Heaven's Queen (35 page)

No
, she said softly.
It won’t work.

I stopped short. “Why not?”

You can’t get to Maat
, she said with a helpless shrug.
The Dark Star might be old, but it’s been built up over decades to do only one thing: keep Maat in. The entire place is a labyrinth designed to confuse and trap anyone who enters without clearance. Even Brenton was never suicidal enough to assault the Dark Star directly, and he’s much stronger than you. It’s simply impossible for you to reach Maat. All you’d do is get yourself killed and ruin everything.

“What do you mean ruin everything?” I said. “You said if I die, the virus goes free.”

That was back on Reaper’s ship
, Maat replied, indignant.
There, Maat was set up to catch you, and only if it was the virus itself doing the killing. If you die to a bullet with your virus still dormant, you’ll just be dead.

“Then I’ll make sure to get mad before I go,” I said. Shouldn’t be hard; failing now would certainly make me angry enough for a final black-hands hurrah. “That way even if I fail, all you’d have to do is be ready to catch.”

Maat refuses
, Maat said, shoving the words into my mind like needles.
You will not risk my freedom or theirs
—she nodded at the phantoms crawling over her shoulders—
on a stupid gamble
.

I sighed. Deep down, part of me agreed with her. It
would
be much safer to just stop here, give her the virus, and be done with it. That’s what a smart merc would do, take the sure bet, keep her nose clean, get the job done. Trouble was, I’d stopped being a merc at some point over the last week. I wasn’t sure what I was anymore exactly, but on one thing I was absolutely certain: I was not going to throw anyone to the wolves on this. Not Maat, not the phantoms, and certainly not the daughters, whose plight was the kicked kitten that had made me take up this stupid crusade in the first place. I didn’t care if it was nigh impossible. Risk brought reward, and I was too close, had fought too hard, to give up mine now.

“This is not a negotiation,” I told Maat, crossing my arms over my chest. “I know the Eyes have hyperdrive-capable ships in there.” I could actually see the station’s docks now that I was looking for them, four in fact. One of them had to have something we could use. “And if they don’t, I’ll have you. Caldswell would jump a battleship to save your life, and then you take the virus and make a fool out of him.”

I’d thought that image would cheer Maat up, but all she did was bury her face in her hands.
You’ll die
, she moaned.
It’s not fair. You get to die and Maat doesn’t. Maat wants to—

“You should be hoping I die,” I snapped. “Because if I go down at any point during all of this, I swear to the Sacred King that I will give up my virus freely. I’ll cover myself in all the black you could ever want, and you can grab it and die at your leisure, no wait, no fuss. But
until that point
, I’m going to try, and if you care about anything other than your own suffering, you’ll help me.”

Maat dropped her hands as I spoke, her stricken look turning thoughtful as I explained. By the time I was finished, she was staring at me like she was trying to take my measure, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth, and for a fleeting moment I caught a glimpse of the clever, thoughtful girl she must have been once, back before everything went so wrong.

All right
, she said at last.
Maat will help. Maat thinks you’re crazy, but Maat will help.

I rolled my eyes. The craziest lady in the universe thought I was nuts, but if she really was ready to help, I wasn’t going to argue. We’d lost enough time already.

I turned and started jogging down the plastic tunnel, doing my best to keep my mind off the terrifying battle going on outside and on my own mission. “Can you tell me what’s going on inside the station?”

A little
, Maat said, frowning.
Maat has been angry lately, so they’ve been drugging me a lot. They woke me up when the first emperor phantom came, but I held back my aura and let the phantom shut down the station.
Her voice was smug as she said that last part, and I knew she was reveling in their fear.
It’s still out, but Maat can hear them in the other room talking about drugging me again. If they do that, Maat will sleep. When that happens, the power will come back and all the station security with it.

I made a face. That didn’t sound fun. “How much longer have we got?”

Not long
, Maat replied. She was shaking now, her thoughts bleeding into mine. She hated being drugged.
Hated
it. Now that I’d experienced the anti-plasmex cocktail myself, I couldn’t say I blamed her.

“I need you to fight them and keep the power off as long as you can,” I said. “I also need you to stick with me and keep my suit functioning.” Having the only working piece of hardware in a shutdown station was a vital advantage if I was going to have a prayer of pulling this off. But while I’d thought this was obvious, Maat’s brush against my mind only felt confused.

You don’t need Maat for that.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “You’re the only reason I’m still online.”

She shook her head so hard her hair flew.
Maat hasn’t touched your suit.

I looked at her, then back at the dark ship behind us, and then down at my suit, which was functioning just like it always did. “How is that possible?”

Because you’re like me
, her voice whispered in my mind, bringing with it a feeling of connection not unlike what the lelgis had shown me when they were trying to demonstrate the oneness.
Your range is very small, of course, because your plasmex is like a tiny grain of sand. Still, it is enough.

She said this like she was telling me I’d never walk again, but I wasn’t listening. I was too busy studying my suit. All my systems were perfectly normal, my power humming along to all segments without so much as a sputter, even when I stretched my hand out as far as I could. But when I took the test further, slinging Mia out of her holster and placing her on the floor, her charge light flickered out before I’d backed off three feet.

“Well, I’ll be,” I said softly, leaning down to scoop up my plasma shotgun again. “So, what? Am I like a daughter now?”

Maat shrugged helplessly.
Who knows? Maat’s never seen anything like you. But then, no one had seen anything like Maat before, either.

I sighed. Great, sisters in freakdom. But unlike everything else the virus had done to me, canceling out the phantom’s aura was a welcome development. One I meant to use to my utmost tactical advantage.

By this point, we’d nearly reached the place where the plastic tube hooked into the station. Just past the boarding tube’s edge, I could see the heavy casing of what was clearly meant to be a plasma shielded door. Now, with no power, there was no shield, and though I spotted no fewer than four cameras pointed at the entry gate, every one of them was dark and motionless.

The boarding tunnel let out into an entry room that had clearly once been part of a much larger docking area but had since been renovated into something smaller and easier to defend. The initial entry point was wide enough to fit the large tunnel I’d just come out of, but after that the room quickly shrank, funneling into a long hallway lined with inconspicuous turret drops. I froze when I saw them, remembering Maat’s warning that this place was a fortress, but without power, the security measures had no teeth, and I relaxed a little, starting down the hall as I opened up my density scanner to get a glimpse of what I was walking into.

A lot of metal seemed to be the answer. I was about to ask Maat if she could give me another map when I realized I didn’t need one. Now that I was actually in the hall, it felt deeply familiar. This whole place did, like I’d been here a hundred times before. For a second, I worried Maat was bleeding into my mind again, but the truth turned out to be much simpler. I knew this place because Rupert knew it. Even with the lights out, the entry hall triggered his memories, filling my head with his calm, orderly assessment of the station that had been his headquarters for four decades. He’d hated this place with a cold, dark menace, but he knew it like the back of his hand, and that gave me an idea.

When I reached the end of the hall, I paused, sorting through Rupert’s well-ordered memories of the station for the one I wanted. When I found it, I turned and starting following one of the hallways that ringed the station’s center toward the turn that would take me out one of the station’s arms, the rays of the star. This also meant I was going the exact wrong direction to reach the area Rupert thought of as “Maat’s containment.” Maat clearly saw this as well, and she appeared in front of me, her face set in a snarl.

Where are you going?

“You can’t expect me to pull off a job like this without help, can you?” I asked, jogging faster as my suit’s sensors filled in the gaps in Rupert’s recollections, drawing me a detailed map in the process.

Who here is going to help you?
Maat snarled.
Eyes never help.

“He’s not an Eye anymore,” I said simply. “He’s mine.”

I could feel Maat’s bafflement like a fog in my head, but I just grinned and kept going, kicking open the door to the dead elevator so I could jump down the shaft.

I’d noted before that Dark Star Station was set up like a pointed cross with four rays extending from a central mass. From the outside, the shape had looked simplistic, but by the time I’d climbed all the way down to the cramped hallway that ran up the spine of the ray farthest from Maat’s prison, I was thanking the king for every single one of the memories Rupert had left in my head. Without his intimate knowledge of this place bubbling up like carbonation anytime I saw anything remotely familiar, I would have been lost for days.

The station’s interior was every bit the labyrinth Maat had described, a warren of identical metal hallways whose sole purpose seemed to be finding new ways to dead end. The only good part was that the station was big enough for solid-state gravity generation. I might feel like a rat in a maze, but so long as the air pressure stayed normal, at least I wouldn’t have to do it flying around.

I had more than enough to process already, especially since even with Rupert’s mental map at my fingertips, it was still easy to get turned around when every corner looked exactly the same. There were no directional signs, no emergency exits; there weren’t even numbers on the doors, nothing to help me get my bearings. There were, however, a lot of traps.

I lost count of how many automatic turrets I passed. Even the elevator shaft had had them at regular intervals, along with shield generators, gas vents, electrified fields, others I didn’t even recognize. If I hadn’t been trying to break in, I would have been impressed. Whoever had designed this place was a master of redundant fail-safes. Every trap had overlapping fields of fire and multiple power sources to make sure they kept firing even if you managed to cut the line. Too bad all that didn’t do shit against a phantom’s field, but then, considering who the Dark Star was built to hold, I bet they’d never thought they’d be in this situation.

“Keep it up, Maat,” I said as I stepped over the discolored stripe on the floor marking where a shield normally stood. “Keep it up.”

Maat didn’t respond. She’d been getting quieter over the last few minutes, floating along silently behind me like a ghost in truth, her eyes flat and overly dilated. Considering what she’d said about their plans to drug her, I was pretty sure that was exactly what was going on, but though the station lights flickered occasionally, they didn’t come back on. Drugged or not, she was still holding back her aura and keeping her end of the bargain. For now, anyway.

My destination was the door at the very end of the hall, the tip of the star’s ray. The Dark Star’s brig was just as guarded as everything else, the entry flanked by auto-fire turrets and overlapping shields. But even with all of those down, I still had to deal with the actual prison door.

My density scanner couldn’t even penetrate the solid steel mass, which meant shooting or burning my way through was out. I considered asking Maat for a repeat of the trick she’d used to open the blast door on the battleship, but she was nearly catatonic now, her head lolling, so I decided to try another approach. I flipped my visor back down and turned to the wall beside the door, peering through the much thinner metal to see if I could spot a weak point, and got a flash of good luck.

The prison door was made of two interlocked heavy metal halves on a track, but the pressure that kept them pressed together and locked the interior latches down came from a hydraulic pump, which was buried in the wall. Naturally, the door had locked in place when the main power went out, which meant the pump was still extended, using the pressure from the liquid inside to keep the doors pressed tight together, and that gave me an idea.

I flexed my wrist, popping Elsie from her sheath. Another thought had my thermite blade flaring to life, filling the dark hall with blinding light. Fortunately, I only needed it for a second. I wrenched back, letting my targeting system line up my punch before I slammed my blade through the wall and into the pump inside. My Elsie might not have been able to cut through the prison door, but she cut through this just fine. Once I was sure I was where I needed to be, I braced my legs and pushed her up, slicing the pump, the hydraulics, and reservoir hose clean through. Liquid starting pouring out into the wall immediately, and the prison doors sagged with a clunk as the pressure forcing them closed vanished.

I extinguished my thermite to save the rest of my blade and pulled Elsie back before pressing my shoulder against the door. Normally, there was no way my speed combat suit could lift something this heavy, but without the pressure locking it shut, the enormous door was just a big weight on tracks. I didn’t have to lift it; I just had to slide it. Even so, I almost burned out my suit’s motor shoving the halves the two feet apart I needed to slip through.