“Wonderful,” Severyne said. “I hope you’re as good at fighting as you claim to be. All right, you sit there, let me cuddle up close beside you. Good, now, lean this way, a little and I’ll bow my head, here, and my hair will hide our faces. Go ahead and put your hand, ugh, on my hip there, all right, and the other one on the back of my neck…”

  •••

  They weren’t actually kissing, but their faces were very close together, and it still felt more intimate than Bianca had been with anyone except Grandly, a few times, when the stars were bright and the moons were high and her blood sang in her veins. “Move your hands a little,” Sev whispered. “Look passionate.” Bianca did her best to comply, pretending she was in the throes of lust like the heroines she’d read about, but it was hard to feel those feelings when she was nose-to-nose with an alien woman. (But, she supposed, Grandly wasn’t really the same species as her either. Was anyone, since all the Mahact were dead? But she wasn’t quite Mahact, either.)

  “No touching!” a voice grated harshly over the loud­speaker. Sev’s hand briefly left its place on Bianca’s shoulder, then returned.

  “What did you just do?” Bianca whispered.

  “I made an obscene gesture,” Sev said. “I’ll teach it to you later.”

  Boots came thumping down the hall – three sets of them, Bianca could hear, not two, as Sev had expected. Maybe she didn’t know the rota here as well as she claimed, or they’d changed things up to confuse her, or they’d brought an extra guard because they knew what Bianca was capable of. Ha. Probably that one.

  Bianca didn’t expect this plan to work, not really, but trying something was better than waiting around for someone else to do something.

  There was a buzz as the wall of energy came down, and Sev let go of Bianca and turned her head. With her view now unobstructed by the Letnev woman’s face, Bianca could see two masked guards and first officer Richeline, all three holding black batons that crackled with blue sparks of energy at the ends.

  Richeline stepped forward, a bruise dark around her eye. “A pervert as well as a violent insubordinate,” Richeline said. “And you, Bianca – I thought better of you. When the guards first called me, I thought the traitor was molesting you, but no, apparently you’re a willing participant!”

  “It’s boring in the cell, Richie,” Sev said. “We had to entertain ourselves somehow. How’s your eye?”

  “How’s your neck?” Bianca added, wanting to get in on the fun.

  Richeline growled and stepped forward, baton at the ready.

  Sev did a diving somersault, grabbing for Richeline’s legs, doubtless intending to take her down – but one of the guards got a boot in, kicking her in the side and throwing her off course. Sev tried to scramble to her feet, but the guard hit her with a stun baton in the neck, and she jolted, eyes rolling back, and went limp.

  So much for two against two. Now it was three against one.

  Bianca almost felt bad for the three.

  Chapter 21

  Bianca still thought Sev was probably a spy and this was all a ploy to gain her trust. Participating in a doomed escape attempt would create a bond between them that would lead to shared confidences, and eventually Sev would encourage Bianca to cooperate with the Letnev… or, perhaps, Richeline would offer to spare Sev’s life as a “reward” if Bianca helped them find their treasure world.

  None of that mattered, though. If this was all a sham to manipulate her, Bianca would show them what a bad mistake they’d made trying to play her. While Richeline and the guards were distracted by their efforts to incapacitate Sev, she rose smoothly to her feet and kicked out Richeline’s knee. The first officer squawked, dropping, leaving Bianca with a clear shot at the guards. They were impressively armored, but they needed to be able to move their heads around on their necks, so their throats weren’t as well protected as the rest of them. (There weren’t any body armor specs in the databases Ayla could provide, of course, but one bored afternoon Bianca had idly hacked into a security database and perused some of the technical manuals.) She stiffened the first two fingers of her right hand and jabbed straight into the most vulnerable spot. Poking the guard that way felt a lot like pushing her fingertips into a pudding. He gasped and fell down, writhing and grabbing his throat.

  Richeline was slumped on the floor, but she was still conscious, and still a threat. She hit Bianca with the stun baton, jamming it right into the muscle of her calf, but apart from a faint tingle, Bianca didn’t feel anything. She plucked the baton from Richeline’s hand and used it like a club to smack the other guard across the facemask when he came at her, rather slowly since he was now trying not to trip over Richeline, Sev, or his writhing compatriot.

  His mask shattered under the blow (the stun baton came apart in Bianca’s hand, too), and he howled, blood running out from under the mask – a fragment must have cut his cheek. He stumbled around the cell in a very distracting fashion, so she kicked out one of his knees. She picked up his baton and zapped him in a now-exposed part of his neck, and that was him sorted out.

  Fighting was pretty easy, it turned out: mostly just physics and anatomy, with a bit of psychology thrown in, and synchronizing three disciplines at once presented no particular challenge. Richeline was trying to crawl away, but Bianca looked at her and shook her head, and the first officer sank back, staring at Bianca and breathing hard.

  Severyne sat up then, rubbing her face and blinking. “Wha? You took them all out yourself?”

  “I am not taken out,” Richeline spoke through clenched teeth. “This is absurd. You’re on a secure deck. There’s no escape.”

  “Sure there is,” Bianca said. “You’re going to escort me to a shuttle.”

  “I can fly us out of here,” Sev said.

  “I’ve read the manuals,” Bianca said. “I can manage. If you really are a prisoner, I’m sorry, and I wish you luck with your escape. But you could be a spy, trying to trick me, so I’m going to take Richeline as a hostage and make my own way out of here.”

  Sev reached over, picked up a shard of the guard’s broken mask, and stabbed it into the side of Richeline’s neck.

  The first officer screamed, clapped a hand to the shard, and tried to drag herself away on a broken knee as blood welled out all around her fingers. Sev kicked Richeline hard in the ribs, making her roll over and curl up. She glared at Bianca. “A spy?” she shouted. “Do you still think I’m a spy? Would a spy do that?” She kicked Richeline again, and the first officer huddled into a ball at the center of a spreading pool of blood.

  Bianca stared at her. “I… no. I guess not.”

  “Shall we go, then?”

  Bianca nodded. With Richeline dying – she was really dying! Bianca had never seen a person gurgling their last like this, only livestock, and this was very different! – Sev was the only one with the necessary access codes to get them out of the brig.

  Sev picked up a stun baton in each hand, then tore a gauntlet from Richeline’s arm. The first officer made a desperate sighing sound and clawed at her with the hand, but Sev idly kicked her arm away. She stalked off down the corridor, and Bianca hurried after her, happy to leave the scene of carnage behind. Sev didn’t have Bianca’s strength, speed, or reflexes, but she had a will to strike hard and without mercy that Bianca knew she couldn’t hope to match and that she didn’t want to match, honestly.

  “You’re lucky Richeline’s baton malfunctioned,” Sev called over her shoulder. “If we’d both gone down, that would have been the end of us.”

  “Yes,” Bianca said. “Really lucky.” She wondered, though. Her body was good at lots of things, lately: that impressive Mahact handiwork. Maybe she could just ignore the effects of a stun baton now. She had no doubt a knife wielded with sufficient force would cut her, that a laser would burn her, that a ball of superheated plasma would put a hole through her body, but she suspected she could shrug off a lot more than anyone supposed.

  “Here.” They reached an imposingly solid door at the end of the corridor. Sev strapped the first officer’s gauntlet onto her own arm and slid her fingers across it until the door slid open. “Perfect. She never changed the default code used to unlock the gauntlet. Very sloppy. She should be written up for that. Not that her permanent record matters much now, I suppose, with her dead on the floor of the brig.” She tapped the gauntlet. “With this, we can get anywhere on the ship, as long as we move fast.”

  “Where are we going?” Bianca said.

  “I haven’t thought any farther than ‘off the ship’,” Sev said. “You don’t have any contacts in the Lue-Hel system, do you?”

  “I only know people on one planet, and it’s a long way from here.”

  Sev grunted, stepping out of the corridor into some sort of security station, with a curved desk, a row of monitors, and a rack of silver and black weaponry sealed behind a forcefield like the one in their cell. “Can you use a gun?”

  “My father taught me to use a kinetic rifle, a few years back, when there was a drought and the nightclimbers expanded their territory.”

  “Same principle.” She waved her hand, and the field over the rack of guns shimmered, responding to the gauntlet. The ship thought she was Richeline now. Sev took down a long black gun and handed it to Bianca, then took one for herself, and tucked a sidearm into her belt, too. “These are better than a kinetic rifle, though. You don’t have to account for recoil, so it won’t bruise your shoulder.”

  I don’t think I bruise so easily anymore, Bianca thought. She looked over the rifle, and its mechanisms were readily apparent to her. In fact, she saw two or three ways she could improve it to boost its power and accuracy, if she had the right tools and a few minutes to work on it, but now wasn’t the time.

  “The main hangar bay is too crowded.” Sev tapped on a terminal at the security desk, consulting various screens. “But there’s a secondary launch bay where we keep the survey ships. They aren’t made for long-distance travel, but they can handle vacuum and atmosphere both. We’ll need to switch ships as soon as we can, so the more flexibility the better. Let me spoof a security alert to get the guards in the secondary launch bay to leave their posts… Done. Let’s move.”

  Sev set off without hesitation, and Bianca followed close behind, gun at port arms. “Aren’t you afraid someone will see us?”

  “I checked our route. There’s no one along our path right now but cleaning drones. I looped the camera feeds, too. That won’t fool anyone who looks closely, but we can avoid triggering any automated alerts.”

  “You act like you’ve done this before.”

  Sev snorted. “I was trained to stop this sort of thing. I’ve done countless simulated jailbreaks, escapes, rescues, hostage situations, you name it. There are ways to ruin my plan, but only if they’ve got someone smarter than me running things, and by definition, they don’t. The person who’s in charge of security now is no match for me.”

  “I’ve never been in this part of the ship.” Bianca looked around with interest. The corridors here were more bare and austere, and more cramped too. She heard the rumble and whirr of machinery hidden by doors and access panels on all sides.

  “Why would you come down here? It’s where we keep the cargo, the noisy boring machines, the air scrubbers, the matter recyclers, all the unlovely infrastructure of long-haul space voyages. And the prisoners, of course. No reason to give them deluxe accommodations. Here, this way.”

  Sev scrambled up a ladder, and Bianca shifted the rifle on its strap so it hung on her back, then followed. She looked up, Sev’s feet just inches from her face. There was blood all over one of her boots. “Did you have to kill Richeline?” Bianca said.

  “You were going to take her with you instead of me,” Sev said. “That was a choice you made. I simply responded in the only tactically sound manner.”

  Bianca frowned. “Then why are you still with me? Once you took Richeline’s wristband, you could have left me behind.”

  Sev emerged at the top of the ladder into an even more cramped space, some kind of service corridor, and gestured for Bianca to hurry up. When she answered, it was in a whisper. “I don’t know what you are exactly, princess, but you tore through those guards like they were made of lace. Maybe you’re some kind of vat-grown supersoldier who had her memory erased, or Brother Errin crammed you full of military implants, or maybe you’re something else I could never hope to understand, but you are a definite asset. I forgive you for trying to leave me behind. That was tactically sound too, and it’s why I stabbed Richeline in the neck: so you’d believe I wasn’t a spy, and that we’re in this together. How about we stay in this together, at least until we get far away from the Grim Countenance and Letnev space?”

  Bianca considered. Sev definitely knew more about the galaxy than Bianca did – she hadn’t even known this was the Lue-Hel system! – and that expertise could prove useful. Plus, if Sev didn’t care where she went, and she just wanted to get away, then maybe she’d be amenable to traveling to the source of Bianca’s yearning. She still intended to go there, and see what she was meant for. She didn’t want to go on the end of a Letnev leash, but it would be easier to make her way with company than all alone. “That works for me.”

  “Then let’s go. Through here.” Sev crept forward, then waved her gauntlet at a door. It slid open, revealing a guard who stepped back in surprise. Sev launched herself forward, attempting to bowl the man over, but he was huge, and she bounced off his armored legs instead. She swung one of her stun batons, and he caught her arm with one hand and her throat with the other. Sev swung her other baton at the guard’s head, but he kept his chin tucked, taking the blows on the solid back and sides of his helmet, and not the more fragile faceplate.

  Amazingly, he didn’t seem to notice Bianca at all, but then, he was understandably focused on choking the life out of Sev. Bianca slung her energy rifle around her body, took aim at his center mass, then shifted and squeezed the trigger.

  The rifle emitted a beam of reddish light – Bianca knew no portion of the energy that emerged needed to be in the visible spectrum, but she assumed it was probably useful for soldiers to see if they were firing straight. The beam passed through the soldier’s ankle, nearly detaching his foot from his body. He howled, dropped Sev, and fell backward. Sev gagged, spat, and drew her sidearm, pointing at his head.

  Bianca blurred across the intervening space and batted the gun out of Severyne’s hand. “He’s down! You don’t have to kill him!”

  The guard wasn’t even screaming, just moaning; probably going into shock, though he shouldn’t bleed out since the beam had cauterized the wound on its way through.

  Sev scowled at Bianca, baring her teeth, and Bianca thought she might lash out, but instead the Letnev woman nodded. She stooped to pick up her handgun and put it away. “Strangle me,” she muttered, looking balefully at the fallen guard. “Yesterday he would have saluted me.”

  “A couple of months ago, the most unpleasant thing I ever had to do was shoveling caprid shit,” Bianca said. “Things have changed for both of us.”

  “Ha. True enough.” Sev strode down the hallway toward a large set of doors. She waved her wrist gauntlet, cursed, and then punched in a code. One of the doors lurched open half a meter, and Sev said, “Hurry, they’re going into lockdown, I don’t know how long before they cancel these codes!” She squeezed through the gap, and Bianca followed. They were in an airlock. The door behind them closed, and Sev cursed at the door on the opposite side, finally convincing it to open a crack.

  Once they squeezed through that, they were in a small hangar, with three of the birdlike shuttles. The far wall was open to the stars, a shimmering forcefield standing between them and the void… and freedom.

  Sev ran toward the nearest ship, punching inputs on her gauntlet, and the shuttle lowered a ramp. They raced onto the ship, and Sev slid into the pilot’s seat and began punching at the controls.

  Bianca sat beside her, watching the ship’s external camera feeds on the co-pilot screens. A guard was trying to squeeze through the gap in the door they’d used, but in her bulky body armor, she couldn’t quite make it. She stuck a sidearm through the crack instead and started firing at their ship. “They’re shooting at us!” she shouted.

  “Might as well throw rocks at a moon,” Sev said. “Those weapons can’t hurt this ship, and I locked them out of the main hangar controls, so they won’t be able to scramble fighters to come after us until they untangle my code. Still, I don’t like being shot at. I could turn on the maneuvering thrusters and cook her in her armor…”

  “Don’t,” Bianca said.

  “I won’t. I was just saying I could. See how merciful and noble I can be, princess?” The survey ship rumbled and rose up from the deck. “They’d better get back into that airlock and shut the door if they don’t want to suck vacuum, though.” Sev manipulated the controls, and the shimmering wall of light before them vanished. Bianca kept one eye on the external camera feed, and was relieved to see the arm pull back and the airlock door close.

  The ship rumbled. Sev moved a slider on the hovering visual interface, and they shot out of the Grim Countenance and into the dark. The shimmering crystal beauty of the Tree of Grace floated out on their left, but they were headed the other way, toward dark, and stars… and the source of Bianca’s yearning.