Rebel Stars 1: Outlaw (23 page)

Taz pressed her lips together, then sighed. "Yeah, I'm out. Even if everything's like you say, it's like you say. I don't have any ties to this."

"I'm in," Lara said. "For Gomes' sake. She pulled me out of a bad place. Without her, I'd be long dead. I owe it to her to find out why she had to die."

MacAdams narrowed his eyes. "I'm in, too."

"Huh?" Taz whirled on him. "What do
you
care? We were in this for the cash, nothing more."

"And that 'nothing more' is why I ain't been happy with my life for years and years. This? This sounds like the chance to do something that means something."

"I don't know about that," Webber said. "But I do know where we're headed next."

Rada leaned so far forward in her chair she was apt to fall from her straps. "Tell me the course."

He shook his head. "Let's land first. Give everyone the chance to make sure they've made the right decision. Once we're patched up and off the station? I'll tell you exactly where to go."

~

Rada maintained comm silence another twelve hours, then sent a Needle to Hoeffel. They offered to deliver emergency supplies at emergency rates. She informed them that she was just fine, thank you, but would let them know if circumstances changed.

With a backup solution to the oxygen problem in place, MacAdams and Taz took one look at each other and retired to the cargo hold. Webber didn't know if it was spurred by the residual "Holy shit we made it" of the battle or by their impending breakup. All he knew was that it was the loudest sex he'd ever heard.

A few hours later, he woke to zero gravity and the sound of metal groans. The cabin was dark, lit only by displays. The ship was flipping around in preparation for its deceleration. It righted itself and braked, gravity returning.

One of the struts connecting the shuttle to the
Tine
popped like dry spaghetti. Webber's heart leapt from low anxiety to warp nine. Rada eased back, then braked again. The other struts held. The crew let out its breath in collective relief.

"That must have been one of yours," MacAdams said.

Webber swore. "Bet you two hundred it's got your fingerprints all over it."

"Deal. Now pay up."

"We haven't even landed yet!"

MacAdams waggled his hand. "When we installed those, we were all suited up. How many prints you think I left through my gloves?"

Webber rolled his eyes. Losing the bet was the worst that happened to him the rest of the trip to Hoeffel, however. Which turned out to be a standard ring spinning at low gravity in the middle of nowhere. It had once been a safe haven leading deeper into the Outer, but since the introduction of the Lanes, it had diminished. For a time, it looked like it might shrink to nothing. Eventually, however, its slow, easy lifestyle had become a draw, bringing in a trickle of people looking to escape the faster pace elsewhere without having to isolate themselves inside a tiny rock in the Belt.

Most of the ring's circumference was dark, uninhabited, with one main inhabited cluster and several smaller ones dispersed around its curve. Webber was skeptical it would have the facilities to repair the ship, but Rada assured him she'd called ahead and arranged everything. They'd hardly landed when a full brigade of suited mechanics jogged onto the landing pad. The foreman stopped to talk with Rada while the others went straight to work. Rada concluded the conversation and joined the crew inside the terminal.

"They're an unusually enthusiastic bunch," Webber said.

"Money is rocket fuel for enthusiasm." She smiled. "Did I neglect to mention my boss is Toman Benez?"

She put them up in a pair of apartments in a quiet part of town. Not that that narrowed things down; in Hoeffel, everything was quiet. Jons would have stuck out like a corpse on the steps of a church.

With this thought, Webber went to the window and gazed down on the rock garden in the square. Removed from the battle by two days and millions of miles, it felt like a movie, a news clip, some college kid's graphic arts thesis. Yet it also felt as though it was still happening, that he was at that very moment frantically stuffing washers and bolts into the airlock, or staring frozen at a screen while the green dot of a missile grew inexorably closer.

At night, he dreamed about the marines landing on the hull of the
Fourth Down.
Gomes and Jons were there, and they tried to raise their guns but couldn't. They couldn't even scream. The marines opened fire. Gomes and Jons juddered with the impact and were knocked from the hull. At once, they were somehow flash-frozen, their stiff bodies spinning away from the ship, faces hoary with frost.

He didn't see much of Rada. When he did, she looked distant, haunted, as if she were paging through photographs of a childhood she refused to tell stories about.

Lara was sent to the hospital, where the treatment would have her back on her feet by the same time the port crew had the
Tine
back on its fins. Webber visited some. She slept a lot. When she woke, sometimes they said nothing. Other times, they reminisced, or she asked him about his old life, how it felt to have started over so completely.

When he was alone, that's when he got angry. With no other routes open to him, he spent his nights swiping around the net, hunting for pictures or rumors of the UFO. He found a thousand leads, but none felt right.

Four days after reaching Hoeffel, Webber woke and found MacAdams on the balcony, gazing out at the tepid street.

"Taz left," the big marine said. "She waited to tell me she had a ride until after they'd sealed the doors."

"You guys in love?" Webber said.

"No." MacAdams rubbed his jaw. "No, nothing like that. But I would have liked to see her before she left."

"It never goes the way it should, does it? It's always less than. Disappointment. Heartbreak. Maybe the problem isn't with the world, but in ourselves."

"Always wanting more than we can expect to get? Bet you're right."

"I'd say we should be happy with anything that isn't outright disaster," Webber said. "Because usually, it's a bigger mess than vomiting in zero G."

MacAdams laughed. "I think I'm checking out of this conversation."

"The two of you were good, though, right? For a while?"

"We sure were."

"Then what more can you ask?"

Two days after that, Rada announced the ship was ready. They assembled at the port the following morning. The shuttle had been removed, the solder blasted loose, the holes patched. He wouldn't say the
Tine
looked new, but it did look good. Beautiful, even, and deadly, in the way of swords from ancient Ryukyu. Japan, rather; that had been its name in those days.

He climbed in and found a seat in the main cabin. Rada scanned the displays. When everyone and everything was ready, she launched, boosting out to clearance distance and then braking the
Tine
short.

She twisted in her chair, floating against her straps. "Where to, buddy? Inner? Outer? Wherever rabbits go to buy shotguns?"

"Earth," Webber said.

"I hear it's large. Any particular part?"

"I'll tell you once we get there."

"They're pickier than most about granting flight plans. But it'll be another two days before I have to call it in."

Webber waited until both those days were up to let her know. There was no point in delaying, yet he understood exactly why he did it: because, until he spoke it out loud, it wasn't really real.

"Idaho," he said, then laughed. "Of all the places in the system, we're going to Idaho."

"What," Lara said, "is Idaho?"

"The Panhandler virus' ground zero." Rada smiled with half her mouth. "Jain was very into xeno history. Figures she'd hide the answer where we made first contact."

"The rabbit isn't a real rabbit," Webber said. "It was my mom's way of telling me to be creative. If the Swimmers ever came back, the last place they'd look for us would be ground zero."

"Love it. But I do hope you can narrow it down a little further. Idaho isn't exactly small."

"Don't worry." Webber stared at the stars, trying to pick out Earth. "I know exactly where to look."

~

The mountain loomed above them, green and tremendous. It was early summer but the morning was crisp. Webber scowled. It had been years since he'd spent time outside of a climate-controlled environment. Some people loved seasons and weather, the cycles and unpredictability of a planetary atmosphere, but Webber thought those people were insane. Why not always be comfortable?

Hiking up the mountain was like traveling back in a personal time machine. She had done this on purpose, he knew, directing him to a spot that could only be reached by the slow, thoughtful, archaic process of walking. Thus subjecting him to hours of time in which to meditate on his childhood, when they had been so happy, before Dinah got sick and Webber began to understand that, in the choice between her kids and her work, his mother would always look to the latter first. This place, this trip—it was pure manipulation.

And it was working. The tang of the pines evoked a thousand memories of hikes, of fishing and swimming in the streams, of running through the meadows with their smell of sweet pollen. Wind rustled the grass and the needles.

It was nice, he'd give it that much. Enough to make you think that maybe humanity should have stopped bludgeoning its way forward after the invention of the mill and the plow. The spaceships, the stations, the warrens…all of them put together were less than this one morning on a mountain nobody wanted.

But we had to press outward, didn't we? Because of the plague and the aliens who'd sent it. It was either learn to build hives in every nook of the galaxy, or be wiped out by those who'd left their homeworld behind.

By afternoon, he found the cabin. It looked like it hadn't been used since their summer vacations: windows broken and shuttered, holes staved in the roof, the dirtiness of a thing being reclaimed by the earth it had been torn from. Webber gazed at it a moment, remembering Dinah running in the back door, tracking mud, their mother too exasperated to yell.

The trail was overgrown with thorny blackberries, but Jain must have passed through it not long ago. And unlike her, Webber had friends to help him clear the way.

The trail led to a centuries-old foundation completely hidden by shrubs and leaves and fallen rocks. There was no agreement on the exact spot the Panhandler had started from—in fact, most theories argued that it had to have emerged at dozens of points at once to achieve such complete, swift, worldwide saturation—but the record of the Ancient United States' outbreak began on this mountain, and his mother believed, for reasons he'd never fully grasped, that the precise location was this old house.

He went straight to the crack in the cement where they used to leave messages for each other. There, he found the video chip.

"Can I watch, too?" Rada said. "Or would you rather be alone?"

He shook his head. "Without you, I never would have found it."

He flipped it on. His mother's face appeared on his device. Strong. Resolved. She was smiling, yet there were tears in her eyes.

"Hi Pip," she said, voice creaking. "I'm so sorry you had to find this."

And then he had to pause it, because he was crying too hard to see.

Rada's impatience burned hot enough to char her, but she let Webber take his time. After he calmed down, he wiped his eyes on his shirt, blew his nose in the grass, and resumed the video.

"Because it means," the dead woman continued, "that I won't get to see you again. I had more to say to you, though, which was part of what this was about. Trust me, I considered contacting you through more conventional methods. I knew you weren't dead. But I didn't want FinnTech to know that. If they did, I have no doubt they'd hurt you to get to me."

On the device's screen, Jain Kayle glanced down, possibly to consult her notes. "I'm going to explain everything. Everything that
can
be explained, at least. But keep watching, okay? Because there will be something more for you at the end. The most important thing I have to say."

She took a deep breath. "For me, this road started years ago. I'll spare you the personal history and fast forward to where it kicks off in earnest: my involvement with Valiant Enterprises."

As she launched into a lengthy explanation, Rada transcribed a summary into her device, something for Toman to wolf down before tackling the main course. With Valiant, Jain had signed on to a program meaning to answer the most perplexing question of the time: why couldn't probes, cameras, or ships make it out of the system? To attempt to answer that question, they'd come up with a number of plans, including inserting a camera into a comet on its way back to the Oort Cloud. Any transmission could give it away, so it was programmed not to Needle home unless certain triggers were met—the detection of engines, biological matter, other transmissions, and so on.

Meanwhile, Jain relocated to Hoth, a free-floating facility on the fringe of safe Outer space. There, she observed the ice, rocks, and vacuum of the deep beyond. Like so many others, she found nothing.

Months later, she got a transmission.

"That transmission is included in the appendices," Jain said. "It is a video of an encounter between a FinnTech ship and an alien vessel."

There in the woods, the four of them turned to each other, swearing, crying out. Webber paused the video until everyone was coherent enough to resume.

"Their communications—also included here—regard the gifting of a technology," Jain said. "The simplest way to describe it is to say it nullifies changes in momentum. If you have this object on a ship, say, and you accelerate, you won't feel anything. This is even bigger than it sounds, because the
ship
doesn't feel it, either. Not only do you not have to worry about the limits of the human body, but you don't have to worry about the ship's frame. The only limits are its engines and its fuel."

"We saw that." Webber paused the vid again. "That's what was on the
Specter
."