before it had a chance to become a flame.
“That’s what I thought.” Stein moved away, and the guard relaxed a fraction.
The other two guards stood frozen in indecision. Then Leda saw Kransvik reach for his weapon. In a flash, she pulled her plasma gun from the suit’s holster, aimed, and fired. A bright blue stream lit up the hallway. The guard didn’t have time to dodge the blast. It hit him in the chest, dead center, burning a hole through his uniform. Stunned, he stumbled back into the other guard, then slumped to the ground.
Leda took aim at the sentry, who was staring at the man at his feet. “Are we going to have any more problems here?”
He looked up, eyes wide with fear. “No, no trouble.”
“Good.” Leda motioned to the wall, where the third guard still cowered. “Drop your stunner and head over to your buddy.” To the skeleton, she said, “And you, stunner on the floor, then kick it over.”
They both complied. Stein took their comms, making sure they couldn’t contact anyone while he and Leda were making their escape.
“Nice work,” Stein whispered through the comm system in the RomTek suits. “Sorry I kind of froze there for a second.”
Leda tucked the stunners under her arm. “No worries. We’re almost out of here.”
Stein held out his hand for a stunner and Leda gave one to him, knowing what he had to do. She shut her eyes behind her visor as he shot the remaining sentries, but she heard their muffled cries and bodies slumping.
“Time to go,” Stein said.
“We’re heading for Aurelis now, right?”
He nodded. “Hope you know how to stop the Woede once we get there.”
Yeah, about that…
Leda didn’t have a clue.