“Yes, captain.”

  “Good,” Severyne said. “Give me two minutes, and then send in the shock troops.”

  Chapter 23

  “I’m really sorry,” Bianca said again, raking the last of the toothpicks toward her. “It’s just beginner’s luck.”

  “You can’t be a hustler,” the big teddy bear said, voice all a-growl. “We weren’t playing for money, and we certainly aren’t going to start now.”

  “Oh, I just enjoy games, and making new friends.” Bianca picked up one of the toothpicks and began chewing on it.

  Sev emerged from the bathroom, glanced around, and beckoned to Bianca.

  She stood up, offering her hand to Strig (the teddy bear), and to Gretla (the Winnaran), and Ashont (the kitty with the little four-armed person on her shoulder), and to Clec (the little four-armed person). “It was lovely to meet all of you.”

  “Very nice to meet you, too, Amina,” Ashont rumbled.

  She walked to the bar, where Sev was leaning with studied casualness. “Are we leaving, Gen?”

  “I hope.” Sev drew Bianca in close and spoke into her ear. “Did any of those gamblers mention plans to leave soon? We could follow them, and persuade them to let us borrow their ship.” She patted her waist, where her sidearm was hidden under her sweatshirt.

  “Gen, they’re my friends. I bet they’d help us if we just asked.”

  Sev snorted. “Faint hope. Oh, you’re charming enough to get us a ride off this rock, no doubt, but we need a ship we can take anywhere we want, so we can explore this… what did you call it?”

  “My yearning.”

  “Yes. That. You’re not charming enough to convince someone to give us a ship for free, I’m afraid, so we’ll have to proceed by other means.”

  Bianca sighed. “I suppose you’re right. I just hate to strand anyone here.”

  “This is a civilized place. If they’re professionals, their ships are insured against theft. They’ll be fine.” She looked past Bianca, toward the door. “So, again, are any of your new friends departing Glamarij soon?”

  Ashont and Clec were planning to leave shortly, she knew – they’d just landed here to refuel and resupply and “get a little R&R.”

  “I suppose after we find the treasure, I can repay them for the trouble,” she said.

  “Repay who?” Sev asked.

  Bianca started to point out Ashont and Clec, and then time slowed down, the same way it had when the cup fell in the mess hall, but far more extreme. The sounds of the bar, the drinking and boasting and grousing and flirting and slurping and clattering, all elongated and stretched and dropped in pitch. The movements of the people around her stopped almost entirely, until she was surrounded by a room full of mannequins.

  Last time, this power had manifested so she could prevent the very small disaster of a broken teacup. What disaster was it meant to prevent this time? What danger had her subconscious noticed, and acted to protect her from?

  She looked at the open door and saw a shadow. Two shadows, actually, overlapping. The shadows were moving quickly, far quicker than anything else here, though they still crawled. Someone was rushing into the bar. That probably wasn’t good.

  Bianca stepped away from Sev, discovering that she could move at normal speed. She picked up a bottle from the bar as she went by – not glass, but a heavy metal vessel, containing some potent brew not meant for human consumption. The floor was crowded with patrons, now frozen in place, and cluttered with tables, so she just stepped onto an empty chair and used it as a launching pad to leap over the whole crowd. (Fortunately, the ceiling was high enough for such a maneuver, though the top of her head only cleared it by a few centimeters.)

  She landed near the door just as the first of the Barony shock troopers cleared the entryway. Bianca dropped, spun, and swept his legs out from under him, and he fell forward in slow motion. The trooper behind him came at her, and, since Bianca was already crouching, she swung the metal vessel at his knee.

  Just at the last moment, she pulled the strike, following a quick mental calculation. Force equals mass times acceleration, after all, and her acceleration must be a lot faster than it currently appeared. If she hadn’t pulled back, she thought she would have torn his whole lower leg off – it would have been more like blowing off his kneecap with a shotgun than hitting him with a bottle.

  As it was, his knee crunched, and he began his own slow fall. Bianca stood up, and then stepped back, giving herself some room to operate. Two more guards approached, one of them raising a weapon at her – not a lethal armament, she noted, but some kind of tranquilizer gun, meant to subdue.

  She threw the bottle at his gun hand, then stepped toward the other soldier while the bottle was still making its way through the air. She had to reach over the first two troopers (who were still slowly collapsing to the floor) to shove him in the chest, sending him flying back into yet another trooper beyond him.

  Their bodies moved slow, slow, like drifting snow. Last time, the time dilation had stopped when the cup was saved, and the danger was done – but the danger here was ongoing, wasn’t it? This state wasn’t likely to end on its own anytime soon, but she needed to get Sev out of here, and that was hard when she was a statue.

  Bianca turned her ever-more-powerful attention to the contours of her own mind, seeking to understand the mechanism. How could you seize control of a process that happened without thought? There were ways. Breathing was an automatic function, but you could choose to exert control, to hold your breath, to stop and start… or how about changing the focus of your eyes from something up close to something far away? That happened by itself too, but you could blur your vision at will if you wanted… Ah. There. The process had been opaque to her when the teacup fell, but now she could understand. Brother Errin was right. She was changing all the time. Bianca exhaled, walked over to Sev, and then bid time return…

  •••

  Heuvelt jerked his head up at a sudden explosion of violence by the front door. His hand went to the knife at his belt – a gift from Dob Ell that he hadn’t thrown away, because even though their friendship was over it was still a good blade. He couldn’t tell what was happening exactly, but bodies were falling, and people were screaming. After a moment, his brain caught up to his eyes and made sense of what he was seeing – those were Barony of Letnev soldiers, in their terrifyingly blank face masks and black body armor.

  Someone had seen him, and turned him in, and the Barony was coming for him! He couldn’t tell what had happened to their ranks, whether they’d been attacked or if one of their weapons had gone off by mistake, but the commotion might allow him a few crucial moments to escape.

  “Ashont, Clec, come on!” Heuvelt leapt up from the booth as his crewmates shoved back from their table and rushed to join them. “Through the back!” They followed as he hurried toward the doors leading to the kitchen. Heuvelt had spent enough time in bars to know that door would inevitably lead to some sort of back alley or service entrance or loading dock – they certainly didn’t take the trash out or bring the kegs in through the front door, after all.

  He was surprised to see the human and Letnev women – Amina and Gen – rushing toward that exit too. What were they running from?

  They all piled up in the rear of the kitchen while a human in a dirty apron shouted at them. “It’s locked!” Gen shouted, hammering her fist against the door. She spun toward the cook, drawing a gun, and said, “Open this door!”

  He shrieked and ran away, and Gen swore, then pointed the gun at Heuvelt. “Who the hell are you and what do you want?”

  “I- I- we…” Heuvelt had never been good at expressing himself when he was figuratively under the gun, and it turned out he was even worse at doing so when the gun was literal.

  “I’ve got it.” Amina kicked the door, and it crashed off its hinges, banging against the wall of the hallway beyond. Was the door made of lightweight plastic or something? It had certainly looked solid enough. Amina rushed through, and Gen followed.

  Heuvelt looked at Ashont and Clec. “Very strange,” Ashont rumbled.

  “They went through there!” a voice shouted from the bar behind them. Heuvelt swore and ran through the opening, his crewmates following. They pelted down the service corridor on the other side, Gen and Amina just a few steps ahead. Someone yelled at them to stop immediately, so Heuvelt ran faster. Gen looked back at him without breaking stride and shouted, “Why are you following us?”

  “I’m not!” he called. “We’re just running away in the same direction!”

  “Why are you running away?” Amina called.

  “Because there are Letnev soldiers chasing us!”

  “They’re chasing us, you fool!” Gen said.

  Oh. Could that be possible? Surely not. Such a thing would constitute good luck, and Heuvelt no longer believed in that. “I don’t think so!” he said. “I’m a wanted man in the Barony!”

  “Us too!” Amina said. “Only we’re wanted women!”

  “Go away, leave us alone, you’re slowing us down!” Gen shouted.

  “How can we be slowing you down when we’re behind you?”

  “Stop chasing us or I’ll shoot!” the Letnev howled.

  “No, don’t!” Amina said. “This is perfect! Ashont, Clec, strange man – let’s all go to your ship!”

  “What?” Gen shouted.

  •••

  They escaped the building and slammed the external door behind them. “I don’t know how to lock it!” the human (who ran pretty fast, for an old guy) cried out, furiously pushing his fingers against an access panel.

  Bianca touched his shoulder and gently pushed him aside. She was learning to be gentle, now that she could so easily break things accidentally. She squinted at the panel, punched in a rapid sixteen-digit code, and then smiled as the lights went red and bolts slammed home. “There. I remembered the factory settings, and they didn’t change. The door thinks there’s atmospheric decompression on this side. It won’t open without a command override from the station administrators now.”

  “There’s atmosphere out here,” the man said. “Why would there even be a code to indicate decompression?”

  “This facility uses standard hardware and software,” Clec said. “The same doors are used on space stations and habitats all over the galaxy. But there are dozens of manufacturers – how did you know the factory codes for this one?”

  Bianca shrugged. They were the same sort of doors used on the Grim Countenance, and she’d perused a technical manual on one of her visits to the engineering department, until they chased her off. The next time she came down, the terminal with those files had been locked. It had taken her almost a full minute to unlock them. “I must have picked them up somewhere.”

  “Our Amina has a mind like a wastebasket that never gets emptied,” Sev said. “It’s been a displeasure meeting you. We’ll be on our way now–”

  Bianca shook her head. “They’ve got a ship, Gen. I’m sure they want to leave in a hurry. We should go with them, instead of taking our chances on finding a ride elsewhere.”

  Sev opened her mouth as if to object, then looked toward the ranks of parked spacecraft in their neat hexagons. Her shoulders slumped. “Fine. We can work with this. Take us to your ship.”

  “You weren’t invited,” the human said, drawing himself up and crossing his arms over his chest.

  “She’s the reason you aren’t in Letnev custody right now, Heuvelt,” Ashont said. “Even if those troopers weren’t chasing us specifically, they would have been happy enough to pick you up as a bonus.” The panther-woman showed off her teeth in what was surely meant to be a smile. “I’m inviting her.”

  “Seconded,” Clec said from her shoulder.

  Heuvelt sighed. “I–”

  Something slammed hard against the door on the other side.

  “Go!” Sev said. Ashont and Clec set off running, weaving through the parked ships, and the others followed. They arrowed toward one particular vessel, on the far edge of the lot, and Bianca was surprised to see it was a fast courier, though retrofitted to add extra compartments on either side of the main body – it looked like a wasp wearing saddlebags.

  A signal pulsed out from Clec toward the ship, and – Wait. Bianca wondered how she knew that. Apparently, she had another new ability, bubbling up from the depths. She couldn’t exactly see the beam of energy, but she could sense it, from its origin to its direction. Now that she knew to pay attention, she could sense a whole overlapping array of signals, crisscrossing the facility and the ships. She could pick out individual signals and trace them from source to destination. She shook her head. There would be time enough to ponder this new sense later. Clec’s pulse triggered a mechanism on the ship, and a boarding ramp slid down as they approached.

  “Get us out of here!” Heuvelt shouted, the last one on board, the ramp rising under his feet as he ran. Ashont and Clec were already moving to the front, the engines engaging in reply to more signals from Clec.

  “We’d better strap in,” Heuvelt said. “Things get a bit bumpy on the Show and Tell when we take off in atmosphere.”

  “Your ship is called the Show and Tell?” Sev said. “That is a ridiculous name.”

  Bianca smiled and turned toward her. “Your old ship was called the Grim–”

  She stared at Sev for what felt like a long moment (it was, in fact, barely a microsecond), then snatched the knife from Heuvelt’s hip, knocked Sev’s legs out from under her, and leapt atop the Letnev, blade raised.

  Chapter 24

  “Report!” Richeline barked. Voyou winced, and he wasn’t even on the receiving end of her bad mood.

  The shock trooper’s head filled the screen at an odd, tilted angle, as seen from the camera on a wrist gauntlet. “Xing disabled half a dozen of my people. We need immediate medical attention–”

  Richeline pointed at the bandage bulging around her neck. “I told you to be careful around her.”

  “We didn’t have time to be careful, captain. She attacked us before we even came through the door.”

  “Remarkable,” Archambelle murmured. “If we could replicate her transformations, the military applications–”

  “Shut up,” Richeline said. “Not you, trooper. Continue your report.”

  “Xing fled, as planned, along with some bystanders from the bar, who we assume were frightened by the violence. Those few troopers capable of movement pursued her all the way to the facility’s external door. The door was sealed before we could continue pursuit, but we’d chased them nearly as far as we were supposed to, anyway.”

  “Are you expecting congratulations? Following your orders exactly is the bare minimum I expect, squad leader, and you didn’t even manage to do that.”

  If he looked chastened, Voyou couldn’t tell; those full-face masks were useful for hiding emotions. He wished he had one. “Understood,” the trooper said. “We’re in some trouble, here, captain. The local security forces aren’t happy with an unauthorized action on their moon–”

  Richeline slapped the terminal, and the squad leader’s head vanished from the screen, replaced by a map of the moon’s surface, with a blinking dot moving slowly from left to right. “What in the bright stars are they doing over there?” Richeline said. “Their rendezvous with the mercenary ship is on the other side of the facility, but the captain is going the wrong way. No one is chasing them anymore, so they should be heading straight for the extraction point. The whole point of sending in those troopers was to herd Xing in the right direction and make her jump onto the first available transport.”

  “I’m sure the captain knows what she’s doing,” Voyou said loyally. He wasn’t sure why he was even part of this executive team – probably because he was the first person on board to meet Bianca, and the only “friend” she’d had on board, which made him, rather laughably, the closest thing they had to an expert on her psychology. He didn’t think he’d be able to add much of value, but no Letnev would turn down an opportunity to sit closer to the seat of power. In this case, very close: they were in Captain Dampierre’s ready room, the most secure place on the ship for monitoring a clandestine operation.

  “Spoken like someone the captain never stabbed in the neck,” Richeline said.

  “Wait. Where did her signal go?” Archambelle shoved her face close to the screen, as if perhaps the little blinking dot had merely gotten smaller and fainter, instead of completely disappearing.

  Richeline hissed and pulled the doctor away. “Stop it. Maybe I just need to reboot the monitoring system.” She tapped at the terminal for a moment, squinted, then shook her head. “No good. We’ve lost her.”

  “What does that mean?” Voyou asked.

  “It means we can’t track her anymore.” Richeline sat back in her chair – the captain’s chair, and, to be fair, she was acting captain, but Voyou still wouldn’t have dared to sit there in her place. “As for why we can’t track her… it could be a malfunction, I suppose. You implanted the tracker, Archambelle – what are the odds you botched the job?”

  “Nil,” she snarled. “That tracking device is so simple it’s barely capable of failure.” The doctor didn’t look good, in Voyou’s opinion. She’d always been pale, even by Letnev standards, but now she looked somehow waxy, too. She must not be sleeping much, or not very well when she did. “We deliberately chose the most foolproof device available. The tracker doesn’t even have a separate battery. It’s passively powered by Severyne’s own body heat – oh.” The doctor sat down and stared at the least interesting wall in the cabin.